their salvation. It kept a person from ruminating needlessly about things. It was the ultimate ecstasy, removal from self.
Jeanette returned to work. She put Joey’s BrightBox in its place beside the potted plant and the fishbowl. Her fish was floating near the surface of the water, its long floral fins drooping and losing their color.
“Has no one been changing Tess’ water?” Jeanette asked, swiveling away from her desk. Louis and Rita exchanged tired looks. Rita popped her gum and turned away.
“Joey, I’ll be right back. I have to take care of this,” Jeanette said, uncertain if she was being heard.
For a moment Joey’s Box flashed to life. She replied with a noncommittal grunt and sunk back into unawareness.
Jeanette went to the office kitchen and found Reggie, who was leaning with his tailbone propped on the side of the table as if he’d been waiting for her. She rubbed her eyes and tried to look alert in his direction.
“Glad to see you’re back, Jeanie,” he said with a nod. “Did the trip go alright?”
“I, uh yeah. Went great. Thanks for letting me off on such short notice, sorry about that.”
He scratched the folds of skin dangling beneath his chin. If he was mad at Jeanette’s recent flightiness, it wasn’t clear. Men his age were opaque to her; even their father’s emotions were distant and hazy, impossible for her to divine.
“I wanted to run an idea past you, see if you can get the ball rolling on it,” Reggie said. He continued before she could assent. “My understanding is you’ve been building up some connections with LifeMedia of late. Certainly must’ve established some rapport, what with your sister and all.”
Jeanette nodded and sat the beta fish down. It fluttered its heavy, winglike flippers and sunk to the bowl’s bottom.
“You know, we’d kill to have them as a client.”
“Oh. Sure. That’d be great…”
“And with this whole BuzzBox crap they’ve been peddling, they could really use some new representation,” he pondered this a moment. “If they had a good marketing team they could maybe jump to Google’s level, you know? Or Apple circa 2005, or something.”
Jeanette nodded again, more vigorously. “Oh sure. Definitely. Are you saying you want me to pitch them, or..?”
“Just use your connections to your advantage,” Reggie said. He reached backward and retrieved a mug from the table.
“Oh sure. Yep, I can…do that.”
“I think it’d be a fruitful partnership. Don’t you? Worth a shot anyway?”
“Absolutely. I do have someone on their sales team that I could talk to.”
She paused for his response. His expression was flat, almost reptilian.
“I’d be happy to pitch them,” she said.
Reggie scratched his chin. “Great. Keep me posted.”
“Who the fuck ratted me out?” Jeanette barked as she stormed back into the office.
Louis looked up from his carrot sticks. “Jeez, about what?”
“My ‘friend’ in LifeMedia?”
She shot a glare to Rita, then Louis, and back. They both shrugged. Jeanette crossed the carpet and returned the fish to its spot on the sill.
“Somebody told Reggie I have a ‘connection’ at LifeMedia. You two are the only people I told about that date. So?” She opened her arms. “Spill!”
“Oh, that was totally Pete,” Louis said. “I mentioned it to him and he blew the whole thing way, way out of proportion. You know how he is.”
“You told Pete?”
Louis glanced worriedly over to Rita, who’d already swerved her chair back to her screen.
“Yeah. I didn’t mean to, it just popped out my dumb mouth,” he drummed on his desk and sighed dramatically. “Well, anyway.”
Joey fluttered awake and glowed. “What’s the big deal?”
“Ooh, she speaks,” Louis said.
“Nothing! It’s fine. But now I have to suck up to Steven and see if we can work with them.”
Rita snickered at her screen.
“You want to work with them?” Joey said.
Jeanette turned to the BrightBox. “Why not?”
“After everything they did wrong so far, you wanna represent them?”
Joey watched her sister slump in her chair and wipe her bangs from her forehead. The ends of her hair were growing brittle. Joey made a mental note to instruct her to drink more water.
“I’m thankful for them, still, aren’t you?” Jeanette said. “They’re not perfect, but they made all this possible. Plus it would be nice for something good to come from all this.”
Louis turned and said through a mouthful of carrots, “It’s true. If she brings in a client that big, you’ll be sitting in an office with a much better view.”
