Dragons - Part VII

1

Even gaining an hour on the flight back from Miami, I didn’t get home until well after midnight. The house was dark, with Jenny and Jacob both sound asleep, and I did everything I could not to wake them. I left my packed luggage and took most of my clothes off in the dining room, creeping upstairs in only my boxers and undershirt. I peeked briefly in on Jacob, his unkempt hair a dark and shaggy mass on his pillow, and then tiptoed into my bedroom.

Jenny was nothing more than a shape under a pile of blankets. She always turned the thermostat way down at night, more to create her ideal sleeping conditions than to save any money. In the winter the heat was off and in the summer the air conditioning was turned on full blast -- whatever it took to get the bedroom down to sixty degrees. Even before her pregnancy she claimed it was the only way she could sleep comfortably. With a new life growing in her womb, her sensitivity to heat was even more pronounced. If there was a way for her to sleep inside the refrigerator, she probably would have given it a try.

I slowly drew back the covers on my empty side of the bed. Jenny was lying on her side, facing away from me, and as the blankets came back I revealed her shoulders and her wide back, her whole body seemingly girded with extra thickness in order to better support our small daughter growing inside. I couldn’t see her belly, but I knew it was enormous, the outlined bulk of it clearly present in the shadowy darkness of our bedroom.

I gingerly climbed under the covers and drew them up to my chin, my natural sleeping position putting my back towards Jenny’s. In the creaking and bouncing of the mattress I was sure I was going to wake her, but after I settled into position a dark and total stillness descended on the room. Jenny had demanded black-out shades in all three of the bedrooms -- ours, Jacob’s, and the one that would soon be Crazy Horse’s. Like freezing temperatures, it seemed, complete darkness was a requirement of Jenny’s sleep cycle. But now, since I had left the bedroom door open behind me, I could see some moonlight spilling into the hall from the bathroom window, and it gave just enough illumination for me to see the shapes in the bedroom carpet and the piles of folded laundry on my dresser.

I was exhausted, but I tried to keep my eyes open as long as I could. It was a kind of sleepy game I played in quiet moments like this. It helped to calm my wayward thoughts while I simply observed my vision slowly fuzzing and unfocusing in the darkness that engulfed it. There was a lot on my mind, but most of it easily drifted away.

The next moment, it seemed, it was 6:52 AM, the glowing green numbers on my bedside clock flipping to 6:53 just as I became aware of them. I did not remember closing my eyes nor falling asleep, but the evidence seemed clear that both had happened. It was Jacob’s shout that had woken me, and now I heard it again. Not a cry, not a wail, but a shout. An angry one.

“No, Mommy! No!”

He was downstairs. In the dining room, from the direction of his voice. As was Jenny, whose terse command followed at a lower volume but deeper intensity.

“You will eat these peaches, young man.”

“I won’t! You can’t make me!”

The next sound was not hard to identify. Jacob’s bowl of peaches -- probably the one with the picture of his favorite train engine on the bottom -- fell onto the hardwood floor of our small dining room.

“Jacob!”

I closed my eyes and put a pillow over my head. Working for so many hours on the road had actually earned me a comp day from the company, and this was how it was starting. It was not what I had imagined. All year long, I was typically the first one up in the house, my office hours compelling me to rise and, in the winter months, depart before the sun even rose. So I had decided that on this rare comp day I was going to sleep as late as I could and stay in bed as long as I wanted. A bit of self-indulgent luxury, sure, but some part of me thought I had actually earned it. After working that meeting and dealing with all its attendant bullshit, I thought I was entitled.

“Jacob! You clean that up right now!”

“No!”

“You do what I tell you, young man!”

“No!”

Evidently, I was not. And I was suddenly very angry. The pillow I had tried to clamp over my ears had done nothing to block out the disturbance. Jesus fucking Christ, I boiled, can’t I get even one extra hour of sleep in this goddamn house? I decided then and there that I was not getting out of bed, no matter what happened downstairs. Fuck them. Fuck Jenny and Jacob both. Let them kill each other for all I cared. I was not getting out of this bed.

But when Jacob started screaming -- a full throated banshee cry that would curdle milk -- I found myself bounding out of bed, leaping physically out of the cocoon of blankets I had wrapped myself in, my mind fatefully still encased in its furious red carapace.

I tore open the bedroom door and flew down the stairs. Rounding the corner, my bare feet slapped to a hard stop in the dining room, where I found my wife and my four-year-old son locked in some dire combat. Jenny had one of Jacob’s forearms in her tight grip while she desperately tried to unbuckle the straps that held him in his booster chair. Jacob’s face was red and wet, his body contorted into a disjointed position, his toddler spoon held like a weapon in the chubby fist Jenny was holding away from her eyes.

“What the living fuck is going on down here?!”

“Alan!” Jenny cried. “Help me! Help me, goddammit! He’s out of control!”

Jacob wasn’t the only one. All three of us were caught up in the swift moving river of our own frustrations and there was nothing any of us could do in the moment but ride the current. I ran forward and blindly grabbed Jacob under the shoulders, attempting to yank him up and out of there, but Jenny had not yet undone the buckle, and both his booster seat and the dining room chair came with him and his wildly kicking feet. I didn’t care. I was strong. I kept pulling, but before I could drag him away one of his tennis shoes connected with Jenny’s face, and she flinched and fell away with a yelp of pain.

“Jenny!”

“Get him out of here!” she wailed, cowering in the corner like a beaten animal. “Get him out of here!”

I did. I shook Jacob free of the entangling straps of his booster chair, the plastic seat and wooden dining room chair falling to the floor with cracking thud, wrapped him in a great bear hug, and ran upstairs with him. He twisted and squirmed against me as if my arms were white hot branding irons on his slender body, but I held him fast. In our struggle I tripped and fell once on the stairs, both of us getting rug burns that we would each discover later, but I did not release him until we were inside his room. There, I literally threw him onto his bed. And then, as if I had just released a rabid tiger, I ran from the room and slammed the door shut behind me.

Inside, Jacob howled, angry, frightened, and probably hurt. He was unreachable. When in the throes of a tantrum, Jacob was imprisoned at the bottom of a miserable well, blindly clawing at the walls around him. Eventually, I knew, he would wear himself out, and only then would he be able to look up and see the small circle of sunlight above him.

I took a moment to catch my breath, getting my own anger under control, and then went downstairs to check on Jenny. I found her sitting on the floor of the dining room, her legs splayed out under her pregnant belly, her back against the wall between the window and the sideboard, a look of resigned failure on her bruised face. Jacob’s shoe had caught her just below her right eye, the yellow stain growing there already darker than any normal amount of foundation could cover.

I will still in the boxers and undershirt I had slept in. I could even feel the pressure of a full morning bladder. But I went over and crouched down in front of her. Her head was shaking, and her eyes did not look up to meet mine.

“Are you all right?” I asked.

“No,” she said, defeated. “No. I am not all right.”

I sat down next to her, leaning my back against the same dining room wall, and put my arm around her. Upstairs, Jacob was still screaming.

“Are you hurt?” I asked, taking a closer look at the bruise on her face.

Now she did look at me, her eyes brimming over with tears. “Why is he like that?” she croaked. “What have I done wrong?”

“Nothing,” I said, deciding to answer only her second question. “You haven’t done anything wrong.”

“Do other four-year-olds kick their mothers in the face?”

“Jenny,” I said. “You know that was an accident. He was having a tantrum.”

“He’s still having a tantrum. Listen to him.”

We paused for a moment to do exactly that. Through the floorboards, it sounded like a troop of wild raccoons were being tortured upstairs.

Jenny shook her head, the tears now spilling down her face. “That’s not normal, Alan. There’s something wrong with him. He needs help. And I can’t… I can’t…”

She couldn’t continue, burying her face in my shoulder and crying openly.

I held her. I didn’t know what else to do.

2

The balance of my comp day and the ensuing weekend were spent planning and prepping for my interview with Quest Partners. Airline tickets were bought, a hotel room was booked, public transportation systems were researched, my resume was polished up, interview questions imagined, and responses written, practiced, and honed until they almost seemed natural. On the upcoming Thursday I would board a plane, fly to Boston, and spend a night in a budget hotel. And on Friday I would wake, dress, enter the downtown offices of Quest Partners and submit myself to whatever fate awaited me there.

But now it was Monday, and I was back in the office, with only one important task on my mind. I had to take two vacation days which would allow all of the preceding planning to flow forward unimpeded.

It probably won’t surprise you to hear that the company had an archaic mechanism for requesting vacation days. Accessing the company’s network drive, I found the Wordperfect document that sufficed for the vacation day request form, printed it, and filled out the necessary information with a blue ballpoint pen. 

The color of the ink is significant. Legend had it that vacation requests submitted in blue ink were more likely to be approved than those in black ink -- and for those completed in red, green, or some other subversive color, everyone knew that those were never even considered. One might as well put the paper slip through one of the many shredders that dotted the office landscape. None of this, as far as I knew, had ever been tested in any scientific sense, and yet the veracity of these beliefs were never questioned, and we all adjusted our behavior accordingly. That’s the way things generally worked in any cult-like setting. 

The next step was to drop the completed document in Ruthie’s inbox, whose job was to log the request, make sure the employee in question actually had the vacation days available -- because, you know, we’re all trying to scam the company -- and then, if passing that hurdle, initial the document in the designated spot and route the document through the appropriate supervisory chain. Since I reported directly to Mary, my request would go directly to her desk for consideration. Other employees, lower on the company’s chipped and paint-faded totem pole, would have their forms go through all the layers of management before landing on either Mary’s or Don’s desk for the final approval.

“Taking some time off?”

I had already turned and was moving away from Ruthie’s desk when her question stopped me in my tracks. I didn’t even think to ask her how she knew I was dropping off a vacation request slip. Ruthie, it seemed, knew everything that happened in the organization and even a few things that hadn’t happened yet.

“Umm, yeah,” I said, trying to convey with my tone of voice that it really wasn’t any of her business.

“Going somewhere?”

“What?” I asked, now turning fully towards her and meeting her eyes. She was dressed in blue, with diamonds sparkling on her ear lobes and at her throat.

She looked at me for a full ten seconds before speaking again, the silence in the air between us thicker than cookie dough.

“You and Jenny. You’re going somewhere for a little getaway. Something nice before the baby is born.”

Oddly, none of her sentences were questions. They hung in the air like the accusations they were. Go on, they seemed to say. Make something up. You’re going to need a believable story if you expect Mary to approve this request.

And, of course, I had no such story. I hadn’t even bothered to think up a plausible excuse. The week after the Annual Conference was one of the busiest there were -- with all kinds of details to see to: minutes to write, evaluations to tabulate, refunds and extra charges to process, follow-up conference calls to schedule. Usually, it was the second or even the third week after the conference that people chose for burning their vacation days. 

My wheels were spinning but I kept my face as placid as possible. “No,” I said. “Nothing like that. I wish. Truth is, Jenny’s mom is moving into a new condo and we need to help her get settled.”

To this day, I have no idea where this particular lie came from. It’s true that Jenny’s mom was a widow, and that Jenny was trying to get her to downsize into something more manageable, but Meredith had so far refused to be removed from the sprawling house in which she had raised her three children.

“Uh huh,” Ruthie said, and when she didn’t seem to have any other comment, I turned quickly and walked without further comment back to my office.

