ROBERT J. LEVY

EVERY DAY DIFFERENT

There was an unvarying sameness to Lester Manning's days at the public relations
firm of Selvage & Fleischman that he found insidiously comforting and yet
vaguely pernicious. His job as the head copy editor, he once reasoned in a rare
flight of poetic excess, was like an old bowling shoe: It might fit perfectly,
but one could never quite escape the disconcerting knowledge that hundreds of
others had worn it before.

During his two decades at the firm, however, Lester had kept whatever fleeting
reservations he had about his stultifying vocation to himself. In the course of
that time -- by doing solid if uninspired work, rarely overlooking a serial
comma, never neglecting a misspelled word, truckling to those above him and
gently patronizing those beneath him, wearing faultless suits and unimpeachable
ties, in short, by fitting in perfectly and never ruffling feathers -- he had
risen to a position of solid respectability within the organization. That he was
a somewhat aloof man, accepted but not exactly liked by his colleagues, only
gave weight to the air of sobriety he brought to his work.

So when the company's director, Mr. Templeton, declared all Fridays hence
forward to be Casual Day, Lester, unlike his colleagues, remained ambivalent
about the lax bonhomie such an edict would undoubtedly encourage. It meant
change, and change was inimical to Lester's nature. Things had to be orderly.
Things had to be neat. "I's" had to be dotted and "t's" crossed.

However, there was another side to Lester. Typically, after work, sitting alone
in his modest midtown apartment, he would begin drinking scotch while the
sunlight waned. As the city grew dark, he would slowly fill with self-loathing,
his mood growing black as the night itself. Soon he would find himself embarking
on another round of endless introspection regarding the hollowness, pathos and
unending sameness of his life. He would stare at his own vague reflection in the
TV set, there behind the news broadcasts and music videos, and imagine his
ghostly face as an appropriate symbol of the life he led in the world--or
rather, the life he didn't lead. He knew himself to be a man incapable of living
a man so afraid of change and spontaneity that even the prospect of going
to.work in different attire completely unnerved him. At last, he would fall into
a fitful, unrewarding sleep.

When the Friday morning of Casual Day arrived, Lester approached it with all the
trepidation of a man confronting the gallows. On the other hand, his ablutions,
coiffure, choice of tie and the press of his pants were no less correct than on
any other day. Casual didn't mean sloppy, he reasoned.

From the moment he arrived at the office, he knew something was amiss. Everyone
he passed stared at him for a fleeting second, then turned away. The men wore
jeans, open-collared shirts and sneakers; some of the women wore culotte-style
outfits and pants with tennis shoes.

Lester went to the men's room and looked at himself in the mirror. He was
attired in full business regalia-- gray pin-striped suit, military stripe tie,
black Oxfords. All was as usual -- except that he had no memory of dressing this
way. He had intended to dress casually, in accord with Mr. Templeton's edict,
but something in his unconscious had obviously balked at the prospect. He had--
trancelike, in robotic fashion -- dressed as for every other day at work.
Staring at himself, he saw a tear well up and brim his eyelid. He wiped it away,
but it was as though he watched a movie of someone else, some other hand, wiping
the tear from someone's else eye.

He went back to his office, unable to meet the gaze of his colleagues, burying
himself in a travel manuscript about distant places and far-off vistas that he
would never see, never know, except in the rather abstract form of repunctuating
someone else's experiences.

At the end of that weekend, on Sunday evening, faced with the prospect of yet
another day at Selvage & Fleischman, Lester drank more than usual. In fact, he
drank himself into a stupor. He sank deeper than ever before into a morass of
self-vilification, a dark, bottomless pit of his own loathing. Bits and pieces
of the latter half of the evening surfaced momentarily into his consciousness,
like grotesque, distended fish from the depths of some alien sea, only to be
again swamped by the black, roiling muck of his despair. He thought of suicide,
but that notion, too, dissolved in his alcohol haze. He raged about his living
room upending chairs and smashing pottery.

What were all these "things" doing here? he asked himself at one point. What was
all this stuff? It didn't make a life. It wasn't living. I am already dead.

Then, as he sank down to the very bottom of his well of misery, which, in
seconds, would give way to unconsciousness, he cried out, over and again, to no
one in particular, to no god, to no person -- to nothing in fact, that he could
see, save the pristine walls of the pristine cage of a life he had constructed
for himself:

Why does it have to be this way? Why is every day the same? Why can't my days be
different?

And, improbably, as he blacked out on the living room floor, he felt a presence,
a hand. Something or someone, had heard his plea, pulled him back from the edge
of complete oblivion, and granted him his Wish.

