Copy Cats

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My office did not look like my office. I had asked the department secretary to redecorate it while I was on vacation, and she had filled it with hanging plants—spidery things with long sharp leaves. All the green made me nervous. The increased feeling of responsibility depressed me. The plants would die and it would be my fault. Still it was good to be back, better than being at home where life’s only choices seemed to be the noise of the television or a serene suburban quiet that made me feel like something horrible was going to happen. When I had parked my Explorer in its familiar reserved space that morning, I felt relief, more than anything else, to be back where I belonged. I had even worn a new shirt—blue gray to match my steely resolve—and polished my best shoes. The sun was strong and high in the east as I walked to the building, and a cluster of little birds hopped around the parking lot mechanically pecking at the grit near the empty handicapped spaces. CODE CO D E 164 My travel thermos still contained half a cup of surprisingly good coffee. If I wasn’t full of love for any particular individual, I was at least spilling over with good feeling for mankind in general. Living seemed a good idea. “You look great,” the security guard at the front desk said as I signed in. The day before, I had sprawled out on a lawn chair in the yard for a couple of hours so I’d have a healthy glow. “Where did you go?” he asked. I wondered if I had just returned from a better vacation than I had imagined. “Europe,” I said in an attempt to be impressive and ambiguous at the same time. “Europe,” he said thoughtfully. With one word I had opened a gap between us, a distance he could be amazed by or get indignant about, depending on his mood. “Yes,” I said. “Next year I’m planning to go to Asia.” “Wow,” he said, “that would be something,” and he turned around the logbook and inspected my signature as if looking for a clue to my success in the fat curves of my name. GuldeckandCranlanmetmeattheelevator.“Hey,”Guldeck said. “If it isn’t you.” He pointed at me with a thick finger, holding the elevator door for the crowd—tastefully dressed people who looked something like me. They sprayed the same juices under their arms and worried about the same things when they looked in a mirror at three in the morning. Except—and this was a crucial difference—they were not me, were they? Sometimes I didn’t even feel like me. As we jockeyed for position and I smelled their colognes and perfumes and aftershaves, it passed through my mind that maybe someone in the crowd could be better at being me than I had been. Then I thought of my empty house with its cheeseencrusted pizza boxes and half-empty photo albums and real- CO D E 165 ized that someone out there right now was probably doing just that. “I thought you weren’t due back until next week,” Guldeck said. He was a large, excitable man who had a way of making those around him feel rushed. Often I had heard people complain about how they couldn’t think straight in proximity to him. He had the rough hands of a construction worker, someone who spent his time gripping and lifting. “That’s true,” I said, “but some issues came up with a particular project. Things I had to address personally.” “No substitute for the hands-on approach,” Cranlan said, and he laughed quietly as if disdaining such a simple idea. He did this often, I noticed—summarized someone else’s words with a subtly sarcastic chuckle, a study in economy and control, a barely audible noise that could make you feel inadequate at a near-childish level. I would have added the technique to my repertoire if Cranlan had not mastered it so completely that it seemed inseparable from him. The elevator reached the fourth floor, the crowd reshuffled, and the three of us pushed into the hallway. “You should know,” Guldeck said. “We have a situation.” “It’s another reorganization, Michael,” Cranlan said. “I haven’t seen it, but there’s a list of names...