Dragons - Part IX

1

The leadership meeting was the same one I had attended the year before, when I had first moved into my position as deputy executive. That’s the way things worked in the company and with the clients it served. Everything was on a slow slog of an annual cycle, with the same events happening again and perpetually, with only the glacial pace of the volunteers changing positions in the leadership ranks there to provide some variety and a fresh set of political challenges.

If you remember, Eleanor chaired the meeting a year ago. She did that in her then-capacity as the vice chair of the Board of her organization. That meant that the chair for the upcoming meeting was the current vice chair  of the organization. And who might that be, you ask?

None other than Paul Webster.

By that time I had already had several conversations with him -- all of them before my recent run-in with Gerald. As vice chair, one of his functions was to review and confirm the leadership and rosters for the hundred or so committees that made up the byzantine structure of their organization. Like so many, it was an annual ritual, the vice chair making sure his or her hand-picked supporters were in any position that was vacant, and making sure the appropriate bonds could be forged with those who would statutorily continue into the vice chair’s term as Board chair. My job was to make sure he had an accurate report of all the committees, to accept all his changes, to coax those changes into our membership database, and then to coordinate the appropriate invitations to the leadership meeting he would be chairing.

Fortunately, with just two weeks to go before the meeting, most of that work had already been done, and now I was corresponding daily with some portion on the one hundred and thirty-nine people that had been invited, making sure that they had the information they needed to make their travel arrangements and, shortly, that they had received the agenda materials that had been prepared for them.

There were still several pieces of information I needed from Paul before that final task could be completed, but I knew better than to contact him without speaking to Mary first.

“Mary,” I said, leaning into her office the day after Gerald had been pushed out. “I need to contact Paul Webster about the agenda for the leadership meeting.”

Mary was sitting at her desk, her fingers busy on her keyboard, but she stopped and spun on me like I had caught her cheating on a test. “Oh, Christ, you didn’t call him, did you?”

“No,” I said. “But I need to.”

“Don and I haven’t spoken to him, yet,” she said, somewhat frantically. “You had better wait until we do that.”

“I know,” I said. “Or, at least, that’s what I suspected.”

“You’ll have to wait,” she said, very much like she couldn’t hear me over the torrent of thoughts running through her brain. “We have a call set-up for two o’clock this afternoon. You need to wait at least until then.”

“Sure, no problem,” I said, backing away. “I’ll hold until you tell me it’s safe to reach out to him.”

As I left I almost bumped into Ruthie, who was waiting for me to leave so that she could shut Mary’s door.

“Is she all right?” I asked.

Ruthie gave me a quizzical look, like I had asked for something nonsensical. “She’s fine. She just has a busy schedule today.”

I nodded and went back to my office, knowing that there were a thousand other things I could keep myself busy with until two o’clock that afternoon.

One of those things was a meeting with the department heads -- our number reduced down to six with Susan, Michael, and now Gerald sacrificed on Mary’s increasingly bloody altar of concentrating productivity. Bethany was the only one who remained who was my direct report. The others -- motherly Peggy Wilcox over Human Resources, closeted Scott Nelson over Accounting, pallid Jurgis Pavlov over IT, and hydrant-like Angie Ferguson over Meeting Planning -- they all reported either to Mary or Don. The meeting was about as focused as all those intersecting lines of authority would suggest.

Our agenda included the upcoming leadership meeting, which everyone should have had a stake in. Bethany and I were trying to organize the agenda with Paul Webster and all the various committee chairs -- stalled until Mary gave me the go-ahead to contact him. Scott reported out on the latest variances of actuals versus budget -- none of which had changed since the last time we had come together. Jurgis talked about the latest patch to our membership database -- which hadn’t been in place in time for us to coordinate all the appointments and invitations through it, forcing use to rely on our own tracking spreadsheet and word processing documents. Angie had everything lined up with the luxury hotel hosting the event -- and knew there was nothing more substantial to do until we reached 72 hours out and the final catering numbers had to be confirmed. And Peggy? Peggy did everything she could to keep silent, knowing that her only contribution would be reassigning some staff to help with the logjam, which she was prohibited from doing by both Mary and Don.

They meant well. At least I think they did. Well, all except Scott Nelson, who I couldn’t stop seeing as Mary’s spy. But meaning well or not, it was clear that they were all focused on the political intrigues besieging their own fiefdoms, and were reluctant to come together under any kind of shared purpose that I dared to define.

When it was over I asked Bethany to stay behind. She had seemed unusually uncomfortable during the meeting, and I wanted to make sure she wasn’t hiding some even bigger surprise. Unfortunately, she was.

“It’s Wes Howard,” she said after getting up to close the conference room door that the departing crew had left open. “He’s causing trouble again.”

“Oh, god,” I said uncontrollably. “What now?”

Wes had been appointed to lead one of the most influential committees and, as such, he was a key player in deciding which topics would get discussed at the upcoming leadership meeting. Bethany had drawn the short straw and was working with him to confirm those details and get the right communications out to the right people.

“I think he’s trying to sabotage me, Alan,” she said, sitting down in the chair next to mine. “Like he did with Susan. He’s nitpicking everything I do. He even yelled at me over the phone yesterday. Told me I was an idiot.”

Tears welled up in Bethany’s eyes and she choked back a sob. I reached out and put a reassuring hand over hers.

“Hey, hey,” I said, “It’s okay. Don’t let that asshole get to you.”

Bethany composed herself, pulling her hand out from under mine so that she could carefully wipe away tears without ruining her mascara. 

“I know,” she said, more confidently. “I know he’s just trying to get under my skin, but he’s talking to other people, too. I think he’s calling several people on my team and telling them what he thinks of me.”

