We were up to nearly four in the morning -- me getting sick and Jenny cleaning it up multiple times -- before the room would stop spinning and things were calm enough that I could contemplate going back to bed. It was a bad reaction to the medicine Blair had given me. I couldn’t really know that for sure, but in the moment that’s what I decided had happened and no one was going to talk me out of it.
“Throw them away,” I told Jenny, never wanting to see the offensive little pills again.
She tried to reason with me, asked me not to act rashly, to give the medicine a chance to work.
“Fuck the medicine,” I told her, climbing back into bed and pulling the covers up over my head. “It’s poison. I’m not taking any more.”
She must’ve stopped arguing with me, and I must’ve fallen back to sleep, because the next thing I remember was the alarm clock going off. The covers were still over my head and I had to fight against them to free myself from their cocoon before I could stumble across the room and extinguish the offending noise.
“Are you okay?”
I looked back at the bed. Jenny was an enormous shape under the blankets, her face framed in the dim light by the glowing cream-colored pillowcase, Jacob’s tousled mop of hair just visible below her left cheek. The alarm may have woken her up, or she may have been laying like that awake through the passing few hours of the early morning. There was no way to tell.
I considered her question for a moment. Without even thinking about it, I realized, I had bounded out of bed in my usual manner and there I stood, upright, on both feet, without a trace of dizziness or disorientation fogging up my brain.
“Yes,” I said. “I think so.”
“Are you going to work?”
Work. The word was like an incantation, conjuring up a thousand thoughts that had lain dormant and more or less forgotten. There was something on my calendar today, I knew, something important, but I had a hard time pinpointing it. It wasn’t the leadership meeting, was it? The terror of that thought almost giving me a heart attack. No, that was next week. I was leaving on Monday. What was it?
“Don’t you have that call with Steve Anderson today?”
That was it. “Yes. Yes, I do.”
“Why don’t you stay home and take it here?”
The thought of that seemed to terrify me even more. No, no, I should take it in the office. I’ve got a lot of things that still need to get done before next week’s leadership meeting. I can’t afford another day out of the office. When it’s time for the call with Steve, I can close my office door and minimize the distractions. It’ll be all right. It’ll be fine.
“Alan?”
It was only then that I realized that I hadn’t said any of my inner monologue out loud.
“I’m fine,” I said. “I’m going to the office.”
“Okay,” Jenny said, in one of her rare moments of acquiescence. “But do me a favor. Get dressed in Jacob’s room. I need to sleep in today.”
I knew better than to argue with that. I quickly gathered the items I would need and then quietly left the bedroom, shutting the door behind me. A shower, a quick breakfast, packing a bag lunch, and a short drive later I found myself at the office, riding the elevator up from the parking garage and walking down the long, interior wall of the building to my office. It was not lost on me that less than twenty-four hours ago I had been practically crawling along that same wall, using its planar geometry like a blind man desperate to find some small safe haven. Whatever had afflicted me, migraine or something else, was now equally a memory. I was tired, but no more so than any other day. And my throat was a little sore. But otherwise I felt ready to tackle whatever the day was planning to throw at me.
The call with Steve was not until 1 PM that afternoon -- 1 PM Central, that is. Steve’s assistant had confirmed it for 2 PM Eastern and that was 1 PM Central. I felt confident that I was not going to make that mistake again. I would also make sure that I had a completely empty bladder.
I kept to myself as much as I possibly could that morning, working for most of it with my office door closed. Part of me hoped that it looked natural -- I had a lot of phone calls to make, following up on all the volunteer committee changes that Wes Howard had demanded, and office protocol often looked favorably on those who closed their doors during long phone calls so as not to disturb all the other drones busily going about their tasks -- but another part of me didn’t really care. I just wasn’t up to interacting with people that morning. The phone calls alone were likely to exhaust me.
Hello? Yes, Mr. Richards? Neil Richards? It’s Alan Larson calling. Yes, that Alan Larson. Yes. Yes, I am looking forward to the leadership retreat next week, and that’s actually why I’m calling. Our incoming chair Wes Howard has taken another look at the pending committee rosters and has decided to bring some fresh faces onto some of the key committees. He asked me to call and thank you for your service on the Bylaws Committee, and also to inform you that he will be asking Kathleen Meyer to chair the committee next year. Yes. Yes, sir, I understand that Eleanor had previously asked you to serve as chair, and Wes would very much like you to continue serving on the committee, but he has decided to tap Kathleen for the role of chair. Yes. Yes, it is his decision as incoming chair. I’m glad you understand. No. No, please. We very much wish you will still attend next week’s leadership meeting. Wes is hoping to speak with you personally there, and your contributions there will be an important part of setting our plans for the future. Yes. Yes, thank you. We’ll see you. Thank you. Good-bye.