There, I shut the door and hid my face behind my computer monitor. I had done a lot of stupid things over the last several days, but I decided then and there that telling that particular lie to Ruthie MacDonald was clearly the stupidest of them all. Not only did it sound like a lie, it was too easy to check, too easy to verify that there wasn’t a shred of truth behind it. Why, all Ruthie had to do was give Jenny a call and ask her about--

In my fevered mind I knew I had to beat Ruthie to the punch. I had to talk to Jenny and bring her into the center of my conspiracy. My hand reached out for the telephone, but the instrument began ringing before I could bring it into my grasp. Recoiling as if it was a venomous snake, I peered at its little screen and saw it was Ruthie, calling me on the intra-office line.

“Hello?”

“Alan.”

“Yes?”

“It’s Ruthie.”

“Yes?”

“I forwarded your vacation request to Mary.”

“Yes?”

“She would like to discuss it with you in her office.”

“Yes?”

“Now.”

“Yes. Okay.”

I placed the handset back in its cradle, and found that I had some small sliver of the presence of mind needed to contemplate my downfall. Never, in the history of the company, had a vacation request moved so quickly through the chain of command. Five minutes, surely no more than three hundred seconds from the time I dropped it in Ruthie’s inbox, I had a request for an in-person meeting in Mary’s office. I didn’t know how I had misplayed the situation so badly, but it appeared that I didn’t have the proverbial snowball’s chance in hell of getting the time off I requested.

And then what would I do? Go to Boston anyway? Call Quest Partners and tell them I couldn’t come? Either action seemed equally impossible.

I composed myself as best as I could and presented myself as ordered in Mary’s door. As I passed by I gave Ruthie the best poker face I could muster. She did not look at all convinced by it.

“You wanted to see me, Mary?”

Mary was standing next to her glass curio cabinet, wearing one of her smartest suits, and carefully re-arranging some of her trinkets and trophies. “Yes, Alan. Please. Come in and shut the door.”

I did as instructed, standing, more or less at attention, just inside the office.

Mary did not turn to look at me. “What’s this I hear about you wanting two days of vacation at the end of the week?”

“Yes,” I said. “I’ve earned them, haven’t I?”

That got her attention. She turned toward me, a large crystal award still in one hand. “Well, I don’t know why you’re taking that tone. I’m just curious why you would need to take vacation so soon after the Annual Conference. Is everything all right at home?”

There was a lot to unpack there. I had successfully struck the opening blow, knocking her somewhat off balance with my curtness, but she had recovered well, feigning both offense and concern for the welfare of my family. It was meant to soften me up, to get me to drop my guard so she could slip in her knife. My next play would be crucial. I decided to stay focused on the facts -- such as they were.

“I already told Ruthie,” not altering my hostile tone in the slightest. “Jenny’s mother is buying a new condo, and we’re going to help her move and get settled in.” It was still a lie, but it felt more like the truth this time, or at least I felt like I had put more truth into it. 

Mary stood silently for a moment, hefting the large chunk of crystal in her hand like she might throw it at me. I could see her wheels turning. Eventually, she turned and gently placed the award on one of the cabinet shelves.

“Alan, have a seat, please.”

“Okay,” I said, moving into the office and taking an uncomfortable seat in one of the uncomfortable chairs opposite her desk. 

Mary came over and perched herself on the edge of the giant slab of mahogany that served as her desktop. In doing so, she had to hitch up her skirt a little, revealing a tiny run in her stocking as it passed over her bony knee. She looked at me gravely.

“Alan, I want you to know that I know about the mistakes in the final conference program.”

It was such a non-sequitur that at first I wasn’t even sure she had spoken English. “Excuse me?”

“The mistakes. The ones Eleanor was counting on you to fix. The ones we were both counting on you to fix. I know that Eleanor said that the matter would remain between you and her, but later on she felt it was important for me to know and she told me about it.”

Yes, I’m sure she did. Something of such magnitude? I was very important for you to know. After all, how are you supposed to run your company if you didn’t know how far the key members of your staff could be trusted? Especially with something as crucial to the very survival of your business as a few misplaced words in a 200-page program book. I mean, if you had an employee like that, one who lacked either the competency or the judgment necessary to protect the integrity and reputation of the company’s clients, it was absolutely vital that such information not be hidden from you. To do so would undermine your ability to lead your organization forward. Why, if Eleanor hadn’t volunteered the information, it wouldn’t be surprising if you hadn’t managed to drag it out of her.

“Alan,” I suddenly heard Mary say, “did you hear what I said?”

She pulled me out of my Pavlovian brain rush of sarcasm. Fortunately, none of it had escaped through my lips, but mentally, the damage was done. I was now completely off my game. Whereas before my anger had been calculated, now it was honest and true.

“Sure, I did,” I said. “I heard your words, but I guess I’m struggling to understand their importance. What mistakes did Eleanor tell you about?”

“Mistakes in the conference program,” Mary said.

“Yes. Such as?” I could see Mary tensing up. She did not like being confronted.

“Are you denying it?”

“I’m not denying anything,” I said. “I just want to be clear. What specific mistakes did Eleanor tell you about?”

With that, Mary skooched off the edge of her desk and moved around behind it. She opened a drawer and pulled out a perfect-bound copy of the program from the Annual Conference just completed. “Here,” she said, tossing it across the desk at me. “Eleanor gave me her copy. She wants it placed in your personnel file.”

The booklet that landed in my lap was creased and well-worn -- almost like a Bible that a zealot had poured over and carried in her grimy hands for decades. Pages were tagged with dozens, maybe hundreds, of little sticky notes, and as it flopped open almost of its own will, I saw that the random spread was covered with little underlines, cross-outs, and marginal notes in Eleanor’s tight and exact script. I did not, but I felt like flicking the offending thing off my lap like some hairy insect. I didn’t even want to touch it, so I simply let it lay there.

“Mary,” I said, feeling my anger rise even as I was trying to calm myself down. “I fixed everything she wanted fixed before going to press. Don’t you remember? I worked late for a week to get it done. These have to be all new changes. These have to be things she didn’t even tell me she wanted fixed.”

Mary looked at me suspiciously. “Alan, I find that very hard to believe.”

Now I did pick up the tattered document. “Look at this one,” I said, literally seizing on one correction at random, but my anger swelling even further when I realized what it was. “She’s rewriting the learning objectives from an education session she wasn’t even part of. Look at this! She’s not correcting their punctuation or grammar. She’s rewriting someone else’s learning objectives.”

“So?”

“So?” I said. “She wasn’t part of that session. The learning objectives come directly from the presenters. What right does she have to change them like this?”

“She was the program chair, Alan. She was responsible for all the education sessions. How do you know she didn’t speak with the session presenter and get their agreement on those changes?”

I shook my head. Mary wasn’t hearing me, and I was too upset to realize that she wasn’t going to hear me, no matter what I said or how long I explained it to her. “Then why wasn’t it part of the changes she sent me before the program went to print? How am I supposed to make changes to a program after it’s already gone to print?” And with that I threw the offending program back onto Mary’s desk, where it landed with a dull slap. “This is a joke, Mary. And I think you know it is.”

Mary sat down behind her desk. “Alan,” she said seriously, “none of this is a joke. In fact, the cavalier attitude that you’re showing now is part of the problem you’re creating for yourself. Eleanor and I, the two of us, we’re frankly questioning the seriousness with which you’re taking your responsibilities.”

I tried to interrupt her, but she held up a hand and I held back.

“At first, I thought that maybe I had promoted you too soon. That you weren’t ready for the additional responsibility. But now I have to question if you’re even trying. You’re not making mistakes because you don’t know what you’re doing. You’re making mistakes because you don’t seem to care.”

Mary paused, but I kept my mouth shut, not wanting her to shush me again. Inside, I was boiling, but I knew blowing up at her more than I already had wasn’t going to do any good.

“And now there’s this vacation request,” Mary resumed, speaking logically, as if one idea flowed easily from the next. “The very week we get back from one of the most difficult conferences we’ve ever run, you’re planning to take some vacation. And for what? To help your mother-in-law move? Is that it?”

I remained silent, but this time Mary really did want an answer. 

“Alan. Is that it?”

“Yes,” I said tersely. I was trapped in my own stupid lie. There was nothing else I could say.

“And how long have you known about this? Did she just call you up over the weekend? Hey, Alan, I’m moving next Thursday, can you help me?”

“We’ve known for a while,” I said slowly. “But everything has been so crazy and hectic. It just kind of snuck up on me.”

She sat there behind her desk, her arms folded across her chest, a pouty look on her face. She might have been waiting for me to say more, but I did not give her the satisfaction. I very much doubted if I ever was going to give Mary any kind of satisfaction in the future.

“Okay, Alan,” she said finally. “I’ll approve your vacation request. I don’t know how I’m going to explain it to Eleanor, but you can have my approval on one condition.”

“And that is?”

“That you start taking your responsibilities to this company and the clients we serve seriously. No more putting silly family matters like this ahead of your professional responsibilities. You are a senior leader in this organization now. Your allegiance and loyalty has to be first and foremost to the satisfaction of our clients. If Eleanor Rumford doubts that commitment, she would be within her rights and authority to pull her business away from the company -- and I cannot have that. You are far more expendable than the business that Eleanor represents to this organization. Do you understand what I’m telling you?”

Did I understand? I sure did, perhaps more than Mary realized.

“Yes, Mary. I understand.”

“Good. Now get the hell out of my office.”

3

On Wednesday of that fateful week we had one of our “state of the company” meetings. As I’ve previously described, these were largely painful affairs -- painful for both the staff and the company owners -- as the latter went through the motions that would invariably fail in their intended purpose: convincing the former that the things they did were appreciated and pivotal to the success of the company.

This one was at least on schedule, in the sense that it had been three months since the last meeting and that they were supposed to be held quarterly. But it was also typical in the sense that no kind of agenda was circulated in advance of the session. For anyone outside the inner circle -- which evidently included me and anyone else who wasn’t Mary or Don -- all you knew was that you were supposed to show up in the company’s all-purpose room at nine o’clock sharp.

I got there at 8:57 AM, and most of the staff were already assembled by that point. Since all the chairs were taken, I squeezed my way into the room, and found a place to stand in one of the far corners. I avoided as much eye contact as I could on my difficult journey, brushing past Gerald at one point and walking behind Bethany at another. When I finally filled the only empty spot that remained in the crowded room, I had to reluctantly acknowledge Jurgis, who was already there, and who nodded to me as I assumed a position beside him.

There was a lot of chatter in the room as, true to form, neither Mary nor Don had yet made their appearance. The ambient volume was loud enough that I had difficulty hearing Jurgis when he addressed me.

“What?” I said.

Jurgis leaned in closer, revealing the color of the cream cheese that had adorned his morning bagel and which now adorned his grizzly beard. “They are unveiling the staff qualities.”

“What?” I said again, now looking at Jurgis square in the face. This time I had heard him distinctly, but doubted that such a thing was actually coming to pass.

Jurgis nodded knowingly. “Da. I heard them talking about it this morning. They are unveiling the staff qualities.”

I had no time to question Jurgis further, for at that moment both Mary and Don entered the room. Neither of them had any difficulty as the path to the front of the room was wide open, where a single table with two chairs had been placed. Don had a thick folder of what appeared to be loose paper in his hands. Mary appeared to have nothing but her wits.

The room quickly went silent as Mary and Don took their seats.

“Good morning,” Mary said. “Thank you all for attending this morning. As everyone here should know, last week we successfully navigated a major Annual Conference in Miami Beach. I thought I’d start this session by citing some of the impressive statistics from that event.”

