Douglas Baker
Chris sends me an email, asking that I draft an email for him to send to the client. I email back and ask what he wants it to say. He emails me high-level thoughts. I send him the draft email. He rewrites it and emails me the new version, along with an explanation of why he rewrote it. I email him back to say thanks. He emails me and says I should send it to the client, which I do. An hour later, the client emails just me without copying Chris to ask a follow-up question. Certain hierarchies must be observed in this firm, so I forward the question to Chris and ask how he’d like me to respond. He sends me a “general idea” of what he’d like to say, after which I send him a draft, which he rewrites, which I then send to the client.
After that, there’s a period of silence before Chris calls me. His office is just down the hall, so I can faintly hear him through my slightly open door even as his voice is coming from the speaker phone on my desk. It gives me a strange sense that he is omnipresent. Which, for me, he kind of is. I answer the phone and say, “Hi, Chris,” in the indulgent tone to which he is accustomed.
He says, “Listen, looking back at what you sent the client, I’m not sure it fully answered their question. I think we should send another email.” He then dictates exactly what he wants the email to say, which I type up verbatim and send to him with the subject line: “For your review.”
He emails me back with comments, and I revise and send to him, and he rewrites, and I update the draft, and then he rewrites one more time, and then I proof it. Once we’ve finally sent the third client email, Chris calls me again to say he’s glad we sent it.
“I just didn’t feel like your earlier email answered the question,” he says. I tell him I agree. After I hang up, I walk to the bathroom. Standing at the urinal, my phone vibrates in my pocket. It’s an email from Chris with the subject line: CALL ME. As I walk the long hallway back to my office, I pass ten other offices, each like mine, and in each one sits a lonely person, head craned into a computer monitor’s blue light, tapping out messages, shaping and reshaping words into a form of acceptable expression.
When I pass Chris’s office, he’s leaning back in his chair, holding a phone to his ear with his right hand, rubbing his temples with his left. Chris is mid-forties, slightly overweight but not fat, though a little jowly already. His hair is thinning but well-maintained. I’ve never seen him smile.
He always keeps his door open. I try to scuttle past unnoticed, but he hears my footsteps and looks up. Seeing me, he sits upright and extends a finger, instructing me to wait. I wait. Several minutes pass while I stand in the doorway listening to Chris vehemently disagree with the lawyer on the other end of the line.
“Come on, Walter,” he says, “you and I both know that’s not a good-faith position. And we will go to the judge on this one.”
He pauses, listening again, and then says, “If that’s your position, then I guess that’s your position. But I think we both know it’s not legitimate. You can take that approach, okay, whatever, that’s your prerogative. I just hope you’re ready to litigate it.”
Chris slams down the phone and turns his attention immediately to his computer, where he begins typing aggressively. After two minutes of this, I begin to seriously question whether he remembers I’m standing there. As I start to angle my feet back to the hallway, Chris, without looking up, says, “One second, almost done.” I turn back toward him and continue to wait. Finally, he says, “Fucker,” as he clicks send on whatever email he’s just written.
He stands up and walks to a coatrack holding his suit jacket. The firm’s dress code is business casual, but I have never seen Chris enter the building in less than a jacket and tie, except for last Christmas Eve when he wore a jacket with no tie. For him that was letting loose, indulging in a small holiday pleasure like letting his neck breathe. I’m not sure what he wore on Christmas day because I wasn’t in the office. But I’m sure he was.
“Let’s get lunch,” he says.
“Now?” I ask.
“We got the email out already,” he says. “I think we have time.”
I want to tell him I have other work to do, different partners to keep happy, but the truth is, for Chris—and, honestly, the rest of them—I exist only in relation to him. Outside of our interactions, I simply cease to be. I am indistinguishable from a computer, a copy machine, a desk, a chair. So we go to lunch, and he spends an hour complaining about his cases and giving me tips on how to improve my performance.
***
The next day, Chris and I receive an email from the client asking if we are available for a quick video-conference. Chris forwards me the email, even though I was on the original thread, and writes, CALL ME. So I call him.
“Thanks for calling,” he says. “We need to prepare for this meeting.”
“When’s it happening?” I ask.
“You know as much as I do. Can you start gathering some materials we can share with them?”
I have no idea what this means, but neither does Chris.
“Sure,” I say. “I’ll put something together.”
“Thanks,” he says. “And can you respond to their email saying we’re available to meet at their convenience?”
“Of course. Do you want to see it first?”
He hesitates, considering whether I’m ready for the responsibility of sending a one-sentence email without supervision.
“Better run it past me,” he says.
“Sure thing.”
We then go through the usual iterative process of revising and refining and in the end produce an email that says we’re available for a phone call. A secretary from the client responds to ask when we can have the call. Seconds later, my phone rings. When I pick up, Chris jumps right into it:
“Here are the times I have available,” he says. “Tomorrow, that is, Wednesday, I have a nine-thirty and a noon, and I’m booked after two. Tell them we can do between one and two tomorrow. I have a deposition on Thursday, so that’s out. On Friday I’m free before ten a.m. and then again after five p.m.”
