Out of Office

At 9:04 p.m. the phone lit up on the nightstand and I turned it face-up with one finger.

Tina Voss

Hello Tylet - We have decided to let you go

That was all of it. The preview ran the full width of the lock screen and stopped. I tapped it. The app opened onto nothing, just the circle of death going around.

Top right corner: no bars. Not one.

Battery: 62%.

Tina Voss was my boss's boss. She had spoken to me twice, both times in rooms containing at least nine other people. Tina Voss had people whose job was messaging people.

Before I left there had been a rumor with a shape to it. No facts, just the shape. Two people from Finance gone on a Tuesday. A ninety-minute meeting with no agenda. Kevin from Ops using the word restructure at the coffee machine, noticing me, and leaving.

On my laptop, in a folder I had not opened once that week, sat eighteen months of work on the Anderson account. Four decks, two dinners, one pointless flight to Cleveland that I still described as groundwork. Eighteen months of trying to be spelled correctly.

The trip had been booked eleven months out, non-refundable in a way the confirmation email mentioned four times. Nine days, all-inclusive, an island I had picked off a list. The flight down was four hours in an aircraft older than me, in weather that made the overhead bins talk. The woman across the aisle prayed in two languages. We landed to applause.

By the third night I was sunburned across one shoulder only, the wristband from check-in still on, lying in room 341 with the balcony open and a plate of buffet pineapple going warm beside me.

I did all the things. Airplane mode on, airplane mode off. Power down, power up, staring at the phone like it owed me money while the circle dragged itself around.

I stood on the bed. I held the phone out over the railing, three floors above an empty lit pool, and thought, with perfect clarity: maybe if I drop it, that's that. One splash and it's over and somebody has to tell me to my face like a person. Then I brought it back in and held it with both hands.

Searching… Searching…

I opened my email, which did nothing, and took the nothing personally. Access revoked. That's step one. They kill the access before the conversation.

And they do it on a Friday. Everyone does it on a Friday. This is Saturday, which is worse. Saturday means somebody forgot.

There was a phone on the desk. Using it meant asking somebody to say the sentence out loud, to me.

I put on shoes and went to find somebody who worked there instead.

Nine words. I read them again in the elevator. We have decided. Not we are considering. Decided. Done, minuted, circulated.

And Tylet. She had misspelled my name. You don't misspell a name you know. You misspell a name you're reading off a column.

The lobby was empty except for a woman behind the desk whose tag said MARISOL. She was lovely about it. The signal came and went, she said. The hill blocked most of it. But down by the water people sometimes got a bar. Her hands made a small shape to show me where the beach was.

Past the loungers the hill stood black against a blue-black sky, a red light blinking on top.

A tower. There was a tower.

Battery: 55%.

I walked the waterline holding the phone out like a dowsing rod, eyes on the corner of the screen. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Then one bar. One gray apologetic bar, for about the length of a breath. I froze. The bar went away. I said something to the Atlantic that I will not be repeating.

Two inebriated people sat farther down in plastic chairs dragged into the sand, enjoying the vacation I had paid for and not taken. The woman waved me over with her cup.

"You lost?"

"Signal," I said.

"Oh. DARREN." She said it to him, not to me. "Darren. Tell him."

Darren was certain. With the serene authority of a man who has never been asked for a source, he explained that reception came off the water: get past the break, away from the buildings.

"Out past the break," I said.

"Out past the break," Darren confirmed, and drank.

Battery: 47%. Bars: none.

I want it on the record that I took my shoes off first. That I went in ankle-deep and considered it like an adult. Phone above my head. Water at my knees, then my waist, then the cold lurch where the sand drops away.

Something brushed my leg and I made a noise I have never made since.

I turned a slow circle out there, arm up, reading the corner of the screen in the dark like a verdict. Hello Tylet - We have decided to let you go.

She wrote to me personally, at nine at night, on a Saturday. Legal told her it had to land before Monday. There is a list, and my name is on it, spelled wrong among names spelled correctly.

Searching…

I stood out there until my legs went stupid with cold. Then I shuffled up the sand with my shoes in one hand and did not stop at the hotel.

Battery: 36%.

A taxi sat outside the resort gate, engine running, driver asleep against the window. I knocked. He was awake before my knuckle left the glass.

"Osvaldo," he said, and put his hand back over the seat.

I told him I needed signal. It came out as a medical request. He nodded. He had somewhere in mind, which is not the same as understanding. Then he pulled onto the coast road with the enthusiasm of a much younger car.

