Kyle Ellingson
Work Life
The CEO stands behind her mod iron desk, posing for no one.
She poses alone, on lunchbreak, in her soundproof office. Apart from posing, she has no hobbies. Her four walls are paneled in twice-daily Windexed mirrors. Level, nondistortive mirrors, giving back reliable, verisimilar images of self. The way she appears to the many people eyeing her, expectant.
She used to knit socks. The socks of yesteryear. Now, in the now, she poses. As in, power poses.
The CEO’s face, in pose:
one eyebrow flat ( __ ), one aslant ( ⌢ ).
She maintains dry, suspicioning eye contact with herself in the mirrors. Blue eyes, gazing skeptical into blue eyes. She searches her face for quirks of weakness: congeniality, twinkles of decency.
None. Well, sort of none. The solemn miming of none.
Her choice of dress: loosely jacketed, snugly pantsed, barefoot. Decidedly braless under her black button-down blouse. Polished bald head (shaved) gleaming bluish under led-tube lighting. Bare left foot squeezing toefuls of carpet shag, as it would a stress ball. Bare right foot victorious atop a box of ingratiatory thank-yous and Turkish soft chews from board members of a conquered and acquired produce distributor (Agnecorp).
Fists set on wide hips, above her childless pelvis. Chin elevated so as to face, on high, the fast descent of an unpredictable career.
A Washington-Crossing-the-Delaware-of-Professional-Apex-at-a-Very-Young-Age.
Results of CEO’s first annual holistic checkup:
Sex: female
Name: Tammy Ferris Feld
Height: 6’3’’
Weight: 178 lbs.
Age: 34
Annual Salary: $659,345.35
Allergies: dust, mold
Fears: irrelevance, irresolution, debilitating disease
Recurring Dream(s): Sitting in rowboat, staring into water,
and there, ascending rapidly from the depths, a megacopy
of her own face, mouth open.
The CEO no longer sits, has divorced herself from seatedness.
The obsessive standing is not, this time around, due, so much, to hemorrhoids (as in, rage hemorrhoids), which hurt to sit on. This was the case back in the previous and lower-performing fiscal quarter, when hemorrhoids arose. This time she stands so as to maintain the elevation of her face above the faces around her.
All typable work the CEO dictates to a seated secretary or two, or to as many as are needed to keep pace. The CEO, meanwhile, paces a last-quarter-moon shape around the pacing area in front of her desk.
Cyclical pace pattern of CEO:
To relax her legs or the balls of her feet, the CEO does not sit, but leans an elbow back against a wall, a doorframe, the shoulder of an unpaid intern.
In conference rooms, at the head of tables forty junior executives deep, the CEO swings her legs and arms atop a portable elliptical unit. Semi-supportive yoga tank and stretchy pants. Joggling breasts and stiffened nubs of nipples a deliberately in-your-face sensorial overload, instruments of workplace oppression by way of discomfiture. Expendable white towel draping her neck, gallon jug of water swashing in the jumbo cupholder appended to the elliptical’s computing console. Sweat rilling freely from her bald scalp and reddened face to her jawline.
Message to subordinates being, While your bodies are seated, deteriorating and eructing at rest, mine achieves the height of status as brain-carrying mechanism (conveyor of lucrative brain), maintained and toned and kept full of the clarifying good feelings exercise is proven to induce.
As of not that many years ago, the CEO was still living middle class and close quarters with her husband in a studio apartment (no washer/dryer) above a pet supply store (food, toys, meds). The husband still lives there. As in, to this day, same life, minus her.
He sends her small gifts and bouquets (standard postage) bought with his low-wage earnings ($9.75/hr.). He appends little notes to his gifts, indirectly inquiring as to when/if she plans to end her “tour of power” and return to him and their minimalist, but sexual, existence.
His moderately pricey gifts are meant to mean that much more because his earnings are so small.
A journalist doing a fluff bio for a “Women in Business” featurette asks the CEO why she, a CEO, shaves a head that produces a liberal poof of black hair (judging from pre-CEO photos).
“My goal is always to think more than the people I’m with, the people I’m negotiating against. If my opponent spends half of every minute with me thinking about my bald head, that’s half of every minute my opponent isn’t strategizing. I sap my opponents of time. Of brain ammo.”
