The Exodus of the Corporate Zombies

I harbor a secret fantasy that the lot of us are undead zombies. Shuffling corpses. Slavish, insentient lumps of meat. Navigating the public transportation system by reflex, devoid of any signs of higher-level cognitive function.

I am waiting on a train platform to board the Long Island Railroad. The platform of Riverhead Station is indistinguishable from the platforms of any of the multitude of other trains run by the Metropolitan Transit Authority. The branching arteries all lead back to the beating heart—New York, New York—the Big Apple.

The sunshine is what really gets me down. Those brief moments in the sun are the most depressing part of my day. Before I board my metal coffin and descend into the bowels of the subterranean tunnels that lead back to the source.

Boarding the train, we all nod to one another. There is Caitlin. She is wearing a sleek pantsuit. Pale as an unbasted Christmas turkey. There is Vinnie. He has quit smoking. He gnaws on a smoking cessation chew stick. Caitlin takes her usual seat, clicks open her laptop immediately, and responds to an e-mail. It’s 6:19 am and I’m working,’ she says to her superiors. Vinnie is a cell phone guy. He calls some labor union flunky and barks some pointless orders to let the men know he’s awake and he’s watching.

There’s Brandon. He is a Wall Street Journal guy. A reader. He opens that paper wide. In the seat next to me. His elbows brush my shoulder and that infernal paper smells like paper mache and peat moss.

Pulpy ammonia and sulfite.

Smells like hell.

* * *

I get off at Grand Central Terminal Madison and exit through the bowels of the city.

Bodies flow out of the trains when the doors open like the gates of navigation dams allowing water to flow down through canals to the next elevation. The corpus of the flowing bodies splits at little tributaries, some leading to the surface, where I am headed, others lower, deeper into the subterranean dungeon.

I walk north from 47th Street to 53rd Street on Lexington Avenue. I blend in amid a stopping-and-starting throng of mindless streetwalkers that navigate communally like a school of fish or a flock of birds. We split at a street crossing with an Uber that didn’t make the turn and is blocking pedestrian traffic—“blocking the box”—then we swerve en masse around a homeless man sleeping on a cardboard box in the middle of the sidewalk, with a hat by his feet and a sign saying “Homeless Humiliated Veteran. Please Help.” We do all of this mindlessly in comatose prisons, our unremitting corpses dragging us along. Our thoughts are closed off by the virus in a faraway chamber, unreachable and fortified.

No one speaks to one another. We walk in silence. Heads lowered. Zombified bodies still donning the starched and pressed suits of the living. Pallid faces are directed away from the searing sunshine. We are still draped in living, breathing skin that gives the appearance of life.

I arrive at my building. I walk through the grey-streaked white marble lobby with a matching grey-streaked white marble reception desk, flash my badge, and place it on the turnstile into the building. I take the elevator down to the basement level. I stare blankly ahead with the feeling that the whole world is asleep.

I walk into the dingy maintenance office suite—a shut-up room with pumped-in air—and I am back in another subterranean dungeon, away from the things of man.

“Hey Duct Tape,” Graig says, nodding. Graig has thick-framed high-prescription glasses and an unassuming brown suit. He is a heavily balding 40-something Clark Kent-looking guy with paler skin and a bit of a gut.

“Hi Sam,” Gina says with a smile.

She is about thirty and single and wearing a floral blouse over a casual jean skirt, clear leggings, and pumps. Gina has flowing black hair and dark eyebrows. She has a little rouge on her face and dark carmine lipstick. Gina smells like fresh laundry, with a spritz of Lillie flowers—waxy, light, and verdant. I can taste her on my tongue like a fruity Jolly Rancher candy. Back when I was still living I crushed on her hard.

“Morning,” I say.

The placard on my desk reads, “Facilities Maintenance Specialist.” I report to the Facilities Operations Manager, Jeremy. It is quite possibly the most useless job of all time. I can hear Mike Rowe’s voice on a “Useless Jobs” special describing the stupidity of this position in vivid detail.

Jeremy also sits in the same room as Graig, Gina, and I. Because why not house multiple levels of redundant management, literally right on top of one another? That isn’t a rhetorical question. It is a statement I made once that cost me another job. Jeremy is on a Zoom call about a pesky HVAC issue with the 40-ton AC unit and chiller. This seems to confirm my suspicion that we are undead creatures—with ventilation just as stagnant as that offered to subway rats. Jeremy is a dusty, square man who moves in a choppy-Claymation manner like a character in a Gumby cartoon.

“Yeah, but the water loop. Right, Larry. How do we make sure it reaches the lower floors? I didn’t ask you that Larry. So, it’s the chiller? Right, Larry. The chiller then? I didn’t ask you that Larry. And Bob, how many men will it take? What is it gonna cost us? Put in the requisition Larry, we need to get his going Larry. This isn’t gonna be a problem now, is it Larry?”

