Dragons - Chapter 33 (DRAFT)

We were there for another hour, Bethany and me, stuffing tickets and ribbons into envelopes with the rest of the junior staff members. We got some surprised looks when we first came over and asked how we could help, none of them likely suspecting that we’d ever do anything so far beneath our station. And I have to admit it felt odd, running counter as it did to Mary’s rigid hierarchy of tasks and the people meant to perform them. But at the same time it felt right, as if, by sharing their work, we were communicating something more clearly than words ever could, something much more meaningful than Gerald’s suggested gesture of letting them knock off early.

“What?” Caroline said when I first approached her. “You want what?”

“A stack of tickets,” I said. “Or ribbons. Whatever needs to be done.”

She looked at me blankly for several seconds, as if I was speaking a foreign language.

Bethany stepped forward and gently took a piece of paper out of her hand. “What’s this?” she asked, looking down at it. “The list of people that need VIP ribbons? Where are those?”

Caroline continued to stare at us silently, her eyes flitting between me and Bethany as if a single wrong word would plunge her into the abyss.

I took a stack of gold ribbons out of Caroline’s other hand, her warm fingers yielding and releasing them to my care without question. “These are them,” I said to Bethany, then, “we’ll finish with these,” to Caroline. “Go start on something else.”

She stood motionless, as if waiting for the miracle that had fallen out of the sky to sweep her off to the great beyond.

“Go on,” I said gently, the way you might talk to a child trying to ride a bike for the first time. “You can do it.”

Bethany and I worked side by side with the junior staff until the work was done and we could legitimately call it quits without anything extraordinary waiting for us in the morning. I felt strangely happy, picking my way through the envelopes and stuffing little ribbons and slips of paper inside, satisfied with the simple mechanics of the task and the way progress could be easily and objectively measured. To help keep my mind occupied I began to cogitate on some of the names I saw—some of them familiar and some of them not—members of the organization we served, thousands of them lined up in neat alphabetical order. They were from all over the world, dozens of nationalities equalized in large manila envelopes, their names printed on white labels in the upper right-hand corner.

Bethany was working next to me and at one point I elbowed her in the ribs.

“Look,” I said quietly, holding one of the envelopes so she could see the label. “Anastasia Amarosa. It’s kind of musical isn’t it?”

“Mmm mmm,” she said in assent. “I know her. She serves on one of our grant review committees. She’s nice.”

“What about this one?” I said, pulling out an envelope I had seen a few minutes ago. “Mert Aassen. Do you know him?”

“No.”

“That’s not musical at all. Mert Aassen. That sounds like something you need to cook really well before you eat it.”

Bethany laughed, doing the best she could to hide it behind her hand.

“What about this one?”

I looked up. One of the junior staff farther on down the row had spoken. His name was Jeff Hatchler. He worked for Angie, I think. A couple of other staff looked horrified, aghast probably that he had dared intrude on a private conversation between two of the bosses, but Jeff was smiling in his gap-toothed way, like we were all in this together.

He held up an envelope. Knowing he was too far away for anyone to read the label, he spoke as if announcing someone at court.

“Surender Viswani. Isn’t that what the Wicked Witch of the West wrote in the sky over Emerald City?”

There was some stifled laughter among the group, more nervous than genuine.

I reacted instinctively. “That’s nothing,” I said, moving down the row and clawing for an envelope I had seen while stuffing committee chair ribbons. When I found it, I held it up just as Jeff had done.

“I think this is the new Wookie ambassador in the Imperial Senate—Karnen Baratawidjaja.”

The laughter was more genuine now.

But Jeff was not the kind of guy to be outdone. I could see it in his eyes, a relentless mirth that itched to infect everything he did, including something as soul-sucking as stuffing reg packets in the air-conditioned concourse of a Miami Beach hotel.

“This one needs no introduction,” he said, as he held up yet another envelope. “Bengt Weeke.”

“Bent Weekie?” I said, before he could tack on his own joke. “That reminds me of something that happened on my honeymoon.”

The laughter was slow in coming on that one, but my delivery was ribald, and as my meaning became clear the snorts and guffaws that followed were no longer polite, but deep and heartfelt. They were all laughing, I saw, or smiling at least; Caroline also staring at me with disbelieving eyes. It certainly wasn’t the kind of crack a supervisor should make, I realized retrospectively, but it was out and no one seemed offended by it. Besides, after the day I’d had, I didn’t much care.

“I always knew there was something crooked about you,” Jeff said good-naturedly, as if we were partners in a vaudeville act.

+ + +

“Dragons” is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. For more information, go here.

This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

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