And this Mary began to do -- listing, apparently without referring to any notes, a long slew of numbers and statistics that would have put a charging gorilla to sleep. Two hundred and twenty-one educational sessions. One thousand six hundred and thirty-two scientific papers presented in the poster sessions. One hundred and six exhibitors renting one hundred and forty-nine thousand square feet in the exhibit hall. Six thousand four hundred and twelve registered attendees. The recitation went on and on, the tone of Mary’s excited voice working overtime to convince us that each statistic was more interesting and relevant than the last.

From my vantage, it didn’t seem like she was convincing very many people in her audience. Other than a few sycophants up front, smiling and nodding as if being blown kisses from their lover’s mouth, most everyone else simply looked uncomfortable. We were stuck, listening to something we didn’t want to listen to. Doing something we didn’t want to do.

“It was the largest and most successful conference we have ever held,” Mary finally concluded triumphantly. “Eleanor Rumford and the rest of the leadership was VERY HAPPY with the outcome.”

That seemed typical, too. Eleanor was happy. Because that’s why we all worked so goddamn hard. Like you, Mary. All we want to do is make sure Eleanor Rumford is happy.

And it was that thought, sarcastic though it was, about all the work that had gone into the conference, and more specifically about the people that had done all that work, that made me realize, almost as an afterthought, that in her entire run-down of the event, and here, in front of her assembled staff, that Mary had utterly failed to even mention any individual staff person by name, and much less to thank them for what they had done to make Eleanor’s conference so large and successful.

Huh. I wonder why that didn’t surprise me.

“Now,” Mary was saying, already moving onto her next subject, “there is something else that we want to go over with everyone today. Don?”

Snapping to exactly like he had fallen asleep, Don clumsily got out of his chair and began passing out the creased and somewhat wrinkled pieces of paper that he had brought in his smudge-stained manilla folder. Giving a clump to several folks in the front row, he communicated with a grunt and a nod of his bulbous head that he wanted each to take one and pass the rest around to the other people.

“Don is passing around an extremely important document that we want everyone to read and come to understand as best they can. We’re calling them our Company Values, and we’re going to start using them to govern how we act around here.”

Oh my god. That’s how you’re introducing this? Despite my cynicism, and like everyone else in the room, I found myself suddenly desperate to get my hands on a copy of this important document. What did it say? What hoops were we going to have to jump through now? It can’t possibly be the list of ten staff qualities we had agreed on. Could it?

“As copies make their way around the room,” Mary said, “let me say that these Company Values were carefully chosen to help ensure the best possible performance among our various teams. While we were in Miami Beach I was able to review them with Eleanor, as I have reviewed them with the leaders of our other major clients, and everyone is in full support of their implementation within the company. They are absolutely essential to our success.”

If I was curious before, I was absolutely desperate now. Approved by Eleanor Rumford! Not even Moses, who witnessed the great and terrible finger of God carve His holy commandments into mundane stone, could have felt the anticipation I felt now. I had to see what Mary and Eleanor had done to our staff qualities. There was a reason, I suddenly knew, why I had not been told that they would be unveiled today. Clearly, they had been twisted into shapes beyond recognition.

I saw a stack of crumpled paper heading my way, but Mary began reciting the list before it got to me.

“Let’s start at the top,” she said, assuming that everyone was now able to follow along. “Thrives in a team environment. This is absolutely critical to our smooth functioning as an organization. If you’re not a team player, you really don’t belong here.”

She paused, almost for effect, but more likely because she had already lost her place on the copy in front of her. As she did, the last few pieces of distributed paper had finally made it to the back corner where Jurgis and I stood.

“Shows initiative,” Mary continued. “This one is extremely important, too. We need people…”

My ears tuned Mary out as my eyes greedily scanned down the list before me. Almost beyond my belief, I saw that they all seemed to be there: the staff qualities we had worked so hard on, that we had felt so strongly about, that had come together almost magically in that stuffy conference room. But, wait. What’s this? Are there eleven of them? Yes, yes there were. Had Mary reinstituted the one about practicing a healthy work/life balance? 

It felt like way too much to hope for, so now I forced myself to slow down and actually read the document. Under a banner that said “Company Values,” the words in some clip-arty script font not quite centered on a unfurling parchment scroll, I saw:

1. Thrives in a team environment.

2. Shows initiative.

3. Anticipates challenges.

4. Creatively applies resources to solve problems.

5. Maintains positive relationships.

6. Shows respect for others.

7. Supports the mission of the organization.

8. Obeys the rules to maximize productivity.

9. Mentors--

Wait. What?

There were three more to read, but my eyes jumped back to number eight. Obeys the rules to maximize productivity. I looked up disbelievingly at Mary, who was busy talking about how important it was to apply resources to solve problems, her face turned down to her paper rather than up at her followers. 

Obeys the rules to maximize productivity! I felt like screaming at her. Where the fuck did that mutated beast come from? From your twisted mind or Eleanor’s? Nothing like that came out of the inclusive discussion I had. It doesn’t even make sense. How does obeying the rules lead to maximum productivity? And what rules are you talking about? Are they posted somewhere?

“Maintains positive relationships,” Mary said, long since dropping into a bored monotone, and oblivious to the cyclone rampaging in my brain. “Now this one is important, too...”

I nudged Jurgis and pointed to the eighth item on the list he also held in his hand.

“What the hell is that?” I whispered.

Jurgis appeared to squint at the document, his eyes all but disappearing into the lines of his face. When he looked back up at me, he simply shrugged.

I looked up, scanning the room for the others that had been in that magical meeting with me. One by one I found them. Peggy Wilcox, our director of human resources, sitting in the front row, facing forward, with her hands neatly folded on top of the offending piece of paper. Two chairs down from her I saw the back of Scott Nelson’s head, his long and angular frame striking just about the same pose as Peggy. 

“Shows respect for others,” Mary’s voice droned on in my ears, as if trying to lull me with a sleep spell like she had done with most of her audience. “This one is very important, especially when it comes to our interactions with our clients.”

God! They’re all important, Mary. That’s why they made the list. You don’t have to tell us that every single one is important!

I managed to catch Angie Ferguson’s eye. She was standing on the side of the room, her back against the wall, her piece of paper held up so she could follow along. She looked quizzically at me, as if not understanding the angry glare I was giving her. I mouthed “Number Eight” as clearly as I could, and I watched as her brow wrinkled in distaste. Evidently, she had not read ahead as I had.

“Supports the mission of the organization. Now this one may be the most important of them all.”

Someone coughed on the opposite side of the room, and as I turned to look, I saw my final two co-conspirators, Gerald Krieger and Bethany Bishop, standing together, and both looking intently at me. Gerald was bringing his hand down, his faux cough having accomplished its objective. As we stared helplessly at each other, Gerald slowly shook his head and Bethany looked for all the world like she was about to cry.

“Obeys the rules to maximize productivity,” Mary’s voice echoed, but then stopped short, as a deep silence fell over the room.

When it had gone on to an uncomfortable degree I forced myself to turn away from Gerald’s disapproving and Bethany’s disappointed eyes and realized with a sinking feeling of horror that Mary was waiting until she caught my attention. I had to clench myself to keep my bowels from loosening when her steely gaze bore into me and then, and only then, did she resume her sonorous incantation.

“I misspoke,” she said, her voice as dull and mechanistic as a soulless robot. “This is actually the most important of them all. Every business, every culture, every society has to have rules, and those rules must be obeyed if the people within that society, within that culture, within that business are going to flourish and succeed.”

There was another long and silent pause, and throughout its length it was as if Mary and I were the only people in the universe. The room, the building, the world, it all dropped away as Mary and I locked eyes in a silent and deadly battle of will.

You will lose, Mary’s eyes, her face, her whole bearing seemed to say, and say it as confidently as anything she had ever said in her life. In response, I could only slowly nod my head, understanding, perhaps now irrevocably, that I had indeed lost my battle with her.

And worse, if I didn’t mind my Ps and Qs, the dragon was going to win the entire war.

4

At the conclusion of the “state of the company” meeting, I did not approach Mary and Mary did not approach me, and for the rest of the day our paths did not cross. I don’t know if she was avoiding me, but I was certainly avoiding her.

But at home that night I said all the things I would have wanted to say to Mary.

“Eleven? Really, Mary? I thought you said eleven was such an odd number. Don’t you think it will work so much better if there are only ten?

“Obeys the rules? Really, Mary? It takes a rule follower to think that’s a good idea. How does obeying the rules possibly fit in with the other qualities? You want people to show initiative, to creatively apply resources, to be visionary -- and you want them to obey the rules? Do you even realize how schizophrenic that is? Oh, and what the hell does obeying the rules have to do with maximizing productivity, anyway?

“Company Values? Really, Mary? You don’t get it, do you? You can’t just take our list, slap Company Values on the top, and claim it as the company’s own. There’s more to it than that. Goddammit, we worked hard to describe professional qualities that people could possess. People, Mary, not companies! People can show initiative. People can creatively apply resources. People can be visionary. All the company can do is identify, encourage, and reward people who have those qualities, because those are the qualities that are most closely correlated with the company’s success. But you don’t have any plans in place to do any of that, do you, Mary? You certainly didn’t talk about those plans in the company meeting. All you did was pass out a list and remind everyone how important it was. If these are the company’s values, what is the company going to do to embrace them? To make them a reality? To reward instead of punish anyone who dares to embrace any of them except your glorious number eight? Because if I took a survey of everyone in that room today, I’d wager that number eight is the only one that any of them remember. Obey the rules!”

It all came tumbling out of my mouth. Like a holy roller, I was angry, indignant, and righteous. I wanted to do battle. I wanted to hurl myself on my enemy’s sword and let her feel the terrible heated pulsations of the blood I was willing to shed for my cause.

And through all of it Jenny simply sat quietly and listened. When I was spent and could speak no further, she was short and to the point.

“What time is your flight tomorrow?”

I looked at her quizzically, wondering if she had even heard anything I had said.

“Ten fifteen.”

She slowly nodded her head. “Better get a good night’s sleep. You really need to knock them dead on Friday.”

5

The next day I was on the plane out to Boston. I was paying my own way for this one -- or, at least, was until I got reimbursed by Quest Partners. Either way, I had purchased the cheapest coach ticket that I could find. And now, walking past the power elite sitting in the first class cabin, I found myself unable to not think about Mary Walton.

See, unlike a lot of people who travel for their jobs, I never go first class. Even when I get an upgrade -- I fly enough, so they do come my way -- I have to turn them down, because I’m staff, and it isn’t seemly to have staff flying first class. Mary had explained it to me many times. Even when it doesn’t cost the company any more than a coach ticket, it gives people ideas. Ideas you don’t want people to have. What if a client should see me? What would they think the company was spending their money on? The only person from the company who ever got to accept those upgrades was, guess who? Mary Walton. Because Mary was the president of the company, and only company presidents and other similar titans get to ride in first class, where people drink their liquids out of little glasses instead of little plastic cups.

Whatever. Hopefully, this plane ride was part of the process that was going to get me out of that damn company and its crazy rules that must be obeyed in order to maximize productivity. But as I made my way into the coach cabin and found my seat, I was dismayed to find that my discomfort was not yet at an end. My neighbor, evidently for the next three hours, was one of those “hey, isn’t it interesting the people you can meet on an airplane?” people.

