The Genealogies: Chapter 4, The Business of America—Part One

Hi ho, everyone, LL here. So, this particular chapter is LONG. And it's split into sections. So, over the next couple of weeks I'll be posting the sections separately. The chapter itself is some 11,000 words long. Yeah, Proust and Joyce are my homies.

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The feeling of redundancy

Once, in pursuing a dangerous Internet infatuation, Marcelo had flown to Chicago. He was met by the object of his infatuation—an infatuation he admitted to no-one, himself included, even though it was obvious to everyone, and was, indeed, reciprocated, though again not admitted to—her husband, their child, and a friend who was also visiting, who likewise had an infatuation with her, again unspoken and, sadly for him, unrequited. The husband may have had suspicions that the visit was more than merely friendly, but he too had infatuations he was pursuing. Skeins wound about them, and beyond them, carrying charges of desire and disappointment, pulsating beats of attraction and desperation. Marcelo often wondered if he could have been happy with Olivia, if he would have taken her in if she had left her husband, upended his life, created a new one with her. He often found his answer in the fact that once the infatuation was actually spoken out loud, it stagnated. Calls became less frequent, and, slowly, ended. They ended during a time of duress for Marcelo, and he often thought of her with resentment for having abandoned him during what was for him a somewhat anxious hour. He had his answer in that, he supposed. But sometimes, he didn’t remember all that, the disappointment, sullen sentiments he felt towards her. Sometimes he just remembered the feel of her body on his as they danced.

It had been Marcelo’s first trip to Chicago, and the image that stuck with him, even years later, was the drive from O’Hare into the city. The airport lay some miles outside of the city, out in the middle of the sprawling suburbs, and for a long while all he saw were billboards and strip malls and power lines. But, eventually, rising slowly up out of the horizon, the city came into the view. The skyline loomed up out of the flat prairie, bit by bit coming to dominate everything, until it seemed like all he could see was the serried ranks of skyscrapers, the Sears Tower standing guard over it all. It wasn’t quite as overwhelming as the Manhattan skyline, and that made it somehow more beautiful. He could encompass it all in one glance, take it all in, let it wash over him. Manhattan’s skyline was too overwhelming; Chicago’s had a comprehensible grace to it. That sight of Chicago’s soaring buildings always stayed with him, even as it became harder to remember Olivia.

The tall buildings of downtown Los Angeles did not inspire the same sense of excitement in him. Back before he worked downtown, driving into that skyline plopped incongruously in the middle of a basin besides a nearly-dry river elicited a certain frisson from him. At night, or in the sunlight on a particularly clear day with the San Bernardino Mountains framing the high-rises, downtown was quite pretty, in a postcard sort of way. It was an earth-tone and pastel skyline, not the massive, uniform gray of Manhattan or Chicago. The buildings were in a hodgepodge of styles, some tall, black and boxy, some whimsical and Italianate, almost belonging in another city, a city that took itself less seriously than L.A. did. He used to love driving up the 110 on the way to Hollywood, or the 10 on the way to Palm Springs or Vegas, and pass downtown, watching it almost as if standing sentinel, seeing him off with a gentle benediction and a promise of being there on his return. Of course, he, like most residents of the city, never had any reason to actually exit at any of the downtown off-ramps. Downtown was a live photograph, its composition changing with the changing the light, the passing of seasons, the cycles of rain and sun, but in a way a benignly neglected Forbidden City, a place you only journeyed to out of necessity, or when invited.

For several years Marcelo had been working in the telecommunications industry. He had entered it quite by accident, and remained in it out of a lack of anything better to do. People weren’t breaking down his door to make use of his English Literature degree; his facility with computers and databases, however, allowed him to earn a respectable living. He had entered the industry at its apex, when it seemed that it was about to become one of the driving engines of American industry. Telecommunications, the Internet, the service industry: America seemed more and more on the verge of becoming a country that provided ideas, ephemeral, non-material products, leaving the dirty business of producing actual goods to those countries where labor was cheap and regulations, if they existed at all, easily circumvented. And everyone was getting rich doing it. Coming of age during the 90s was a seminal experience. One felt as if all the old rules no longer applied. The previous generation’s obsession with recession, depression, job stability seemed quaint when it wasn’t sad. Recessions had been outgrown, and job stability was, if anything, undesirable, when there was always another, better paying job just over the horizon. Stock options and 401K’s promised, if not always wealth, at least extreme comfort. Everything was rosy, and everything was correctable.