This seemed especially outrageous, even for someone like Wes, so I asked Bethany to elaborate. She said that one of her team members -- a twenty-something named Tammy -- was late coming to one of their team meetings last week, and when Bethany went to go investigate she found Tammy on the phone with Wes.

“He was filling her head with all kinds of lies about me,” Bethany said.

“Like what?”

“I’d rather not say,” Bethany replied. “But I heard them. Tammy was obviously trapped, not wanting to talk to him anymore, but unable to get off the phone. I motioned for her to put him on speaker phone and I heard some of what he was saying.”

I looked at her as if I expected her to go on, but she didn’t oblige. “Bethany,” I said as gently as I could. “What kind of things is he saying about you? If you want me to do something about it I’m going to need you to be specific.”

I tacked that last sentence on almost without thinking, but it was the one that Bethany had the strongest reaction to.

“Oh, Alan! I’m not expecting you to do anything about it. There’s nothing you can do about it.”

That set me back in my chair. The reason my comment of doing something came off so thoughtlessly was, of course, that it was empty. Whatever Wes was saying, however vile or untrue, there was nothing I would be able to do about it. I knew that, and that’s why my words felt so hollow. But clearly, Bethany knew that, too. She knew that there was nothing I could do about anything that went wrong in the company. Our experience together at Club NOW had proven that.

I gave Bethany a bemused look. “Well, I’m sorry. I wish there was something I could do about it. People like Wes Howard should be banished from polite society.”

Bethany smiled, and this time placed a reassuring hand on mine. “It’s okay. I just wanted you to know that he was causing trouble. We’ll be seeing him again at the leadership meeting.”

There was something in the way she looked at me, a strange mixture of affection and disappointment, that made me charge down an unpremeditated path.

“Bethany, can I ask you something?”

“Of course,” she said, pulling her hand back.

“Gerald said some things about me in…, in his…, in the tantrum he threw when Don was firing him. I think he’s crazy, but I haven’t been able to get them out of my mind since Mary told me about them. I’m worried that they might actually be true.”

Bethany shrunk away, folding her hands in her lap. “What did he say?”

The words were on the tip of my tongue but they suddenly felt like the most dangerous words I could possibly utter. Once out, I realized, they would never be able to be brought back. They would be out forever.

“He said I was in over my head. That I was not up to the responsibilities of my position. That I had lost the trust of my team members. That they knew they couldn’t count on me.”

I looked at Bethany and she looked back at me in silence for several uncomfortable moments. I struggled to read the expression on her face, desperate to find something like incredulity or compassion manifest there. But try as I might, her stoicism seemed absolute, perpetual, eternal.

“Do you think any of that is true?” I asked.

“No,” Bethany said after only the shortest of perceptible pauses. “I think there are people here who are out to get you, who want to see you fail, but I don’t think those things about you, and I know plenty of others who don’t as well.”

I smiled, but Bethany did not smile back. If anything, she looked more uncomfortable than ever, far more distressed than how she appeared before telling me about Wes Howard’s hijinks. I thought briefly of the difficult position I had put her in -- I mean, what would anyone say if their boss laid that kind of doubt and fear on them -- and decided to chalk it up to that. The idea that she might be lying to me didn’t even cross my mind.

“Okay,” I said. “Thank you. I appreciate that vote of confidence.”

“Uh huh,” Bethany said, quickly excusing herself and leaving the room.

2

Very late that afternoon Mary stopped by my office. I was in the middle of packing things up for the day, sliding my laptop into its sleeve in my shoulder bag.

Mary shut my door and stood with her back to it. “Paul Webster is out,” she said.

My fingers froze on the zipper. “What?”

“Paul Webster is out,” she repeated. “Don and I spoke to him this afternoon and he’s agreed to resign from the Board. He’s out.”

“Just like that?” I asked.

Mary gave me a disappointed look. “No, if you must know. Not ‘just like that.’ We had to move heaven and earth to pull this one off. Eleanor is not happy about any of this, and especially since we had to pull her in to do some of the dirty work.”

Not happy. That was one of Mary’s euphemisms. It meant Eleanor was spitting mad. She had likely chewed Mary out and extracted all kinds of promises for future work and concessions. And that, I knew, made Mary more uncomfortable than any coup attempt from below possibly could have.

“You and Gerald really did a number on us, but we’ve taken care of it. It’s over.”

“Wait, Mary,” I said. “What do you mean ‘me and Gerald’? I didn’t have anything to do with this. I’m the one who brought it to your attention, remember?”

The look on Mary’s face could only be described as skeptical, but her words were placating. “Yes, I’m sorry. You’re right. I spoke in haste. This was Gerald’s doing, but you should have discovered his plans when he started concocting them, not when he was about to execute them.”

I shrugged my shoulders. “If I wasn’t doing two other jobs in addition to mine, maybe I could’ve kept a closer eye on him.”

It was a dangerous thing to say, but the words were out before I could stop them. Most things Mary said were crazy, but it was typically even crazier to challenge them. For a moment I saw Mary’s eyes smolder, but then she carefully cooled whatever fire was brewing within. 

“You’ve got three other jobs to do now, Alan. And the leadership meeting is in seven days. I told you, we’ll talk about help when we’re on the other side of that. Not before.”

I zipped up my bag and slung it over my shoulder. I just wanted to get out of there. “Uh huh. So who am I supposed to coordinate the agenda with now? If Paul is out, is Eleanor going to step in and run the meeting in his stead?”

“No,” Mary said. “We’re moving Wes Howard into the vice chair seat. You should work with him on the final details for the event.”

My heart stopped. 

Wes Howard.

“Mary!” I cried, but her hand was already on the door knob and she had already pulled it open. 

“Yes, I know,” she said, as she exited my office. “You’ll just have to find a way to work with him. There’s no other way, now.”

And quick as that, she was gone.