You know the type I mean. He’s the first one on the plane and he’s saying “Hi there!” before you’ve even fastened your seat belt. He’s usually a salesman of one kind or another -- a thirty-something-year-old balding salesman wearing a baseball cap to cover up his thinning hair. The logo on the ball cap is usually a sports team, but sometimes you’ll see a fly fishing destination he visited on some incentive program, or a symbol you don’t even recognize, something emblematic of the secret brotherhood that forces him to shake every hand and speak to every stranger. Your role in the war novel that is his life is similar to that of cannon fodder: you’re there so he can practice his gift of gab. He cares about you about as much as a cigar-chomping general safe behind the lines. You are simply a means to his larger end. Talking to you helps loosen him up before he has to get off the plane and go close an actual deal.

This one at least had a fresh opening line. As sales practice went, the opening line ranked in importance only behind the ask.

“Hey, wasn’t that Taylor Jenkins up in first class?”

I like shutting these guys down, but I had no idea how easy this one was going to be. I just responded instinctively, saying what I would have said if my mother had asked me the same question.

“I don’t know who Taylor Jenkins is.”

Balding sales guy looked at me strangely, as if I was speaking Japanese and he had to reorient and figure out what frackin city he was in. He would've said “frackin,” too, I knew. It was good-natured, a code word shared between close friends, and anything stronger could risk a business relationship. After a long pause that was surely more uncomfortable for him than it was for me, he slowly explained to me that Taylor Jenkins was a pitcher for the local baseball team and, evidently, given the reverence in his voice, a very big deal.

“Oh,” I said.

Then I fished a book out of my briefcase. As I did so, I made sure he had an opportunity to see the cover before I buried my nose in it. I wondered only momentarily if he even knew who Sinclair Lewis was.

And that was it. I’d pulled the rug out from under him, pissing all over his typically reliable common ground. He wouldn’t bother practicing on me. I wasn’t buying what he was selling and he knew it.

A few minutes later my eye strayed over while he was playing with his Blackberry -- getting a few quick texts out before they closed the boarding door.

YA YA DUDE! GUESS WHO'S SITTING NEXT TO TAYLOR JENKINS ON THE PLANE!!!

Not you, you lying dork.

6

In my Boston hotel room that night I tried to find some peaceful balance with myself. After a simple dinner at a little burger joint around the corner (yes, thank you, I’ll take the sweet potato fries for two dollars more), and an uneventful phone call with Jenny back on the front lines (Jacob is being a little sweetheart tonight, he even ate his peas at dinner), I had a good two hours to spend with myself prior to going to sleep at a respectable hour.

I went down to the sundry shop in my hotel, bought a bottle of beer (yes, I guess I’ll have the Sam Adams if that’s all you have) and was sitting with my feet up, a glass at my elbow with two generous sips already taken out of it, and my Sinclair Lewis novel open in my hands.

I remember it was Cass Timberlane; a novel that even most people who had heard of Sinclair Lewis had never heard of. Frankly I hadn’t previously heard of it either. It was just something I had picked up at a second-hand book store somewhere, attracted more by the author’s name and the way it looked. It had lost whatever dust jacket it had originally had, and there was nothing even stamped on its dark cover. You had to look at the spine, and there you only saw four words. Cass and Timberlane and Sinclair and Lewis. Four names, I guess, but none of them really meant anything, at least not anything that would tip you off as to what you might find between the book’s covers. Unless, of course, you knew who Sinclair Lewis was and which direction his prose was likely to take you.

So there I was, my stocking feet up on someone else’s coffee table, sitting in the corner of someone else’s sofa (a sleeper, no doubt, knowing that in a pinch this hotel room could therefore be converted to a double/double), a passable beer at my side and lost in the pages of someone else’s story, when, without warning, my phone emitted a vibrating pulse and the little red light on its front began blinking at me.

It was a text. That much I had come to understand. Someone had just sent me a text, and I quite consciously decided to ignore it. I mean, I was in my happy place. At that moment I was convinced that there wasn’t anything that anyone could text me that would give me greater peace of mind than what I was already experiencing.

But a few minutes later the damn thing vibrated again -- meaning that someone had texted me again. Was it the same person? Probably. Back then I didn’t receive a lot of texts and the idea of two different people sending two different texts in such a short span of time seemed unlikely. It was the same person and, whoever it was, they wanted my attention on something. Maybe it was Pamela Thornsby. Maybe something had changed with my scheduled interview tomorrow. The speculation was enough to get me to put my book down and pick up my phone.

R U THERE? was the first text and it was from Bethany Bishop. 

I NEED 2 TALK 2 U. was the second, and it was also from Bethany Bishop.

I sat there looking at the letters on the screen. They were small and non-descript, but they felt imbued with an unrecognizable power. They told me very little, but something had evidently happened. My mind ran through the scenarios. Had she been fired? Had she been injured? Had she left her husband?

The phone vibrated while I held it and new letters appeared on the screen. PLEASE CALL ME IF U CAN.

I pushed the button that would dial her number and sat there listening to it ring once, twice, three times.

“Hello?”

“Bethany?”

“Yes?”

“It’s Alan.”

“Alan! Oh my word. I wasn’t expecting you to call so soon.”

It was hard to tell. The connection was not the best, but it sounded to my ears like she had been crying. “Are you all right? Can you talk?”

“Yes, I can talk,” she said, and this time I definitely heard her sniffle. “The fireworks are over and he’s left the house.”

“What? Who has left the house?”

“David. We had a fight and he stormed out of here.”

David was her husband. She had had a fight with her husband and now she was reaching out to me. Not her mom. Not her minister. Me. What the hell did that mean?

“Are you all right?” I asked.

“Yeah, I’m all right,” Bethany said, “I’m just so sick of his nonsense.”

“What about Parker?” I asked, suddenly thinking about her little boy.

A pause. “What about him?” she said in a suspicious tone.

“Is he all right?”

“Oh, yes,” she said with expressive relief, “he’s fine. David would never do anything like that!”

“What happened?”

That opened the floodgates. For the next ten minutes I sat and listened as Bethany described the fraying edges of her relationship with her husband. It had started innocently. The laundry needed to be folded and she wanted him to do it. More explicitly, she wanted him to want to do it, to do it without having to be asked, and when he wouldn’t, she asked him, and he blew up at her. He swore, he raged, he shook his fists in the air. She cried, desperate for him to be more attentive to her needs, but unable to communicate that simple feeling in a way he could understand. They argued. They fought. He shouted some more. She cried some more. Eventually, he left the house. He took his jacket, his car keys, and just left. Where was he going? Away from her! And now she was alone. Did he leave her? She didn’t think so, not really, but he was gone wasn’t he? What if he didn’t come back? What if he was gone for good and she never saw him again? Could she handle that? Would that be the end of all things, or just another thing that happened? She wasn’t sure.

Throughout it all I did not say a word and did not even shift position. For most of it I simply watched the bubbles in my beer glass form, float to the top, and disperse.

“Hey, I’m sorry to burden you with this,” she said eventually. “It’s not a big deal, I guess. I’m just feeling down and I needed someone to talk to about it.”

“I’m glad I was available,” I said.

“Where are you?”

There was something mischievous in her voice that gave me pause. The first frightening thought that passed through my mind was “she knows, she knows,” but what she knew and what I was afraid of having her find out I couldn’t say.

“You’re supposed to be helping someone move, but you’re not doing that, are you?”

So she didn’t know. I mean, she knew I wasn’t doing what I had told Mary, but she didn’t know what I was actually doing. That was good, wasn’t it? No one at the office -- not even Bethany -- should know that I was interviewing for another job. If word should get out about that, things could get even worse for me than they were now.

“Alan?”

“What do you know?” I asked her. “What’s the grapevine saying about me?”

“Not much,” she said. “Just that you took two days off to help a family member move.”

“My mother-in-law,” I added quickly.

“Oh, okay, your mother-in-law. But that’s not true, is it? Are you going to tell me where you really are and what you’re really doing?”

“I’m in Boston,” I said, liking the illicit chill that the words sent up my spine. That was stepping up to the line but not stepping over it.

“Boston?” Bethany said. “Is that where your mother-in-law is moving?”

I stopped and reflected carefully on Bethany’s words. She had more or less just bared her soul to me -- talking about her husband and her marriage in a way that shouldn’t be shared outside a therapist’s office. And now she was fishing for something secret and private from me. Somewhere deep inside she knew I wasn’t helping my mother-in-law move, but if I insisted she would believe me. I could hear it in the way she asked her questions. Tell me, her disembodied voice seemed to say in my ear. Tell me whatever you want. A truth, a lie, it doesn’t matter. Just tell me. Tell me something and I will believe it.

“No,” I said, making a fateful decision. “My mother-in-law isn’t moving anywhere.”

“Then why are you in Boston tonight?”

“If I tell you, Bethany, you have to swear not to tell anyone else.”

“Of course. I swear.”

“I mean it, Bethany. No one. Not even David. Do you understand me?”

“Sure, sure, I understand. What is it? You’re not interviewing for another job, are you?”

She sounded torn, like she both wanted to guess right and didn’t want her guess to be true.

“Yes,” I said. “Yes, that’s exactly what I’m doing. The interview is tomorrow morning.”

“OH MY GOD! ALAN!”

I had to hold the phone away from my ear, she shouted so shrilly.

“What are you doing? You’re interviewing? For another job? You can’t do that! You can’t!”

“Why not?”

“Alan! Because! What about all the work we’re doing to fix the company? What about our battle against Mary? You can’t leave now. How can I keep working there without you?”

Her words were emotionally-loaded, and it was a real challenge for me to sort them all out. Frustration. Anger. Betrayal. Those were the top emotions, coming through loud and clear. But under them were emotions darker and more sinister. Sorrow. Fear. Jealousy.

“I’m sorry,” I found myself saying, even though I didn’t really feel sorry, and then I found myself dropping all kinds of other cliches on her. I was just keeping my options open. It was an opportunity I just couldn’t pass up. I had to look out for me and my family first.

She listened, but didn’t really seem to hear me. When she spoke again, her voice sounded quavery, like it had when she had first started talking about her fight with David. This upset her. A lot. Maybe she was being silly, but still, she felt like I was abandoning her, like I was setting her adrift, like I no longer cared about her. 

I told her I didn’t know how to respond to any of that, and that I now regretted telling her why I was really in Boston.

“Alan, do you remember that night on the beach in Miami?”

The question sprang up like a sudden threat, conjuring up images in my mind of sharpened blades laced with poison.

“Yes,” I said softly. “Of course, I do.”

“Did you not feel something that night?”

“Feel something?”

“Something between us. Did you not feel something happening between us that night?”

My mouth opened, but no sound came out. Of course I felt something. I felt a lot of things that night. The cool sand between my toes, the moonlight on my skin, Bethany’s warm hand clasped in mine. But more, she meant something more than that, and of course I had felt that, too. The connection, the comfort, the satisfaction of being at ease, at being in someone’s company without having to pretend, or strut, or hide. We had both felt that, and we knew that we had both felt that. That is partly what had made it so powerful, the knowing, and the not needing to speak about it. 

But now she was talking about it. She was bringing it out into the open -- over a phone line, no less -- as if it was something to be discussed and analyzed. Did she not know that it, whatever it was, would not stand up to such recognition, to such scrutiny? Talk about it and it will die, and all we’ll have left is half-formed memories that could never be fully articulated or shared.

“I know you did, Alan,” Bethany’s tiny voice whispered in my ear. “I don’t need you to admit it, because I know you felt the same thing I did. Something changed between us that night. Something personal and meaningful and long-lasting.”

“It’s true,” I croaked. “But what does that have to do with me being in Boston?”