I scribble notes, tracking Chris’s schedule for the next two-and-a-half weeks, even though I can access this same information through Outlook. When he hangs up, I draft an email and send the proposed times to the client. A few minutes later, my phone rings, but it’s not Chris this time. Instead, it’s Sophie, the legal assistant for George, the client’s deputy general counsel, our main contact at the company.
“George wants to know if you can just talk today. It should be a short meeting.”
“I’m not sure,” I say. “Let me get in touch with Chris and see if he’s free today.”
“Okay. George said it doesn’t have to be both of you. He’s happy to talk to just you.”
“I’ll get back to you,” I say.
When the call is over, I email Chris to see if he’s free today, but he doesn’t answer. This is a man who typically responds to emails within two minutes, day or night, on weekends, from his phone or computer. He lives to reply to emails. His phone vibrates every time he receives a new email, and he invariably pulls the phone from his pocket, looks at the screen, unlocks the phone, scrolls through the email, and, if possible, responds. But not today.
Four hours later, a few minutes before five p.m., Chris sends me a terse message saying he was tied up all day: Please send the client our apologies and ask if they are available tomorrow. I respond to George’s original email and get an out-of-office reply—he will not have access to phone or email until next Monday.
***
The next morning Chris calls me and says, “I wish we knew what the client wanted to talk about.”
“That would be nice,” I say.
“Would it have killed them to give us a little more information?”
I want to tell him all this easily could have been avoided, but in a place like this, criticism is only permitted to flow in one direction. So I make a noise that I think will come off as affirming and supportive, a sort of “Mmmm” sound, which Chris mistakes for disinterest.
“I can tell you’re busy,” he says, feeling slighted. “Can you get me those materials we talked about? Sometime today? I want to be prepared whenever we do finally talk to them.”
After we hang up, I search through documents for something that might be relevant and bill the client for 3.7 hours. Initially, I describe my time as: Review and analyze documents and other materials in preparation for client meeting. But then I rewrite it to say: Review and analyze documents and other materials and send analysis to C. Hamilton for review. If the client balks at this work, I want them to know it was Chris’s idea.
I send a zip drive to Chris, along with an email explaining why I included each document. He writes back, “Thanks much, Chris,” sent from his iPhone. A minute later he calls me from his car. I can hear road noise, and his voice is somewhat distant.
“Where’s the PowerPoint?” he asks.
“What PowerPoint?”
“The one I told you to make for the meeting.”
“I don’t think you told me to make one.”
He sighs loudly, and I hear his hands come down hard on the steering wheel.
“I distinctly remember telling you,” he says.
“Maybe I misunderstood.”
“Okay,” he says, “let’s go with that.”
“Do you recall telling me what it should say?”
“Just look back through our correspondence, please. Prepare something consistent with that. I’d like to have this tonight or tomorrow so I have time to review it.”
“I’ll get right on—”
Chris disconnects before I finish my sentence but then texts me moments later saying, Sorry to hang up, had another call. I write, No problem, and start going through our past emails in search of anything that might be relevant.
For the rest of the afternoon, I put together the presentation and then send it to Chris. He waits forty-eight hours, until a little after six on Friday, to email me with an urgent request for a call. When I receive his message, I’m backing out of the parking garage. I call him back, and he says, “Are you at your desk?”
“I’m driving,” I say.
“Call me back when you’re at your computer. We have a lot of work to do.”
And just like that, I see my entire weekend vanish.
***
The client meeting is finally scheduled for Monday at four in the afternoon. That gives Chris virtually the whole day to agonize over it. The emails begin around seven a.m., before I’ve even begun my hour-long commute to the office. He’s requesting last-minute changes to the PowerPoint we spent all weekend perfecting. The first email begins: I woke up feeling uneasy about your statements on slide seven…. The second email says, Likewise, I’m concerned we cannot support some of your assertions in slides 4, 11, 16, and 22. Ah, I think, so now they’re my statements, my assertions.
My instinct is to respond immediately, but I decide it will be better if I can simply get to the office, make his requested changes, and attach the draft in my emailed response. But Chris interprets this approach as lazy and unresponsive, so he calls me halfway through my drive.
“Where are you?” he asks.
“Driving,” I say.
He sighs in exasperation. “Did you at least get my emails?”
“I did.”
“Okay,” he says, drawing out the word. “And? Do you have any thoughts?”
“I’m planning to send you a revised draft this morning.”
“That’s nice,” he says, “but perhaps you should run it by me first? Instead of just unilaterally making changes?”
“I was under the impression that you wanted me to revise consistent with your comments in the emails. Is that not right?”
“Just come to my office when you get here, please.” And he hangs up abruptly, the phone coming down hard in its cradle.
