And welcome, duck--your life is passed
In vague aquatic dreams which cannot last--
A sudden wave and they are swept away.
(from The Conference of the Birds by Farid ud-Din Attar)
"Williamson says someone's gotta go," Hector Gonzales reports as he hangs up the phone. He sighs and sits down heavily at his desk. "He sounds serious this time."
No one says anything. You can hear the deep snorts of the old steam radiator, but we've all got our coats on still. It's only nine thirty and the office hasn't warmed up yet.
Hector is our nominal Manager, but he knows deep down that we're all in this together. "I'm as upset as you are," he says, and looks at each of us. "But, amigos, that's what he told me."
We all stare at each other until Kali Korminsky breaks the silence.
"So-o," she says, her melodic Long Island-Bulgarian accent splitting the vowel in twain. "Who will it be?"
"We won't even get a choice." Alice Cheng answers softly.
"Pardon, but--" Gupta Singh begins to speak until Ms. Grunsenvald cuts him off.
"Zis is not right. Ve haf always run zis office... together. Zey cannot simply... separate us like..." She gestures wildly with her hands.
"Listen, folks. This is not our decision. It is their decision." Hector attempts to inject order into the conversation, but Ms. Grunsenvald is not to be deterred.
"Vat ze fuck," she yells, her little frame quaking with the effort of pronouncing the words. Hector searches for some way to console her, while the rest of us look on.
The phone rings. Few people call the foreign-language hotline of the MTA Office of Directions. They should have replaced us with a recorded announcement long ago--Para español marque uno, In Deutsch drücke zwei, pour Français appuyer sur le numéro trois and so on--yet we've survived through the years, six employees in Astoria, Queens, answering phones, forgotten. The main console is in the middle of the room and since Gupta is up, he takes it. The caller is speaking Arabic.
"Vic. For you. A live one," he says.
I pick up the phone and pull my transit map closer, clear my throat.
"How can I help you?" I ask.
"With whom am I speaking?"
"My name is Victor, at the Metropolitan Transit Authority Office of Directions," I say. " How can I help you?"
"I want directions," he says. Although his speech is fluid and his accent is almost perfect for an educated middle-easterner, he is not a native speaker.
"From where to where?"
"No, you misunderstand me." He pauses. "I want you to tell me all the possibilities."
"I don't understand," I say.
"What's beautiful?" he asks, almost whimsically.
"I'm sorry." I don't know what to say. "I don't know how I can help you."
"What do you find beautiful?"
"What?"
"Listen to me." There's some urgency in his voice. "What is beautiful?"
"I don't know." But something in his tone makes me answer. The first thing that comes into my head. "The Duck Pond in Central Park."
"Fine. Why?"
"What do you mean, why?"
"Victor." He pauses. "Think about what I am saying."
"All right. Central Park. Ducks," I say, stalling for time. "I don't know."
"If you don't know what's beautiful, how are you going to give directions?"
"Look. I give directions between subway stations."
"There are a lot of beautiful things you can get to by subway. This is New York."
"This is absurd," I say.
"Victor. Wait," he says. "I agree with you--"
"About what?"
"About the park. It is beautiful."
"Good," I say. He chuckles.
Then the line is dead, so I hang up the phone. Today is not the day to be dealing with new crazies. Everyone is on edge--they're all looking at each other, wondering who'll be the one to go. They're all so terrified.
"Who vas zat?" Ms. Grunsenvald asks, finally.
"Someone who was pretty confused," I say. No one responds.
Time passes. Hector calls his mother in Chile. Ms. Grunsenvald finishes one sleeve of the sweater she's been knitting. Gupta has now read both the Post and the Daily News to completion and has begun the El Diario crossword puzzle.
"Hey Victor-bibi, you want some lunch?"
Gupta and I head to the deli downstairs. It's run by a bunch of Pakistani guys from the neighborhood. Even though he's Hindu and I'm Jewish, we still get credit from them for trying to speak Urdu. Gupta gets some kind of lentil and rice dish they've got cooking in the back and I get a pastrami sandwich.