“It’s not that you’re in Boston, Alan, and it’s not even that you’re there to interview for a new job. It’s that you didn’t tell me. How could you not tell me! Don’t you think I deserve to know that you’re thinking of leaving the company?”

“I’m sorry,” I said, still not entirely sure if I was or wasn’t. “I guess I didn’t think about it that way. Jenny has done so much of the behind-the-scenes work on this, the fact that I’m seriously working to get out of the company hasn’t really hit home for me.”

At the mention of my wife’s name I could sense a stillness come over Bethany’s end of the telephone call, and then an almost crystalline iciness in the words she finally chose to speak next.

“Yes, well, I guess that makes sense, Alan.”

“It does?”

“Yes. Look, I think I just heard David’s car. I’ve got to go now.”

“Ummm. Okay.”

“Good-bye, Alan. Good luck at the interview tomorrow.”

Her line clicked off and I was left alone in my hotel room.

7

I couldn’t stay in that hotel room. Not after such a phone call. What had once felt almost like a sanctuary now felt decidedly like a prison cell. I knew the walls weren’t actually closing in on me, but I just couldn’t look at them anymore. Their stucco surface seemed to mock me, their last coat of paint not entirely covering the last around the thermostat and that stupid black and white print of Faneuil Hall -- the same one, I knew, repeated hundreds of times, in the same spot on the same wall in every room in the building -- staring at me, showing me nothing but my own eyes reflected in the dark spots between the windows. I hated it. I had to get out.

Moments later I found myself out on the street with little recollection of leaving either my room or my hotel. My mind was filled with questions and worries about the conversation I had just had with Bethany. On the surface were the simple terrors: Should I have told her about the interview? What would happen if she told people at the office? What would Mary do to me if she found out I was looking for a new job? But below that flow were deeper and darker currents: Why had Bethany texted me in the first place? Why was she so upset that I hadn’t told her about the interview? What exactly did that night in Miami Beach mean to her?

It was a cool night, but plenty of people were out and about. My hotel, it seemed, was in a trendy part of Boston, with upscale boutiques and restaurants lining the way. Something about it seemed familiar to me, but my mind was too distracted to make any real connection with it. I could feel my heart sinking and a cold sweat breaking out on my back as I continued to imagine implication after implication.

What, exactly, did Bethany think was going on between us? Sure, we had shared something close, perhaps even intimate, on the beach in Miami, but I distinctly remember our connection being interrupted by two phone calls -- the first from my wife and the second from Caroline Abernathy. I didn’t leave the beach with any lasting impression about Bethany. I only remember running frantically in an attempt to rescue poor Caroline.

My mind had run quickly over the memory of that first phone call from Jenny, but now it skidded to a stop and began to backtrack towards it. Tonight, Bethany had gone distinctly cold when Jenny’s name had come up. Why was that? She was the one reaching out to me behind the back of her spouse. Was I supposed to disclaim all knowledge of my own? We had talked about our marriages dozens, if not hundreds of times -- especially in that concrete bunker in the basement of our office building. Why was tonight any different? What was going on in Bethany’s head? In her heart?

Distracted by these thoughts I accidentally bumped into a passerby. I offered a quick apology, but the person was already gone. Nevertheless the altercation had spun me partially around and I found myself staring at and thinking about something fresh: a street sign, showing that I had arrived at the corner of Newbury and Clarendon Streets.

That gave me pause. Newbury Street. I knew this place. I had been here at least once before. When was it? Had I been to Boston before on business? I must have, I’d been just about everywhere that had a convention center, but I couldn’t put a specific memory on it. 

I turned and began walking down Newbury Street itself and then it came to me. I had been here before but not on business. Jenny and I had come here once. We had spent a long weekend here, visiting the Museum of Fine Arts, walking the Freedom Trail, and shopping and eating here, on this very street, at that very cafe right over there. It seemed an absolute certainty to me, and yet I still doubted it. How could I not remember that? In all our preparations for this interview, never once had our previous trip to Boston even come up in our conversation. It was true, wasn’t it? I mean, I know it was in those forgotten years after our wedding and before Jacob’s birth, but how could it have slipped both of our minds like this?

I walked up to the cafe that I thought I remembered. There was a chalkboard positioned next to a simple rope line, on the other side of which were small tables with people enjoying coffees and desserts of one kind or another. The chalkboard told me their specials but before I could read them the hostess addressed me.

“Table for one, sir?”

“Huh?” I said, looking up at her, surprised to see that she was impossibly young, surely no older than fifteen or sixteen.

“Do you want a table?”

“Oh, no, thank you,” I said, and then forced myself to stumble away.

It was the cafe we had eaten at, wasn’t it? Suddenly I wasn’t so sure. Yes, of course, it was, I told myself. It had to be. Because there’s the clothing store I couldn’t drag Jenny out of, and there, farther down the street, there’s the book store that Jenny couldn’t drag me out of. It was all so familiar and yet so foreign at the same time, as if I was seeing someone else’s memories, or maybe my own memories through someone else’s eyes.

I took my phone out of my pocket and dialed my home number.

“Hello?”

“Jenny, it’s me.”

“Hi! How are you? Is everything all right?”

“Yes. I mean, no. No, I mean, yes. Well, it’s weird.”

“Alan, what’s going on? Where are you?”

“I’m on Newbury Street,” I said, giving it special emphasis. “I’m standing across from the cafe where we had coffee and carrot cake in the dim years before Jacob was born. Do you remember that? Do you remember that at all?”

“Oh my God, Alan! What are you doing there?”

“Do you remember?!”

“Of course I remember. How did you get there?”

“It’s just a few blocks from my hotel.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“No, neither did I. How is that possible?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, in all the time we spent getting me ready for this trip, for this interview tomorrow -- booking the flight, booking the hotel, writing the sample interview questions and practicing them -- the whole time we knew I was going to Boston, to the city we had visited and spent some time as newlyweds. How is it possible that neither one of us thought to mention that?”

“Alan, I’m not sure I’m following you.”

“Hey, Boston,” I said, not really talking to her anymore and just kind of talking out loud. “Isn’t that the place we went that one time? You know, that time we saw that Manet exhibit at the art museum and that time we ridiculed of all the idiots in the stupid swan boats and that time we made love in the Jacuzzi tub in our hotel suite? You know -- Boston?”

There was no response from the other end of the line, and in that silence I noticed an elderly couple walking past me briskly and giving me some kind of frightened look. 

“I’m ranting,” I said. “Aren’t I?”

“Yes, you are,” Jenny said. “Why don’t you try to calm yourself down? You shouldn’t be getting this upset.”

“But why, Jenny? Why did neither one of us remember? We had fun here.”

“I don’t know, Alan. Life is just so different now. Most days just getting showered and dressed seems like a big accomplishment. We’re busy. We forgot.”

She was right. She usually was. But still, it bothered me -- and I could tell that it bothered me in a way that it didn’t bother her. Probably because I was there and I could see it. I could see the cafe and the clothing store and the book store, and I could see the people we used to be. There they were. Drinking their coffee and eating their carrot cake and doing their shopping. At one time they had been us -- Jenny and me -- and now we were something else.

“Oh, hey, Alan, one of your staff people called here a few minutes ago.”

That brought me back to myself in a hurry. “What? Who?”

“Bethany Bishop.”

“You spoke to her?”

“Sure. Why wouldn’t I?”

My mind was racing. “When was this? When did you speak to her?”

“A few minutes ago.”

Yes, a few minutes ago, but how many? Thirty minutes ago? Did thirty count as a few? Because if it was thirty minutes ago then Bethany had called before she started texting me and she was probably just looking for me. But if it was ten minutes ago, and ten could probably more appropriately be called a few, then Bethany had called after she had already spoken to me, and why would she do that? Why would she call my wife? What possible reason could she have for doing that?

“How many minutes ago?”

“Just a few before you called. I thought it was kind of strange.”

So did I. “What did she want?”

“She said you had something she needed. She didn’t seem to know that you were out of town.”

“Jenny,” I said as calmly as I could. “Everybody at work thinks that I’m helping your mother move. Remember? That’s the excuse I gave Mary.”

“Oh my god, Alan. I forgot.”

She forgot. “What did you tell her? Did you tell her I was out of town?”

“No,” Jenny said quickly, almost too quickly. And then she said it again, as if to reassure herself. And then a third time, this time sounding as confident as anything else in her life. “I did not say you were out of town. I just said you were out.”

“Jenny, are you sure?”

“Yes, Alan, I’m sure! I said you were out and that I would take a message.”

“Did she leave one?”

“No. I’m mean, not really. Just that you should call her when you get a chance. And that she needs something you have. She seemed oddly insistent about that. That she needed something from you.”

I stood silently on the street corner, looking at a couple sitting at our cafe, wishing all over again that Jenny and I were them and not the people we were.

“Do you know what she’s talking about? Maybe you should call her?”

“What?”

“Maybe you should call her. If she doesn’t know you’re out of town it’ll look odd if you don’t call her back. Do you know what she’s talking about? What she needs from you?”

“I think so,” I said honestly, and then shifted into a convenient lie. “There’s a project we’re working on together. It’s probably something to do with that. I’ll call her when I get back to the hotel and pretend I’m home, that I was just out getting some groceries or something.”

“OK, that sounds good. I’m sorry, honey, if I screwed something up.”

“It’s okay,” I said, silently noting the irony of her apologizing to me. “It’s nothing, Don’t worry about it.”

“Okay. I love you, Alan.”

“I love you, too. I’ll call tomorrow after the interview.”

“Okay. Knock ‘em dead.”

“I will.”

The line clicked off and I stuffed the phone back in my pocket. Call Bethany? I thought to myself. Not on your life. From that moment forward I planned to stay as far away from her as I possibly could.

8

I arrived for my interview exactly eight minutes before the appointed time and was greeted at the door by a tall and slender woman in a gray business suit and dark hair.

“Hello, Alan?” she said to me. “It’s so nice to meet you,” she continued without waiting for me to confirm my identity, extending her hand for a powerful shake. “I’m Pamela Thornsby.”

Pamela ushered me gracefully into a small conference room just off the lobby. Once inside, she shut the door, motioned for me to take a seat and then sat opposite me. How was my flight yesterday? Did I have dinner in the city last night? Any trouble finding the office? Her polite questions came in quick succession, each in a tone meant to communicate that she really cared, but with barely a chance for me to even grunt in between.

“Now, Alan,” she said, turning deadly serious, “here’s how things are going to go today.”

She then proceeded to tell me that in a few minutes I would be sitting down with the retiring executive of the organization whose top job I had come to interview for.

“Wait,” I tried to interrupt, “you mean I’m going to be interviewed by the person whose job I’m trying to win?”

Yes, yes, Pamela said dismissively, clearly indicating with a wave or her hand that such things happened all the time in Beantown. His name was Thompson, Mister Richard Thompson, and he had been the organization’s executive for something like thirty-five years. He would be speaking to me for no more than twenty or thirty minutes, really just to get a sense of who I was, and then I would be returned to this small conference where I was to wait until Mister Thompson had had a chance to brief the Executive Committee on his discussion with me and the other two candidates.

“Wait,” I interrupted again. “There are two other candidates? Here? Today?”

Yes, yes, but not to worry, not to worry. Pamela was there to ensure that everything went smooth as silk and none of the candidates accidentally encountered each other. One was meeting with Mister Thompson as we spoke and the other would be arriving in about twenty minutes, when they would be sequestered in another conference room very much like this one, but not quite as nice as this one. Just between me and her, I was told as if Pamela and I were co-conspirators, that my conference room was the nicest of the three and she had put me there because I was her leading candidate. She was pulling for me, she really was.

