Penelope Chu,

She’s Just Like You

Suicide rates had crept to an astonishing low,

which is not to say that people were very much happier.

Had the psychologists bothered to make a press statement,

they might have told us that people simply didn’t feel like

putting in the effort.

Why bother?

Even now, Penelope Chu is gazing sedately from

her hairdryer to the tub and deciding, languidly, that she

may as well go to work. The cord would never reach

anyway and she has neither the time nor momentum to go

purchase an extension. She dries her hair and dusts a light

film of cover-up along the bridge of her nose before

stepping out from the seventh floor apartment.

Downstairs, she unlocks her mailbox…a uniform,

grey casket stacked among forty-four others in the corner

of the lobby. Just as she has every Monday for the past

two decades, Penelope discovers a letter – one clad in

loose fitted brown paper – post-marked from El Salvador:

from Santiago Martín-Romero, 89 Avenida Norte y Calle

13.

Santi: a child her family adopted when she too was

a kid. A lesson in responsibility.

By adoption, the Chu’s meant only this – a child

in misc. infectious climate in misc. corner of the world to

whom they sent a sum of $100, twice a year. Penelope’s

real brother, however (Peter Chu, who had been the

principal architect of this ‘afterlife insurance’, as he

referred to it) had long since entered treatment at

Northwestern Memorial to which every spare dollar in the

family was rapidly funneled thereafter.

Nonetheless, the doctors lost him and

nonetheless, every Monday, Penelope receives a letter

from Santiago.

Many of these correspondences contain pictures

in which her ‘adopted brother’, now entering his mid-

twenties, stands stone-faced in a surplus Harvard

sweatshirt, the lush sweep of valleys behind him. Or at

least they used to. Penelope has not opened the past

thirteen envelopes. She stacks them neatly next to the

newspapers, snug beside the bathroom door.

After thirty-two years, four failed relationships,

and her brother’s death,

after an MS in Accounting and her runaway cat,

after three move-ins in three counties,

Penelope steps outside having forgotten her coat,

clockwork turns back on one foot, and retreats into 94

Oakland. She will certainly be late for work.

On the gated patch of lawn, dew is clinging

to brittle grass -- water maintaining itself as millions of

distinct spheres – hesitant to embrace the slow

evaporation into morning’s haze. Penelope struts with an

anxious fervor to meet the L-train – she imagines the

motion of this tremendous mechanism beneath her feet,

rattling in the city’s grungy viscera as it rises towards the

surface. Like she does every weekday, morning and night,

Penelope finds Alvin waiting by the tracks.

Alvin does not have a bed, at least not in any

formal sense. He sits beside the Addison Street train

terminal, back pitched parallel to peeling advertisements

on the brick façade, fifteen meters from the news stand –

no more, no less. Beneath him, a torn Tempur-Pedic

mattress pad which he drags from station to station.

“they stole my dog,” he mutters, grumbles,

greeting Penelope Chu to the morning commute. She

drops a quarter – mistakenly Canadian – into Alvin’s cup.

“they stole my dog, dammit.”

Across the street:

men in suits jockey for position, waiting for the

light.

nobody will take a free sample from the teenager

in a banana suit.

Penelope admires the aimless flow of cracks

through the asphalt beneath her, then steps absently onto

the train which will take her to AllGood.

The corporation of AllGood Textile &

Garments has never known poverty. Leapt from the

wallets of Hiroshi, Dresden, & White, Allgood’s offices in

Chicago, Shanghai, Austen, and Berlin seemed to spring up

simultaneously. It was as though the very act of pouring

coins into the dirt had resurrected the buildings’ revolving

doors, only hidden beneath the earth.

AllGood was born from wealth and has no want

for it – AllGood cannot imagine an absence of wealth. It

manufactures ready-to-stich fabric, drapery, casual attire,

and bedding as well as specialty items: Halloween

costumes and clothing for animals. None of this brings

AllGood joy or despair. AllGood’s only desire is the even

flow of employees among its endless, fluorescent

corridors.

It is a Global 500 company.

It has an average annual revenue of 34,958 million

dollars.

It is the household name for high-end dog-wear.

What else could AllGood want?

At her desk, Penelope Chu spends too much

time thinking about other people’s beds. Not, necessarily,

in a sexual way (…) just imagining what that space might

be like: would there be floral print and throw pillows? Is

the blanket tucked & gently folded or scrunched sloth-like

in one corner? Perhaps knotted like the nest of some

undiscovered, exotic bird? Then there were the dimensions

to consider, the colors, the stains – will there be any stains?

coffee? wine? something worse? What about a duvet or

whatever those primped frilly sheets are called in French?