The rest of the day is a repeat of the weekend: Chris requests changes, which I then implement and send for his review, only to have him reverse course on most of them. At around three in the afternoon, the draft presentation looks largely the way it did when I finished it the night before. I send it to Chris, who waits until a quarter to four before emailing me. Looks good, he says, please send to the client.
I send it and then prepare to log into the videoconference. Four o’clock arrives, and three client representatives are on the screen before me, one of them being George, the deputy GC. They’re all wearing casual clothes, joining from their home offices or dining rooms. Chris is late to the call, so the four of us remain muted in four little boxes on the screen, each of us tapping away on our machines, sending off digital messages to other people in other small rooms. At 4:08, Chris finally logs in. He begins speaking immediately, apparently unaware that we’re still not sure why we’re having this meeting in the first place. Chris asks me to put the PowerPoint on the screen and then starts going through it slide by slide.
But a few minutes into this, George interrupts.
“This is all very interesting,” he says, “but it’s not really what we want to talk about.”
He then tells us that their company has been named in a new class action, and they’re soliciting pitches from a few firms.
“We’ve got some groups coming in today. Could you guys come in tomorrow around noon?”
“Absolutely,” Chris says. “We’ll be there.”
The videoconference is over by 4:15. As I disconnect, I hear Chris’s door open, followed by his heavy footsteps in the hall. Then he’s knocking at my door and opening it and standing there, irritated beyond belief.
“Would have been nice to have a little notice,” he says. I want to scream at him, to say, maybe if you’d called your client back right away, you’d have known, you fucking child. But instead, I laugh ingratiatingly, as if to convey the universal sentiment among partners: Clients, am I right?
“A couple things,” he says. “We can’t in good faith bill them for the work we did last week. So you’re going to need to write that off.”
Thirty-nine hours of work vanishes in one second, my efforts wasted, uncountable, not to be used toward my end-of-year totals. Worse, if any partners see my stats from the previous week, they’ll assume I need more work. Both thoughts fill me with anxiety.
“And then we’ll need to prepare for the client pitch tomorrow,” Chris says. “Can you handle that?”
“Sure,” I say. “Whatever you need.”
He leaves the room, and I begin the nonbillable work of researching the case, putting together a strategy for the defense, and estimating the cost of our representation. Around ten p.m., Chris leaves the office, but he calls me on his drive home to give me his thoughts, most of which are ill-informed, cluttered, and vague beyond all usefulness. We speak until he arrives at his house, and then Chris’s voice is overwhelmed by the sound of several small children—Chris as a father is a terrifying reality—and he ends the call.
I finish the presentation at three a.m. and go to sleep on my office floor.
***
The next day, the pitch goes fine, but we get an email from George that afternoon. We appreciate the work you guys put into the presentation, but our GC has decided to go another direction for this one. Thanks. A wave of relief comes over me as I consider that, if we’d landed the case, I’d have been stuck doing Chris’s work for the next several years.
Still exhausted from my long night, I stand up, walk to my narrow window, and look at the parking garage across the street. Everything’s gray, just slabs of concrete under a cloudy sky. I watch miserable people limping to their cars, waiting in interminable garage-exit lines to enter congested highways, everyone’s nerves screaming. And I start laughing uncontrollably. Ten thousand years of civilization, and this is what we built. Fucking prisons, a series of inescapable enclosures that define the sequence of our days: Wake up in your house prison, get in your little motorized prison and drive yourself to your work prison, log into your digital prison, drive back to your house prison, where you are subjected to electronic monitoring via your cell phone.
There’s a knock on the door, and then Chris is once again standing in my doorway.
“You saw the email?” he asks.
“Yeah.”
“Don’t feel bad about it. You did your best.”
I laugh in spite of myself—there’s no doubt he’d be taking credit if we’d landed the case—but he seems not to hear me.
“The good news is we have some big cases coming up, and I’m going to need lots of help with them. I looked at your hours from last week, and it seems you have some time.”
I stare at him, wanting to scream, unable to think of a single non-profane thing to say.
“Let’s catch up tomorrow morning,” he says. “I should be in by seven.”
As he walks away, leaving my door open, I sink to the floor and let my head fall back against the wall beneath the window. A few colleagues walk past my office door, but no one looks inside. We are born, I think, bearing a life sentence. We have against our will moved from forests and plains, abandoning our freedom, to this new existence, the sedentary exchange of text and images in an immaterial universe of our own creation. And there is no opting out. The world for which we evolved no longer exists, covered now by a wilderness of glass and concrete, billboards and strip malls, endlessly looping highways.
For a second, I consider jumping out my window. Then the phone in my pocket vibrates. It’s a message from Chris. It says, CALL ME.
#
Douglas Baker lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he works as a lawyer. His stories have appeared in Fiction on the Web, Locust Shells Journal, Gastropoda, and Close to the Bone (forthcoming).