“Wait,” I had to say again. “Who are you again? Aren’t you the executive recruiter?” I thought it odd that someone with that responsibility would be so biased and unprofessional with one of the candidates.

Of course, of course she was. She was the executive recruiter. She worked for Quest Partners, the firm that the organization had hired to pre-screen and submit candidates that met the right qualifications to the real decision-makers, Mister Thompson and the Executive Committee. Now, please, stop interrupting, she needed to tell me a few other things before checking on some other arrangements. 

And then she took an actual breath, looking at me severely, as if waiting for me to acknowledge the difficulty of her task and to apologize for my thoughtless attempts to make it even more difficult.

“...okay…” I said eventually.

Fine, fine. Now, once Mister Thompson has briefed the Executive Committee there would be a determination made, and there was a chance, a chance, mind you, that not all three candidates would be asked to meet with the Executive Committee. She would come and deliver the news either way, but in my case she was sure it would be fine, that there was no possible way I would fail to make the same impression on Mister Thompson that I had made on her, but a chance nonetheless. If things went the way she expected, I would be granted an audience with the Executive Committee. That conversation would likely not last more than thirty minutes, but every one of those thirty minutes would count in the final analysis, she could assure me.

“Do you have any questions?”

It took me a few seconds to realize she had stopped speaking and was now waiting for me to respond.

“Ummm, what happens after that?”

Excellent, excellent. Keep thinking like that and I would do fine. After that it was frankly anybody’s guess. The Executive Committee would go into a private session with Mister Thompson and a decision would be made. That decision could be a hiring decision, or it could be a decision to extend the process further. She wasn’t exactly sure.

The silence that followed was short-lived. Clearly uncomfortable with her own inability to affect the process any further, Pamela rose from her chair and quickly excused herself from the room, promising to return when it was time for me to meet with Mister Thompson and asking me to not leave the nicest of the three conference rooms until she came back for me.

Then the door clicked shut and I was left alone. For the first time, I started looking around the room. It was small and windowless, really just big enough for the mahogany table and the six chairs that surrounded it. In one forgotten corner was a green office plant, and on each wall was hung a tasteful piece of office art. I could have been anywhere, I realized, in any of a million little conference rooms in a hundred thousand office buildings, in ten thousand different cities across the globe and everything would look exactly as this one did. I noticed a framed photograph on the wall next to the door -- something black and white of people standing around in coats and ties -- and I had just decided to get up and take a closer look when the door opened and Pamela came rushing back in.

“Okay, Alan, it’s time, it’s time. Mister Thompson is ready for you.”

I picked up my padfolio and followed Pamela out of the room, round a corner, and down the side of what was a busy office complex. A sea of office cubes, a little like Don’s Ergonomic Pods, but more tasteful and understated, greeted me, and in each one, it seemed, a well-dressed young person was hard at work, only a handful looking up to see what kind of creature was being marched past. We traversed the length of the office floor and stopped just outside a corner office.

“Mister Thompson?” Pamela said, again proceeding without waiting for any kind of response. “Alan Larson is here to see you.”

She looked at me and cocked her head to the side, indicating that I should go in. Taking a deep breath, I did, and Pamela quietly shut the door behind me.

“Come in! Come in!” an elderly man from behind a wide desk said, rising slowly and somewhat painfully to his feet. He was dressed in a rumpled three-piece suit, the kind of thing likely last worn by Sydney Greenstreet in The Maltese Falcon, watch-chain and all. But unlike Mister Greenstreet, Mister Thompson was thin as a rail and had a full head of white hair, combed severely to one side and standing up a bit in the back.

“Hello, Mister Thompson?” I said, stepping forward and extending my hand.

“Yes, I am Richard Thompson,” he said, taking my hand limply in his. “And you are Alan Larson?”

“Yes.”

“Well, Alan Larson, please have a seat.”

We both sat, he behind his desk and me opposite. I could not help but notice that his desk was colossal, easily the biggest I had ever seen, seemingly more a block of concrete than a piece of furniture.

“So, Mister Larson...” Thompson began, looking down at me through a pair of glasses perched on the end of his nose. “Or may I call you Alan?”

“Alan is fine with me, Mister Thompson.”

Thompson smiled. “Thank you. And please, dispense with this ‘Mister Thompson’ nonsense. My name is Richard -- has been since I was born seventy-eight years ago. There is no reason for anyone to call me anything else.”

I nodded, laughing nervously. “Okay.”

“Now, Alan,” Thompson said quickly. “Tell me. How did you first come to hear about my position becoming vacant.”

I answered as best I could. “Actually, Mister Thompson, it was my wife who found the advertisement for the position and who brought it to my attention. I did not know until just a few minutes ago that you were vacating the position. Your retirement, I assume?”

Thompson studied me closely in silence for a few uncomfortable seconds. Yes, he was retiring, he said suddenly, and with a hint of frustration in his voice. Retiring after thirty-seven years of service to this organization, thank me very much, thirty-seven years in which the organization had steadily grown in size and influence. How much research had I done on the organization before coming there today? Did I know when it was founded and what its essential purpose was? Did I know anything about its accomplishments and the people who had worked so hard to make them happen? Because it wasn’t just him, I was to be sure about that. He had had the pleasure of keeping his hand on the tiller for so many years, but without the volunteers, and without the staff beneath him, the organization would have had no rudder, and it would have been impossible to steer it in any direction at all. Did I understand that? Did I understand exactly what kind of situation I thought I was walking into?

He took a breath, but thankfully it wasn’t out of any desire for me to answer any of the questions he had just asked. Instead, it was just a breath, and in a moment he was lecturing me again.

He had spoken to a lot of young men lately, and a few young women, too, all thinking that they were ready to step into the shoes he was vacating, and without exception he had been singularly unimpressed with them all. Most hadn’t done any homework at all, waltzing in here evidently thinking that they could get by on their charm and the strength of their resumes. That wasn’t going to fly with him and it wasn’t going to fly with the Executive Committee. This organization was a sacred trust. Yes, that’s what he said. Call him old-fashioned, but the sacred did still exist in this increasingly secular world, and organizations like his were there to protect the sacred, to preserve it, and to bring it forth into all the years that were still to come. Did I understand that? Was that the kind of commitment that I was prepared to make?

He took another breath, and this time it looked like he did want some kind of response from me. But I wasn’t ready. Throughout his lecture, it was all I could do to maintain eye contact with him, keep the expression on my face placid, and nod sympathetically from time to time like I knew what he was talking about.

“Alan, do you understand me?”

“Yes,” I said, slowly releasing the grip I had taken on the arms of my chair. “Yes, I think I do. You feel very strongly about this organization, and you want to make sure that its essential mission is in good hands.”

It felt like I was just stringing words together. If Thompson would have asked me to repeat myself, I’m not sure I could have.

He looked at me craftily again -- more like Peter Lorre than Sydney Greenstreet, with the same kind of crazy in his eyes. In my mind I counted the seconds passing by, waiting for him to ask me another question or pull a gun out of his drawer and shoot me -- and not sure which would surprise me more.

“Here,” he said eventually, pushing himself with difficulty up and out of his chair. “Come here, Alan. I want to show you something.”

He led me over to a corner of his office where several photos were framed and hung on his wall. Thematically, they were similar to the one I had almost had a chance to study in the best of the three conference rooms. People, almost entirely men, mostly in coats and ties, standing around and posing stiffly for a cameraman in some bygone era. Most were black and white, but some of the newer ones were in color -- and by newer I mean from the 1980s, judging only by the hairstyles and the patterns on the sport coats.

One by one, Thompson began pointing them out to me and telling me his story behind each. The stories themselves were barely even anecdotes, just long lists of forgettable names and places. This was Harvey Withers, he said reverently, the first chairman of the Board that Thompson served under, standing with other members of the Board at their meeting at the Greenbrier in 1965. And this was Tom Donnor, who led their capital campaign in 1973, at the award banquet at their annual conference in Naples. And this was Jack Reardon, the first chair of their foundation, with his ceremonial gavel at its Board meeting in Niagara-on-the-Lake in 1982. And, of course, unmentioned but there nonetheless, Thompson himself was in every single one of these photos. First a young Thompson with black hair and a bow tie, then a middle-aged Thompson with a mustache and a paunchy belly, and finally a thinning and aging Thompson with a wrinkled face and eyeglasses.

But the oldest of all the Thompsons was the one standing right in front of me, his hand with its swollen joints and age spots trembling ever so slightly as he held it up to point out the people he had not forgotten in all those photographs. Through the long litany -- and long it certainly was, my feet growing sore in my polished wingtips as it dragged on and on -- through the long litany I did the best I could to remain attentive, to show deference and respect, but all the while I was wondering what the hell was going on and what kind of sick test this could possibly be. My attention kept going back to Thompson’s hand, his ancient hand with its manicured but still yellowed nails, and slowly I think I began to realize how sad this whole thing actually was. There was not going to be any test here, no gotcha questions designed to trap me into confessing the specific kind of monster I was. There was just a lonely old man in his corner office, preferring to remember the times he did the things that mattered than to engage the younger man they had sent to replace him.

Eventually, there was a knock at the door. 

“Mister Thompson,” Pamela said, pushing the door open and her head into the room. “Mister Thompson, it’s almost time for your next appointment.”

We both turned towards the door. As we did so our eyes met.

“It was a pleasure meeting you, Alan,” Thompson said to me, almost as if the last twenty minutes hadn’t happened. He extended that same crippled hand to me as his parting gesture.

“Same here, Mister Thompson,” I said, gripping his hand as tightly as I dared. “I really appreciate your time. You’ve got a lot to be proud of here.”

Thompson nodded.

“Come on, Alan,” Pamela said, now pushing the door all the way open and stepping fully into the room. “Let’s get you back to your conference room.”

As we left the room I gave a backward glance and saw that Thompson had turned back to his photographs, now simply looking at them with both his hands hanging forgotten at his sides. 

Pamela began walking me briskly back through the office.

“How did that go?” she asked. “Well, I hope?”

“Perfect,” I said, smiling, and wondering the name of the planet I had just found myself on.

9

There were five members of the Executive Committee. They were all men and they were all dressed in business suits. They sat around one end of a conference table, their chairman at the head and two on either side, each turned slightly in his chair so he could face me. I sat at the other end of the table, three vacant chairs between me and the nearest person.

They introduced themselves in quick succession. Their names, their companies, their positions in the volunteer leadership of the organization. They were all company presidents, and some of the companies I had even heard of. None of them were old and none of them were young. They all looked at me with a kind of placid understanding, as if they had already decided who and what I was.

The questioning was led by their chairman, a guy named Steve Anderson. He was the only one among them not wearing a tie, just an open collar shirt under his suit coat. First, he wanted to know more about my background and my current responsibilities. Had I really done the things my resume said I had? Then he wanted to know more about why I was looking for something new. Was there something wrong with the company I worked for or the organization I served? Where did I see myself in five or ten years? And then he wanted to know more about my plans for their organization. What did I know about their goals and objectives? What would be my plan for the first ninety days?

Unlike the experience with Mister Thompson, this felt like something approaching normal. The stakes were high -- I hadn’t needed Pamela’s warning to understand that -- but at least I felt like I was somewhat prepared. The questions were direct but appropriate to the situation. Jenny and I had rehearsed many of them, and most of them I answered without even looking at my notes, trying to remember to make eye contact with as many people as possible around the table. In doing so I received an array of silent feedback. Some eyes were encouraging, seeming to root for my success, while others were skeptical, hoping to knock me off my game so they could kick me while I was down.