And why exactly does she, a CEO, shun the use of a private lavatory?
“I like to remind my employees I’m not afraid to perform excretory functions alongside them. That they don’t hold that over me.”
The CEO crafts all her selfies to appear annoyed with the viewer—tired of the viewer’s fangirl/boy need to view her, ogle her, mythologize her. One gets the sense, doesn’t one, observing her sidelong, pursed expressions of contempt and dismissal, that some lowly smartphone paparazzo has encroached upon her mid-sentence, mid-tactic, mid-victory, to capture an instant of her helming commerce.
The CEO has had friends (college, etc). As in, she has watched herself make friends really proficiently, using allotments of humor and listening poses and unidealized flattery.
Knowing she “could” make friends, she now doesn’t “have to.”
Results of CEO’s husband’s annual Eastern medicine physical:
Sex: male
Name: Mark Judd Frisch
Height: 5’4’’
Weight: 128 lbs.
Age: 32
Annual Salary: $19,415.93 (content with this)
Allergies: Amanita muscaria (if ingested)
Fears: public speaking (esp. toast-giving), willful vanity,
unused rooms, nihilism
Recurring Dream(s): Sitting in rowboat, staring into water,
and there, ascending speedily from fathoms, supersized
version of wife’s face, mouth open.
The CEO’s staff and board member offices occupy the vertiginously tall Penumbra Building, with the CEO’s office located on the quite miniature and architecturally interesting ultimate floor (shape of tiara).
All exit signs in the Penumbra Building the CEO has reissued as do exit signs. As in, Please, do exit.
On the CEO’s desk sits a lineup of family portraits: father, younger sister, two younger brothers, identical triplet male cousins. The only face missing is her mother’s.
Her mother, who is the CEO of a more stable but now smaller corporation than the CEO’s.
Her mother, through whose unimpressable, unsurprisable demeanor (very mothery) the CEO views herself as a wisdomless young person.
Her mother, whose corporation (Tynacorp) it would be satisfying to acquire and subsume, to say the least.
Her mother, whose portrait pends in the CEO’s head, over her small crackling hearth of autonomy, her flickering logs of trying to move on and not care.
The CEO prohibits logo’d or slogan’d T-shirts in-office on Casual Mondays. (People need more help easing into the workweek, goes the thought, than easing out of it.) The CEO displays authority by skirting her own rule and wearing, each week, a different block-lettered aphorism on black cotton.
This Monday’s tee:
RESPECT YOUR ELDERS—
IF THEY DESERVE IT
The skirmish in June over the Swollen Orange Distributor of Austin is notable for being the CEO’s first major acquisitional victory over the racist misogynists manning (never in any sense womanning) an insolvent umbrella corp. All seven hubristic, racist misogynists flee the boardroom on June 23rd (calling it “a noxious social space in which one can, emotionally, so to speak, hardly draw a satisfactorily or energizingly deep breath”), leaving the CEO in control of sizable storehouses (42°F) of ripe, fragrant oranges, the dusty and unswept prisons where tens of forcibly overpaid and overvalued white males supervising undermotivated white male teens have priorly “been held” (by exorbitancy of wage), and who will imminently be replaced by an upbeat assortment of migrants and women, “freed” to go quietly revise their lifestyle goals from sun chairs in the shaded backyards of parents and friends.
The CEO snail-mails her condolences via a popular greeting card with a popular victim-health mantra inscribed:
Abuse: Never think it did happen.
UBER DRIVER #1: Pornographic material is the bedrock of marital society. Pornographic material is the release valve on the steam engine of monogamous cohabitation That said, if you never shut the valve, the system loses pressure. But if you refuse to ever open the valve, the system detonates. And so my message is…. My message is: Wives—forgive your husbands. Husbands—your wives. Wives—your wives. Husbands—your husbands.
CEO: (upright, sunglass’d, back seat, asleep)
37 letterheaded requests to authorize stock trades in her private portfolio are “rotting” (says her broker), unsigned and unsent in the CEO’s filing cabinet. As in, hundreds of thousands of unmade, undiversified dollars. The CEO explains that the papers make her tired. As in, make her yawn. The CEO explains that there are some people who cut people that make them yawn out of their lives, and there are other people who cut from their lives papers that make them yawn, and that she, the CEO, is both these kinds of people. End of call.