3

The following day was Friday. I must have been in a deep sleep, because when the morning alarm went off at its usual 5:30 AM, it felt like a bucket of cold water being dumped on me. I woke so violently that I woke Jenny, who normally slept peacefully through my alarm.

“Whaaaaat?” she moaned groggily. 

I sat for a moment in bed, the klaxon call of the alarm growing steadily louder in our dark room, trying to catch my breath and slow my heart down. I had been dreaming. Running, I think, down a dark hallway, and being chased by shadowy figures with sharp teeth and sharper knives.

“Alan,” Jenny groaned, pushing me in the small of my back. “Get up.”

I did, dragging myself over to the dresser just long enough to switch off the alarm before flopping myself back down on the bed.

“Alan,” Jenny said again, rolling her pregnant belly over so she could face me. “Get up. You have to go to work.”

“I don’t want to,” I said. “Not today. I’m going to call in sick.”

Jenny seemed instantly awake. “Are you sick?” She reached out a motherly hand and felt my forehead for a fever.

“I’m sick, all right,” I said. “Sick of that fucking place.”

Jenny knew all about Gerald’s attempted coup, my role in it, and the fallout that I would now have to deal with. We had talked about it at length, Jenny pulling the details and confessions out of me like an experienced prosecutor. She was more committed than ever to getting me out of that place, and had been sending my resume to even the less attractive listings in the newspaper. She was still hopeful about Quest Partners, but, like me, was growing worried that I hadn’t heard from Steve Anderson or his assistant.

“Have you ever called in sick before?” she asked me, a tinge of hopefulness in her voice.

“Not that I can remember,” I said. “But I really feel like doing it today.”

“If you stay home,” Jenny said, “you can come with me to my well baby checkup. Help your fat, pregnant wife out of the car. See the latest ultrasound.”

That was all it took to decide it. In a moment my cell phone was in my hand and I was placing a call to Ruthie’s direct line -- the company-approved method for calling in sick. Checking the clock to make sure it wasn’t a time that Ruthie might be at her desk, I waited for her voicemail to pick up and then left a short and appropriate message. I’m sick. I won’t be in today.

That task completed Jenny actually gave me a kiss on my unshaven cheek. “Come on,” she said. “You can make us breakfast while I get in the shower. We have to be there by nine o’clock.”

Having just looked at the clock I knew that was more than three hours away, but I also knew that would be calling it close. The clinic was only a few minutes from our home, but there was a lot that would need to be accomplished and organized before we could leave. Even still, I waited until Jenny was in the bathroom and I heard the water running before I even got out of bed. Making breakfast now would just mean a cold breakfast by the time she got herself dressed, so I went down the hall and peeked in on Jacob.

He was sleeping soundly -- a tuft of hair on his pillow and a pudgy calf and bare foot sticking out from under his blanket. I left his bedroom door open, expecting the noise of the house to wake him gradually in the next half hour or so, and went downstairs to use the second bathroom and start putting some things in order for everyone’s breakfast.

I didn’t feel the least bit guilty about calling in sick. Rather, I felt liberated, as if some heavy burden had been lifted from my shoulders. I suddenly decided that I was going to make the best breakfast ever, even pulling a package of bacon out of the freezer and getting the microwave working on defrosting it while prepping the other things I would need for both scrambled eggs and French toast. Jenny liked a little cinnamon on her toast, I knew, and I decided to include some of that even though I didn’t care for it. This breakfast was not about me. It was about her, my wife, my soulmate, the mother of my children. Cinnamon French toast with raspberries and warm maple syrup -- it would be like that bed and breakfast we had once stayed in, long before Jacob was born, before everything -- and I would act like it was no big deal, like it was everyday. Here you are, darling. Can I get you anything else? 

Jacob was down first, trailing his baby blanket on the floor behind him and rubbing his eyes with a balled-up fist. “Daddy,” he said. “What are you doing?”

He wasn’t used to seeing me, I knew. I was usually up and gone to work before he even got out of bed in the morning, but now the noise of my bustle in the kitchen must have brought him disoriented to my door. I saw that his sleep diaper was full and sagging under his pajama pants. Everything was prepped but nothing had started cooking yet, so it was easy for SuperDad to wipe his hands on a towel, scoop his son up in his arms, and carry him back upstairs to get him changed and ready for the day. On our way past the bathroom door we heard the shower shut off and the shower door slide open. I told Jacob that I was making a special breakfast for Mommy and that he could help me with the fruit salad.

In a flash we were back downstairs and Jacob was sitting in a corner of the kitchen where I could keep an eye on him, carefully plucking grapes off their stems and dropping them into a bowl, while I started pouring the egg mixture into a pan.

Jenny suddenly appeared at the door in her bathrobe and with her hair wrapped in a towel. “Oh my goodness,” she said, feigning surprise. “What’s going on here?”

“We’re making breakfast!” Jacob proclaimed proudly, smiling with his cheeks stuffed with some of the grapes that were supposed to be going into the bowl. 

“Indeed you are,” she said, as she came over and gave me another kiss on the cheek. “And what a breakfast! Is that bacon I’m smelling?”

“It sure is. Bacon and eggs and French toast -- just the way you like them, dear.”

“Well, I’d better go get dressed,” Jenny said. “And Jacob,” she said as she shuffled out on slippered feet, “save some of the grapes for the fruit salad.”

When everything was ready, I called up the stairs to let Jenny know. I could hear the blow dryer going so I had to shout in order to be heard over it.

“Okay!” Jenny called out. “I’ll be down in a minute!”

I got Jacob strapped into his booster seat and put his bowl of fruit in front of him as I retreated back into the kitchen in order to serve the plates and bring them to the table. In no time at all we were all around our small dining room table, enjoying the feast I had created, Jenny still in her bathrobe but with her hair dried and appropriately tousled.

