Clarissa Snow was an extraordinary typist and often finished her work well before 5:00 p.m. On these days, she spell-checked the Secret Report, proofread it two or three times, then spent the rest of the afternoon thumbing through magazines she had smuggled in her bag. Her interests were varied and sundry, and wholly vicarious. Because she was afraid of flying, she bought travel magazines, wherein she browsed the pictures of exotic lands she would never visit. She read gourmet magazines, as she did not cook; gardening magazines, as she had no garden; dog- and cat-breeding journals, because her apartment building did not allow pets.
When she was done with her magazines, she stared out the window. She’d heaved some file boxes out of the way and discovered a floor-to-ceiling panel of tinted shatterproof glass. It gave her an unobstructed view of the high-rises across the street, and the high-rises beyond them, and the dim yellow mist that obscured everything in the distance. When this bored her, she snooped around. A narrow linoleum trail wended its way through the file boxes, which were labeled by fiscal year — FY72–73, FY71–72, and so on — some going all the way back to the 1930s. The older boxes were filled with brittle, yellowed claim forms. They were smudged with carbon-paper stains and freckled with typos. The signatures and countersignatures were elaborate and ornate, and Clarissa Snow imagined the signatories trying to outdo each other, engaged in inked battles of loop and filigree across the bottoms of their staid documents. She looked forward to her late-afternoon forays into the company’s past, perusing the archives of a world without correction fluids and highlighters and Post-it notes, a world where — in Clarissa Snow’s rude, romantic vision — policies were never canceled and claims were never rejected. Whenever she came across a previously unexplored file box, her heart would thump. When she lifted the lid and peered inside, the dust motes of sixty years would waft up and dance around her head.
Because she received sections of the Secret Report out of sequence, Clarissa Snow was at first baffled by its contents. One section discussed the technical specifications for computer networks and telecommunications protocols. Another section consisted of pages and pages of balance sheets, the figures unlabeled. And another delineated the agenda and minutes of a business conference in Ireland. (Ireland! she thought, unable to imagine business being conducted in Ireland.) But one morning during Week Four — the last week of her assignment — Clarissa Snow received the opening pages of the Secret Report and discovered its secret. It was a proposal to eliminate the Claims Unit and to transfer all of its functions to an overseas vendor. In two months, the twelfth floor would become a records storage facility, and everyone in the Claims Unit would be out of a job.
Clarissa Snow snapped her eyelids shut, but it was too late. She could not unread the paragraph she had just read. She slapped at her skull with the palms of her hands, but neither hand nor fist, neither brick nor rock, could dislodge what she did not want to know. Inside the lids of her closed eyes she saw the terrain of her office multiplied a thousandfold, column after column of file boxes looming in a dense fog of gray dust.
That afternoon she locked her door and made some additional changes to the Secret Report. Using the search-and-replace function of her computer, she substituted all occurrences of the Executive Vice President’s name with the word “Dickhead.” Other Executive Vice Presidents became “Bunghole” and “Pedophile” and “Pig-bitch.” She changed “downsizing” to “butt-fucking,” “remuneration” to “masturbation,” and “capital outlays” to “steaming piles of shit.” She printed a copy and read it aloud. She hoped this would make her feel better. It didn’t. She reversed these changes, of course, and destroyed the adulterated copy. She moved on to the file boxes. She selected one of the oldest ones — FY29–30—and poured diet soda into it, just enough to soak in and ruin the contents without seeping out. There was no relief in this, either. But Clarissa Snow — while ashamed at inflicting such petty vengeance upon these venerable and innocent artifacts — was nonetheless resolved to petty vengeance. What else could she do? Somebody had to be punished. So she carefully poured the rest of her soda into several more boxes.
That afternoon, on her way up to the twenty-ninth floor, the Unit Manager cornered her at the elevator. “We hear tomorrow’s your last day,” he said. He was wearing a tie that looked like a rainbow trout, its tail fin knotted tightly beneath his chin and its head hanging wide over his belly. “You know,” he said, “we’re really going to miss you.” Clarissa Snow’s stomach churned. She thanked him.
The next day, she finished the Secret Report, assembling and formatting its sections until it was the perfect and uniform document she was hired to create. She downloaded and inserted graphics, cross-referenced an index, printed out and assembled the required number of copies, bound them into their gray report covers, and slipped them all into a box, which she was instructed to tape tightly shut and leave locked in the office along with her office key. She was done by 3:00 p.m. and was gathering her things to make her escape — the stairwell was only two doors away; no one would see her if she timed it right — when there was a knock at the door. It was the Unit Manager. “We’re having a little birthday party,” he told her. “And you’re invited.”
A banner taped to the lunchroom wall read GOODBYE CLARISSA! A cake on the table was decorated and frosted to resemble the screen of a computer terminal. The message on it read WE’LL ALL MISS YOU! Everyone from the Claims Unit was there: the Analysts and the File Clerks, the Specialists and the Secretaries, and all the ugly-tied men. People she had never met before hugged her and handed her slices of cake and told her how wonderful it was having her. “We hope you come back!” they said. “We’ll get you a job here!” they said. And who, who should Clarissa Snow see at this moment among the press of well-wishers but the Executive Vice President’s Assistant, arising out of the crowd as if from a hole in the floor, head weaving at shoulder level — toward her — like a predatory balloon, and who, upon reaching her, executed the following in seconds: a brisk, professional hug; the cool touch of a doll-like hand upon her own; and — to Clarissa Snow’s horror — an impish wink of the eye, a wink like the shutter-click of an insidious camera, a dirty little flicker of implication passed from one to the other like a pornographer’s contraband. And then she was gone, slipping into the mob around the table and gliding away with a plate of cake in her hand and — to the delight of the Claims Unit employees — a creamy blue smudge of frosting on her chin. And then attention was called for — the clang of a spoon against a coffee mug — and presentations to the guest of honor were made: a bouquet of flowers, an immense tin of homemade oatmeal cookies, and, after the Unit Manager stammered through a little speech, a card signed by everyone in the Claims Unit. Clarissa Snow started to cry. Three women she didn’t know cried with her.
Forty-five minutes later, in the thinning light of late afternoon, she sat hidden in her office. She was on the floor, with her knees to her chest, in a far corner of the file-box labyrinth. There were occasional knocks on the door from potential well-wishers, which Clarissa Snow ignored. She was listening for the Claims Unit stragglers to just go home, her ear attuned only to the inevitable sound of an empty office — the enormous quietudes of Friday that roll through the corridors and lap into the conference rooms and cubicles like a submerging tide. And then she could slip away, slip down the stairwell and outside and into the din and clamor of the evening exodus, leaving behind a tin of cookies that she would never taste, flowers that would be dead by Monday, and a tightly taped box heavy with Clarissa Snow’s best work.