These questions, or rather, this series of modifying

images so preoccupied Penelope’s thoughts that very rarely

could she recall someone’s name upon their first or even

second encounter, but rather kept a catalogue, knowing

co-workers and clients simply as Boy: Bed w/No Sheets &

Deep Blue Pillow or Mournful Housewife On the Side Nearer the

Window, Husband’s Socks Atop the Unwashed Blanket.

This was not a big deal – at least not under normal

circumstances – but in the office, it was a problem. She

could pull off conversation just fine.

‘Morning, everyone!’ ‘Of course, sir.’

‘I’ll get right on that.’

It was the memos that killed her; the messages and

notifications. Consider, for example, this morning, when

Penelope discovers an envelope left at her desk, post-it

atop reading:

Urgent: Please deliver to Peter Ruben.

-MGMT

– and off she goes hovering around the lunch

room like a nervous hummingbird, stopping the rare

passerby.

“do you know if Mr. Ruben’s come in yet?”

“hey, have you seen Pete around today?”

Who the hell is Pete? Does he sleep in a twin or a

full?

It’s a disaster. Forty-seven minutes later, Penelope

knows Peter Ruben no better than a ghost. She’s told to

ask someone in HR. She’s told to ask the guys down in

shipping, but doesn’t know how to address these men

either.

How long can she keep this up? It’s too late to

ask names now. Sooner or later, a supervisor will realize

her incompetence and she’ll be back on craigslist within

the week, eating Uh-Oh Oreos from the sleeve. It’s

through apprehensions such as these that the office

succeeds in flooding Penelope’s mind. Every day it’s there,

waiting, and like a Venus flytrap, Penelope muses, everything

will be fine, right until the moment it isn’t.

People have seen Peter Soffer. Peter Killen is

downstairs in IT and Peter Pevsner works in Public

Relations, but nobody knows a Pete Ruben. Penelope

ducks back to her cubicle, hunching low in the adjustable

chair – she is very fond of cubicles. They’re comfortable.

More importantly, she knows that no one shares in this

affection; everyone loves a lover, a friend, a dog or a cat,

but without Penelope, no one would care for the cubicles.

She grips the edge of her desk, pushing and

pulling, rolling herself to press gently against the plastic

shelf before pushing away. She stares at the ceiling and

counts three missing tiles. She stares at the computer. She

stares at the envelope, which still rests atop a paper heap.

She spins around and, for a moment, locks eyes with the

woman seated across from her. Plump Lady Who Tucks the

Blanket in Each Corner, Neglects the Sheet Hidden Beneath.

Penelope mouths, scarcely audible,

“excuse me,

do you, Did you by any chance see who left this

envelope on my desk?”

Her co-worker hears the question, but decides it’s

possible that she didn’t. Her co-worker keeps her gaze

focused neatly on her monitor, absently pecking at keys.

“Sir, I know the numbers haven’t gone up, but

they haven’t declined either.”

Penelope whirls a semi-circle, wrapping the phone

cord taught across her chest for a moment, then releasing

its tension as she spins past the desk. Briefly, she considers

pulling the wire around her throat, but the voice on the

other line hardly seems like someone worth dying for.

“In today’s economy, no one’s sales are getting easier –

maintaining your numbers is a fiscal improvement.”

Penelope says.

“Well, I’m sorry you feel that way, but I assure you,

AllGood Textile & Garments is as devoted to serving your

business’s needs as always.” Penelope says.

She stares sedately across the office to an

inflatable clownfish, flapping vacantly where it hangs from

the break-room’s air vent.

“Sir, I assure you, people are buying more clothing for

their dogs today than ever before. This year alone, over

$55 million dollars were spent on pets – more than a

quarter of that market is devoted to apparel. That demand

will have to be filled and if your store isn’t reaping the

benefits, someone else will be.”

“No, sir, I’m afraid I can’t do that, but if you’d like, I can

connect you to my supervisor.”

It’s nearly 5. So very, very close to 5.

“Alright, sir, I’m sorry you feel that way. If you have any

questions or concerns regarding our conversation, please

feel free to call back – just ask for Penelope if you’d like to

speak with me again.”

She has already begun shutting down her

computer. She slides Peter Ruben’s undelivered envelope,

snug among her other papers, into the pocket of her tote.

