Finalizing the Merger
Zachary Maher
Zachary Maher paints a breathless scene of a boss and her assistant as they navigate several currents of their lives at once. We love this exploration of what really matters among the many layers of plot in this chaotic elevator ride.
—Dina, Senior Editor
My daughter’s elementary principal is saying he’s notifying me officially, I’m running out of the office proper while jabbing scare quotes in the air using my phone-free hand, and Ken, Überassistant of one decade’s standing, ducking and shielding his eyes from my punctuating fingers, he’s harrowing me en route to the elevator bank.
“I quit,” Ken’s saying.
I’m sottovoceying to Ken, pleading for him to sack up, the principal spluttering in my other ear. Ken’s stabbing the down arrow, pouting and fanning himself with the 300-page merger. Now Ken’s glowering at me, his boss.
“After I am gone, you can remember me as the guy who traversed the Atlantic, smuggling French sperm for you through JFK in his refrigerated tighty-whities. The rest is your fault.”
“Are girls forbidden to have appetites? Is this 1950?” I’m saying into the cellphone, wagging a finger at Ken before I, too, am stabbing, over and over, at the button meaning down.
The elevator’s plinging and plinging, rising past floor after floor, its massive brass doors are sliding apart, and I am boarding.
Ken’s attempting stuffing the fist-thick merger down the billowy front of my blouse. His arms are preventing the vacillating doors from closing. The warning signal of the elevator is dinging and dinging. Other passengers waiting in the car are sighing as I am making faces and shrugging, and Ken’s crying.
“Why are you crying?”
“Einstein defined insanity as appealing the same decision, over and over, expecting a different judgment.”
I’m feeling the gazes of people looking at us, all of them making silent attempts at puzzling out what we’re doing.
Two contentious telecom companies are becoming one. We’re finalizing the merger.
Ken’s kneeling on the threshold of the elevator, and I am screaming into the phone.
“Of course it wasn’t done with intent. She’s six. It’s hormones. The gut–brain connection. Get off your knees, you silly bitch. No, not you.”
I am yanking Ken in by the armpits of his expensive tailoring, and a mulish-looking woman is stepping back, retreating to the corner by the console, giving us a wide berth. The elevator is closing, and Ken is dampening the hem of my skirt, blowing his nose and dabbing his eyes with its folds, treating it like an extravagant hanky. I’m kicking a Choo in his ribs until he is struggling to his feet.
“One upside is the awesome powers of patience and endurance I have developed,” he’s saying, sniveling. “Ken Drubble, the assistant who can outwait a wall. The Dalai Lama may need me to watch a dead cat for him.”
“Ken, Maya has eaten the hand of another child.”
“Not bitten.”
“Eaten.”
“Ate.”
I am imagining sloughing off Ken; sprinting to Grand Central; catching the 11:10 train home; getting this kid’s hand out of Maya’s stomach, somehow, and replacing it with a prosthesis; dealing with legal repercussions—all the above costing obscene sums, so; rushing back to the Pleasantville train station; late train into Grand Central; back here; up this same elevator, to work.
Finalizing this merger.
I’m falling and Ken’s cushioning me.
The elevator’s coming to a halt. The doors are opening, the lobby gleaming, marble and more brass. Other passengers are stepping around the huddled forms of Überassistant and me, streaming in a hurrying mass toward the revolving doors, the rushing street where people are hailing taxis, the shining sun.
“I take back what I said,” Ken’s saying. “Not your fault.”
I’m paying four hundred dollars an hour to the pediatric psychiatrist lecturing me about spending more time with Maya. I’m procuring the full-service un-partnered-parent support package, requiring an annual subscription with six-month notice of cancellation, including full-coverage childcare which, only a month later, I’m supplementing with the "XXL Big Kids, Big Problems Support Supplement", and so then I’m paying and working even more.
“Sprinting, catching the 11:10 from Grand Central, whizzing northwards,” I’m saying. “Train pulling in, striding off, waltzing into Pleasantville Elementary, where I am. I’m. I.”
An important-looking person is trying to board the elevator. Ken, poking a loafer between the doors that are attempting reclosing, is wagging a forbidding pointer finger at the man.
“I have a tendency to exaggerate,” Ken’s saying. “This hysteria obscures the emotional truth. I want to clarify a thing.”
The doors are closing again, this time Ken’s letting them shut with a thud. We are rising.
“No verray parfait gentil knight ever ventured forth armed with as much zeal and devotion as I, on that Air France flight, bringing home your man juice. I kept fixating on the Frenchman and Nobel laureate. Your content provider. Somewhere over Iceland, I wondered, why not me? I was prepared to dump and pump, my own member in hand, secreted in the plane’s cramped bathroom. Flush the French. Vive le Ken Jr! But I thought of you. I put my penis back in my trousers. I resecured the complicated truss supporting the refrigerated underpants. I returned to my in-flight movie.”
Then Ken is running a hand through the entangling mess grief is making of my hair, fondling my scalp, roughly detangling the knots with searching fingers. Ken is punching an emergency-looking button on the console, we’re stopping somewhere in the air, and a distant bell is ringing.
The voice is still whining from the speaker of the phone that’s resting on the worn paisley rug after slipping from my drooping hand.
Ken’s saying: “I failed to do, unilaterally, what was best for you.”
“Provide me with your content?” I’m saying.
“Help you, with your whims and your crises—not because I had to, or because it’s my job. Because we were creating and tending something growing and precious together.”
The noise squealing from the cellphone’s ratcheting to a higher pitch then being cut off. Ken’s pressing the red button, hanging up the call, sliding the phone like a gleaming sword into the black sheath of his breast pocket.
“I imagined being your happy counterparty.”
I’m telling myself that I am leaping from a cab, outside Grand Central, dashing through the brass doors revolving, sprinting down the platform and leaping aboard the huge rumbling, panting train that’s waiting for me to come flying out from its hot underground tube.
I am digging my nails into the yielding flesh that girds the back of this man’s neck.
“I’m quitting,” Überassistant’s saying, and Ken’s fingers in my tresses are slowing then stopping their little motions. Loose pages are rustling as my legs are kicking involuntarily. “After this, I am quitting.”
“After this merger is finalized.”
“I can’t keep doing the same thing.”
“Flying to France.”
“Providing you with someone else’s content, so that you can panic while I watch helplessly.”
“In frozen underwear. And over Iceland …”
“Exerting my vast powers of patience and endurance. The shriveled guy tucked back in his polar den.”
“Poor Ken,” I am saying to Ken.
My hand is resting in his lap. The Astrocom to my Telenet, Ken is agreeing, silently, to my conditions.
“They also serve those who only stand and wait,” he’s saying.
I’m saying, “But you said you’re quitting.”
“I’m …” Ken’s saying—stopping there.
I am working the zipper of his fly down, slowing down, grinding it open.
He’s waiting for me.
Zachary Maher writes stories and lives with his family in Luxembourg. His fiction was first published in Weird Lit Magazine.