Monday morning as Lester rode the elevator to the 50th-floor offices of Selvage
& Fleischman, the sudden altitude change kicked his already throbbing hangover
headache onto a new level of pain. He had only a foggy recall of the previous
night, and virtually no memory of how his living room had ended up a shambles.
In too much distress to feel regret, he bulled ahead on instinct alone. Eyes
narrowed against the inevitable glaring office lights, he lurched from the
elevator as the door opened, bumping into Fanshawe from the copy department.

"Morning Mr. Manning" said Fanshawe in the cheeriest voice imaginable. "Hey, you
already look like a casualty! Congrats!" As the man continued down the hall,
Lester noticed that his arm was in a sling.

Lester, nonplussed, walked toward his comer office at the furthest end of the
corridor. Those he passed looked like the ranks of a defeated army. Some had
bandages on their heads. Some used crotches. Others sported eye patches and
tourniquets. It looked as though some terrible disaster had hit the office in
his absence. Lester's secretary smiled up at him, nodding a cheery good morning
despite the obviously confining neck brace she wore.

"Good day, Mr. Manning. All your mail is on your desk, and Mr. Templeton wants
to see you at 10."

"Right," said Lester, opening his office door. "Miss Alvarez, are you quite all
right? "

"Of course, Mr. Manning, whatever should be wrong?"

"Nothing, just asking."

Manning closed the office door behind him and sat at his desk, feeling utterly
discombobulated. Something terrible had happened to all his coworkers over the
weekend, but everyone acted as if it were business as usual. Lester felt edgy, a
bit insane. So he did what he normally did when feeling things were getting out
of control: He began leafing through the memos on his desk. There was the usual
nonsense about hirings and departures (no one was ever fired, of course, but
merely left for new ventures), shutdowns of the air conditioning over the
weekend, new cafeteria hours . . .

One memo, though, stopped him cold. It looked, in almost every way, exactly like
the memo he had recently received regarding Casual Day. In fact, it could have
almost passed for the same document. However, this memo, also from Mr.
Templeton, announced that today was officially Casualty Day, and that all
employees were required to come as injury victims. The memo was unclear about
whether one actually had to injure oneself or merely dress in costume. What
Lester had seen so far suggested, frighteningly, that the former was the case.

Lester checked his calendar to make sure it wasn't April Fool's Day. It wasn't.
This was the first he had heard of a such a preposterous event. He determined to
think nothing more of it and get to work. At 10 sharp he sat before the CEO, Mr.
Templeton, whose leg, in an uncomfortable-looking cast, was propped up on the
desk before him.

"Hmm . . ." said Templeton, eyeing Lester suspiciously, "Except for your
slightly bleary eyes and pained expression, you don't particularly look like a
casualty."

"I'm sorry, sir. I didn't see the memo until this morning."

"Well, all right then. But don't let it happen again. I like a man to fit in,
you know. Don't like wild individualism. You're not a wild individual, are you
Lester?"

"Of course not, sir."

"Fine then. Be on about your business."

Lester virtually hid in his office the rest of the day. He checked to see that
no further memos announcing unusual days had crossed his desk, and sped home as
fast as he could, into the protection of the sane world.

Had Templeton gone mad? Casualty Day? What sort of way to improve office morale
was that?

That night Lester ate dinner, alone as usual, at a local eatery. He went home to
watch the news -- everything outside of his office seemed to be proceeding apace
in normal fashion. He slept poorly, though, his dreams clouded by phantasmal
memories of his previous debauched night and the vague recollection of his plea
to dark gods that could not possibly exist.

The next day Lester knew something was wrong the moment the elevator doors slid
open. Wilkinson, from production, buttonholed him en route to his office.

"The platypus," said Wilkinson.

"Excuse me?"

"The platypus. A rare creature growing rarer all the time. They have to be saved
from extinction."

"Of course," said Lester, noticing for the first time the "Protect Our
Monotremes" button on his lapel. Lester signed some sort of petition and
scurried on toward the oasis of his office, a safe haven at a seemingly infinite
distance down the hall -- infinite because he now realized that everyone at work
was carrying a clipboard with a petition, and all wore buttons on their lapels
advertising various charities and organizations.

He arrived at his workspace, managed to sign his secretary's petition on
"Working Morns for the Metric System," and bolted into his office, securing the
door behind him. He frantically shuffled through papers on his desk until he
found the memo -- the memo he had never seen, that could not possibly have been
there the day before, but was, none the less, dated the day before. It was in
his hands now, tangibly real, announcing to all members of the company that
today would be Cause Day. Everyone was required to come to work as a
representative of some cause and politic in favor of that position.

Lester sat at his desk, sweat trickling down his neck. He knew he was either
going mad or that something horrible had transpired at Selvage &, Fleischman.

Casualty Day? Cause Day? What was happening?