“Fantastic!” she said, as she lifted her wine glass filled with orange juice and toasted me. “I think you should stay home from work more often.”

We ate in comfortable silence, Jenny encouraging Jacob to try some of the new-to-him things that I had made and Jacob firmly refusing. When she was done eating, I got up and started clearing the plates.

“Oh, I’ll do the dishes,” Jenny said.

“No,” I told her, looking pointedly at her bathrobe. “I’ll do them. You go get Jacob and yourself ready for the appointment.”

“Aren’t you going to shower?” she asked, a little bit of horror creeping into her voice.

I looked at the clock. It was a little past seven-thirty. “I’ve got time,” I told her. “I only need fifteen minutes to shower and get ready.”

She looked at me a little suspiciously, but accepted it, knowing that it was probably true. “Okay,” she said, rubbing me on the back. “Thanks for the wonderful breakfast.”

Truth be told, doing the dishes never took me as long as it took Jenny. She claimed I didn’t do them “right,” assuming, of course, that “her” way of doing dishes was the only “right” way of doing dishes. The same could be said about any other household chore she assigned, be it cleaning the bathroom or vacuuming the floors. Jenny both insisted that I help her with these chores -- which I did -- and she insisted that I didn’t do them “right.” As if there were a right way and a wrong way to vacuum a rug. What Jenny of course meant by the right way was her way.

I made short order of the dishes, making sure to hang the kitchen towels up just the way Jenny liked them, and then headed upstairs to take my shower and get ready. Jenny was still in her bathrobe, perched on the edge of our bed with a makeup mirror propped up on top of a pile of books on top of my nightstand. She pushed her eyelashes up with a mascara brush as she told me to get in the shower. Jacob’s bag was already packed and we needed to be out the door in twenty minutes.

When I came out of the bathroom a few minutes later with wet hair and a towel wrapped around my waist, Jenny told me that my phone had been ringing while I had been in the shower. I shouldn’t have, but without thinking I scooped it up and looked at its little screen.

“It’s work,” I said, recognizing the caller ID. “Someone from the office was trying to reach me.”

“You’re sick today,” Jenny said, standing up and shrugging herself out of her bathrobe. Underneath she was only wearing her bra and panties, her enormous belly exposed and glistening with the lotion she had recently applied. 

“You’re right,” I said, putting the phone back down. “I went back to sleep after leaving the message for Ruthie. And I turned my phone off so I wouldn’t be disturbed.”

“I swear, your honor,” she said, beginning to slather her armpits with deodorant.

“Mommy!” Jacob suddenly cried, barreling into our bedroom like a forgotten and out-of-control freight train. He rushed at Jenny and wrapped himself around her bare legs, almost knocking her over.

“OH MY GOD!” Jenny practically screamed. “Alan, get him out of here!”

I rushed over to extract Jacob as ordered, knowing that I had committed one of the greatest domestic crimes there was in our household -- leaving our bedroom door open while Jenny was getting dressed. Ever since Jacob learned how to crawl, Jenny had made it very clear that there was nothing more important than keeping the bedroom door closed while she was getting dressed. As I struggled to pull Jacob away, I could feel the towel around my waist begin to loosen, and my efforts were hampered by my own need to keep one hand on it to keep it from falling away. 

“Mommy!” Jacob was crying. “Mommy! Mommy!”

Jenny, for her part, was able to move closer to the bed and sit down, which both kept her from falling over and gave me the additional leverage I needed to finally pull Jacob away. Hooking him under one arm like a football and keeping my other hand on the knot of my towel, I carried him out of our room and into his. As soon as I left the master bedroom the door slammed shut behind me.

“Mommy!” Jacob continued to cry, but he wasn’t writhing like he would have been had this been a full-blown tantrum. 

In his room I put him down on his bed and took the necessary moment to re-secure the towel around my waist. “Jacob!” I said. “What is the matter with you? What do you want?”

“I want Mommy!” he said, looking up at me defiantly.

“Well, Mommy is getting dressed,” I said. “And I need to get dressed, too. We’re going to Mommy’s doctor today.”

Jacob crossed his arms and started to pout. “I don’t want to go to Mommy’s doctor,” he said. “I want to stay home and play with my trains.”

“We can play with your trains later,” I said, doing the best I could to not lose my temper and to reason with this unreasonable creature. “The doctor is going to take a picture of your baby sister in Mommy’s tummy. Don’t you want to see a picture of your baby sister?”

“No!” Jacob cried, kicking his feet out and rumpling his blankets. “I want to stay home and play with my trains!”

I shook my head. “Well, we can do that later. In a few minutes we’re leaving for Mommy’s doctor, and you’re going to come along.”

“No, I’m not!” Jacob said, his voice threatening the darkest violence.

I’m not sure what would’ve happened next had Jenny not appeared behind me.

“Mommy!” Jacob cried, seeing her and extending his arms toward her.

She moved around me, now dressed in a pair of stretch pants and a fleecy maternity tunic, and confidently told me to go get dressed. She sat down on the bed next to Jacob and wrapped him in a tender embrace. He clutched her desperately, pressing his face into the soft fabric of her top. 

“It’s okay, honey,” she said soothingly to him. “Mommy’s here now. Mommy’s here.”

I shook my head, not really understanding the why and how of anything that had happened that morning, nor what any of it might portend for the future, and left the room. 

4

Going to the clinic where Jenny saw her doctor was like going to another world -- an alien world where everything had its place and everything was in its place, even the broken and suffering human creatures that had journeyed there, often at great risk and peril to themselves. The building had four wings that spread out from a central core like the splayed limbs of a condemned man -- one, seemingly, for each of that man’s ages: birth, youth, adult, and old age, better known to the medically-literate as obstetrics, pediatrics, internal medicine, and geriatrics. The wayward and shuffling souls that each made their way through the whooshing automatic doors went first up to an enormous reception desk to make their offerings of insurance cards and co-pays, where, once recognized and registered, they would be sent down to one of the spacious waiting areas at the center of each wing, each customized for those whose ailments and concerns brought them to that temporary destination.