Monday’s tee:
CONQUEST: THE NEW COMPENSATION
The CEO can, at all hours, be sighted exercising her left or right hand’s squeezing power upon a cue ball. Her firmness and vigor of squeeze.
And when the CEO is scheduled to shake the hand of an executive or politician, she instructs an intern to vet in advance his or her, the executive or politician’s, hand dominance (usually by phoning counterpart interns in the others’ offices). The CEO then, upon meeting her opponent, presents, for conventional shaking, the hand that corresponds to her opponent’s submissive hand. Left with left. Right with right.
Firmness and prolongment of squeeze.
Note from husband, with bouquet of markdown fork-knife-spoon set (rose gold):
…We are at a marital stalemate is my understanding. You want me to feel inferior to you by the standards of professional achievement and income. And I want you to feel inferior to me by the standards of social humility and financial ambivalence. Until we edit our standards, we will, I’m afraid, continue to…
How the CEO copes with a seasonal cold:
1. At first tickle in throat and lymphatic plumpness under jaw, cancel or postpone the week’s meetings/engagements.
2. Jet to private resort on southeast shoreline of Little Tobago.
3. Lay amid cushions of open-air gazebo.
4. Receive fluids / nutrients / sedatives / anodynes intravenously.
5. Utilize catheter.
6. Talk to no one.
7. Do not remove sleeping mask.
8. Have nose wiped and body carried to toilet by trained team of silent nurses.
The CEO resides in her office.
It is a sedative, noise-ordinanced space in which to sign papers and check email, yes—but it is also a primary residence, for now.
A room for yawning and muttering sensible encouragements to one’s reflection.
You’re good, you know. You are good.
Monday’s tee:
FREE LADY MACBETH
The CEO accompanies eight of her fellow CEOs (six female, two male) into an upscale massage parlor in subterranean Hong Kong. It is the second evening of a four-day global fruit vendors’ conference. The parlor’s lobby is covered floor-to-ceiling in black velveteen, overcrowded with curvaceous couches. Hidden vents pump in odors of aloe and drying tobacco.
On the anglicized sign-in sheet, below Full Body? ☐ , the CEO is ocularly clobbered by the question Happy Ending? ☐
“For real?” she asks her dimly lit companions.
“Happies aren’t just for men,” says one of the men. “Not anymore.”
“Never were strictly for men,” say two of the women, “the happies.”
“Is anyone here not having one?” asks the CEO.
Someone nods. Someone withholds eye contact. There is much shy plucking at thumbnails. It appears, yes, everyone intends to have one—a happy.
Eight boxes: 
The CEO pens a hesitant, disempowered ninth.
The CEO, hungry before lunch:
innovative vulgarity
pathological honesty
cross-eyed gazes
The CEO after lunch, sated:
brow-raising
ironic
hands folded
The CEO, drunk and talkative (prosecco) on a private jet, having socially cornered the pilot in the cockpit (idly patting the head of the joystick at 41K ft.):
“People love—love—to say you’d be shocked at how few people are actually thinking about you at any given moment. Like Oh, quit your vanity, no one’s thinking about you. Quit primping for an audience that isn’t even awake to you, whose seats aren’t even pointed at your stage. But all most people talk about are other people. If you add all that up, math would tell you at least some people are actually being thought about, and maybe a ton. People who don’t become experts in the humanities or sciences become experts in other people. I, for one, have always found people are thinking about me more than I expected. Now I’ve changed my expectations. I expect people are thinking about me. I wake up and ask: How should I comport myself toward a world that is thinking about me? And the answers are always immediate and clearly annunciated in my head, orders barked from my psyche. Like right now, if I was younger, I might think This pilot isn’t even thinking about me right now, he’s flying his plane. It would be vain to think he’s thinking about me. But you are thinking about me.”
The pilot closes his eyes and tips his head in humble (beaten-in) blue-collar concurrence.
Monday’s tee:
GET OUT OF MY HAY!