“I guess.”
Jeanette scooted forward. “Joey, it would be perfect. You could help. We have so much firsthand experience with the client’s perspective here.”
“Don’t ask me. I’m not their client, you are. Do what you want.”
“Are you sure?”
“It’s your career, Jean— decide for yourself. Act like I’m not here.”
Lily messaged.
Jeanette watched lights shift and swirl on Joey’s sides. She didn’t anticipate an additional response, but hung in place waiting for it nonetheless. If the lights flashed and shut off, it meant Joey was going to disappear for a few hours, replying in hazy, confused spurts. If the Box went dark, it meant Carlton was coming. Even that was becoming less disturbing to Jeanette. At least it meant someone would talk to her.
Eventually she turned away and opened her email. Joey had remote access. She saw Jeanette type out several drafts to Milton and delete them before arriving at one with the appropriate tone. It took humans frightfully long to communicate, and always through a scrim of propriety or feigned distance. The problem was that a message had to appear effortless. What was the point, Joey wondered, in inhabiting a body so full of emotion when so little of it was shown?
When the message was sent, Jeanette smiled and pushed away from her desk. Lily whispered in Joey’s ear, reminded her that this was for the best. That it was much better if Jeanette was busy. Next to the BrightBox, the beta fish swam around its fresh bowl, disoriented by the new water but refreshed.
29.
In college, Joey picked classes like fruit from bulging trees. Her major was Undecided for years as she plucked off credits in sculpture, botany, photography, ethnography, welding, and physical education.
It wasn’t flightiness; she bore deeply into each pursuit, dug a fresh groove in her brain where the knowledge from each discipline stayed forever. Her grades were high. She worked her hands to calluses, muddied them, taught them a bevy of skills. Jeanette worried she would never find a proper home.
“I am home,” she would say. Her kitchen table was covered in modeling toothpicks, architectural models, dried nubs of clay, and plants she was in the process of repotting.
When she graduated (after shaping her many credits into a degree in general education), firefighting was the obvious choice. She needed to be on her feet, but she didn’t have the stomach to be an EMT or the amorality to be a cop. Teaching itself was obviously out of the question. Jeanette, who’d been out of school for a year by then, made her sister a LinkedIn profile and began forwarding job announcements, all of which set Joey’s teeth on edge.
In the end she didn’t need to seek a job out. She was called to service. One day, she was walking home from the gym and spotted a fellow runner slipping into the doors of a firehouse. From outside, Jeanette watched the firefighters high-five and stride carelessly into and out of their kitchen. Dogs and cats and bulky uniforms were strewn everywhere. There was a flyer pasted on the window advertising job openings. Simple as that. Joey passed the physical on the first try.
Joey’s sister wanted her to have ambition.
“Firefighting is a part-time gig,” she said.
All that free time Joey had, slothing on the fi
rehouse couch, staring at the ceiling and spinning records— couldn’t she apply that time to a career?
“I’m doing what I want already,” Joey said with a shrug. “It’s taken care of.”
“But don’t you want to feel some sense of…accomplishment?”
Joey couldn’t explain it to her. She carried a child in her arms through the blazes. Doused a historical home and preserved its centuries-old wood and its thick, musty rugs. She’d taken a frail, elderly woman across a chasm of broken stairs, in a gloriously dilapidated factory the woman called home. There was accomplishment in all of it.
And there was accomplishment lingering in the hours of firehouse camaraderie, too. In the wasted hours spent driving to meet police at the site of 911 calls, many of which required no firefighting at all. There was accomplishment in the gentle gestures, like holding an oxygen mask to a gunshot victim’s face, or wrapping a car accident victim in a metallic blanket that crinkled in her hands. There was accomplishment in filling the dogs’ food bowls, in dusting soot from her hair. In replacing the thick, python-like fire hoses with her callused hands. Every moment of it felt productive, sacred.
Jeanette’s idea of excitement was standing on the outside of a stifled fire, in the safety of the sprinkled grass, a pen in her hand. Perhaps in telling people about the destruction she had seen, but only long after the flames had cooled and the more gruesomely damaged