The road went up. Of course it did. Switchbacks nobody could call two lanes, no guardrail, gravel where the asphalt gave up. White crosses at one bend. He took it the way you take the stairs in your own house.

On my side, a low white line, then dark, then water a long way down. One gap in that line and none of this would be my problem. I made sure of my grip. Not the door handle. The phone.

A plastic Virgin Mary was glued to the dash, turned backward, looking right at me. Faded to a suggestion of a face, one hand chipped off at the wrist. Ten uneventful years do not wear a statue down like that. I went back to the phone.

I was refreshing the messaging app.

Blind curve, sixty, one hand on the wheel, me in the back dragging my thumb down a white screen. Pull, release, circle of death, nothing. Pull, release, circle of death, nothing. A rat in a box with a lever. I stopped counting somewhere north of two hundred. Back to the lock screen for the nine words. Something went past us in the road and Osvaldo said "ah" and I said "mm" and did not lift my head.

Somewhere on that hill I finally did the arithmetic I should have done at 9:06.

With no service, the phone screams into the dark at full brightness, hunting for a tower that never answers. I had been burning battery to search for the thing I needed it to receive.

Which meant the correct move, the disciplined and adult and obvious one, was to power it down until morning.

Battery: 27%.

I refreshed it again.

He took me down into a neighborhood the brochure had cropped out. Cinderblock and corrugated iron, wires slung pole to pole, a dog that thought about it and didn't. One lit window on the whole street.

Osvaldo pointed: BETO'S, hand-painted on plywood, the apostrophe added later by a different person.

"He is open," Osvaldo said. "He is always open."

Nobody is always open. Nobody sells anything at three in the morning except one thing.

Battery: 19%.

Inside: a bare bulb, a tray of cracked screens, chargers on pegs, a price list gone soft at the corners. The curtain across the back doorway moved. I noted it.

A man came out from behind it, wiping his hands. He was a mountain of a man in a sweat-stained undershirt, with a pale scar from one cheek toward his jaw and enough dark body hair above the collar to braid. I had been prepared for a man who fixed phones. I had not been prepared for Beto. He said his name twice because I had not been listening. I had been watching him.

"No signal," I said. "And the battery's almost dead. I need a powerbank."

Beto had a powerbank. What Beto also had was a consultation.

"Give me the phone."

"I know what's wrong with it."

"Then why are you here?"

Fair.

I handed it over.

He turned it in his hands, tapped through settings, restarted it, waited. I watched the battery drop from nineteen to sixteen while he diagnosed an island with a hill in the middle of it.

"No signal," he said.

"I know."

He looked at me.

I looked at him.

"The powerbank."

He wasn't finished.

He checked the charging port. Battery health. Network settings. Behind him, the curtain moved again.

"Is somebody back there?"

"My wife."

From behind the curtain, a woman said something.

Beto answered her without looking away from my phone. She said something else and laughed.

"What did she say?"

"She says you look scared."

"I don't look scared."

Beto looked at me.

Battery: 16%.

"Phone is fine," he said. "Battery is going because it keeps searching. Turn it off until morning."

The only honest man on the island, telling me at three in the morning the thing I had worked out in the taxi and declined to act on.

"Powerbank," I said.

He sold me a powerbank. Fifty thousand milliamp-hours, it promised, in a font that had never met a lawyer. He set the box on the glass, glanced at the band on my wrist, and named a price with a tourist tax baked into it. I paid in cash. He counted it twice, which I found sinister, and which is what you do with cash.

Then he said, warmly, "Don't worry. Nobody bothers anybody on this street. It's a quiet street."

I had not asked whether anybody would bother me. Now I had an answer, and an answer implies a question.

He shook my hand and held it half a second past the handshake. "If it doesn't work, come back. I'll remember you."

Why would a man need to remember me. He meant the warranty. I went out to the car with the hair up on both arms. That was the reasoning, start to finish, of a man who has seen too many films set in places he has never been.

In the car, door shut, I opened the box with my teeth. The powerbank was dead on arrival. Zero percent. A cable, at least. A cable and a brick with nothing in it.

Battery: 13%.

The tower had been blinking from the corner of my eye all night, so I told Osvaldo to drive at it. He waited. There was a track partway up, then there wasn't. I did the rest on foot in wet shoes, past a goat with no opinion at all.