Things were not cleared up much for Lester at his 9:45 session with Templeton,
who spent the whole time talking up his "Bosses Against Bonuses" petition, which
Lester, under duress, finally signed.

"You do have a cause?" Templeton said, at one point, eyeing Lester warily.

"Uh, well, you see sir, I didn't get the memo . . ."

"What, again! Look Lester, you already used that excuse. You're on the message
routing list like everyone else. If I didn't know better, I'd say you just
weren't a team player."

Lester spent the remainder of that work day signing one petition after another
in favor of everything from "Save The Whelks" to "Biker Chefs for a Leaner,
Speedier America." Everyone at work seemed dead serious about their cause, no
matter how absurd, and all seemed to accept unquestioningly the sensibility of
Cause Day.

Finally Lester escaped to the safety of his midtown apartment, and breathed the
chill air-conditioned atmosphere of rationality while swigging from a cold
tumbler of vodka. The radio broadcast the usual news; the customary programs
were on TV. Everything was quite normal everywhere else. It was just that
something had happened to his workplace he could not explain. It wasn't as
though everyone at Selvage & Fleischman had gone mad, because, despite the odd
behavior of his colleagues, they all seemed quite rational. It was just that
each day had been completely different . . .

And then it struck him: His prayer on that dimly remembered drunken night.

He finally recalled his invocation to the void as he swam down into
unconsciousness that fateful evening. He remembered his supplication to dark
gods in which he did not really believe, beseeching them to make his days
different. And now, finally, he recalled, too, that incredibly vague sense --
before complete unconsciousness hit him, before he submerged utterly -of
something responding to his cri de coeur, as though some infinitesimally distant
hand had reached out and grabbed him at the last second before oblivion had
overwhelmed him.

Was it possible that, somehow, his plea had been answered in this utterly
perverse fashion? And was it perverse? Wasn't it simply literal? He went to
sleep with a knot in his stomach, dreading the morning and what the prospect of
a new workday might bring.

It wasn't noticeable at first. Everyone at his office looked the same; there
were no outward signs of abnormality. However, as he passed Hating from
accounting, the man stopped him, and, pointing to Lester's balding pate, asked
"Is that your head, or is your neck blowing bubble gum?" Hating burst into
guffaws and continued down the hall.

When Lester arrived at his office, Ms. Alvarez greeted him with a smile:
"Morning Mr. Manning. You know, you have a classic Roman nose . . . it's roamin'
all over your face." She burst out laughing as Lester entered his office.

Let me guess, said Lester to himself as he shuffled through the memos on his
desk. And there it was once again: the memo from yesterday, which never existed
yesterday, which somehow came into existence retroactively today, declaring that
this was Caustic Day. All employees were asked to be especially withering and
sarcastic in their dealings with their colleagues for the duration.

He suffered through several unkind japes from Mr. Templeton during their ten
o'clock meeting-- in which his boss again accused him, even more threateningly
than the day before, of not sharing the company spirit. Lester went home early
to lay in bed, nearly comatose, staring at the ceiling.

It wasn't him; something had happened to the reality he inhabited, all of it
instigated in some supernatural manner by his wish. He understood now that every
day would indeed be different, but just how different he would never know. So
far, all the days seemed to rely on close spellings, puns almost, of Casual Day,
but when those possibilities ran out, in what direction would this mad roller
coaster ride take him?

Over the next few weeks he began to find out just how freakish reality could
become. The very next day turned out to be Claus Day, in which everyone dressed
like St. Nick (for no particular purpose Lester could discern, since it was
September). Soon followed Causality Day, in which cause and effect appeared to
be jumbled: xerox machines subtracted rather than reproduced copies, and memos
unwrote themselves before his eyes. Casuistry Day was, perversely, something of
a relief; Lester merely had to endure endless sophistical arguments, by everyone
from the mailroom staff to his boss, about the existence of god and the meaning
of life. Claws Day proved unpleasantly pointy.

Lester, by this time, was a complete wreck; and yet, being Lester, he could not
bring himself to resign or call in sick, even though his demeanor at work and
apparent refusal to comply with the terms of the company's "special" days was
earning him no brownie points with Mr. Templeton. In fact, though he would still
have been the perfect employee in his own reality, in this altered
every-day-different universe he was increasingly seen as an upstart, a
troublemaker. The fact was, as Mr. Templeton had hinted on several occasions,
Lester was now in danger of losing his job.

Lester, meanwhile, had narrowed it all down to two equally disturbing
possibilities. The first was that he had gone completely mad and was permanently
immersed in some sort of intense schizophrenic state that looked and felt
exactly like real life save for the bizarre unpredictableness of each new work
day. The second possibility was that he had indeed come in contact, however
briefly, with some entity that had either changed the very nature of this
reality or had propelled him into a concatenating series of alternate realities,
in which each day was forever unpredictable.

