Just Quitting

One day, Henry just quit. He had soldered wires for he didn’t know what in the back room of the Magnavox plant for thirteen years, and enough was enough. His eyes itched, the watery coffee from the machine was bitter, the pinups in the maintenance room never changed, and he had grown to hate the Chinese woman who sat next to him at the table chattering in quasi-English about everything that crossed her minimalist brain with a fervor usually reserved for close relatives.

So he just quit.

He walked home and went straight to the fat landlady’s office. She was sitting behind a computer screen, pretending to work. Henry knew she was playing Solitaire.

“I’m quitting,” he said.

The fat landlady’s face had a puckered look that belonged on another head, and when she looked at Henry it double-puckered, like the skin of a newborn opossum.

“You need to replace that fixture.”

“Did you hear what I said? I’m quitting.”

“Quitting what?”

“Everything.”

Henry lived in an efficiency apartment above a wretched two-bit diner, and the smells from the kitchen made him ill. He was sure that carcinogens could be transmitted through odor, and he knew that he had cancer of the stomach, the brain, and perhaps even the esophagus.

“You’re going to move out? I’ll have to keep your deposit to pay for that fixture.”

“You’re not listening. I’m quitting, not moving out.”

“That’s not an option in your contract.”

Henry went to his room, locked the door, and barricaded it with a sofa, two old chairs, and a side table from the bedroom. Then he moved one chair back because he needed it to watch TV. He switched on the TV, muted it, and waited.

Heavy steps echoed in the stairwell, then a knock. “Mr. Adams. We need to talk.”

Henry watched Oprah welcome Tom Cruise to the couch. Tom flashed an impish smile.

From the other side of the door, the voice of the fat landlady: “You owe me for that fixture, and rent is due tomorrow. It sounds like you’re not going to pay anymore. Are you saying that you’re not going to pay rent anymore?”

“You aren’t listening. Some people quit this or that. My quitting is not piecemeal. My quitting is absolute. I just quit, and ‘just’ in this context means totality, completeness. I am doing nothing else. I am just quitting. My quitting is cosmic in scope.”

“Did you get fired?”

“Now I’m going to quit talking.” Henry hit the mute button, and Oprah’s screams of laughter mingled with Tom’s oily snickering and made the room vibrate. He didn’t hear the fat landlady descend the steps, but when he muted the TV ten minutes later she was gone.

Henry picked up the phone and dialed.

“Hey.”

“Oh, hi, Henry.”

A long minute passed.

“I’m quitting.”

“Oh.”

“Just quitting.”

“Henry, you sound weird. Have you been to see your, your . . . ?”

“I quit my job, and I’m not going to pay rent anymore. I’m just quitting. And I’m quitting you too.”

“That’s impossible, Henry. Your rent?”

“Don’t start that. I know how girls are. You can’t stop me. It’s over. I’m just quitting.”

“Quit talking for a second . . . .”

“I understand perfectly. You can’t live without me, but I don’t care anymore.”

“No, Henry, that’s not . . . .”

“My brother’s got nothing to do with this. Nothing. I haven’t seen him in weeks.”

“OK. Forget your brother. Nothing’s going on.”

“You don’t even know my brother.”

“Between us, I mean.”

That’s the way she wanted to play it. Fine. Henry hung up.

Henry did not just quit in the absolute sense. He breathed, drank from the tap until the fat landlady turned off the water to the apartment, snuck out late at night when the fat landlady’s brother-in-law’s little sister was sleeping at the front desk to go dumpster diving for the next week’s meals and to fill bottles with drinking water. He didn’t quit watching Oprah. Quitters, even cosmic ones, have to keep up.

Three weeks later, Henry was flipping through the channels and lingered at PBS, where an elderly man with greasy gray hair and large glasses was speaking in a thick Eastern European accent about the “liquidity of life” in late modernity. “Life,” he said in a deep authoritative voice, “has become liquid. Nossing stays still. As Emerson said, ve are skimming along ssin ice, and our safety lies in our speed. Ve start vone vay of life, and before it has time to settle into habit ve move on to an . . . .”

Henry flipped to another channel, where an energetic young Catholic priest was preaching. “Accedia is the great affliction of our world today. As Dorothy Sayers said, ‘It is the sin which believes in nothing, cares for nothing, seeks to know nothing, interferes with nothing, enjoys nothing, loves nothing, hates nothing, finds purpose in nothing, lives for nothing, and only remains alive because there is nothing it would die for.’ The church calls this sin ‘sloth,’ but it is not laziness alone . . . .”

