Emergency Contact

Life is good until you go and break your leg on the job, owing entirely to Your Employer’s buffoonish Chief of Staff, who is at all times walking around with a profusely sweating water bottle. The steel, slim bulbousness never fails to fill you with shame in its resemblance to the anal toy Your Ex was always wanting you to try — shame at the knowledge that you’ve never achieved a prostate orgasm, shame at never having tried.

How many times had you scolded this Chief of Staff? Though, as Security Head, technically you rank below him, he is still beneath you insofar as, at work, every being retreats from focus except when they are: 1) in the way of Your Employer, 2) behaving in a way that adds veins to his neck, or 3) dredging up pinpricks of regret in regards to Your Ex.

Too many times to count. It trails the Chief of Staff like a shadow, this drip of cold filtered water — reverse osmosis, as he never tires of lecturing about, though if it is so precious then why shouldn’t he find a less leaky vessel, or invent some technique for gulping that involves a tighter seal on the mouth? 

And yet, after all the leaks and all your attendant scoldings and the Chief of Staff’s rebuffs, it is not he who gets the brunt of it, but you. 

Naturally, this is preferable to the brunt being gotten by Your Employer. You would, after all, take a bullet for Your Employer—it is not in your contract, per se, but there was the first night when you were asked out to sign the paperwork, which turned into more of a hazing with Your Predecessor, who was retiring. Your Employer insisted on taking you both out to a celebratory dinner at the Cowpoke Tough, an anachronistic haunt peopled by rich men eager to project down-home values. 

Several rounds in that night, after you had drunk whiskeys that twisted your cheeks and shuddered your stomach and searched for such symptoms on the faces of these harder, older men, but saw nothing, you felt so wobbly in the foot and so light in the head that you were stupid enough to utter your joke.

“Cowpoke Tough,” you began, tongue still prickling with poison, “is an exemplar of the rule that the names of steakhouses and gay bars are interchangeable.” 

Your new Employer squinted. Your Predecessor’s eyebrow jutted out. 

You froze and cursed the drought of your mouth from all the brown liquor, leaving you nothing to swallow. 

Then they exchanged a glance and burst into laughter, thick as thieves, and you laughed with them. 

They, of course, thought you’d made that joke because you weren’t gay. They must have thought you would never be comfortable saying it if there were any chance that you had frequented dens of iniquity such as The Cock & Bull and the Steel Stallion for any reason apart from mistaking them for establishments specializing in the aging of beef. 

Really, you don’t like steak. It’s too much chewing. You concealed this in the wake of your joke by carving out a Connecticut from your ribeye, sweeping it into your napkin, leaving only Rhode Island on the plate, and tucking the heap into a fold of the leather banquette while the grandfather-aged man opposite you was boisterously clapping the back of the father-aged one. You focused instead on the silky potatoes au gratin, a name you’d pronounced on ordering as oh-gra-tan, with the nasal last syllable and nearly-silent final consonant, à la the French, i.e. correct, way, but the correctness of which resulted in blank stares and you reddening, not being able to come up with the sturdiness of the Americanized version in time, until Your Predecessor cleared his throat and glottal stopped it for you: oh-gra-‘tn. 

Post dinner, you all retreated to Your Employer’s apartment, the walls of which were lined with medieval legal documents written in cryptic English. Now you know that Your Employer is fascinated by this period, revolving as it does around the early stages of property law — the foundation, he has said, of his own real estate development enterprises. 

The deal done, Your Employer shook your hand and poured something from a dusty-labeled bottle into tiny tulip glasses, raised his hand and conducted yours, and then he and Your Predecessor began to chant:

“The BENDS —”

“DePEND on the SOLidest MEN —”

You kept your glass in midair, silent until they spurred you on with impatient hands, then you echoed each line.

“The BENDS dePEND on the SOLidest MEN —” 

“And it’s THESE solid men that are YOU —” 

“The ONES who arRIVE without any PRIDE and make THEIR life the lifeBLOOD of YOU.”