Lots of mothers with small children, obviously, found their way to the obstetrics waiting area, and, as such, it was appropriately decked-out with comfortable recliners, small, private lactation chambers, and, for the elder siblings of the soon-to-be-birthed, an elaborate and modular jungle gym of sorts -- a series of ramps, platforms, and slides that even toddlers could push around in order to create unique configurations of their play space.

Needless to say, Jacob loved this jungle gym. It was the thing that we could use to consistently coax him to both behave and to go peacefully to the doctor. They had a larger and more elaborate version in the pediatrics waiting area, but even the one meant for toddlers in the obstetrics area was usually enough for him. We had used it again that morning, simply reminding him of its existence and how much fun he could have with it. Suddenly, he had no longer wanted to stay home and play with his trains. He wanted to go to Mommy’s doctor and play with the jungle gym.

Not that getting there and getting settled in was any easier after that. Even with Jacob fully on board we couldn’t get to the clinic any sooner than ten minutes past Jenny’s appointment time. We hustled as quickly as we could down the throat of the beast and arrived breathless at its thumping, thriving heart. There, we received a disapproving look from the school marm that sat there, her day evidently ruined by the need to wait for the tardy Larson family to arrive.

Jacob was already tugging on my arm and Jenny told us to go -- knowing both where we would be going and that he would just be a distraction as she went through the ritual of getting checked in and placed in the queue. Once we got within eyesight of the Holy Land I let Jacob go and he half-jumped, half-ran the remaining distance, too excited to do either one consistently. As I settled into one of the ordinary waiting room chairs (not the recliners, oh no; even if vacant, a man sitting in one of those was akin to parking on top of a handicapped person in one of their coveted spots), I watched Jacob immediately set about to start re-arranging the modular pieces in the way that scratched his particular itch.

There were two other kids already playing there, their parents among the half dozen or so adults scattered about. I carefully avoided eye contact with all of them, and used my kindest parent voice to caution Jacob to play nice with the others.

Soon Jenny came waddling down the concourse, a clipboard in one hand and her heavy purse slung over the opposite shoulder. She came and sat down next to me, exhaling deeply as she settled into the ordinary chair.

“How is he?” she asked.

“Fine,” I said, looking up to see Jacob in some kind of friendly discussion with another one of the children, each navigating how to compel the other to create the playzone each preferred, but apparently doing it amicably. “No screaming or tears, yet.”

“Good,” Jenny said, turning her attention down to the form attached to her clipboard and beginning to scribble the information it requested with the provided pen. It was a simple ballpoint, but it was taped to a large and long tongue depressor, which in turn was taped to a three foot length of heavy twine, the other end of which was in turn taped to the shiny metal clip at the business end of the clipboard. It appeared like an entire roll of tape had been used to create the contraption.

“Do they think you’re going to steal their pen?” I asked.

Jenny mumbled a response.

“And why do they make you fill out that same form every single time?” I asked, my annoyance springing from some unknown place. “They must have all that information already. We’ve been coming here for years.”

“It’s just their process,” Jenny said, the pen continuing to scratch its way across the form. 

“Well, their process is stupid.”

Jenny shushed me. “Alan, keep your voice down.”

“Keep my voice down?” I asked, unconsciously lowering my voice. “Why? Are you afraid of being kicked out by the stupid process police?”

She gave me a sarcastic smile. “Here,” she said, pushing the clipboard into my hands. “I’m done. Go put this in the bin for me. My feet hurt.”

“I’m sure they do,” I said, pretending to be more upset than I actually was. I got up in a feigned huff and went over to the door that led back to the various examination rooms. This was also part of the stupid process. I wrapped the tethered pen around the top of the clipboard and placed it along with Jenny’s completed form into a large document bin that had been attached to the wall next to the door. Next to the bin was a small panel with a series of lighted buttons on it, each one labeled with the name of one of the doctors that were busy working today. I pushed the button that matched Jenny’s doctor and made sure the light came on. Somewhere within, I knew, there was a matching panel, and the same little light had just gone on there, alerting whoever’s job it was to monitor such things that Doctor Andrews had a patient patiently waiting. 

My assigned task in the ritual completed, I went back to sit down next to my wife. As I passed, I happened to catch the gaze of another of the expecting mothers, waiting for the light that corresponded with her doctor to also be noticed so that she could be called back into the inner sanctum. She gave me only a passing glance, but it felt overly hostile.

Jenny was already deep into one of her magazines when I sat back down. “I just got the stink eye,” I whispered to her.

“From who?” she whispered back, not looking up from the glossy photographs.

“That woman over there,” I said, just as the door opened and a nurse in scrubs called for the very woman I was referring to. She got slowly to her feet, gathered her paraphernalia, and started making her slow way out of the waiting room.

Jenny watched her go. “You’re imagining things,” she told me, and then turned back to her magazine. “Now, sit there quietly and stop making trouble.”

I decided not to dwell on that one for very long. It seemed to me that I could either be imagining things OR I could be making trouble, not both. But Jenny, typically, saw things from a different angle than I did. In her view, two opposite things could be true at the same time.

Instead, I turned my attention back to Jacob and his playmates and settled in for what I called “the long wait.” No matter what time one arrived at the clinic, twenty minutes early or twenty minutes late, you were always left to stew in your own juices in the waiting area for at least forty-five minutes. They were either chronically behind schedule, or they had determined that patients had to marinate for a designated period of time before they were ready to be poked and prodded.

Deciding to test my theory, I brought up the stopwatch function on my watch and set it going.