Today we both approach the same old-fashioned coffee pot at the same time. The one with the burnt-in brown crust on the bottom from warming stale coffee too long without the burner being turned off. These have gone out of style but are still seen these days in the waiting area of every dingy car mechanic’s shop.

I wait for Jeremy to get his cup and then fix mine. I add in the processed coffee mate, fake creamer, and add some stevia fake sweetener, to taste. Staring down at the putrid brown coffee in the Styrofoam cup under the unnatural overhead lights in the subterranean room full of pumped-in air with the coffee mate clumping up into little floaters as I stir, I am certain that no living creature would take part in such a deadening ritual.

The coffee tastes like arsenic. The overhead lights penetrate my skull and char my brain, which caramelizes into brown residue, like the stain on the bottom of the coffee pot. The stilted silence is intermittently interrupted by phones ringing on the floor. It reminds me of the secure unit of a nearby Bellevue sanitarium in which invisible orderlies stand ready with concealed blackjacks and expandable riot sticks in their coats, all for the too-frequently needed crisis intervention.

My job is to maintain the “look and feel” of the facilities and ensure a “comfortable and high quality” environment. I have no knowledge of plumbing, electrical, or carpentry. But I decide when specialists in these areas are needed to fix a problem. I have no knowledge of snow removal, office cleaning, on-site and off-site data storage, supply reorder processing, or furniture and décor. But I “specialize” in “assisting” the “Operations Manager” with “managing” all of these tasks.

* * *

At 4:11 PM, the role of Facilities Maintenance Specialist suddenly becomes temporarily obsolete. The fluorescent lights overhead unceremoniously flicker, hiss angrily, and go dark. So do the computer screens, the phones—everything.

The elevators are stuck mid-floor. Trains in subway tunnels slow to an abrupt and jarring stop. It is as if a blood clot has become lodged in the left main artery, cutting off blood flow to the heart. The pulsing beat of the metropolis slows, du-dump, du-dump, du- dump, du-       dump, du-               dump. And then stops. Du- --------------



I walk all the way up to the twenty-second floor. As I climb the stairs, the sweat coats my chest underneath my white button-down shirt, which begins to seep through. I finally come to the floor where our cohorts in purchasing sit. A little color returns to my face from the climb.

There is an old-fashioned table radio on the darkened conference table, streaming out news from 1010 WINS AM radio.

Walking in, I scream out, “Bill. Bill. You there, Bill?”

“Sam?” he asks.

“Bill, what’s going on here?” I say.

“Blackout, Sammy-boy, the whole East Coast is down and part of Canada,” Bill says.

“What the hell caused it?” I ask.

“They are saying some trees in Ohio brushed against a high-power line and overloaded the system,” Bill says. “How’d you like that, a strong gust of wind and some tree branches have sent us back to the Stone Age.”

“So, it’s a vegetation management issue—human error,” I say.

Walking out into the hallway I can hear the screams of a woman trapped in an elevator in between floors. She is screaming for help. I take off my shoe and use it to pry open the closed elevator doors. Peering in, I cannot see anything but the black interior of the car from above where there is a small opening down into the car.

“Hellllppp. Help!” she screams.

“Are you okay?” I ask.

“Oh, my God. Thank you! Thank you. Please get me out of here,” she says.

“What’s your name?” I ask.

“I’m Michelle,” she says.

“And where do you work?” I ask.

“On the 59th Floor,” she says.

“Ok. We are going to get this sorted out. Get you out of here. I’ll stay and talk to you for a few minutes until someone comes. Why don’t you tell me what is going on with you?”

“I’m so scared. I want to check in on my daughter, but I don’t know what is going on,” Michelle says.

“I don’t know either, the lights, the electricity, it all just died,” I tell her. “Someone said it is a power grid failure, some trees downed a high-power line, and it overloaded the system.”

“My God!” she says. “It is so, so dark in here.” And I think of how dark the bleached corridors and office suites are but in a different way.

A firefighter comes running up the staircase I just exited from. He stands at attention like a superhero in a comic book. Larger than life. Totally calm. In command. Assured. He must be one of the last of the living.

“Someone’s here, a fireman,” I say.

Even though it is summer he is wearing the traditional tan topcoat with reflective taping, the fire hat, and is holding a crowbar and a hatchet in his enormous left hand. He is a big fellow of at least six-foot-four. Strapping. He pushes me to the side, reaches into the elevator, clasps the woman’s arm, and pulls her out in one yanking pull. She scuffles her feet as she finds footing on solid ground.

I give Michelle a hug. She cries on my shoulder and says, “My darling Rebecca, I don’t know how to find her.”

“People are walking home, walking the streets,” I say. “Just walk with them. I’m sure she’s doing the same.”

I head back down the stairs to the maintenance room.

* * *

Arriving in the maintenance room, I see Gina chewing on the end of her pen and tapping her left foot nervously. Her eyes are wide and inviting and I feel a thumping in my chest. Can’t be? I think. A sign of life?

“Where have you been?” she asks.

“I went up to purchasing to see if anyone knew anything,” I say.

