2:13 a.m.

The gridlines on the spreadsheet have blurred into dancing lines of the white powder your boss snorts to ensure that his spreadsheet’s gridlines don’t start dancing but stay stiff no matter the hour.

Click click pow. Shift+F9. CTRL+ALT+whatever-the-fuck, the keys still punching. Season 5 episode 3 of Veep already? Been up too long. Started the day on season 2 or 3. That’s how you track how long you’ve been working — how many episodes pass, providing the sounds that interrupt the longer sounds that send your heart beating during the twenty-hour working days. Usually, you time it by the amount of times the twenty-four-hour news cycle repeats itself or how many times Wolf Blitzer, Anderson Cooper, and Alisyn Camerota flash across the TV screen, but the news is ugly with stories of an orange figure not believing science who convinces millions more to also ignore science. So, then they die and the people they’re around also die because the disease is airborne. Two of your uncles got snuffed out because presumably someone who didn’t believe in science went to their nursing homes and breathed on, in, or near them.

Nah, the news is too personal. Not to mention cops are home-invading while y’all are sleeping in homes, shooting while y’all are jogging, asphyxiating while y’all are shopping even when one of y’all is crying out for mama.

Nah, you have to keep your bedroom’s sounds filled with the comedy of this alternate universe of a female vice-president with a potty mouth and a staff who’s more foul-mouthed yet just as ineffective. If you listen to anything else, you might ask that boss for some of that gridline-stiffening white powder.

This is working from home.

3:18 a.m.

The automated sound of your manager’s Slack message. Answer it. No, don’t answer it. The clear bubble says you’re offline. The manager should know you’re busy — that you’re not available, that you’ve logged off for the day. Your status says Away. Boundaries have been set, you tell yourself, and he’d better not cross the boundary.

But fuck the boundaries. Don’t get fired. Don’t miss that bonus. You need that shit. You need that shit times two because, in your head, you spent it times three.

So, open Slack, the app that controls when you go to bed and when you wake up but makes sure to shroud itself in the playful colors of red, green, and yellowish orange. The message comes in and the manager asks a question you know is a command but you can’t do anything but say yes — your bonus performance depends on it.

Jeff, are you up? Do you mind adjusting the color of the slides you put together? Yeah, every single one of them. I know that sounds like a lot, 250 slides. But hey, big meeting tomorrow. You’re a champ, bud!

You consider responding with, Sure thing! I’m on it and while I’m at it, I hope you find out your wife is pleasuring herself with devices that vibrate the way your phone does when the senior partner calls to yell at you. But you know it’s not that clever, his wife probably does get her rocks off with flesh not just rubber, and you know it just won’t fly. Plus, it’s better to imagine that she’s fucking the senior partner, in a way more pleasurable and consensual than the ways the senior partner fucks your boss.

So, instead, you stop at Sure thing! That’s the best thing about Slack, email, and texts. You can make people feel whatever you want them to feel with exclamation points, lols, and smiling emojis, when all you actually want to do is find a way to ruin your boss’s day just as much as he’s ruined yours.

8:15 a.m.

Same day, except the light of the sun has come to replace the light of the moon, and you’re in the same seat. Head against the cold black desk that gets more of your time than your bed. You pick your head up off the desk, wipe the desk of the drool and — before brushing your teeth, sniffing your armpits to assess how gruesome the odor has become, or fully wiping away the crust from your eyes — you look at the screen, all three of them. The clear ball has now been replaced with the green-colored circle on your Slack that tells the world HIT ME UP. But the red colored balls that could be called eyes if they could stay open long enough, tell the world, Fuck off.

Click, click pow. The keystrokes interrupt the ten-minute pitter-patter of the soft drizzle in your phone’s meditation app you use to soothe the nerves that twinge, tingle, and twitch. Ding Ding Ding. The emails come in faster than the dulcet tones of the Headspace app the company paid for to get you through the moments you’d otherwise spend wishing for the untimely death of your intrusive boss who stumbles into your life like a loud drunk who never sobers. The emails from the boss who slept while you worked pour in, removing any semblance of Calm or Headspace that those two apps were supposed to bring. Keystrokes, mouse clicks, attaching this file and deleting another. Type email responses as fast as you can to keep up with the waves of emails coming in.

9:00 a.m.

It’s a Friday, 30 minutes before the check-in call, a thirty-minute Zoom meeting with your team that will indicate just how much weekending you’ll get to do on your weekend, only to inevitably realize that weekends in this job are just another two days to do the work that couldn’t be finished in the previous five. But for now, you have 30 minutes.

Call your mom.

See how she’s doing. You’d try to bitch about the job to her but she’s working 16-hour shifts in a job she’s overqualified for, making eight times less than you at her best. I mean, 30 or more years of grinding as a nurse, only to be told by young doctors who had more privilege than they knew what to do with that she doesn’t know anything.