"So what do you think about this layoff thing?" I ask him, figuring it's better to be direct than not.
"Victor," he says in his lilting, slightly melodic accent. "It's you or me."
"Why do you think that?"
"Think about it. Who is disposable, Victor-bibi? Ms. Grunsenvald retires soon. Hector is the manager. Kali's mother, she is Williamson's shrink, and Alice is Chinese. The MTA has enough Asian representation issues."
Just as we are preparing to go home for the evening, the phone rings one last time. We all stand, but Kali Korminsky gets there first and picks it up.
"Hello," she says, "office of direction, how may-ay help you?" and hits the speakerphone button.
"Kak ya khozu v Hoyt Street s ostanovkoy v..."
We sigh in relief. It's Puzzle Man, our most reliable caller. This is Kali's territory and so the rest of us saunter back to our desks and resume whatever we were working on, keeping only half an ear on Kali, our Slavic languages specialist, trying to explain the quickest way to get from Brooklyn Heights to East Gun Hill Road with stops at 59th street in Manhattan and 36th avenue in Queens.
Ms. Grunsenvald is the only other in the office that understands any Russian, and she chuckles as Kali hangs up.
"You should haf told heem zat he could come and visit, n'est pas?" she says. 36th avenue is the subway closest to the office.
Puzzle man calls every day at five with a new puzzle, a new series of locations on the giant laminated transit map on our wall, to be connected in the most efficient fashion by the 7 or the J, the 2 or the B. We all have our pet theories about who he could be. Alice thinks he's some kind of delivery man, trying to find the easiest way to drop off the next day's packages. Ms. Grunsenvald, still lodged in a cold-war mentality, thinks he's a Russian spy. Hector has the last word, as usual. "The guy's a crank, a huevon. That's it. He doesn't have anything better to do."
At five I go home, fix myself dinner in my little apartment, read for a few hours, and fall into a deep, almost dreamless sleep. In the morning I wake up a half an hour early and lie in bed, inexplicably unable to get back to sleep.
I get in at about quarter of nine and everyone is already at their desks, but no one's talking. Alice goes out to get breakfast at nine thirty, but she doesn't ask if anyone wants anything like she usually does. The room is so quiet that you can hear Gupta playing little tabla patterns on his desk and the click of Ms. Grunsenvald's knitting needles, the roar of the L a block away.
Hector's secret admirer calls at ten. She's an eighty six year-old Italian widow who's mostly housebound now, and calls more because she's lonely than from any real need for directions. About a year ago, she asked Hector out to dinner (he speaks his stately Italian with her, sounding very impressive indeed on the phone), and now he regrets turning her down, "because she needs to get out more." At eleven-thirty a Taiwanese immigrant asks Alice where Brighton Beach is. The usual.
I take lunch at twelve thirty. Surprisingly enough, Alice decides to come with me. We don't usually eat together. Today we go to a little Indian takeout place around the corner that Gupta never eats at. He says he doesn't like the owners' politics. After we get our food, we sit down on the stools in the back.
"Look Victor," Alice says in her quiet, well-thought out way. "You know how this has to go."
"What do you mean?"
"Someone needs to leave voluntarily. Or else it can't work."
I try to see what she's thinking. "Do you have another job lined up?"
"I don't think anyone does," she says. "I'm just saying that none of us can take any more of the waiting. And no one's just going to let Hector fire one of us, arbitrarily after all of this talk about cooperation."
She munches her nan, expecting me to respond. I don't, and so we finish our lunch in silence and go back to the office.
Around two we hear from another of our repeat customers. We call him Joyce, because he's unintelligible (Ms. Grunsenveld is responsible for the name). Every couple of days he calls and speaks to us in some language we've never heard before. One by one we've given up on figuring out where he's from, until now only Alice occasionally brings in Basque dictionaries or Igbo conversation manuals.
Today she takes the call and tries out a few phrases of Kurdish, copied down onto a yellow pad. She falls silent and then after a second, hangs up the phone.