Ultimately, though, the reasons for his predicament seemed almost irrelevant,
since he was trapped, in either case, in this alternate universe until further
notice. The trouble was, there was no way to cope: Each day he arrived at work
without the benefit of the previous day's memo to prepare him, and each day he
was roundly chastised by Mr. Templeton.

Lester was not a man who believed in deities or judgments from on high, yet,
unquestionably, this had the feeling of a reckoning from a power above him. That
it felt like a judgment, Lester understood, did not mean that whatever power had
put him here was doing it for that reason. Maybe it was some advanced
intelligence's form of play or experimentation or sheer vindictiveness. In any
case, the power responsible for his predicament was clearly not intending to
make itself known, so he had to rely on his own instincts. Just on the off
chance that he wasn't insane, Lester determined to keep a positive attitude
about the ever-shifting world he found himself in.

However, as time wore on, he grew morose. He began to understand that if every
day was different, there would never be any progression or forward momentum to
his life, that each new morning was simply a single piece of a puzzle that fit
into no greater picture. Life had become completely incoherent, driving him
deeper into, not away from, his despair, the very despair that had originally
compelled him to make his now-regretted wish.

The days grew increasingly strange -- and, at times, threatening. Claustrophobia
Day preceded Class Struggle Day which preceded Classics Day. One morning the
elevator doors swung open to reveal a pitched battle underway between sales and
accounting (Von Clausewitz Day). Bonfires blazed near several distant desks;
live ammo filled the air. Lester belly-crawled to his office and locked himself
in till the next morning.

When he emerged, expecting the worst, he found instead, for the first time in
weeks, that everything was absolutely normal. People went about their usual work
in the usual way without any oddities or peculiarities. It was only later in the
afternoon, when he found the previous day's memo declaring Unexceptional Day,
that he realized this "normality" was merely a blip on a greater map of
insanity, and thus, in fact, was not normal at all, but ultimately a more
frightening version of "difference" than he had ever imagined possible. He also
realized that, for the first time, the special day had veered decisively away
from a near-spelling of Casual Day, and this new development only filled him
with greater foreboding about what lay ahead.

That night he went home to his apartment and stared out the window at the normal
world, which went on its merry way, unaffected by the little schism in reality
that was Lester's life. He drank to forget, but ended up remembering
--remembering the way things were before. The boring diurnal round of his days
at Selvage & Fleischman now seemed so comforting and compelling in light of all
that had transpired. He thought about Mr. Templeton, the gray eminence who had
once considered Lester his prize protege, who now believed him a destructive
influence. Ms. Alvarez had put in for a transfer to another department, not
wanting to be associated with such an "oddball" as Lester. Templeton had made it
pretty clear to Lester: He would have booted him out already were it not for the
possibility that Lester might sue.

Sue? What a laugh, thought Lester. How would you sue the ravings of a
schizophrenic mind or, for that matter, the alternate reality created just for
you alone by some alien intelligence?

He drank more and more, his only release these days, and found himself slowly
but surely descending once again into a state bordering on oblivion so black
that the boundaries between self and non-self faded and grew obscure. He lay on
the sofa, muttering and mewling to himself, sighing every now and then over the
wreck of his life, and then crying out, at last, his new realization, one that
should have been so obvious so long ago:

It's not the days that should have been different. I was blaming the world for
my own cowardice. It's me! Me! Me! I want to be different!

And, as before, the someone or something that listened and pulled Lester back
from the void -- which had been listening and watching his plight all along
during the last few weeks -- was there again with a helping hand and a receptive
ear.

Lester rode the elevator up to his office, thinking, even before he left his
apartment that morning, that something was truly different today. He had woken
that morning from a fathomless sleep, feeling unexpectedly refreshed. He had
gone about his morning ablutions with incredible alacrity and dispatch --
shaving, dressing as one possessed. He had made the effort, unusual for him, to
be just a little more casual in his attire, a little less proper. It was a
start, he reasoned.

The elevator door slid open and people parted before him like wheat as he rushed
toward his office. Ms. Alvarez fled as he approached, but it didn't make an
impression on him. He entered his office and began working, typing, filing,
cross-indexing, writing memos and letters at a furious pace so that by ten he
had finished what normally would have been a full day's work.

He opened the door for his meeting with Mr. Templeton, and his boss stared at
him, eyes agog. Lester sat in the armchair. Templeton stood up, ashen-white, and
ran from the office.

I'm not dressed that casually, mused Lester-- adjusting his tie with one hand,
unbuttoning his suit jacket with the other, combing what little hair he had with
his third hand and examining the long delicate nails on his fourth -- wondering
what unpleasant surprises the world had in store for him today.