5

“Jennifer Larson?”

I looked at my watch. Thirty-seven minutes had elapsed since the experiment began and, given the several minutes that had elapsed while we struggled with their form, I judged it to be a success. Forty-five minutes. Every fucking time.

“Come on, Jacob,” I said, standing up and extending my hand with the idea that he would come and take it.

No response. I could partially see him under one of the ramps of the jungle gym, one little leg extending out to the side, his shoe gone and his sock mostly off.

I gave Jenny a look as she struggled to get to her feet, me only absently remembering to extend her an arm and to help her.

“Go get him,” she told me, as she started making her way towards the beckoning nurse.

I went over to the jungle gym and crouched down next to Jacob. All the other children had been called away by their parents and he had been playing by himself for the last ten minutes or so. I saw that he had found one of the many coloring books that were scattered around the playzone like fallen leaves, most of their pages already marred with the monochromatic smudges of oblivious toddlers pushing crayons back and forth across any and all lines. The pages of the one Jacob had found were relatively uncrumpled, and he was working hard at coloring something that looked like an especially cartoonish version of Noah’s Ark.

“Come on, Jacob,” I said with feigned excitement. “It’s time to go see the pictures of your baby sister.”

Still no response. He sat there in the relative shadow, the book between his splayed legs, his fingers holding a lime green crayon, carefully filling in the body of an elephant.

“Alan,” I heard Jenny call from behind me. “Let’s go.”

“Jacob,” I said, adding some stern Daddy tones to my voice. “Let’s go.” And then, with something that felt like an epiphany, I added, “You can bring the coloring book with you.”

Still no response. He was in his own world, ignoring me, perhaps willfully, perhaps not. I lacked the clinical discernment to know one way or the other. All I had was the boiling rage of a spurned and inexperienced father. I reached out and grabbed him by the upper arm, and began to pull him out from under the ramp.

“Owww! Owww! Owwweeeeeee!”

“Alan!” Jenny cried. “What are you doing?”

I released Jacob immediately. I had only moved him a matter of inches, but he quickly recovered that lost ground, retrenching behind his battle lines, and silently returned his full attention to the coloring book.

“He won’t come!” I shouted back over my shoulder.

“Then leave him,” Jenny counseled wisely. “You stay out here with him. I’ll go in alone.”

I turned and looked at her. She was right. She always was. Despite the fact that we had all come here together with the intention that we would all see the ultrasounds of the newest addition to our broken family, in the final analysis, it wasn’t worth fighting over. And it certainly wasn’t worth risking a full blown tantrum in another public place.

But the unfocused rage within me fought against this cool logic. He wouldn’t come? The HELL he wouldn’t. I was in charge here, goddammit, and he was going to do exactly what I told him to do. Who the living fuck did he think he was?

What stopped me was not the look on Jenny’s face, but the look on the face of the nurse that stood next to her. Both of them, the nurse and Jenny both, they saw the rage monster rising within me, and whereas Jenny’s face gave way to the subtle fear that helped shape the nadirs of our relationship, the look on the face of the nurse was a strange mixture of disgust and authority, the police officer watching the sloppy drunk tip and teeter as he walked the straight line of our society’s sobriety test. Unlike Jenny -- unlike myself -- the nurse, a young woman of no more than thirty and standing no more than five foot two, had real power in this situation. A power that she had used before and wouldn’t hesitate to use again.

“Okay,” I said as obsequiously as I could, rising from my crouch and standing in front of the remaining witnesses of the waiting area. “I’m sorry, honey.”

Jenny didn’t respond to that. She turned and went through the door, the nurse following close behind her. When the door shut completely I went back and retook my position in the chair I had left only moments before. I stole a couple of glances around and found no one actually looking at me, but I had the overwhelming sense that I was being watched very closely, probably from some secret location, maybe through the use of sophisticated surveillance equipment.

We’ve got an abuser in obstetrics. That’s what they were saying in the secret place. A man who beats his children and probably his wife. They were both watching me and taking Jenny to that same secret location, asking her if she felt safe in her home, if there was anything she wanted to tell them that she wouldn’t be able to say if her husband was present.

For ten minutes or more I was absolutely petrified. My eyes were constantly darting around and every time someone who worked at the clinic walked towards me, I started sweating, confident that they were coming to talk to me, or detain me, or arrest me. At one point, far down the concourse and back up by the reception desk, I saw an actual police officer -- a squat, thick man with a bald head and a goddamn gun on his hip -- and my bowels almost let loose. I couldn’t take my eyes off him, even moving to another chair to get a better look. As I watched, he had what appeared to be a casual dialogue with the intake nurse for a few minutes, and then turned and walked away, heading down the corridor that led to the exit.

Looking back on it now, I’d like to think that I was overreacting. I mean, how many screaming kids and arguing parents did they see in that clinic every day? But in that moment, with everything else going on in my life, I was convinced that I had crossed the line, that I was trapped, that I was going to lose my wife, my children, everything that really mattered to me.

Eventually, I was able to calm down a little. Jacob was still quietly absorbed in his coloring book. Several people had come and gone from the waiting area, and no one seemed to be paying any attention to me. Composed enough to know that I needed a distraction from these escalating fears and thoughts, I fished my phone out of my pocket.

There was another call that I had evidently missed, the little light blinking to tell me that they had left me a voicemail. I pushed the right buttons and held the phone up to my ear to hear this second message. “Hello, Mister Larson,” an unfamiliar female voice said into my ear. “This is Julie Prescott, executive assistant to Steve Anderson. Mister Anderson asked me to arrange a call with you sometime next week. Please call me back so we can compare calendars and get something set up.” She then went on to leave her phone number and to thank me for my trouble.