"No luck?" Kali says.
"Nope." Who knows what kind of response she's looking for, since she couldn't respond even if he did speak Kurdish.
We sit around at our desks staring at each other and fiddling. Alice keeps reading the Learn Kurdish book for lack of anything else to do. Hector organizes his calendar. Kali does her nails. When the phone rings at three thirty, it's the duck pond guy. Direction Man, I've decided to call him. Hector gets it and hands it off to me. For you, he mouths.
"Victor. Je n'ai pas téléphoné pour directions du métro. Vous me comprenez, n'est pas?" I don't know why I know it's the same guy, but it is. The same voice.
"Oui. Je comprends. Look," I say, still in French. I've thought about it all day. "I don't need another Socratic dialogue."
"Un autre quoi ?" he asks, with a note of laughter in his voice.
"I don't need you asking me more questions."
"Bien sûr. I won't ask any more questions, then. You can ask me questions."
"Like what? What is it I'd want to know from you?"
"Do you really want me to answer?" he asks. I've decided his accent is Parisian.
"Sure," I say, reckless.
"You want to know why a simple question made you ride the train to Central Park last night and sit by the Duck Pond until the sun went down?"
"I didn't do that."
"But you wanted to." He's right. "You want to know why you've never been to Far Rockaway--"
"What's that got to do with anything?"
"Or Jamaica Bay, or Floyd Bennett Field," he interrupts me. "Or even Coney Island since you were eight. You want to know why birds are beautiful."
"So tell me."
"Parce-que ils savent quand aller au sud et comment arriver." Because they know when to go south and how to get there. He hangs up.
I put down the receiver and no one meets my eyes. After a while, Kali asks what we were talking about. "Station closures," I lie. Ms. Grunsenvald catches my eye and winks. She speaks French.
No one else calls. By four thirty, even Alice is ready to leave.
At five, we gather our stuff and file out of the office. Behind us Hector turns out the lights and locks the door. We go our separate ways, but Kali and I stay together for a dark block or two as we walk to the bus station.
"So-o. Who was that guy you were talking to?" she asks.
"Just some guy," I say. She looks at me. "Really--" I start to say, but she cuts me off.
"How do you feel about this layoff thing?"
"I don't know."
"We-ell. I think it's stupid, if you ask me. I think they should get rid of us."
"What do you mean?"
"I mean, all at once." The pitch of her voice rises.
"Hold on," I say. I can't help it.
"No!" She says, forcefully. "I just can't stand it. I don't want to hold on. I know we're going to go one by one until it's just Hector and Ms. Grunsenvald sitting alone in a dark office. I can't stand it."
"Kali," I say. "Don't worry so much. It's just one person they're asking for."
"But that's not all they want--" she says, now with a hysterical note in her voice.
"Look, you know that Gupta or I would be the first--" I start, but she cuts me off again.
"I don't know anything, and neither do you. All I know is that this whole thing makes me really nervous." And with that we get to the bus stop and she crosses her arms. Before I say anything else, the bus comes and she gets on the M60 to upper Manhattan.
Once again, I go home, fix some couscous, read for a while, and fall asleep. I don't sleep as well, though, and have a hard time waking up at seven thirty. I dream a very simple dream that I haven't had for years now. I dream that there is someone in bed beside me. They sleep holding me from behind and their hands are cold but their body is warm. Right before the alarm goes off I feel them getting out of bed quietly.
The next day, the phone doesn't ring all morning until Puzzle Man calls at noon, earlier than usual. He catches us off-guard, and Ms. Grunsenvald takes the call. For a while, it sounds like she's very politely giving him directions to the buses in Staten Island, though the conversation's in Russian and so I don't really understand anything. Then without warning, she switches to English.
"Lis-ten, asshole," she says, accenting the Œt' in listen, "you know as vell as I zat ze Park Place station is clos-ed."
She pauses for a second and I see vanish any restraint she might once have had in her tiny old body.