As you sipped something syrupy, viscous, and cold out of these doll-sized glasses, you were struck by the unlimited ceiling of manliness. Could it be that when one becomes rich and powerful enough, one can drink whatever effete substance out of whichever delicate vessel one so pleases? 

It wasn’t just the chanted vows — hallowed, but obscure — that told you that it was your job to put your life before Your Employer’s. It wasn’t just the shock of your tongue moving from bitter to sweet as you swallowed. It wasn’t anything written in the paperwork — this wasn’t something that could legally be enshrined in writing. It was the way it all coalesced into a shroud of ritual that showed you the naturally occurring hierarchy and where you stood in it.

In a way, then, it is disappointing when it is only your tibia that goes first.

“HANSON!” Your Employer cried when you went down. It was a veritable pratfall in the back stairwell, which you always take to the parking garage to avoid the protesters and paparazzi whose specters loom even as their numbers have dwindled in the wake of the settlement. 

You can’t deny that the urgency in his voice warmed you, broke through the frozen sheet of shock in the first moments after the fall. That the sun you orbit for a living could turn his focus to you, express even a hint of the grief attending your hypothetical demise, soothes your bitterness at how much you care that he cares, and how uncertain you are that he does, even now, after ten years.

Two months earlier, this same embarrassing insecurity defined the last hours you’d spent with Your Ex. 

You had been relaying your day to Your Ex while he made dinner: how you’d briefed Your Employer on the approach you and the Handlers had developed to spirit him safely through the throngs protesting anti-union practices outside the company’s new Brooklyn building. Your Employer always appreciated how you crafted the perfect petit four of a briefing, with just the right balance of realism to reassurance, never too glossed over or too cynical — but that day, he interrupted with a simmering undertone. 

“You’re thinking like a goon. It’s your job to make the hoi polloi go away, not herd me through them like some lamb for the woke slaughter.” 

You responded with platitudes about protocol and bad PR. He slowly rapped the desk with his knuckle until you could no longer concentrate.

“Get rid of them,” he said.

“He’s such a classical villain it’s not even funny,” Your Ex said, not looking up but shaking his head as he chopped peppers and onions. “Forcing you to steamroll the public’s right to question fair labor practices.”

“Well, they’ve clarified that the anti-union stuff was in the past. Why should they be there?” 

Your Ex stopped, inhaled and closed his eyes. “Really? It’s symbolic, this building, of the whole blight of development, whatever the press they’ve put out might say differently.” 

“Come on,” you said, “it’s waterfront Williamsburg. It’s so far gone. What’s there to preserve?” 

“I know you sold your soul for this job, but I can’t just throw my hands up because I think things are too far gone.” 

Rejoinders came to you: about Your Ex’s envy and his own savior complex as a suffering teacher, when he knew perfectly well he could have easily gone to law school, too. But the allium in the air vaporized these barbs into hot tears that dislodged something in you. 

Your Ex let you leave without argument and without offering any fajitas as consolation. You crawled downtown on an express train gone local, because taking a cab would have felt like proving his point. 

But it hadn’t ever been about the money. There was money that came with it, true, enough to be meaningful in this strange city-state with its own independent economy, its triplicate tax structure and oat milk cachet, enough to allow you to buy your tiny Hell’s Kitchen co-op. But it was about the niche you’d carved out, the strength your dad and brothers never thought you capable of when you were starting out in law school, thinned out from uppers Sunday-Wednesday to get through the work, downers Thursday-Saturday to release the pressure in whatever sex you could find. 