It was the lifeline I needed. I would call Miss Prescott back as soon as I got myself and my family home. I would call her from the secluded refuge of my own domain, and I would work with her -- two professionals speaking to each other on the telephone -- to set an appointment for next week to speak with Steve Anderson. The crystal ball of my beleaguered imagination couldn’t see any farther into the future than that, but it was enough. In my dark and terrible moment of uncertainty and worthlessness, it was enough.

6

The rest of that Friday, and then Saturday, and then Sunday passed with an unremarked numbness. I did things. I spoke to my wife. I played with my son. I did my share of the housework. I ate my food. I took my showers. At the end of each day I went to sleep, and each morning I woke up. And throughout it all I tried to keep my mind off of what was waiting for me back in the office. I tried and I failed. No matter what I did, no matter how I tried to occupy myself and my mind, nothing could keep those dark and desperate thoughts far from my consciousness, and they cast their fretful and numbing pall over everything I did.

Only two things from that long weekend do I remember distinctly. The first was the phone call I placed back to Julie Prescott, Steve Anderson’s assistant, in order to set a day and time for my conversation with him the following week. Miss Prescott was a champion of pleasant efficiency, genuinely glad that I called, and expressing her professional concern that we find the best possible time for me and Mister Anderson to connect on our important business. It was no trouble at all, quickly resolved by a close comparison of two calendars, one in my home and the other on her desk in far off Philadelphia. Tuesday? Yes? Tuesday afternoon? At 2 P.M.? Eastern? Yes, that will work. That will work splendidly.

The second was listening to the voicemail that had been left for me by someone in the office, which I intentionally did not listen to until much later in the day on Friday. I had, after all, called in sick, and had to at least pretend that I was unable to engage in my professional responsibilities.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the voicemail was from Bethany, her hushed and mousy voice apologizing for disturbing me, wishing me a speedy recovery from whatever was ailing me, and pleading with me to give her a call as soon as I was able, even if that meant over the weekend. It was Wes Howard. Always and forever, it seemed, it was Wes Howard. He was making trouble and Bethany needed my help, needed me to do something about it. She left a lot of details on the voicemail, but I had trouble focusing on them; wishing, preferring, that I could just turn all those details into vapor and let them blow away on the wind.

Her voicemail was one of the things that hung over me all weekend. I was determined not to actively engage in whatever nonsense it represented until I was back in the office on Monday and to put it entirely out of my mind. I was only successful in doing the first thing.

She cornered me early on Monday morning, much as I should have expected.

“Are you all right?”

We were standing in the breakroom, me just closing the fridge on my sack lunch. “Yes, much better,” I said, remembering to pretend that I had been sick on Friday. “Thanks.”

“What was it? The flu?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Migraines, maybe. I just couldn’t get myself out of bed. Dizzy and nauseous. I slept most of the day.”

I don’t think it was intentional, but she was standing in a position that effectively prevented me from leaving the room. Her arms were folded across her chest and she seemed to be glaring at me.

“Did you get my voicemail?”

“Yeah,” I said, trying to dissipate her accusatory tone with feigned innocence. “I didn’t see it until Saturday, and we were wrapped up most of the weekend in family matters. I figured we would talk about it this morning and come up with a game plan.”

“I asked you to call me,” she said pointedly. “I was waiting all weekend. Goshdarnit, I needed you to call me, Alan.” She looked like she was about to cry, her eyes shining and her lower lip quivering.

“I’m sorry,” I said quickly, self-consciously looking around to verify what I already knew -- that no one else was in the breakroom with us. Knowing that someone could walk in at any moment I suppressed an innate impulse to touch her -- to caress her shoulder or, God forbid, to hug her -- to comfort her in some way. Reacting negatively to the impulse, I turned suddenly cold. “I was busy, and I figured we would talk about it today. What’s the big deal?”

The look she gave me could only be described as horrified. She teetered on the edge of snapping back at me, but pulled her anger back when Angie Ferguson suddenly entered the room, an oversized lunch thermos -- the kind only arctic explorers would use -- clutched tightly in her pudgy hands.

“Good morning,” she said, navigating easily around us and pulling open the refrigerator door.

“Good morning,” I said absently as I maintained eye contact with Bethany. The look on her face turned quickly from anger to betrayal.

“Good morning,” she said icily, and then left the room.

“Is she all right?” Angie asked me.

“Yeah,” I told her. “She’s just under a lot of stress right now.”

Angie nodded. “We all are,” she said matter-of-factly, and then barreled her way out of the room.

I was left alone with a choice. Go and apologize to Bethany, ask her to share her secret fears with me, and take the burden of those fears off her shoulders and place it on mine; or go back to my office and press my nose to the grindstone perpetually waiting there for me.

I chose the latter.

7

My phone was ringing when I got back to my office. I rushed to pick it up on the third ring that I heard, not knowing how long it had been ringing before that. 

“Hello, this is Alan Larson.”

“Alan. This is Paul Webster calling. How are you?”

I felt my heart stop. Literally. There passed probably five seconds of silence where it would either decide to start beating again or I would flop over onto the floor of my tiny office.

“F...fine, Paul. How are you?”

“Well, I was a lot better a week ago. I was hoping you and I could have a talk about some of the things that have transpired since then.”

“S...sure,” I said. “Give me a minute to close my office door.”

“That’s probably a good idea.”

I clunked the phone down on my desk and walked over to my door like a zombie. While I was there I took a moment to look out through its cracked glass to see people arriving and getting settled into their cubes. Among them I saw Caroline Abernathy -- the young woman who was almost fired the day they terminated Amy Crawford, who needed rescuing from the clutches of Wes Howard in the dark basement of Club NOW. She was wearing another one of those droopy sweaters she always wore, the tissues for her perennial runny nose tucked reassuringly into its pockets and sleeve cuffs. She wasn’t talking to anyone, simply easing herself into her ergonomic chair and into her lot for the day and suddenly, insistently, I wanted to be her, to give up everything I had and everything I was to be her, sitting alone and unbothered at my desk with my long, straight hair hanging around my face for the next eight hours. That had to be better than what waited for me on the telephone, and whatever would come after that, and after that.

