The Golden State

It is nearing the end of the month and I can assume that the University has not gotten wise to my job abandonment and thus that my full monthly salary is forthcoming on the first which after my mandatory retirement contribution taxes healthcare will be $3,316 which after daycare and rent leaves $516 which is never quite enough for phones and utilities and the food we are all three eating on two different continents and hopefully Engin will get one of his periodic but not totally reliable payments from Tolga et al. And there is the mobile home obviously with its current list price of $80,000 down from $99,900 but it’s not something to bank on although Christ that would be a windfall. I read in the news that some huge percentage of Americans can’t find $400 in an emergency so in the grand scheme of things we are really doing astonishingly well, a thought that both bolsters me at the intimate nuclear family level but demoralizes me at the citizenship human family level. I’d wager some huger percentage of Altavista residents can’t cobble together $400 but then again Cindy Cooper owns her own mobile home and goes to the Golden Spike every Sunday for $4 Picon punch with her lover so maybe she’s sitting pretty, who knows.

It occurs to me now in full force that if I do in fact abandon my job I will lose my gold-plated university health insurance and I conservatively estimate that whatever alternate mechanism I take advantage of if I do not resume the job will be $700 per month if we stay here, and what if one of my dire nighttime imaginings comes true, what if we are sickened or maimed, what then?

I look at the Institute e-mail and see 165 unread e-mails which is actually better than I expected, it is 5:32 a.m. and I could conceivably read through all of these before Honey wakes up. I have the brief and insane idea that I could just work “from home” here in Altavista and not have to pay rent in the City but there are several reasons why that won’t work one being that Hugo would never allow it, he likes to have as many attractive and competent women bustling around his person as possible, and I’m still highly competent at least and Hugo assures me in his ludicrously inappropriate way that I will return to myself as long as I don’t have any other children. Two being Internet which is needed in order to access the VPN that will get me on the network drives. The final and most important thing is Honey because I obviously can’t sit in front of the computer while she just rolls around on the floor all day, although I often stare at my phone while she rolls around the floor. If I am going to work anyway and Honey is not going to have my attention she may as well go back to daycare and I may as well go back to the office and we may as well wash all the bedding and fold it up and sweep the floor and mop it and vacuum the carpet and make Grandma and Grandpa’s bed and tape some cardboard over the soft place on the bathroom windowsill and turn down the thermostat and set the timer on the lights and lock and close the doors behind us.

Or we could go somewhere else. There is something almost sexually pleasing about this thought. I could take thirty-five dollars from the checking and go to Joie de Vivre which is the town’s sole beauty establishment and have my hair washed and blown out and I could moisturize my face with the ancient cold cream in the bathroom cabinet and iron my white blouse and put on Grandma’s jet-black fur coat from Gray Reid’s in Reno circa 1972 and put Honey in her overalls and we could polish up the Buick and hit the road and go somewhere where we will step out and really be somebody.

I am feeling deeply criminal about my absence from work but the truth according to my lizard brain is that it is nearly impossible to be fired from the University, I mean various Vice Provosts are always groping their colleagues and it takes years before any action is taken. Moreover Hugo and Meredith are so divorced from the Deep Administrative State, HR and Purchasing and so forth—a sort of parallel army of administrators with less education who all the specialized administrators like ourselves loathe and condescend to—and since both Hugo and Meredith often contravene every employment rule by having me fill out their HR paperwork for raises promotions etc., not to mention my own performance evaluations, it’s highly unlikely they could get it together to file the piece of paper that would for example inform Payroll that I was gone.