“Whatever,” Henry muttered as he flipped the channel.

There was a loud knock at the door.

“Disappointed napkins fought greenly,” Henry shouted over the TV.

“I’m sorry?” It was a man’s voice.

“Is my sofa sad?” Henry answered.

There was no reply. Henry turned down the volume.

“I mean, leafy footballs sorted over the elbow.”

Henry hadn’t talked with anyone since the fat landlady last attempted to entice him to the door with promises of peppermint ice cream and gummi worms. In the meantime, Henry had determined that, for consistency’s sake, he had to quit making sense. With an actual human on the other side of the door, Henry reconsidered that decision. He wasn’t lonely, but he wasn’t not lonely, that was for sure. In a flash of insight, he decided that it was as consistent to quit not making sense as it was to quit making sense.

“I’m not paying,” he shouted.

“I’m not selling anything. Can we come in for a few minutes?”

“Give me a second. I gotta move . . . .”

“OK. You OK?”

As Henry pulled it, the sofa scraped a gash in the wood floor, and a chair fell from the barricade and pinned him to the ground. He lay for a moment enjoying the pleasant pressure of the chair on his sternum, and turned his head to see the soles of four blocky back shoes through the crack under the door.

“Are you cops?” Gasping, he wriggled out and stood up. There was another crash as a table turned upside down.

“No, sir. We are elders of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints.”

A moment later, Henry had seated himself where he could keep an eye on Seinfeld across the room, while two young men dressed in black shoes, white shirts, and thin black ties, sat on the sofa. Three weeks in my room, Henry thought, and styles turn back forty years.

“We have good news for you,” said the one who introduced himself as Ezekiel, bobbin

g his head up and down and blocking Henry’s view of the TV. Henry shifted in his seat.

“I felt a burning in my bosom,” said the other, composing his face in a parody of religious ecstasy. Henry couldn’t remember his name. “Now I have a reason to live. Don’t you want a reason to live?”

“No. Reasons to live are over-rated. I’m engaged in an experiment in pointless living.”

“That’s cool,” said the anonymous Mormon.

Henry half listened as the Mormons talked about burning bosoms, angelic visitations, eternal marriage, inheriting planets, the American Indians, Joseph Smith, and Jesus. As they talked, Henry imagined his future as an evangelist for the First Church of Cosmic Quitters. He would stand on street corners handing out tracks and preaching liberation: “Come, you who are weary; come, you huddled masses, caught in the prison of performance, the dungeon of doing. You don’t have to just do it anymore. I will show you a more excellent way.”

Henry was sure the message would catch on. People were tired and overworked and stretched out, and Henry would lead them to rest. Thousands of men would tear off their ties and leave the office forever. Women would just quit cooking dinner, and children would just quit going to school. Retailers would stop selling and consumers would stop buying. Hutus would stop killing Tutsis, and Muslim radicals would stop making basement bombs. The First Church of Cosmic Quitters would usher in an age of global harmony, and Henry would grow a long beard, wear a simple black cassock, and become a regular on Oprah.

And after a time, they would all just quit just quitting. CEOs would quit not shaving and quit not running their companies, the Vikings would quit not winning the Super Bowl, policemen would quit not catching criminals. And after another time, there would be another reversal, and Henry could see human history stretching out in dialectical oscillation age after age to the ending of the world.

But – a fresh thought came to Henry, so vast and terrifying that it arrested his speculations: What if Oprah just quit?

Henry looked up when he heard the door slam, surprised to find himself alone.

A man embarks on a journey along a dangerous path, and he either triumphs or he doesn’t, he either reaches home or he doesn’t. Two lovers are separated by their fathers, by the law of the land, by rival lovers, and their love is either strong enough to survive and triumph, or it is not. A skillful and good man of considerable means defies the gods, and his life ends in ruin. Such stories seem to write their own endings, like a Mozart symphony whose finale is inevitable from its first chord.

Henry’s story is not like these stories. He takes no journeys, is gripped by no passions, and realizes that if he were to defy the gods he might miss reruns of The Simpsons. His life is not a symphony, but a piece of rock music that trails off into silence without resolution. How will it all end? For the teller of this tale, there is only one choice: To follow Henry’s lead, and just quit.