Although in hindsight you saw how this was all an attempt to disconnect your body from your brain, back then it was a revelation — the first time your flesh had accrued value in an exchange that, at least some of the time, you desired in return. You seesawed between fluorescent classrooms and dark bars, a balancing of worlds that worked until, fresh in the thalassocracy of New York for a summer internship, your boss pushed you to the back of a supply closet, grabbed you through your discount suit and forced an arithmetic of mortification and failure that led you rapidly to your knees to take his slightly clammy, only half-hard cock as he thrust your head into the shelf behind. Afterward, when he winked and slapped you on the back and said, “Welcome to the boys’ club,” you’d smiled as if in collusion, and when you could no longer fake the flu four days later, you stopped answering calls and emails, let your enrollment in school lapse, and began disappearing. Your roommates watched you shrivel into a sunken twenty-four-year-old law school flop while you lay in bed imagining eyes that wanted nothing in return. 

The day after you’ve broken your leg, confined to your fourth-floor walk-up, you receive a call from the Chief of Staff. 

“Hanson!” he says in his cold, bright uptalk, “How are you? Getting some well-deserved rest? And you got the care packages from us, I hope?” 

You had received enough Zabar’s baskets to fill a suburban pantry and a Veuve Clicquot gift set in a wooden box big enough to bury a previous century’s orphan — both clearly choices from an Assistant. 

“Yes, incredibly thoughtful,” you say. “Please send my thanks to everyone.”

“No question!” He clears his throat. “One of the Handlers will reach out to talk replacements.” 

“Replacements?”

“For the time being. Doc says you’re in for six weeks, best case.”

You’ve rarely suspected any ulterior motives in Your Employer’s actions. He’s usually intolerant of trifles that distract from the pure managerial brute force underpinning his prosperity. But upon mention of the Doc, who is after all on Your Employer’s payroll, you begin to question the ethics of him being the one evaluating your fitness to work.

“Of course.” You rattle off the practiced series of chess moves determining how the Handlers will be allotted.

“Thanks, Hanson,” he chirps. “We definitely can’t do this without your input!”

You spout the expected niceties. The Chief of Staff says, “Oh, and Hanson? Super hope you don’t blame me for what happened.” 

“Of course not,” you say through a teeth-gritted grin, “I blame that water bottle.” 

You hang up in the midst of his hollow laugh. 

The late afternoon light has stopped filtering through the glass and is now piercing it, scalding your plaster-embedded left leg and bleaching the charm out of every corner of your studio. The opulent whorls of the molding are thrown into sharp relief. They are laden with dust — a particular tease of a problem when you can’t stand at full height to reach them. You watch the entwined right angles patterning the floorboard. Their uniformity feels stifling. Below the surface charm and whimsy of pre-war aesthetics, you see the calculated order of builders tasked with inventing housing for a sudden new rung of people not rich, but privileged enough to desire kitchens free of bathtubs.

Purchasing this studio had felt like a singular accomplishment two years ago. Now it feels like a Pyrrhic asset, the sole triumph of your past decade in a job that isn’t a career, but is your life, and one that could be so immediately obviated by skeletal fragility, and, yes, you admit, perhaps in some part to your 6’4” precariousness never fully leaving you, even after all these years. Your Ex called you Scarecrow the night you’d first met, long enough ago that some of your boyish gangliness could still be read on your limbs, before you’d fully internalized the gym as a contemptible necessity not only for keeping up with every man you lusted after but for fulfilling the meathead role your job called for.

“Scarecrow, cute, I get it,” you’d said, leaning down to speak directly into his ear, over the music. “It’s because, after tonight, you’ll miss me most of all.” 

“Calling me Dorothy?” he breathed up into your neck. “Original.” 

And then, against all odds of height differential, your mouths had coalesced into a tropical kiss, humid and saline, with just a tinge of acrid fog machine vapor. 

Tonight, you fill your mouth with cinnamon-laced breads and poppyseed-filled pastries and hot mustard ladled into swaths of smoked meat. You drink an entire bottle of champagne from the source, hoisting the neck up with one hand and glugging as fast as you can. You burp recklessly, and there is no one around to hear it.