“Alright sir, you have an excellent evening.” Penelope says.

After hours, AllGood is vacant. The

conference rooms sit silent. Its halls are still, no longer

vibrating with purposeful trotting, with hard clacking soles.

The end of the day is always the same: same torrent of

naked exhaustion as dozens of employees eagerly leave the

building behind. AllGood’s doors spinning faster, the

sudden urgency of families, friends, and beds summoning

the beleaguered workers. Very often, this routine exodus is

AllGood’s preferred portion of the day – so much motion,

energy, the people’s rising awareness of the building

around them as they shuffle belongings back together.

Then quiet.

Static hum of fluorescent lights, a few left on for

the thin trickle of janitors.

The endless pacing of each evening’s security shift

– fading remnants of a workday’s climax. These final, worn

employees are all that remains, maintaining AllGood

through the night.

There is a general assumption among people

that they will, at the very least, not allow one another to

come to harm due to carelessness; that they will finish

what they start and can be depended upon. It is an

assumption that they want what is best for one another.

In Penelope’s dreams, this is not the case. Roads

are left half-paved, houses half-built. Doctors try their

hardest, most of the time, but let a patient slide every now

and then. The food is often undercooked. She might be

driving across a bridge and suddenly discover it was only

mostly finished, the cement slipping suddenly out from

beneath her as she wakes.

(!)

Penelope slides out of bed and teeters through her

bedroom door, towards the bathroom. This is a common

occurrence for Penelope, who often cannot fall asleep

without a hot cup of tea. Tonight, however, after she

washes her hands and turns off the bathroom light, she

finds her eyes too saturated to navigate the dark between

her and her room. She feels for the rim of the door,

sweeps one foot, then the other, forward in a delicate arc

only to brush against a sensation of dry paper.

The scattering of envelopes interrupts silence. A

shifting like leaves.

Letters from El Salvador – a handful unfastened,

but most tightly sealed – carpet the living room. Penelope

has nearly made it back to her bed before her eyes adjust,

illuminating there (among the brown paper wrappings.

papers & stamps) pictures of Santiago, his stern lips

upturned by the dozen atop her false-wood floor.

Penelope rides the Red Line eight times, drops four

quarters into Alvin’s cup.

She imagines Peter Ruben when falling asleep. She wakes

up 15 minutes before her alarm and doesn’t turn on the

news all weekend.

Her inspection of the interoffice mail-slots has

grown into custom. Today, while Penelope stares once

more to the enormity of names – many now imprinted on

her mind as no more than letters on paper labels -- she is

longing for last month’s Halloween ‘party’, wishing

everyone in the building would don their costumes

permanently. It would make them so much easier to

recognize, after all:

Oh, Mr. Ruben? He’s the Vampire from Distribution.

He’s the Pirate in Marketing.

It could be so easy.

Penelope drags her eyes wearily along the list of

names. Richards, Roth, Rothstein, Rosen, Rowe, Russell,

Russell. There are two John Russells and no Peter Ruben.

Why would anyone need two John Russells?

Penelope returns her gaze to the top of the boxes

and begins to recite the names once more. If only she

knew about management’s personal mail slots on the floor

above. If only someone would be so kind as to inform her.

Tracing the parched seam of Ruben’s letter,

Penelope imagines which of her supervisors will be the

first to discover her failure --- “Did you not see the word

URGENT, Ms. Chu?” – “For Christ’s sake Chu, can you

still not find your way around an office? We can’t afford to

keep training you.” --- it would be Woman: Sleeps Five Hours,

Pencil Straight Beneath a Grey Blanket – it would be Thin Man

with Plaid Pillows who’s Linens Reek of Ash.

Someone was bound to notice the undelivered

letter.

Penelope draws her cropped fingernail just

beneath the lip of the envelope. There could be some clue

inside (perhaps)…anything that might indicate where Peter

was hiding. With a single slip of her hand this whole ordeal

could be so much simpler…

But what if someone noticed? What if Mr. Ruben

stormed into the office, demanding to know which idiot

had violated his personal correspondence?

Penelope tucks the letter beneath a pile of

incoming documents to be reviewed. Safe for now.

An insectile droning saturates the air, though

no individual cubicle seems to produce a sound. Pipes

mumble dreamily. Rebar, entrenched just behind the

drywall, grind unhappily in their sockets. AllGood is

listless – another day like another day – it seems to shift

down to its foundations, sinking gradually, indiscernibly

deeper into the earth.

