radio

We weren't sure if it was at 12:01 a.m. or 5:59, some time before we woke up for sure, but that day the radio broadcasted only good news. It was the kind of thing you noticed right away in the relieved tone of the announcers.

By the time we'd had our coffee my wife and I were feeling pretty good. The baby seemed to pick up on it as well and he just sat there, smiling. As an experiment we kept moving him to different positions to see if he'd get pissed but he just wouldn't stop smiling. Upside down, smile. Sideways, lying on his stomach, on top of the cat, sitting in the refrigerator. All smiles.

We kept switching stations but no matter where we looked we couldn't find bad news. On the conservative station a Mexican man had legally immigrated and gone on to success as CEO of an environmentally-friendly burger chain. On the lefty ones it was Hugo Chavez's birthday and he was unstoppable, giving out free kittens for each of the world's citizens, postage paid. NPR was doing a 24-hour Car Talk marathon. In sports, the Phillies had won the World Series.

The news was so good that I worried we might be hallucinating. At lunch I asked my wife to feel my chest, which had this strange new feeling, kind of queasy, kind of nervous, but it made me smile. I asked my wife what it was. "That's hope, honey," she said, like talking to an toddler. But she was still smiling too.

By 3 p.m. we were happier than our first date and the neighbors had stopped by and we were all sharing stories. You could picture the radio waves going out all over the place, like friendly ghosts.

That night the kid fell asleep early and she and I made spaghetti and lit candles and talked to each other like real people, the radio still going in the background. When we went to bed the good news continued unabated and we went down to sleep knowing all was good in the world forever amen.

In the dead middle of the night my wife woke me up crying. In a minute we both were, then the pumpkin too. We switched the radio back on, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

my energy efficient new heart

so the other day i wake up and my heart has stopped, a clot of bad vibes blocking up the works. wanting to do the responsible thing i pull it from my chest, seal it in a ziplock bag, and stash it on the bottom shelf of the freezer behind an old carton of vanilla ice cream.

i go down to the hardware store and replace my heart with a compact flourescent bulb. when i get it home it takes an extra couple seconds to light, but when it does i feel 1,000 times better.

people take to me and my replacement heart. i'm a new man. i sprint from the train to work and take the stairs 20 flights in leaps and bounds. my coworkers shower my efforts with unanimous, unfiltered accolades. within the week my boss gives me a big raise and moves me from a cubicle to the corner office with the nice view of the SILVERCUP sign. kids and elderly people rush up to hug me on the street. doves and deer appear everywhere i go, shitting rainbows. my girlfriend even stops hating my guts.

but every time i open the door to the freezer my heart is in there waiting for me, eating something, frozen chicken, tortellini, even raw coffee beans. it looks up in disgust, like a scorned claymation california raisin. my heart hates me. it wants to fight me.

life beyond the fridge continues to improve. my girlfriend and i marry, i inherit a zillion dollars from some aunt i never knew i had. the president of the company flees the country to avoid jail time and appoints me in his place. shares skyrocket. Economic Dipshit magazine puts me on its cover three months running. i lose weight, my piano playing develops a rhythmic quality, the ozone layer replenishes itself. my wife and i even speak in complete sentences.

back in the kitchen, my heart's moved to the refrigerator side and it's looking strong, poised to take over the whole apartment. knee deep in a tupperware full of leftover quinoa, it questions my manhood, my intellect, cursing at me like richard pryor kicked out of his own bed in the middle of the night by a dozen tiny richard nixons in elvis gear. my heart warns me of last days (mine) and irreparable offenses (grievous, multiple).

i know that it just wants me back, that all i have to do is promise to pay more attention to it and we can live in peace. but things have gone so much more smoothly without it that i can't justify the expense. so i stop buying groceries.

one day my heart chomps gloriously through a Hungry Man TV dinner, pantomiming sex with a big bowl of chocolate pudding, singing "Guantanamera." two days later it's dead tired, rationing the last baby carrot, plotting an escape it's too tired to execute. by the weekend it's just my heart and a half empty bottle of ketchup. two days later that's gone and my heart's too weak to even stand. profane requests are whispered for foods high in protein and carbs.