Up close it was a frame. Four legs of steel on a concrete pad, rungs climbing to nothing, and at the top: nothing. No panels. No dishes. Just an aircraft light some contractor wired up years ago and left blinking, out of habit.

Bars, battery. Bars, battery. I had been doing it every eleven seconds for seven hours and I did it again in the dark, nobody on that hill to perform it for except a goat.

Battery: 8%.

I know I sat down on the concrete and I know a sound came out of me that I would cross a street to avoid, and I sat there thirty-eight years old soaked to the chest with a phone at 6% reading the nine words again which had not improved and it was Tylet that finished me, not the sentence never the sentence because somewhere in the small hours the joke — Tylet, sounds like toilet, who names a kid Tylet — had stopped being funny and I had spent all night being fired by a woman who could not spell my name, and eighteen months on Anderson and I was a row in a column.

Then I saw the box.

Bolted to the concrete at knee height. A worker's outlet, left live by the contractor who left the light.

I got the lid open, plugged the brick into the wall and the phone into the brick, and sat in the wet grass. When a small orange LED came on inside that terrible plastic I laughed like something in a cave.

Battery: 6%. Then 9. Then 14.

Bars: none. Obviously.

I sat against the leg of that tower until the sky went gray at the edges and the phone read 88%. Then I walked down.

The goat came with me, ten feet back, matching my pace, stopping when I stopped, the way a colleague walks you to the elevator after a meeting has gone badly.

He was where I left him, seat back, radio low. I said mm.

At the gate I shook his hand and said, "Thanks, Oswald."

"Osvaldo," he said.

"Right," I said, and tipped him badly, I think, in the wrong currency.

The chairs were still down on the sand. Darren raised his cup.

Marisol was still on the desk. Salt to the collar, one shoe making a noise, a phone at 84% with zero bars, a plastic brick swinging off a cable like something shot.

"Still no signal?" she said, sympathetically.

I said no.

"Oh! But if you want Wi-Fi," she said, "we have Wi-Fi. The complimentary access comes with the resort presentation. It's ninety minutes. There's a breakfast."

She said it in the same bright tone she'd used about the hill and the beach. I had asked about signal. She had answered about signal. Twice. Accurately.

I want it understood that I did not scream.

"Sign me up," I said.

"Seven a.m.," she said, delighted.

I rolled into the room at 6:12. The balcony door had been open all night and let in an excessive number of mosquitoes. The pineapple had become a science project.

The bars came back first. One, two, three, strolling in like they'd stepped out for a cigarette. It came and went, she had said. Gone at nine, back at 6:12, twelve minutes after I signed away my morning for it.

The phone shivered and kept shivering. Forty-one emails. Two of them were my own out-of-office notice, fired at the team alias and back at me. Out of Office. Will respond to all messages when I return.

Tina Voss is typing…

It stopped. It started again. Then the white screen turned into something.

Tina Voss

Hello Tyler - We have decided to let you go ahead and take point on the Anderson account. Enjoy the rest of your time off and we'll connect on next steps when you're back. (edited)

I read it three times, then looked at the little gray (edited). Tina Voss, thumbing a message at a stoplight, getting my name wrong, sending it, seeing it, fixing it. In a hurry.

Anderson. I had Anderson.

Battery: 79%.

I felt almost nothing. Something warm a long way under, arriving late, the way the sunburn had turned up hours after the sun. I turned the phone face-down. Then I held the button until the screen went black, which took four seconds and all night.

Somewhere down that hill a man was driving home, thanked by the wrong name and tipped in the wrong money. I wrote Osvaldo on the pad by the phone. Spelled it out. Checked it twice.

Then I lay back with my shoes on. The mosquitoes had been at my ankles for hours. I had not noticed that either.

The knock came at 7:02.

Two staff in matching polos, radiantly awake, holding a lanyard with my name on it. I had agreed to this. There exists no mechanism for un-agreeing to kindness.

So I walked. Corridor, skybridge, morning coming through the glass so cheerfully I had to look at the floor. Me, salt dried white across both shoulders, wearing a band good for unlimited everything, going to a presentation.

There were carafes of juice. A woman came toward me with her hand already out.

"Good morning! I'm Nida." She looked at the lanyard. "Tyler."

I shook her hand and said good morning.

They sat me near the front and clipped the lanyard to my shirt, and I mumbled into my collar for the full ninety minutes: through the slides, through the tiers, through the points, through the complimentary week in Orlando.

At least my name badge didn't say Tylet.