The next day is so gray that you swipe away your first alarm and then sleep well past it. When you do look at your phone, it’s noon, and you see you have two missed calls from the Chief of Staff. And then you realize what has actually woken you: your apartment buzzer. 

“Coming,” you yell uselessly, fumble for your crutch, hobble to the buzzer. You can’t discern the garbled voice, but in your groggy state, whose culprit is nothing more than the champagne and some trumped-up ibuprofen that again leave you to question the benevolence of the Doc, you merely buzz in the anonymous caller and leave the door ajar.

Back on the couch, your eyes unlock your phone and you see that the Chief of Staff has also emailed.

Sorry I missed you. I assumed you’d be up to your eyeballs in free time but it sounds like you’re busy as ever! ;) Please send through avails for us to discuss logistics re: replacements per yesterday’s talk. Also, please find attached paperwork for the worker’s comp claim. Don’t go putting my name down under ‘Cause of injury’! :D Sign and return ASAP, thx

You close your eyes and think back to your first day on the job, the hungover sequel to that fateful initiation night, when Your Predecessor had told you all about the vetting process for your position, alluding to sumo matches and mud wrestling and scouting Mensa meetups and London cab drivers’ associations.

“But then, why me?” you’d replied, to which Your Predecessor merely smiled and could not give you an answer. 

Perhaps your Employer’s greatest talent is having an eye for the malleable. You feel that his choosing made you into this sharp object apt to destroy enemies. Now, though, whatever your x-factor was, your dim prognosis has eroded a meaningful part of it. Your Employer has said not to worry, he will keep you busy. He must assume you are like a sheepdog who, having lost a flock, might walk itself off a cliff. But that is not how you feel. You don’t feel meaningless without your usual task, you feel dangerously distracted from it — given to wonder about your other possible life paths, catapulted back to the raw ache of shelf scraping the back of your head.

The door creaks open and the familiar face enters. 

“Hey, munchkin,” says Your Ex, proffering a bouquet, “I hear I’m your emergency contact.”

He flings open kitchen cabinets until he comes to the vase you’ve confined to a dusty existence.

“Well, a little late for an emergency,” you attempt to banter, but the coyness dies in your dry throat.

He asks you where the scissors are. You can’t answer, not only because your brain is clouded with the rot of depressed indulgence, but because you have no idea where anything is in this place you’ve inhabited more over the past 48 hours than at any other point. Your Ex instead saws off the butts of the flower stems with a chef’s knife, which at least you know, having barely been used, is still sharp.

Crouched over the couch, placing the vase on the table, your comparatively diminutive Ex is now, for once, at eye level with you.

“When they first called, I wasn’t sure I should come. But then at the farmers market this morning, the flowers were so beautiful. My guilt came back to me.”

“Guilt for not reaching out?”

“Something like that.” He settles on the armchair opposite you, cheek resting on the hammock of two fingers and a thumb.

“Well, they are beautiful,” you say, although Your Ex is the one who’s always cared about floral particulars. “Thank you.” 

He nods. The anticipation of silence floods your nerves. 

“I wish you’d come yesterday,” you say, the truth revealing itself in your attempt at lightness. “I overdid it a bit on the care package.” You nod toward the pile of boxes and bottles behind you, marking your despair. 

“It’s good to see you celebrating, at least.” He closes his eyes, laughs silently. “Is this…it, do you think?”

“For the next six weeks at least,” you say, doing the mental math: it’ll be Thanksgiving, nearly, by then. A time when, last year, Your Ex had invited you to his sister’s place in Jersey, and you’d replied that you had to work. You believed this. But when you showed up at Your Employer’s townhouse, he couldn’t obscure his surprise. 