The CEO fantasizes about meeting (as in, making the acquaintance of) a paramour who is like an ascetic monk in all disciplines except bedroom disciplines.
The CEO can think of no reason she wouldn’t like to be with someone showing no interest in who she is (details) or in her profession (domineering behavior). Someone with no horse in the race of emolument, status, material taste. A present person, as they say, hovering in a nirvana above the swamp of the particular. A dude she could be spiritually anonymous with and genitally fond of.
Anonymity = identity in repose. A nap for the self.
She names her fantasy man (clad in red burlap robes) Mr. Zen.
The CEO ponders the motives of her staff. As in, Why do they work for me, who is so corrupt regarding apology, so procrastinative in admitting her wrongs?
The CEO can’t help suspecting her staff of 127 professionals is mired in some depth of self-abasing fixation on her: the sight of her (braless despot), the idea of her (young despot). She believes this is why they tolerate her, even at her most bullying (diminutive nicknaming) and matronly (threats of professional spanking). They are nebbishes who exact vicarious thrills from her storm and stress, her cardio fitness and willy-nilly boardroom sangfroid. They suffer a sort of staring problem where she is concerned, a daily and life-sized staring problem. She can tell, because she has it too—
—cue mirrored walls in office.
Monday’s tee:
THAR BE BOOBS IN ME SHIRT
Replacement tee (promptly mandated by HR at the behest of board members), humorless:
BE BLIND, REWIND
The CEO has run out of fondness, then patience, for menial tasks and duties (e.g., dishwashing, toothbrushing, resending memos). These she allocates to interns.
“Sip, please, ma’am,” says an intern, waiting with a cup of mouthwash. “Spit, please, ma’am.”
Splegh, into sink.
“Ug,” murmurs the CEO, rolling her eyes in a boredom sulk.
These days, the CEO focuses exclusively on doings she’s never done (e.g., expanding the company into metro transit bidwork, running a five-minute mile, enduring disappointment without inducing hemorrhoids).
In college, the CEO trained so compulsively for triathlons (three-a-days, if not four) she incurred triad syndrome, a condition in which prolonged nutritional deprivation produces a waning or discontinuance of menstrual and ovulatory processes.
The syndrome was, among her training mates, a badge of effort. A tiara of validity.
Her menstruations never came back—a convenience she is “fine with” and “no, not creeped out by,” and “no, I’m not interested in investigating further a Western or Eastern medical avenue” due to her, in fact, having achieved this condition “by force of intention,” seeing as menstruation was, “at best, a sort of old-world hassle.”
Monday’s tee:
SUBURBS AND SMALL TOWNS:
WHERE MEDIOCRITY GOES TO RELAX
The CEO graduated from her minor, Kentuckian liberal arts college with a ba in Home Ec and a GPA of 2.87. She often drops a non-sequitur mention of this number among her valedictorian subordinates, to break morale. To induce scowling, griping around the water cooler, chest pains on the ruminative commute home. A diminuendo of the orchestra of egos over which she whips and jabs her conducting wand. Meanwhile, with a beckoning wiggle of her conductorial fingers, a crescendo of the superegos.
Overnight in foreign cities, in the solitude of top-floor suites, the CEO elaborates an encounter with a dildo. Not the dildo her husband special-ordered for her ($157.48): a latex plaster-cast molding of his own (as in, very own) penis, to scale, to remember him by while she is away. As in, Remember my penis, here in Austin, while you’re away. Remember that it is here, remembering you.
The husband dildo (pellucid green) stays zipped in a small pocket of her carry-on. The CEO cheats on this dildo with a second, squattier dildo (pellucid blue). Cheats on, sneaks around behind the back of. This bluer (cuckolding) dildo is an approximation of Mr. Zen’s penis. Via email (private account), she instructed the dildo clerk to ship a dildo at random—said randomness resembling the unpredictability of Mr. Z.’s penis size and character, upon her discovering him, a stranger.
The CEO awakes confused in the dark, in the sleeping nook of her office, and, unable to see, assumes she is blind. Which comes as a sneaking relief: an excuse to retire from her overgrown profession.
By habit, she flips the switch that lights her little ct-scan-style nook, can see, has already forgotten the blindness scare of wake-up befuddlement.