There was really one moment where I felt like things might go off the rails.

“Tell me about your time with Mister Thompson.”

“My time with Mister Thompson?” I said. “What do you mean?”

Steve -- and he had twice insisted that I call him Steve, so that is what I did -- smiled. “You spent some time with him before coming in here, didn’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Tell me about it.”

I looked around the table. If I had sensed some silent supporters before, on this one they all seemed to have deserted me. One wasn’t even looking at me, his eyes down and looking at a few pieces of paper spread across his leather table pad. Another seemed to be licking his chops, his hands up and one slowly spinning an enormous class ring around the other’s finger.

“Well,” I said slowly. “Mister Thompson spent much of the time telling me more about the history of the organization.”

“Uh huh,” Steve said. “Like what?”

“Ummm,” I stammered. “Well, there was something about a capital campaign, and something else about the launch of your Foundation.”

Steve was nodding his head. “What did you think of him?”

“Of who? Mister Thompson?”

“Yes.”

I saw a pit opening at my feet, a pit with poison-tipped spikes jutting up from below. 

“I just met him,” I said.

“How did he strike you?”

I had no idea what this line of questioning was about. It felt like Steve was fishing for something, like he wanted me to commit to one direction or another, but the safest path seemed to be tip-toeing through the middle.

“He cares a lot about this organization,” I said. “He’s dedicated a large part of his life to it.”

“And yet here you are. Trying to push him to the side.”

It wasn’t Steve who said this. It was one of the other committee members, the one with the class ring, a guy named Fred Zeidler.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said without thinking, not knowing what he was talking about. “I’m not here to push anyone to the side. He’s retiring, isn’t he? I’m just applying for the job. Am I missing something?”

Fred looked like he might argue with me, but Steve quickly jumped in. “No, no,” he said. “You’re not missing anything.” And then he pushed a button on a small keypad in front of him and I heard the door behind me open.

“Yes, Mister Anderson?”

It was Pamela Thornsby. She must have been standing just outside the room, waiting for the signal. I could sense her presence behind me, but I did not turn my attention away.

“Pamela,” Steve said. “We’re done with Alan for now. Can you please ask him to wait in his conference room while we speak with the third candidate?”

“Of course,” Pamela said, moving forward, standing behind my right shoulder, and present in my peripheral vision.

I looked across the table at Steve and met his impassive face. Not knowing what else to do, I slowly gathered my things and stood.

“Well, okay, then,” I said. “It was a pleasure meeting all of you. I am excited by this opportunity, I hope to hear more about it later.”

Steve simply nodded, and I felt Pamela step even closer and grasp my elbow.

10

Pamela was strangely silent as she escorted me back to my conference room, exuding the exact opposite of the chipper confidence she had after my meeting with Mister Thompson. I fell into step half a pace behind her, feeling exactly like I had screwed something up but not knowing exactly what it was. Looking out over the sea of work cubes, I saw far more heads up over the sight line, far more faces turned towards me, each bearing a blank and uncertain expression.

At the door to my conference room, Pamela stepped aside so I could enter and, when I had, simply told me to “wait here,” and then closed the door with me on the inside and her on the other.

I let out a deep breath. I had admittedly not interviewed for a job in more than a decade, but this so far had been about the strangest interview I had ever been through. It barely felt like an interview at all. Looking at my watch I saw that I had been there for just over two hours, and I estimated that I had only spent about ten minutes answering the kind of questions that could have reasonably been considered part of an actual interview. Everything and everyone else had felt more like an obstacle course -- one that no one had shown me in advance and in which I had no idea what time I was trying to beat as I raced through it.

Not knowing how long I was going to be there and not having anything else to do, I decided to go over and closely examine the framed black and white photo I had only glimpsed before. I was not surprised to see that it was similar to all of those that Thompson had shown me in his office, but it was somewhat larger than any of those. And it was old. Maybe the oldest of all the ones I had seen. It was a wide shot of a hotel ballroom, taken from a balcony, with forty or more figures seated around a series of banquet tables, each and every one of them looking up at the photographer. They were all men, and they were all dressed in formal wear, the deep black of their tuxedo jackets contrasting starkly against the lighter shades of the tablecloths and their shirt fronts. A set of white block letters, standing in the bottom corner, and written apparently by a slanting hand with a fine brush, proclaimed quietly:

FIRST ANNUAL MEETING, 1953

EMPIRE BALLROOM

WALDORF-ASTORIA, NEW YORK

I forced my eyes to move slowly from face to face. They were people from another era, but in their facial features and expressions they seemed as normal as any group of similar men that you could assemble today. Some heavy, some thin. Some dark-haired, some light. Some smiling, some deadly serious.

I felt my phone buzzing in my pocket and I brought it out to see my home number on its little screen.

“Hello?”

“Hello, Alan?” Jenny’s voice said in my ear as I continued to study the photo. “Can you talk? Is the interview over?”

“I don’t know,” I said, completing my tour of faces and finding myself surprised to discover that none of them resembled what a fresh-faced young Mister Richard Thompson would have looked like at the time.

“What do you mean, ‘you don’t know’? Is it over or not?”

“I don’t know,” I said again, pulling my eyes away from the past and trying to explain to her what had happened so far that morning.

“So you’re just supposed to wait there?”

“Apparently.”

“Mommy!” I heard Jacob’s shrill voice shout in the background.

“For how long?” Jenny asked.

“They haven’t told me.”

“How do you think it’s going?”

“Mommy!” Jacob wailed again, this time much closer and with extra anguish.

“Jacob, honey, Mommy’s on the phone with Daddy right now.”

I began to answer Jenny’s question, but stopped when Jacob began shouting and crying again, this time not even bothering to form words.

“Jacob, get down!” Jenny shouted, and then the phone must have slipped out of her grasp because I heard it clunk and clatter on our hardwood floor. “Jacob! Goddammit!” 

I stood patiently, feeling some unfocused anger growing within me, but taking some deep breaths and telling myself to calm down. In a moment, Jenny was back on the line, but it was only to tell me to hang on, hang on just a minute, and then the phone clunked again as if being set down on a table. There was rustling, then footsteps, and both shouting and crying, all of it quickly fading off into the distance.

I turned back to the Empire Ballroom and tried to imagine myself sitting there among those tuxedoed titans. One guy, I noticed, had a fat cigar captured between two thick fingers, and I put myself at his table, between him and another guy that looked more like a university professor, his bow-tied shirt collar hanging loosely in front of his scrawny neck. What, I wondered, had they been talking about before and after the photographer clicked this photo? What was happening in the stock market? How much did they or didn’t they like the way Ike was running the country? Their summer cottages in upstate New York? Everything that came into my mind seemed like a cliche, something a stranger would graft thoughtlessly upon another stranger. Surely, like me, these forgotten men had had inner lives that were important to them. They must have had thoughts of esoteric value and worth, and they must have had relationships that both expressed and fell short of those ideals.

“Alan?” Jenny’s voice was again in my ear. “Alan, are you still there?”

“Yes, Jenny. I’m still here.”

“Sorry about that. Jacob needed me.”

“Uh huh. Look, I should go. I don’t know when they’re going to come back for me.”

“Okay. But how do you think it’s going?”

“Jenny, I have no idea. This is about the strangest experience I’ve ever been through.”

“Okay,” she said. “Well, call me when you’re done.”

“Sure will.”

“Bye.”

“Bye.”

After putting the phone back in my pocket I stood there in silence for perhaps two minutes. I even closed my eyes and strained my ears to pick up any sounds that might be happening in the office on the other side of my conference room door. There was nothing -- at least nothing that I could detect.

Eventually, I took a seat in one of the conference room chairs. Clearing my mind, I opened my padfolio and looked down at the extra copies of my resume that I had brought with me. No one had asked for them, so there they still sat, paper-clipped together in a tight little packet, my name boldly printed across the top of each of them. Setting them aside I revealed the legal pad beneath, on which I had written several questions that I had intended to ask.

What’s the biggest challenge facing this organization?

How would you describe the culture of the Board?

What three things must the new CEO accomplish in the first year in order to be successful?

I had put a lot of thought into those questions, and they still seemed like good ones to me, but I hadn’t had the chance to ask any of them yet. I suddenly wondered if I ever would.

I flipped to a fresh page on the legal pad and picked up the pen. I didn’t know what else to do so I started writing down whatever came into my mind.

No circumstances

Could have prepared me for this

Hope I’m doing fine

I was busy counting the syllables, making sure it was actually a haiku, when the conference room door suddenly opened and Pamela Thornsby came bursting back into the room.

“Not kept waiting too long, I hope,” she said, her tone back to co-conspirator mode, and quickly took a seat opposite me. 

I closed the padfolio on my awful poetry. “No, not at all.”

“Well, well,” Pamela said, “it seems you made quite an impression on them. I knew you would, I knew you would.”

I nodded my head and smiled. “Are they done already?”

“Yes, of course, of course. They are completely done and have made an important decision.” She brought a manila folder she must have walked in with up from her side and placed it on the table between us.

I looked at my watch, noting that it couldn’t have been more than twelve minutes since I left the Executive Committee. “They are? Did they even bother talking to the third candidate?”

“Excuse me?”

“The third candidate. Weren’t they going to interview someone else after me?”

Pamela’s face actually went pale. “Yes, yes, well, let’s not worry about that. The Executive Committee is, ummm, is meeting with that person as we speak, but they have still already made an important decision. You are moving on to the next step of the process.”

“I am?”

“You are, you are. Here,” Pamela said, sliding the folder across the table to me, “inside this folder you will find a short assessment tool. It’s important for you to complete it as quickly and as honestly as you can.”

I opened the folder. Inside was a paper booklet, printed on something close to newsprint and stapled bound on the left margin, and a single sheet of thicker paper, bearing several hundred small pale red circles and obviously designed for use in an optical recognition scanner.

“Do you need to use the restroom, or do you need a glass of water? Once you begin, we must ask that you work straight through until you finish. I will sit here quietly while you work in order to ensure there is no funny business -- but, of course, there won’t be! My apologies, protocol requires me to say that, but it is a mere formality in your case, I am sure. Just let me know when you are ready to start and I will begin the timer. You will have 60 minutes to complete the assessment, no more, no less -- but, again, I’m sure that such a time limit will be unnecessary for someone of your experience. Do you have a pencil?”

While Pamela spoke I had begun flipping through the booklet, and quickly released that I was facing one of those standardized tests -- some kind of personality assessment, the kind that was intended to trick people into revealing the anti-social tendencies that actually lay under their phony attestations of teamwork and growth that otherwise comprised their interview talk. There were several dozen such assessments on the market, some more well known than others. I had never heard of this one before, but the questions were all too familiar both in their structure and their vagueness. My eye picked one out at random.

I suppose some people may consider me to be a bit of an intellectual.

I was supposed to strongly disagree, disagree, agree, or strongly agree with that statement. Flipping further through the booklet, I saw that there were more than 200 other such statements I would need to respond to.

“Alan?”

“Yes?” I said, looking up at Pamela.

“Do you have a pencil? You will need a number two pencil in order to complete the response sheet.”

“No,” I said. “I don’t have a pencil.”

“I’ll get you one,” Pamela said smiling, patting my hand reassuringly, before rising from her chair. “I’ll be right back.”

