After I was laid off, I found myself haunted by the line “Had a dream I was Bartleby.” It had come to me very much like a dream, not thought so much as arrived. I wrote it down on the first piece of paper within reach, a pink Post-it, in the quick scribbles I am known to leave around the house.Article continues after advertisement
For days, the line wouldn’t let me go. It followed me into the kitchen. Out into the yard. Down the street and across town on whatever minor errand I was running. It was there in the produce aisle, stuck between the impulse to buy mangoes and the need to remember we were out of apples. It was there at the gas pump, in the numb nothing of watching the numbers tick upward. The pink Post-it was still on my desk in the basement but the line had gotten loose. I did not understand why it wouldn’t let me go.
I think I understand now, at least a little. Someone who has just been laid off is someone in the process of disappearing, and they know it, even if they can’t say so. The routines that informed the self are gone. Gone are the title, the inbox, the calendar invites lining up the days. What remains is the stubborn question underneath all of it, the one the routines were so efficient at keeping quiet: Who am I when no one is paying me to be anything?