But the creeping relief sticks around, endures the day, like a slow-release analgesic.
The CEO tells a man in her clinician’s lobby to get up from the middle of three seats and choose one of the side seats so that she can sit in the opposite side seat and not in a seat immediately next to him.
“No,” says the man, looking up and tipping up his fedora so she can see his no-saying eyes. “Nuh-uh. Can’t tell me to. I don’t do telling. I do asking, not telling.”
The CEO has not been said no to in a blip of months—her employees do do telling, and big-time. So her eyes go rooster-lidless and her face trembles like the red caboose of a speeding train bound for a very thick wall.
Time for a comeback. The CEO would like her comeback to be unique. Unique comebacks are almost impossible, she’s found, to dismiss or effectively shit-talk afterward.
You’re all cliché, murmur the eyes of the sitter, under the fedora brim. You’re a mousetrap spring-loaded with cliché.
Am not, say the eyes of the CEO, below her bald head.
Are too.
Not.
The CEO resorts spontaneously to a fart. Her memorable comeback, a fart. One fart: baritone, voluminous. Louder than the retributive honk of a car on the street below.
The sitter: blinking, unmanned, unbreathing, look of hurt. Dazed by the absence of cliché.
The CEO weeps, watching an old home video of her teen self knitting a long green sock.
“And here’s Tam and she loves her knitting. Little zen of yarn,” narrates the cameraman, her father.
“Indeed,” says teen CEO.
Socks, the CEO weeps to herself. O’ the lost simplicity.
The CEO’s recommended reading list for incoming or prospective staff (multiple copies browsable in the lounge):
God is Un-kewl (Knopf)
George Wallace is Lame (W.W. Norton)
Musicals, Ick (One World)
In Defense of Youth (Rodale)
The Economist (monthly)
Monday’s tee:
YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO REMAIN VIOLENT—
ANYTHING YOU SAY CAN AND WILL BE SNOOZED
AGAINST YOU IN A QUART OF AWE
The CEO parachutes (alone and tee-heeing) into an artificial lake of packing peanuts she paid for in salary cash—then, trudging clear up a grade of pebbles, looking back, and frowning, disenchanted with the whole idea, it no longer being unattainable, orders the site set ablaze.
“Trying to have fun,” she barks in vexed explanation of herself to a far-off gaping onlooker—man with a pole, skewering highway trash.
A buzz from the CEO’s secretary:
“Your husband’s here, requesting a personal moment. Something about your, ahem—(muffled) what would you like me to say, sir?”
Off-mic murmurs.
“About your, I apologize, your breasts. Your breasts being not awesomer than many, many other breasts, breasts of lower-achievers—housecleaners and—and girls at Jamba Juice. End quote.”
The green button on the CEO’s desk will unlock her double door, permitting entry. The red button will illuminate a red light outside her door, signaling dismissal.
Instead, she descends, facedown, onto her ergonomic napping table (modified chiropractic), shuts her eyes, gums up a bit of drool—as if to show herself she’s slept through the whole thing.
“You aren’t responsible for how people treat you.”
—(hungover) word of advice to interns
The CEO’s printed image has been desecrated. Someone has penned a nipple and stippled an areola onto the bald forehead of her supersized (ceiling-tall) freestanding cardboard likeness, situated in her waiting room for no other reason than to advertise her presence within to those asked to sit patiently without, in hardback plastic chairs.
Pose of cardboard CEO: regal, sturdy, pantsed, etc.
The CEO has a fantasy, a spinning daydream in which her head is almost swirled to sleep. She dreams of inverting all manner of workplace expectation, arriving at work the next morning with the penned nubbin tatted to her living forehead. She will stalk the staff cubicle bay. The tat beaming like a flashlight over a party nervous in the dark.
Her eyes wander from their axis until they cross from the strength of the dreaming. She has to look up from her desk to the mirrored office wall, where her forehead shines, to make sure the tattoo isn’t an error she’s already committed.
UBER DRIVER #2: And what do you do for a living?
CEO: I’m sorta doing this CEO thing. It’s, meh. Don’t know if it’s for me. Kind of a lot. Kind of puts you in a lot of situations—idk.