"No. No. No, fuck you," she says, and slams down the phone as though she is dispatching a beetle. We are all looking at her.
"Vat?" she says. "He is a crank. You haf said." She looks at Hector, and, paralyzed as he is by women over 40, he shrugs sheepishly.
At lunch I go alone to the Cuban restaurant around the corner, where the waitress is friendly.
"¿Cómo te va la cosa, Vic?" she asks, like always.
"No lo sé." I don't know. It's the simplest answer.
"¿Sabes que quieres almorzar?" she asks.
I say that whatever she brings me will be fine.
"Riesgo tuyo," she says. You take the risk.
But there is no risk. The special for today is the same as it was last Thursday. I'm swishing around the last of the rice and beans when Hector comes in.
He gets a coffee to go and then comes and sits down with me at my table.
"How you doing, Hector?" I ask.
"All right. Oye, Victor." He takes a sip of his coffee and grimaces. "We can stick this out. No one is going to have to leave if they don't want to."
"Thanks, Hector."
"Vic. I mean this. We're all a team here." He gets up and slaps me on the back. His insincerity is palpable. "Be good, Vic."
The office is still dead quiet when I sit down again after lunch. Everyone's desk is suspiciously neat. Gupta's old papers are in the recycling bin. There are no diet coke cans on Kali's desk. At ten of five the phone rings.
"I'll get it," I say. No one says anything, but they all look at me.
It is my beauty-loving friend, Direction Man. He is speaking English, with a Brooklyn Jewish accent that sounds a lot like my father's.
"Hey, Victor. Howya doin'?"
"The riddle was too easy," I say. "It's the Attar poem."
"Good." He pauses. "Yeah, there's not a lotta room for error in this kinda thing. If I'd wanted to make it harder I would've picked the Hadiqatu'l Haqiqat and we would've been on the phone for a month or sumpin' while you figured out which fuckin' Sufi mystic I was talking about. But I didn't do that for a reason."
"So I'm just another bird, right, and you have to convince me--" I start to say, but he cuts me off.
"No, no. Victor. Look. I know you're a smart cookie. Ya solved the puzzle, didn't ya? So if ya wanna interpret the metaphor, do that on your own time. That was just ta get your attention,"
"So now you have my attention, what are you going to do with it?"
"Nothing." And Direction Man laughs. "Not my job. Who knows, maybe ya should ask that Korminsky girl on a date. Good Jewish name there, Korminsky."
"I have no idea where you're going with this."
"That's good, Victor. That's just where I want ya."
"So what do you think I should do? Go back to school?"
"Look." He pauses, pretending to be tired of my foolishness the way my dad did. "You should be so lucky that I call you up and talk all kindsa languages to you just to get you back to school. Sure, Hopkins or Northwestern's payin' me the big bucks as a recruiter. That's what I am, just a big commercial for grad school."
"So who are you, then?"
"A fuckin' angel, right? What do you want, all the answers? Just what I need, to sit around explaining things to a schlub like you."
I stare at the map on my desk.
"Come on, work with me here, Victor."
I look up and I hear the ghost of a chuckle on the other end of the phone. Everyone in the office is staring at me like I haven't seen them stare since Hector turned down the date with old Mrs. Giacometti.
"Didya forget we were speaking English?" he asks. I try to ignore the gazes of my coworkers.
"So fine. What do I do now?" I ask.
"Ya just don't fuckin' listen ta me, do ya? Figure it out on ya fuckin' own."
And Direction Man hangs up. They are all still looking at me. No one says anything for what must be thirty seconds.
"So? Who was that?" Hector asks.
"Just some guy looking for directions," I say. "I couldn't really help him with what he wanted." He nods. I take a deep breath.
"By the way," I say, a little louder. "I'll be the one to leave. It's been good working with all of you." And as they go through the motions of closing down the office for the night and one by one file out the door into the winter street I begin to clear off my desk, putting my few personal belongings into my backpack: my pencil jar, a bottle opener, a few pens, and my laminated transit map, to remember them by.