Unfortunately, history wasn’t done with the world yet. It didn’t quite come roaring back, but stole once again into the world like a teenager sneaking into the house after curfew. One month things were going swimmingly for Marcelo’s company; the following month the layoffs began. He survived a few rounds of layoffs, until the office he had shared with six people he finally shared with two. Marcelo was never good at the job hunt, and he put it off as long as he could, until one day it was his turn to be called into the human resources director’s office. He packed his few personal belongings, and walked out with his box under his arm into a very pleasant summer afternoon.

He had quit a few jobs in his lifetime, but had never been laid off or fired. The feeling was completely different. The two or three times he had quit a job he had been ready to move on, and the act of leaving gave him a giddy liberation that he rarely felt otherwise. The usual clichés of new vistas opening before him were all too wonderfully true. It also had helped that the few times he had quit he had still been in school, and living at home. There was no real threat of him winding up on the street, destitute, homeless, shucked off. But being laid off was different. If anything, it felt worse than what he imagined being fired would feel. A firing carried with it the sense of having done something wrong to have been fired. It had a ring of a just dessert. The end result was the same, but somehow more easy to accept. He could have learned from his mistake and dusted himself off, wiser and a bit more perspicacious in the future. The layoff, however, left him with a dull void. He had done nothing wrong. He had always shown up, worked reasonably hard, more than a few times gone above and beyond the call of duty. He had been rewarded with promotions, bonuses, a trip to Las Vegas. He was always a bit too sarcastic to be considered the model employee, but he had provided loyal service to the company for four years. Suddenly, he wasn’t needed anymore. It didn’t matter to him that the company itself would soon fold in all likelihood. He wanted to stay to the end of it all, clutching to a job that he had allowed to come to define him. Suddenly, he was out of sorts, floating rudderless and absolutely without a clue as to how to proceed. He knew, of a sudden, that he had become a statistic, and not a very fetching one at that.

That day Marcelo entered his recently purchased car, his first real car, all new and shiny still without so much as a dent from a flying pebble in it. He settled in the driver’s seat, holding onto the steering wheel, staring ahead but not seeing anything. His first thought was a wish that he was still driving his beaten up old jalopy. It barely ran, but he didn’t owe anything on it, and the insurance had been a minor amount. He rolled out the upcoming months of car payments in his mind, one bill due after another, more money siphoned out of his meager and dwindling savings, all because he thought his job safe, he thought his company prospering, and he wanted a new car, something he wasn’t ashamed to be seen driving in, something in which he wouldn’t be afraid to drive. Marcelo had a highly developed sense of what constituted hubris, most likely gleaned from living with Mamá for a good portion of his life, and buying a new car was hubristic enough to merit a crashing fall.

He clutched at the steering wheel, the key in the ignition but the engine not turned over. He breathed deeply, slowly, in and out. His boss, Maggie, had cried while taking him down the elevator and escorting him out of the building. They had hugged, and he had promised to go over to her house for a long-planned party that weekend. The day was hot and bright and it infiltrated the car. The cabin baked, the windows rolled up, the ignition off, the air conditioning quiescent. But he couldn’t move. He stayed hunched over the wheel, looking slightly down, through the windshield at the hood of the car. Nothing at the moment seemed more interesting than that. Certainly driving home held no appeal. Once he turned the key, once he pulled out into the street and began the drive home, the new dispensation would become official. He wouldn’t be returning. His last paycheck lay in the box, a relatively fat one, including all his vacation pay for time off never taken. The hulking, faux-modernist white adobe office building loomed over behind him. He couldn’t think about getting another job, that things would, in some way, work out. And it didn’t matter that this day had been in the offing for some time. Even an expected death is still a shock once it arrives. This, like a death, presaged changes in his life, and Marcelo had always had an extravagant fear of change. That too, he thought, came from his mother. He held on tighter to the steering wheel, hoping no-one came out and saw him still lurking about, immobile, unable to do anything else.

After several long moments, during which the temperature inside the car became stifling, and his brow began breaking out in sweat, Marcelo sighed and reached down, turning the key in the ignition and starting the car. Something choked his throat; at that moment he hated himself for caring so much about a job, something that, he hoped, he could easily replace. He finally rolled down the window, letting in an ocean breeze, even that far inland. He thought about how he would miss driving to work, and stopping in at a nearby Albertsons for the croissants he often bought his cube-mates. He pulled out into the light, early-afternoon traffic, and made his way home down an already-crowded freeway.