“Hanson?” he’d said, descending the staircase once an Assistant and one of the Handlers had passed him off in the appropriate sequence of checks: the face recognized, the corners appraised, the calendar spoken for, the man himself given the choice to see you. You knew the entire path one had to travel to get to his face. You knew the cheat code. Still, it was odd to be the spider in your own web. Your shoulders shook in their camel coat, a gift from Your Ex after he’d hit the outlets outside Palm Springs on the trip that you’d also, you thought, had to miss. It felt urgent, that time, there were threats cropping up and things around the lawsuit, people amassing outside the office street, and Your Employer’s health had been fragile, his blood pressure up and The Doc reassuring you it was good you’d stayed.

“Sir,” you’d said, “I wanted to tell you things are looking back to 100% at HQ,” meaning you’d assessed the threat level and it was manageable. 

As you tried to reassure Your Employer about a problem he wasn’t prioritizing on a day he was actually spending, at least in part, not doing work, he stood there in his cashmere sweater, glasses hanging from a chain, giving you a look of pity that you recognized from Your Ex’s own face the day before. 

“Hanson,” he’d said softly, “thank you very much for that update. Now go get on home, I don’t want you working anymore.” 

He’d turned and left you walking past one of the Handlers and another, different Assistant red-faced, as they stared down at their phones and let the blue light wash the judgment from their eyes. 

“No,” Your Ex says, bringing you back into the moment with such a foggy jolt that you in fact do need to reconsider whether the heavy-duty ibuprofen has done more of a number than you’d thought. He’s standing up now, pacing to the wall and back to the couch, squinting through a shoulder stretch and cracking his neck back and forth, “Is this it for you and this fucking job?” he intones. 

Your phone rings and, reflexively assuming it’s the Chief of Staff, you answer it. Your Ex makes his way back toward the door, to put on the shoes he’d carefully removed. 

“Hanson, are you holding up?” he says, and you realize it is not the Chief of Staff but Your Employer himself. 

“Oh, well enough,” you say, “though I was wondering—“ 

“Witness any murders yet, Jimmy?” he cackles. 

You turn to the window abutting your bed, which looks out over the decorative square of a courtyard that no one can access but Your Landlord. She had planted tulips a few weeks ago, before a sudden frost, and now all you see are lonely, sodden strands in the slush of the terra cotta flower box. 

“Afraid not,” you reply, “there’s not much of a view. I did want to ask you—”

“And did you get my gift?” he cuts off. 

“Yes, thank you. Incredibly thoughtful.”

“Ah, good. It’s no substitute for Grace Kelly,” he guffaws, “but I’m glad it didn’t get lost in all the food and booze and whatever else they put in there.” 

You don’t know what he means. You wave your hands to Your Ex, a foot half in his boot, and point to the pile, motion for him to bring it to you. He shakes his head, brows stitched, but starts tearing into things with you until you find the outlier: a wooden yardstick, which you unfurl to Your Ex’s befuddlement. 

“A man as tall as you won’t get by with just a ruler to itch all the way down that fucker,” Your Employer says. 

“It’s a comically large cast,” you agree. “Thank you.” 

Your Ex smirks as he slices cardboard seams and flattens the packages, undoing an entire dimension. 

“Hanson,” Your Employer says, “we need another you.” 

“I know, Sir, we’ve already begun speaking about replacements—“ 

“There’s no replacing you,” he says. “But we do need a little help while you’re convalescing.” 

Your Ex has gathered the recycling in his elbow, is putting his shoes on at the door, the smirk gone. 

“Sir,” you say, your pulse crescendoing, “I’ve been wondering. What was the chant? From the night you brought me in?” 

“Huh? Oh…It’s just a sporting song, from my Scout days. A little old joke.” 

“And the drink? What did you make us drink from those little glasses?”

You heard the flare of a smile in his reply. “Just a bit of Jagermeister, Hanson. Nothing obscene.” 

“Order another bottle,” you say, “I’m afraid I won’t be helping you replace me.” 

Your Ex’s boot freezes in his hand.

Light emerges through the window, illuminating the bouquet on the table: acid purples, fiery tendrils, luminous greens. You imagine what you might do: learn the names of these flowers, scratch your plastered calf, seek love that looks nothing like devotion.