Invisible People

Lyn was tortured by invisible people. In the morning she rode the bus to work because her ex-husband, Don, with his ridiculous door-to-door landscape gardening business, had gotten the Buick in the divorce. At the office, everyone was invisible. All tasks were communicated to the operators through their headsets or through crisp memos and emails. She had worked at New England Bell for nineteen years and had never once met her boss.

As part of the new upgrade, operators no longer sat in rows behind long banks of computers; they sat alone in quiet, individually modulated booths that, despite their tinted glass, reminded Lyn of the cow stalls she’d seen at the state fair as a child. In the old days, everyone sat elbow to elbow, and sometimes, when you were between calls, you could listen to one of your coworkers dealing with a crazy person trying to get a phone number for Santa Claus or Big Foot. The old way had been more friendly, but only a few months after the shift to booths, management had sent a memo down saying productivity was up 3 percent, and each and every operator got their own little plaque of commendation.

The plaque was the size of a large index card and made of wood that was too light to be anything but balsa. At first Lyn had kept hers in her kitchen, next to the cloudy fish tank. But when she’d had to call the cable repairman, after the service had gone out for no reason, he’d seen it and said “Hey, right on, lady!” and given her a big thumbs-up sign which made her feel how embarrassed her daughter Lacey would have been if she’d been there, instead of at college. After that, she kept the plaque in a shoebox under her bed.

Twice a week Lyn took the bus to Walton to visit her brother Lou in the correctional facility. The lawyer said Lou would never make parole if Lyn didn’t come to visit. Not only did it look good to have regular visits from family but seeing her gave him something to shoot for, the lawyer said. Lyn brought chicken pot pies from kfc, his favorite, though they were mutilated by the time the guards were convinced they didn’t have condoms full of cocaine stuffed under their thick brown crusts.

For many years Lyn’s days off had been on Sundays and Fridays. She had liked having one actual weekend day off, especially when Lacey was younger. It gave them a chance to catch up. And she’d always liked being off on Fridays when everyone else was working. She could go to the bank or get shopping done, everything was open. But right around the time the booths were installed at work, she got a memo informing her that her new days off would be Tuesdays and Wednesdays. No reason was given. These were the days she went out to see Lou, but it was a challenge to think up things to talk to him about when she saw him two days in a row. Often she found herself just sitting there staring at him, watching him run his tongue over his mustache looking for leftover pot pie.

Lou had shot a saleslady at the Bikini Hut at Boutique Village Mall in 1998. His defense was that he hadn’t been aiming for her, he’d been aiming at his lying, cheating, ex-con business partner Larry, who’d stiffed him out of three hundred and seventy-seven dollars and sixty-five cents. To Lou that was a lot of money, money he’d won on a horse and had forced himself to part with at Larry’s insistence, even though he’d never won anything before in his life. Lou was still saying, to anyone who’d listen, that someday, when he got out, he was going to find Larry and shoot him in the kneecaps. Lyn didn’t say anything, but she felt unoptimistic about his parole.

When she ran out of things to say to Lou...