Everything Changes

isn’t, he’ll be gunning for me and we’ll never get a dime’s worth of business from Nike again.
    I stand between the money and the client, between Craig and his bosses at Nike. No matter how I act, there will be negative repercussions for me, and all because of someone else’s screwup. The middleman wears a big fat bull’s-eye on his shirt, our version of the Nike swoosh. And the worst part of this whole mess is that Bill will have to be in on it, and he’ll find some way to turn this on me, just like Craig did. Regardless of the facts, there will be no getting out of being blamed for this. It always goes down this way, like a familiar refrain: Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right, here I am, stuck in the middle . . .
    And the thing of it is, today I can’t bring myself to give a shit. Something in my internal processes has gone horribly awry, and there’s this spot, this microscopic group of rebel cells breaking the rules and congregating where they shouldn’t, smoking and drinking and getting tattoos, growing and mutating and fucking around with the system. My system. And I know it’s probably nothing, but what if it isn’t? Sanderson said it would be eminently treatable, but even so, if it came once, it can come again—statistically speaking, it most likely will—and I’ll spend my life wondering when the other shoe is going to fall.
    I stare blindly at the computer screen until my vision becomes pixilated, and then I give up. I’ll be useless today. I pick up the phone and dial Hope’s number, intending to tell her what’s going on and ask her to meet me at the doctor this afternoon, but I hang up after the first ring, not ready to bear the added weight of her worry on top of my own.
    My unwillingness to involve Hope flummoxes me. Am I really so concerned for her peace of mind? That damn spot has me so worried, I could use someone else to do some of the worrying for me. So why can’t I bring myself to call her? Another, less altruistic reason occurs to me. Tamara knows. Hope doesn’t. In some way, admittedly a petty, twisted one, this makes me closer to Tamara than to Hope, and to tell Hope would end that. Hope’s genuine concern—she would, of course, insist on accompanying me to the doctor, would aggressively pepper him with questions in the nature of a concerned mate—would in effect nullify this new chunk of intimacy with Tamara, would reassert the reality that lately I seem to be bending where Tamara’s concerned.
    So, call Tamara,
I tell myself.
Call somebody before you explode.
But I can’t call Tamara either, because I belong to Hope, and my unwillingness to exercise my right to worry her in this manner makes calling Tamara seem like nothing better than a blatant substitution, underscoring my precariously ridiculous perch in the relationship universe at this juncture. It isn’t lost on me that my waffling devotions, as secret and, so far, unrealized as they are, have nonetheless managed to thoroughly isolate me, leaving me to deal with this crisis on my own, and frankly, I’m not up to the task.
    Bill has sent me a barrage of e-mails asking for a CSR on the Nike situation, and judging by the tone and frequency of the e-mails, all sent before I arrived at work, he’s well aware that the status is fucked-up beyond salvage. Hodges, that prick, has gone over my head. Like many middle managers, Bill believes that control and efficiency are best achieved by inventing an infinite array of internal reports, to which he assigns acronyms to make them seem like sophisticated business tools rather than a direct manifestation of his compulsion to cover his corporate ass. A CSR is a Client Status Report, a one-page document reviewing all current activity on a particular account, to keep Bill up to date. We account execs are supposed to furnish him with one per client on a weekly basis, a mandate we ignore thoroughly. Bill himself forgets to ask for them, until something goes wrong, at which point he insists upon them, rather than a quick, verbal update, as if this clerical process itself will keep the chaos at bay. The more paperwork Bill can jam between himself and the clients, the happier he is. Bill is scared shitless of the clients.
    I’m about to e-mail him a response when he rings my intercom.
    “Zack.”
    “Hi, Bill.”
    “We’re finishing up the production meeting in the conference room. I realize you came in a bit late today, but I figured you could join us now and