Penelope inputs data from a form, uploads to the

server, and answers her phone.

A co-worker discerns data from the server, fills

out a form, and answers her phone.

The inflatable clownfish flutters above unused

vending machines.

What is the function of an employee if not to

work? A corporation if not to earn profit? As long as

they’re here, they might as well.

What is the function of anything if not to

function?

Beyond the windows, grey clouds are hung low

from the sky, so low you might think to touch one. So low

you might forget that there’s nothing there.

Watching raindrops trickle and slip down

windows of the Red Line, pressed flat by the wind,

Penelope is placing bets on which beads will reach the

edge first – there to linger a moment by some unknown

magnetism -- and spin back into the stencil grey air which

has formed them. Currently, the raindrop on the left is

winning. Or perhaps it’s losing. All she can say is that it

will almost surely reach the end of its journey first.

As the elevated train thrusts blindly into the dark,

carrying her home on the constancy of its rail, Penelope

begins singing a song in her head.

Shoo Fly, don’t bother me.

Shoo Fly, don’t bother me.

Shoo Fly, don’t bother me…

I’m in love with somebody.

She couldn’t possibly hit the notes if she were to

sing this out loud. It would sound terrible -- a slinky could

better carry a tune. But in her head, it’s really quite lovely.

At Addison Station, there is no sign of Alvin (that

tramp). His mattress pad sloops against the thin plastic

façade of a ticket booth. There is no cup left beside it, but

a cardboard sign which reads:

Homeless. Need Money for New Dog. God Bless.

Penelope looks out to the front of the platform.

She looks to the back. With troubled math she conjures up

her donations of the past several months -- $31, she

estimates. She must have given Alvin $31 since she began

commuting, working for AllGood.

On the six block walk from the station to her

apartment, Penelope glances down every alleyway. She

stops into the corner deli to purchase a chicken breast sub

for dinner – with a Vitamin Water, it costs over nine

dollars. Penelope imagines the contents of Alvin’s paper

cup: it doesn’t seem like it will ever be full.

In the lobby of 94 Oakland, Penelope unlocks her

mailbox, retrieves a brown paper envelope, and begins the

slow walk upstairs.

Opening the microwave, Penelope discovers

the second half of a sandwich from the night before. She

removes the forgotten remnants, slipping them briskly into

the garbage bin, before placing her current sandwich onto

the same, red-speckled glass plate.

The apartment is cold, but not cold enough to

merit turning up the heat. Santi’s letter has already been

placed evenly atop to the reformed stack of Santi’s letters.

It is unopened; left indistinguishable among fourteen

others, save for the date penned studiously in the upper

right corner. For a moment, she wishes her ‘brother’

would stop writing, but a wave of remorse intercedes

nearly as fast as the thoughts coalesce. Penelope sits as a

table for two. Eats half her sandwich. Watches NBC’s

Nightly News. The remaining food is covered with cling-

wrap and placed on a vacant shelf in the fridge.

Penelope’s begun to pick through her tote bag,

searching for something unnamed – a mint to follow

dinner, some documents to review before morning. It is

the letter to Peter Ruben she finds in her hands:

She weighs the heft of it on a palm.

She tests the seal, only firm along its very edge.

She holds it to the light, scanning for discernible

words.

(‘release of claims’

‘do not consider’

‘AllGood Textile & Garments’)

Penelope knows she’ll never get away with this.

She’ll be fired. She’ll be out of a job. She’ll end up

searching for Alvin in the city’s damp veins. Still, even if it

were all to crumble down – if the bridge were to fall out

beneath her – it wouldn’t be worth dying over.

She breaks the seal in a less elegant motion than

planned. It tears slightly in the corner. She withdraws a

single paper, folded twice at even length.

Mr. Peter Ruben,

I regret to inform you that this letter confirms our decision to eliminate the position of Office

Relations Manager. Consequently, your employment with AllGood Textile & Garments is

terminated, effective immediately.

Human Resources will supply you with all information relevant to the status of your benefits

as well as the release of claims document necessary to receive two weeks’ payment.

Payment for your accrued PTO will also be included in this final paycheck. You may receive

this check on our routine pay day, Friday.

Please do not consider this termination to be a reflection of your work. Your contributions to

our organization over the past seven years have been exemplary. Unfortunately, your services

are no longer required and we cannot rightly keep you on staff.

From all of us at AllGood Textile & Garments, thank you for your time and commitment.

Samantha Creston

Regional Director of Management and Budget