Try again nigga, you tell yourself. Try to bitch to boo but boo learning on the job just like you are — except she’s a doctor and for her to not learn quickly on the job has far worse consequences than an effete loser cursing about a misplaced graphic, comma, or semicolon on a slide no one would bother to read. Nah, fam: if she fucks up, it isn’t a misplaced keystroke, it’s some organ that you can’t name but that she’ll expect you to know.

So, go outside for the first time in two weeks. You imagine outside is sunny. You think you’ll step outside and feel the hot sun greet your face with the nutrients your skin needs. You think your dark melanin has been starved of the nourishment that outside can give and that stepping outside to call mom or call boo will give that refresh you can’t get anywhere else, until you get outside and feel the brittle cold. The dark gray clouds stiffen so thick that the sun you’d hoped would give you nourishment can’t pierce through no matter how sharp the rays. The shivers from the cold, the shivers from the stress. They make you consider picking up smoking cigs, except you wear masks unlike the people back home. People back home don’t do masks because they believe in God’s protection more than they believe in personal responsibility even though they only vote for men who yell that Black people like you have no self-responsibility. People back home don’t do science at all, though, and you know that. So, you’re not going to pull on the deep drags of Marlboro Country to send the hot air into your lungs and push it out again. But damn, you know you just want to feel something.

Instead of the drag, bitch to your bros from back home to feel something. But you know what they’re going to say. Keep that silly shit to yourself kid. You lucky. That’s what you know they’d say. Nigga, the prestige. Be grateful they killing you slowly or quickly, cuz at least you’ll die rich.

So, you don’t call anyone. Flip on Season 1 of Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. Try to stop working today by the time darker Aunt Viv gets replaced by lighter Aunt Viv. But you know you’ll be working long after Will screams, How come he don’t want me man?! — season 4, episode 24.

Dark Aunt Viv leaves in Season 3. Today ‘bout to be long.

Now, you only have two minutes until the Zoom meeting starts. Send your mom and boo, I love you, hope your day goes well texts, but make sure the one to your mom has none of the sexual undertones you’d send boo. Make sure mom’s text has the been praying for you and dad. And make sure bae’s text says some shit like I need you, but when you text it, you italicize the need in your head to emphasize, at least to yourself, that it ain’t just emotional need. This need is fundamental, physical, Neanderthalic — if you feel like making up words. But just as the blood rushes from north to south to give your day some rush of raw sensation to access the fantasy to italicize the need, you realize the Zoom call is starting and you nix the shit, wish for a cold shower, slap your face to get in the game, and join the Zoom meeting.

This is the closest you’ll come to sex, physical intimacy, because this is working from home and all you do at home is work.

10:15 a.m.

The meeting goes on longer than you’d expected, cutting into the time you have to work before your feedback call. You’ve killed yourself these past two weeks since the last time you received formal feedback from your manager, the same guy who’s been keeping you up so long that you fail to understand bedtime anymore. He’s the same guy who requires work the clients never ask for in the name of doing what’s best for the client. He’s the same guy who tells you that building strategies to lay off thousands is somehow God’s work, good work, work that means something more than making the rich richer. He’s the guy who’s kept you from calling the friends, calling mom, calling your gal. This man, you’re certain, is the epitome of dedication to the firm at all costs, especially when you’re the cost he’s most willing to bear.

When the client asks for something that isn’t in scope, your night is sacrificed. When the senior partners swing chastisements in the team’s direction, you know your boss will sidestep, bob, and weave so that each swing lands like Ali to Liston on you. Wanting to make partner was his end which would always justify the endless expenditure of means: you.

But fuck all that, it’s feedback time. You know this feedback is going to be better. He’s going to spend the first few minutes of the thirty minutes congratulating you for doing more than the client asked in the name of doing what you think is best for the client. He’s going to recall every single one of those times that emails landed in his inbox at 3:30 a.m. signaling that you’ve been working harder than your colleagues and likely on less coke and uppers than they are. He’s going to say, You’re indispensable. You know it and there’s no telling you otherwise.

Ding, bing! The Zoom call starts. You ready your steely poker face before enabling your camera. Hey how are you? you ask, but don’t care how he responds. You just want to hear the laud you’ve been expecting since the first of four all-nighters this week.

The feedback starts. The manager, seeing your work was passable, says the nice thing, This past week has been super solid. It’s the thing that white guys say to make it clear that they’re excited: super. It’s the professional version of the unnecessary adverbs your middle school English teacher scolded you for. Almost as much as the preposition-ending sentences that you always thought sounded better.

But this is how feedback usually starts, you remind yourself. You know that soon after this super solid, you’ll hear, So here are some ways I think you can improve this week. When you’re grinding the way you’ve been, this part is brief and you can usually, palpably, tangibly sense a manager grasping at straws. You’ve heard from other colleagues that when you’re killing it, the managers will get to this part, they’ll sit back in their chairs, look up in the air, sigh hard, twirl a pen between their thumbs, index fingers, and middle fingers, and finally say, I don’t have much by the way of constructive criticism. You’ve done well. Keep going.