the next morning my heart's lying prostrate in the ice cube tray, both middle fingers extended, out cold. that night when no one's looking, i drive it out and lob it off the verrazano narrows bridge, my energy efficient new heart glowing in my chest.

layoffs

call half of your staff into the main conference room, let your HR director explain things in calm perfect resource-speak and then fire her too while someone changes the locks. pay and then fire the locksmith and have them all thrown out into the parking lot and sprayed with a firehose by the security consultants.

pile the unused aeron chairs in an empty conference room until its full of them. empty chairs have sad old memories, sagging marks from sagging people, dead dreams, amusing enough. but these tangled chairs are also actually a form of competition; if something goes wrong and a competitor buys you out they'll never be able to untangle the chairs and suddenly they're paying rent on a room they can't use.

assemble your remaining staff each morning for 8:00 a.m check-ins. pace the room, filing your nails with a machete. reveal nothing.

don't lay off by merit. keep the managers who botched it up for now but pick their lackeys off at random, using percentile dice or the I-Ching. after you've fired half the staff, hire ten new people at higher salaries to break the spirits of the rest. wear a bandolier festooned with human skulls.

when plotting layoffs, don't think people, think strategy. consider office layout, an even gender balance, two by two. if this downturn for some reason features an apocalypse, will your organization be prepared to propagate the species? consider both your situation as chief executive but also that of your chosen successor. castrate or drug other males. police your brood. kill your successor, planting his head on a pike in front of your office to warn pretenders to the throne. think of your employees as potential followers in the dusty haze that will follow the great war. fill the supply room with bottled water, TV dinners, and a trusty cyanide supply, just in case. in case they come for you.

perhaps you've gotten a bit paranoid, alone in your office late at night, drunk in the dead new york quiet. but it's sort of nice, isn't it, how every one else has gone home. now you don't have to draw the shades or lock your office door. unlock the secret vault and review the dog-eared pages of your great plan. if the market continues its descent you can fire them all, and the last man standing will be you: master of the universe.

watching you and chuck dance

your ex-husband never was much for dancing. i think he thought he'd sprain an ankle or miss something on TV. but it seemed like that's all you wanted, to be good and drunk on a saturday night, dancing your face off. it didn't surprise me when the two of you split up, him on crutches and clinging to a little portable black and white TV, watching you move all that heavy shit out of the apartment by yourself, in your dancing shoes.

once you asked me to dance and i said no. it isn't that i won't do it, but dancing combines two of my weakest suits--rhythm and casual physical contact. i'm still trying to play down a 1995 incident involving language barriers, castanets, and temporary blindness for a hungarian economics major. i felt bad, though, like i'd let you down when all you wanted out of life was for it not be a boring sack of bad writing and flat white brooklyn irony.

this made me all the happier to hear you'd gotten together with chuck--a fantastic dancer--but i didn't see what sort of solid gold shit y'all were working with for myself until the other night.

chuck was wearing a sequined bodysuit and wielding 8" Dazzler-brand glow sticks like a ninja. you were dressed in a triceratops costume, your third of the night, this one a sort of maroon. T and I had been drinking "full grown men" (3 parts beer, 2 parts whiskey, 1 part jaeger, lime wedge) and talking up librarians. Then the librarians had taken off, T and I had missed our own cues to leave and there we were, you, chuck, us, and my dad, who for some reason had just arrived and was playing "Lady in Red" on an accordion.

watching you and chuck dance we saw a future spool out where each of you was always looking up to see where the other one was and the other one would always look back, eye to eye, getting each other, digging what you saw and not fucking it up.

you danced, changing leads, twirling, tipping, never spilling. it was almost 5 in the morning. T, my dad, and I took off in full possession of saturday night peace. the clock tower had all its faces back and we couldn't smell piss anywhere, no matter where we walked, and my dad at the top of his game, chord and melody everywhere, a shimmering and nimble pack of mid-sized animals on a forever plain.