“And fucking left me down here with Graig?” she asks.

“I’m sorry, I needed to check things out,” I tell her.

“What do we do now?” she asks.

“I can’t get back to Riverhead tonight. If you want, I can come and stay with you… walk back, keep you company…” My heart is echoing in my chest. I can feel the warm blood in my ears. It is almost as if I am a living creature, still endowed with a life force and a will of my own.

“You’d do that?” she asks.

Would I do that, I think—are you kidding—of course, I’d do that, in a heartbeat, without question. But I don’t want her to know how keen I am on the idea.

“Sure. I’ve got to sleep somewhere,” I say as casually as I can manage.

Gina and I walk down Lexington Avenue in silence at first, taking in the sights and sounds of this once-in-a-lifetime moment.

The daywalkers are shuffling along in abject confusion. The dislocated bodies rattle, bone on bone, the breathless friction of the arthritic joints griding from lack of use. They all look blankly forward at the footfalls of the other daywalkers, a bawdry display of sudden clemency. Inmates freed from captivity, grumbling at the loss of their comfortable bondage, their predictable helotry. And now they are cast asunder into a concrete desert, wandering listless and free, but free to do what and free to go where?

Some of the more recently dead voice words of encouragement. “We’re gonna make it out of here, all of us, together—we’re New Yorkers.” Some others ask, “Where shall we go?” And yet others speculate, “There will be shelters set up when we get back out of Manhattan.”

The strange thing, the thing I can’t wrap my head around, is that everyone, by some internal navigation system, automatically is fleeing the city—the beating heart of the metropolis. No one wants to stay in Manhattan overnight. Not even the ones that live here. Does anyone live here? Is it even a real place? It seems now to be a work camp. A prison to be escaped. A liminal space that can’t be lived in. An Alcatraz made of bricks and mortar and steel and marble.

The parade of the undead proceeds forward with unexpected charity and unity, even if it is lacking entirely in life. The bodega clerks are out in the streets handing out Poland Spring waters and plates of food that will spoil. There are police at intersections, directing traffic, furiously screaming and waving their hands to stop cars from crashing without traffic signals. There are buses taking folks out to Long Island. The blazing late afternoon sun burns with a surreal intensity. A full day of baking turns the pavement hot and causes waves of heat to radiate up from the roadbase.

The buildings sit like impotent ruins of a bygone age, dark and useless relics. And for the life of me, I can’t understand their use or purpose, which suddenly seems so strange. That all these people would travel from places too far to reach on foot, travel for hours, each day, for what, to assemble in these ghastly concrete prisons like inmates? To have their lives consumed by a machine of consumerism that eats its own young? For what?

As we get into Murray Hill, we turn left on 32nd Street. Everyone going the same way. We are all headed to Brooklyn.

“What an adventure,” Gina says. And I remember that time I took her to Mets Stadium because I had extra tickets to a Dave Matthews Show. I remember how she hit my arm when the opening band was playing. It had been August then too. We’d hit each other with playful jabs like school children, back-and-forth, all night—we'd gotten really carried away with it—so much so that we both had armfuls of bruises the next day. The tension of what we both really wanted to do had been palpable, but neither of us had the courage to act on it.

We turn again at Kips Bay, overlooking the FDR, and head South toward the Brooklyn Bridge.

“Where do you live in Brooklyn?” I ask.

“Oh, just down in the Heights, near the Court House, over on Remsen Street,” she says.

We continue walking.

As the crowd of the undead thickens into a veritable street mob, clogging 2nd Avenue so tight with people we are fit to bursting, I put my arm on Gina’s shoulder and hold her close, keeping her next to me.

“That feels nice,” she says.

“I don’t want to lose you in this mess,” I say.

In time we come to the Brooklyn Bridge. It is a crazy spectacle. The bridge is swaying from the foot traffic. It is jammed from one side to the other with people crossing on foot. There are helicopters overhead filming the exodus.

The mood has changed and some of the daywalkers are shaking off their heavy, hebetudinous slumber and waking as if from a dream. Their faces are full of smiles and laughter. I haven’t seen such wide-eyed impetuosity outside of a music festival.

It is like the Dave Matthews Concert I’d went to with Gina.

They all seem—happy—hopeful. Alive.

* * *

As we arrive at Gina’s seventh-floor walk-up, a dingy place, she smiles and gives me an impromptu kiss on the cheek.

She grabs a bottle of Meiomi Pinot Noir and two plastic cups, and we head outside where it is cooler.

Out in the streets, it is like a festival. We are in a magical realm. People are dancing and singing. Buskers are playing. People are singing along.

This is how the city was meant to be.

We walk down to O’Keefe’s.

And we sit down outside and neck like kids in high school.

“Hey Sam,” she says.

“Yes Gina,” I say.

“Don’t leave me,” she says.

I smile.

And at that moment I know that I am never returning to that office building again.

My undead body finally shakes off the curse.

Do I remember how to live?