Nirvana. The sort of nirvana that your Calm app, your cheesy devotionals, daily affirmations, and Headspace app will never give you. It’s the nirvana that not even umpteen hours of well-crafted jokes, perfectly timed camera angles of the inimitable director of Veep Armando Iannucci, or the perfect, heartwarming, studio audience laughs of mid-nineties sitcom like Fresh Prince of Bel-Air can give you.

Somehow the sleep you’ve been missing, the weight you’ve been gaining sitting in the same damn chair for 17 hours per day, and the repeated reminders from your Apple Watch telling you to breathe because your heart rate has become elevated, would be worth it if you just got to hear, I don’t really have much else to say. Keep going.

The super solid spiel had finished. He says, Here are some ways I think you can improve this week. He starts to sit back in his chair, looks up in the air, and lets out a long deep sigh, as he twirls his pen between his right thumb, index finger, and middle finger. You know it’s coming, the admission that he doesn’t have much to say by the way of constructive criticism. You’re ready to hear him say, You’ve done well. Keep going.

He leans forward so far that you see nothing but the top left corner of his face — eyes, left part of the forehead, bridge of his nose — and says, Smile.

Puzzled, you push the spacebar to unmute yourself long enough to say, Huh?

Smile, he repeats. Like damn, Jeff, this is an awesome job. We’re literally guiding this company. There’s so much impact. This is that consultant-speak which you know means that the client is paying the company a lot of money to do something that sounds a little less tangential than most other projects.

How many people are here doing this? How many people like you are doing this work? he asks. But he’s not done yet. You make me feel a bit bad when you don’t smile. Everyone else, all the white female colleagues on this project, smile. When you don’t smile it makes me feel like I’m not doing a good job, but more importantly it makes me feel like you’re angry.

Your eyes fixate on the bridge of his nose because at this very moment you wish you could stretch through that screen to break that bridge to show him what angry looks like — to give him a sense of how not smiling isn’t the truest indicator of anger. A Detroit rapper and momentary YouTube sensation once strenuously strained her vocal cords to sing, It’s so cold in the D. And shit, it’s so cold in New York that you want to remix the song to apply to you, but you’re sweating because it seems like your body, not just your mind, is racked with the difficulty of not fulfilling his false prophecy that you are, in fact, prone to anger. Become the stereotype he’s tried to bequeath you without your consent.

Ask this man if he realizes he went from you don’t smile to angry. Ask him if he can hear your heart beating faster and your Apple Watch telling you to breathe, because the sum total of your work has been assessed and the only piece of critical feedback your manager can muster is smile, and not because a client has mentioned it or because you have visibly been angry. No, your lack of smiling has made this white man not feel like his management is good, causing him to question whether he’s doing a good job. Smile and nod because massa let you in the big house, is all you hear. This manager, who has kept you up past 2:00 a.m. every night this week, has turned your weekends into working days, and caused higher blood pressure than anyone under 50 years old should have, wants you to smile.

You should be more grateful to be here, you heard. Do you know how few people like you we let into this company? is what you heard, even if he didn’t say it. It’s the same shit you hear from your friends who have told you of the prestige of this company and excoriated you for considering lodging so much as a complaint.

These white folks are giving you the chance to be in the room. Shut up and be grateful. And even if you pressed them further or told them that they’re acting like the house negroes of old, they’re watching the game. Which game? You don’t know. You haven’t watched a game since work from home began, because work from home is just that and that alone: work from home. But you wonder that if they’re watching the game, they’ll remember the times Black folks watched the game, but weren’t happy about just being in the room.

You’ve heard this shit before and you know they have too:

Shut up and dribble, Laura Ingraham told Lebron.

Get off your knees and throw the ball, they told Kaepernick.

Take your medal and put down your fists, they told Tommie Smith and John Carlos.

Make the white folks who let you be in the room with them feel comfortable with you being in the room with them.

And no, you aren’t these legends, because you heard this feedback and didn’t live your life like these legends. You didn’t say “nah” and stage protest or even report this flagrant feedback to the HR department.

You smiled.

You smiled because anything else, heroic though it may have been, would have made uncomfortable the very white people who let you in the room. You smiled like all the Black people in the stock photos in the presentation about diversity at the firm — the sort of presentations that pat the white people who let you in the room on the back for letting you in the room. And you know those smiling Black folks in those photos are stock photos because the only other Black person in your starting class of 70 consultants didn’t smile. You wonder if she’s been told to smile, to make her boss feel good or to accede to some notion of “pretty” and “effeminate.” You smiled because you’ve convinced yourself that you’re supposed to smile. You’ve convinced yourself that you are, as you are, not enough — that the pair of Harvard degrees are enough. So, you smiled because performing whiteness will always be easier than fighting it.

You smiled.

You smiled.

You smiled.

You smiled.