That was a good one and most of them were not good ones. Everything I said about Wes was a lie. Wes Howard didn’t care if people like Neil Richards stayed on their committees or if they came to the leadership retreat. He wasn’t going to speak to them personally and he would probably laugh at any contributions they would try to make. All of that was lies, but they had to be told. What else was I supposed to tell the people that Wes had rejected? The truth? That Wes Howard didn’t give a shit about anyone except Wes Howard?
I did that until quarter to twelve and then darted down to the breakroom to retrieve my bag lunch so I could eat it at my desk. There were a few people milling about in there, some of them waiting for the long line of microwaves to warm up their frozen meals, but no one stopped me or even tried to speak to me. In a flash I was behind my closed office door again, spreading a few napkins down on my desk surface to catch the crumbs.
I had planned to spend the last hour before my call with Steve preparing for that discussion, and only at that moment realized that Steve really hadn’t given me anything in particular to prepare. I tried to remember what it was that he had said to me in the Emerald Club at Logan Airport -- something about their plans for the future of the organization and wanting to hear my ideas.
And then my heart stopped. He wanted to hear my ideas. Not about the stupid standardized test they had given me, but about the future of their organization. That’s what Steve was going to be calling me about in… in sixty-three minutes, and I hadn’t prepared a goddamn thing.
I pushed my lunch aside and turned to my computer, calling up the organization’s website and reading as much as I could as quickly as I could. There. Their mission and strategic objectives. And there. Their Board of Directors, Steve’s smiling face staring back at me from the computer screen. And there. Their list of committees and each of their purposes. The site was organized like almost any similar organization, full of facts, but absent any kind of larger context. Where were the challenges they were facing? The dysfunction that probably existed around their Board table? The programs that failed to achieve their intended purposes from lack of funding? I wasn’t going to find any of that on their website, and that’s really what I needed if I was going to invent something plausible for my ideas on how to move the organization forward.
Suddenly there was a knock at my door. I looked up, my eye catching the time on its journey to the door (12:21 PM), and saw Bethany’s form practically pressed against my door’s glass, still cracked from the punch Gerald had given it.
She was probably the last person I wanted to talk to, especially with only thirty-nine minutes to go before my phone interview, so I gave her a stern look, pointing first to my watch and then to my phone. I’m busy! I’m making calls! But she met my pantomime with her own worried look, holding up two fingers and then pointing to her own watch. Reluctantly, I waved her in. She shut the door quietly behind her and stood with her back to it.
“No time for lunch, eh?”
I spread my hands over my half-eaten sandwich and carrot sticks. “I’ve got too many calls to make,” I said. “Wes practically re-wrote the entire committee roster and I have to reach everyone before they start getting on airplanes.”
“You’ve been holed up in here all morning,” she said, her voice laden with emotional overtones. “I was hoping you’d have a few minutes for me today.”
“Maybe later,” I said, roughly. “Can I come find you at the end of the day?”
She hitched her breath, somewhat painfully, and sighed. “I suppose. It’s kind of important. I’m quitting.”
“You’re what?”
“I wanted to do it first thing this morning, but I didn’t have the nerve to interrupt you.”
“Bethany, did you say you were quitting?”
She seemed to steel herself, choking back tears that had suddenly come into her eyes. “Yes, Alan. I am. I just can’t take it here any more. But I wanted to tell you before I made it official. I’m meeting with Mary at one.”
This was way too much information for me to assimilate. I just stared slack-jawed back at her, a single thought echoing again and again in my mind. She’s quitting. She’s quitting. She’s quitting.
“Alan,” she pleaded. “Say something.”
I shook my head mindlessly. “What is there to say? Is it because of me?”
The question appeared to make her uncomfortable. She started to answer it multiple times, but never seemed able to let more than half a syllable escape her lips.
It enraged me. I guess there’s no other word for it. Standing there, in her bargain basement business suit, with her mousy face and thick calves, looking to me, TO ME, to save her from the embarrassment of having to tell me that I was the cause of her problems, that I was the reason she was leaving the company. It was too much for me to take. In that moment, I hated her. I hated her and anything I might have ever felt for her.
“Get out,” I told her, struggling to keep myself from shouting.
“Alan, please.”
“Just get out of my office, Bethany. Go tell Mary what a monster I am. Tell her how I wasn’t able to protect you from all the stalking predators that surround you -- the real ones and the ones you conjure up from your own fear and inadequacy. Get, the, fuck, out, and never talk to me again.”
Now she was crying, thick, milky tears coming down her heavily made-up face, and that enraged me even more. She’s a clown. A fucking clown! It felt like bombs were constantly going off in my head, and I stood up, shooting up like a jackrabbit, not with any clear intention, but just needing to flee, or to fight.
Bethany must have thought the latter, because I saw the fear in her eyes as she turned, fumbling first with the door knob and then stumbling her way out of my office. I soon followed her, pure instinct taking over, pausing only to scoop up the remains of my lunch and to make sure that my cell phone was in my pocket. I had a call, you see, maybe the most important call of my life, now in thirty-two minutes, and if I was going to take it, I would have to be far away from the scene of this crime.
+ + +
“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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