11

It took me forty-eight minutes to complete the assessment. According to Pamela Thornsby, who had sat silent and unmoving across the table from me the entire time and who, when I finished, took my completed scoresheet and test booklet from me with all the reverence of holy scripture -- according to Pamela forty-eight minutes was very respectable, very respectable, indeed.

I wasn’t so sure. If I can be honest for a minute, I really can’t stand standardized tests like the one they made me take. None of them are worth the paper they’re printed on. To this day, I have never heard nor seen what my results from that day were, but I’m sure they paint a picture that looks nothing like me. They never do. They can’t. There are too many layers to the whole thing.

Let’s take that one statement I remember. I suppose some people may consider me to be a bit of an intellectual. Now, how was I supposed to answer that? Do I agree or disagree with that statement? Well, given all the nested layers in that statement it’s hard for me to know if I agree or disagree with it because it’s not clear to me what I’m agreeing or disagreeing with -- or more precisely what the damn test is going to assume I’m agreeing or disagreeing with.

Let’s just pretend I agree with that statement. Now, what does the test think I just agreed with? Does it think that I agree that I am an intellectual? Or that I am a bit of an intellectual? Or that some people consider me a bit of an intellectual? Or that some people may consider me to be a bit of an intellectual? Or that I suppose that some people may consider me to be a bit of an intellectual? Because those are five different things that I may agree or disagree with. Maybe I agree that I am an intellectual, but I disagree that some people consider me one. Maybe I keep my intellectualism private and don’t talk about it in front of people, least of all a bunch of losers at work who aren’t going to trust me if they think I think I’m better than them.

So how am I supposed to respond to this statement? Do I read it at its absolute face value? Do I agree or disagree with this statement: I suppose … some people … may consider me … to be a bit … of an intellectual. Well, guess what? I disagree with that statement. I don’t suppose that some people may consider me to be a bit of an intellectual. But had you asked, and I suspect what you are really asking, if I thought of myself as a bit of an intellectual, then I would have agreed with that statement. I do. I do think of myself as a bit of an intellectual. But I don’t suppose that most people think of me that way.

But wait, I’m not done. Because then there’s the whole nonsense of just agreeing with something or strongly agreeing with something. Don’t forget about that. What is that supposed to mean and what am I supposed to read into that? Truth be told, there isn’t much that I strongly agree or disagree with, least of all the kinds of things that show up on these idiotic personality assessments. Like maybe if they said I like torturing helpless animals I could safely say that I strongly disagree with that statement. But the kind of equivocating crap that they load these assessments up with, I personally don’t see how anyone can have strong feelings about any of it, one way or the other.

But they clearly want you to have strong feelings about these things -- at least about some of them. If not, the choices wouldn’t even be there. They clearly think it’s important to know what you strongly agree with compared to what you just agree with. For what reason it’s not clear to me. What difference does it make if I agree or strongly agree that people think I’m an intellectual? Does strongly agreeing with that statement mean it is more likely to be true, or just that I think it is more likely to be true, or that I think being thought of as an intellectual is a very important thing?

And what about the number of strongly agrees or disagrees that show up on my scorecard? How is the test going to interpret that? Is it good or bad to have strong feelings about a lot of things? In my book, that’s not necessarily a good thing, as people who feel too strongly about too many things often swing too far and too quickly in whatever direction those strong feelings take them. Is that how I’m supposed to calibrate my responses? Pick some things to feel strongly about, but not too many?

In the end I did what I always do when someone puts me in their Skinner Box. I assume, probably without justification, that the scientist knows exactly what they are doing and that every word has been carefully chosen and calibrated to elicit exactly the response they’re looking for, so I play along. I stick rigidly to the absolute meaning of the words on the page in front of me, and I determine my level of agreement or disagreement as honestly as I can.

I suppose some people may consider me to be a bit of an intellectual. You know what? I agree. I suppose some people may consider me to be a bit of an intellectual. But I don’t feel strongly about it.

So that’s what took me forty-eight respectable minutes to do. Pamela then shook my hand, told me they would reach out again once my results were scrutinized, and sent me on my way. There were still several hours before my flight, so I went back to the hotel where I had stored my bag, and had lunch in their lobby restaurant before picking it up.

“What can I get you?” the waitress asked me. She was an elderly woman, at least as old as my grandmother with her silver hair tightly permed and her eyebrows shaved off and inked in with grease pencil. 

I didn’t even look at the menu. I told her to bring me the BLT, with a slice of avocado, if they had it, and a cup of the French onion soup. To drink? Unsweetened iced tea, with a slice of lemon.

I remember sitting there in a kind of blissful silence, willfully instructing my brain to quiet itself, to quit reading so much into everything I saw, and when the food came I ate it mechanically, slurping the soup and letting its warmth coat the back of my throat, and then chewing the sandwich, carefully isolating the taste of each ingredient on my tongue before swallowing and taking another bite.

When I was finished I picked up my bag from the bell desk and then caught a cab to the airport. In the cab I tried to call home, ready now, I felt, to have a conversation with Jenny and to tell her everything that had happened, but the phone just rang and rang, no one, not even the answering machine, bothering to pick it up. 

At the airport I stood in the requisite lines and did the requisite things, picking up a bottle of water and a candy bar after clearing security and before settling down on one of the uncomfortable chairs in my designated gate area. There was still a good two hours before departure.

When my phone buzzed in my pocket I thought for sure it was Jenny calling back, but the number on the screen was unfamiliar to me.

“Hello?”

“Hello, Alan?”

“Yes?”

“Alan, this is Steve Anderson calling. How are you?”

Steve Anderson. It actually took me a few seconds to place the name. He was the chairman of the organization I had just interviewed with.

“I’m fine. How are you, Steve?”

Why the fuck was he calling me? Did I leave something behind? Did I accidentally set the building on fire as I left?

“Great. Say, are you in Logan airport right now?”

I stood up, suddenly intensely paranoid that I was being watched, that this was some kind of elaborate trick. “Yes. Yes, I sure am, Steve. Just waiting for my flight home.”

“Great. Say, Frank Zeidler is here with me, and we’re both in the Emerald Club. We were wondering if you would have time to come talk with us.”

“The Emerald Club?” I was still wildly scanning the area around me, desperately looking for the uniforms or the men in black who had come to detain me. “Sure. I mean, I guess so.”

“What time is your flight?”

I told him and Steve reassured me that they would have me back at my gate in plenty of time, and then he told me where I could find the Emerald Club and that they had left my name with the attendant at the front desk, and then he said he would see me in a few minutes, and then he said goodbye, and then he hung up.

I didn’t move for at least three minutes. Both my heart and my mind were racing, each trying to stay ahead of the other one and win a race that would end in either a stroke or a heart attack. Eventually realizing there was nothing else for me to do, and that I had already kept them waiting minutes longer than I should have, I began moving in the direction Steve had indicated. After six steps I had to go back for my carry-on and briefcase, and then I started moving again.

When I arrived at the Emerald Club it was just as Steve had promised. I had never been in one of the executive lounges at an airport -- such things were unavailable to anyone but Mary or Don in the company -- and I had no real idea what to expect when the frosted glass doors whooshed apart for me. Inside it was something like a hotel lobby, with a central teak wood table supporting an enormous floral arrangement dominated in whites and purples. Behind it stood a lattice like screen, apparently of the same teak, separating the lobby from the inner sanctum of the lounge itself. To the left and right were polished wooden counters in the same general stain, and behind each stood an airline employee, one man and one woman, each smiling happily and uniformed in something between crew and flight attendant.

“May I help you, sir?” the woman asked me, and I approached and gave her my name.

“Oh, yes,” she said, moving out from behind the counter. “Let me store those bags for you and I’ll show you to your meeting room.”

I stood like a coat rack as she took my carry-on from my hand and my briefcase from my shoulder, attaching a tag to each and then pressing the stub into my hand, giving me a look like it was her hotel room key. 

“Won’t you please follow me?”

I did as instructed, catching a mischievous smile from her male colleague as we passed and entered the lounge itself. A broad set of windows looked out on the tarmac, a few planes moving slowly between gates under a cloudy sky, and inside a scattered collection of desks, chairs, and sofas, many of them occupied by men and women in business suits and with phones pressed against their ears. We seemed to skirt the edge of this common area and soon came to a row of private offices and conference rooms. One had its door standing ajar, and my guide instructed me to enter it with a graceful wave of her arm.

Inside I caught Steve Anderson and Frank Zeidler talking to each other. They were each seated in a pair of comfortable chairs -- the pair, a sofa, and a coffee table seemingly the only furnishings in the small room -- but upon seeing me, their conversation abruptly ended and Steve leapt to his feet.

“Alan!” he said. “Welcome! We’re so glad you could join us on such short notice. Can I get you something to drink?”

I looked and saw a clear-glass refrigerator under a built-in counter with a collection of alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks inside. “Sure,” I said, forcing myself to adopt a jovial tone. “What are you guys having?”

“We’re drinking Amstel Lights,” Frank said. As before, his voice was like a tire deflating. “It’s about the best thing they have.”

But not too jovial. “That would be delightful,” I said.

Steve retrieved a third Amstel Light from the fridge, opened it with a bottle opener conveniently placed on a small banquet tray also holding a small ice bucket and a few glasses. Handing me the bottle, he motioned for me to take a seat and I did on the edge of the small sofa closest to them.

“Cheers,” he said, “holding up his own bottle and tipping it slightly in my direction.

Frank joined in on the toast and the three of us took a sip of beer out of each of our bottles. Despite having been in the fridge, mine was on the warm side and tickled my nose as the bubbles went down my throat.

“So, Alan,” Steve began. “You’re probably wondering what the kabuki show back in the office was all about.”

He paused, probably waiting for me to take the bait, but I didn’t. Something told me to just keep my mouth shut. I put my beer down on the coffee table. I smiled. I nodded.

“It’s Thompson,” Frank cut in sharply. “Much of what happened today was for his benefit. He’s been with the organization a long time and it’s important that he feels he has an active hand in the transition.”

Now that was something I should bite at. “Feels?”

“Touche,” Steve said, acknowledging their subterfuge. “We won’t hire anyone he hasn’t blessed, but the hiring decision is ours, not his. We respect his service, but Thompson long stopped looking forward and now only seems capable of looking backwards. We need something very different for the future.”

And with that, with the ice thus broken, Steve and Frank talked for the next ten minutes, each in turn almost as if reading from a prepared script, talking to me about their vision for the organization, how it needed to change, and the kind of person they were looking for to help make that change happen. My mind was strangely quiet, locked firmly in absorption mode, trying to soak up every word they were saying and keeping its wheels from spinning too quickly. Listen, some small inner voice was telling me. Listen carefully, but just listen. Don’t speak until they ask you to.

That time came quickly enough.

“Look, Alan, I’ll be honest with you,” Steve said, the tone of his voice enough to let me know he was summing up. “We’ve talked with several candidates, and we like the potential we see in you. It has been extremely helpful meeting you in person, but we’re not ready to move forward just yet. We’d like you to spend some time thinking about the things we’ve said today, and then we’d like to schedule a call with you. We want to hear your ideas. What you can bring to the table. What you can do to help us get to the place we want to be.”

“Do you think you can do that?” Frank said.

“Absolutely,” I said easily, more easily, I hoped, than I felt inside. “I would welcome the opportunity.”

“Grand,” Steve said, as he and Frank stood in unison, forcing me to join them. He shook my hand. “We’ll be in touch. Sometime next week, my assistant Julie will reach out and get something on our calendars. From here on out, you’ll be working directly with just Frank and me.”

“Great,” I said, not knowing whether that was great or not.

+ + +

“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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