“Hello?”

“Yes, I’m still here, Alan.”

“What do you want?”

“Just a few minutes of your time.”

“You got them.”

Paul paused, probably uncertain about how to proceed. My tone so far had been hostile. I certainly wasn’t going to make this easy for him.

“Well, Alan,” he said slowly. “How are you doing these days?”

“I’m fine.”

“Really? That’s not what I hear. From what I’ve heard, it sounds like your world is caving in around you.”

I did not respond. It was all I could do to sit in my chair and force my heart to slow down.

“Alan?”

“Yes, I’m here.”

“That’s a little more like it, isn’t it? First it was Susan Sanford, and then Michael Lopez, and now Gerald Krieger. They're all leaving, moving on to better things, perhaps, and there you stay, taking on more than you can possibly handle.”

His voice was strangely intimate in my ear, almost like my own cricket conscience chirping its secret thoughts and worries. 

“How do you think it’s going to end?”

I closed my eyes. “Is there something I can do for you, Paul?”

“Actually, yes, Alan. There is. I was hoping you would keep me in the loop about what is going on in the organization.”

“Which organization? Yours or mine?”

“Well, both actually,” he replied, evidently understanding that I was drawing a distinction between Mary’s company and the non-profit organization whose leadership he had just been forced out of.

“Why would I do that? Mary told me you were finished.”

“Mary doesn’t know half of what she thinks she does. I’m not finished. She is.”

I opened my eyes and was shocked to see Mary standing on the other side of my glass door. Her back was partially towards me, engaged in some kind of conversation with Don Bascom. Whether she was on her way to my office or just passing by when Don stopped her, I didn’t have any idea.

“Alan, did you hear what I said?”

“Yes, I heard you, Paul. You said that Mary was finished.”

“She is. She doesn’t know it, yet, but, I promise you, she’ll be the next one to go. You should think about where you want to be standing when that happens.”

I had no response to that. I was frankly more focused on Mary and Don, having what appeared to be a hushed and fairly serious conversation right outside my office. 

“Paul, I have to go now.”

“Wait. Don’t hang up. What you do next may very well determine if you’re going to be in or out when the shit comes down. If you play your cards right, you may be the one sitting in that corner office of hers.”

Mary suddenly turned, her conversation with Don ending, his bulky form lumbering off and out of view. Her hand reached out to grasp my door handle.

“Paul, I need to go now.”

“Wait! At least tell me…”

His voice drifted off as I dropped the receiver back in its cradle, executing the movement just as Mary pushed my door open and stepped halfway into the room.

“Alan, do you have-- Oh, sorry. Were you on the phone?”

“Just finished up,” I said as pleasantly as I could. “What’s up?”

“Who was that?” she asked, now stepping fully into my office, but not closing my door behind her.

In the split second I was given to make the biggest decision of my day I decided to lie. “Samir Mahdi,” I said, picking someone who was on my list to call that day, a minor committee chair that would be attending the leadership conference next week. “He had some questions about the event.”

Mary looked at me quizzically only for a moment. “Have you called Wes Howard, yet?”

“No,” I said. “He said over email that he would be available later this afternoon. I’m planning to call him around two.”

Mary nodded. “Okay. Just make sure you connect with him today. He has some changes to the invitation list that will need to be dealt with. Whatever he says, just do it, okay?”

“Sure,” I said, forcing my smile to grow wider. “He’s the new boss, right?”

I meant it light-heartedly, but Mary’s reply was deadly serious. 

“Yes. He is.”

I kept smiling, nodding my head like the petrified idiot I was.

8

I tried to focus on my work. In times past, work was always a kind of refuge for me. A thing I could do where progress could always be made. Even if it was nothing more than entering numbers in a spreadsheet, editing an article for our newsletter, or sending out a batch of emails and tracking the responses that came back -- they were all definable and executable tasks, boxes to check, steps to advance, goals to achieve.

But now there were so many things on my plate that there was no real refuge to be found. I kept a document on my computer desktop that served as my on-going “To Do” list, and as I opened it that morning I remember it spanning more than four pages of single-spaced 12-point type. Some of it was organized by project category, but much of it wasn’t. A whole extra page had just been added, representing the immediate tasks that Gerald had left behind, unceremoniously given to me in the same manner I had inherited items from Michael, and before that from Susan. 

It seemed like the first thing I should do was go through Gerald’s list and try to organize it and then prioritize it, line it up by project against the projects I already had and try to decide how to cadence them all in a way that the most pressing things got done first. But that seemed overwhelming to me, so I picked something simple off my existing list and began tackling that, far preferring to get something, anything checked off rather than try to comprehend the totality of the challenge I was facing.

As I worked, keystrokes and mouse clicks the only sound emanating from my workspace, I kept noticing a kind of glitch on my monitor. There was a little fuzzy patch on the screen. Any set of characters that tried to penetrate it got smudged beyond recognition. But the phenomenon was fleeting in a strange kind of way. When I tried to focus my attention on it, it seemed to slide off to the side, but still there, wiggling and wavering in my peripheral vision.

I looked up and away from the monitor, and realized it wasn’t a computer malfunction at all. Staring up into empty space, it was still there, stuck against my blank office wall. And, frighteningly, when I closed my eyes, it was even still there, seemingly projected against the dark insides of my eyelids. Worse, it seemed to be getting bigger, now curving down into a tremendous crescent that obscured fully a fourth of my optical field.

What the fuck? Was I having a stroke? A brain aneurysm?

I got up from my desk, and had to steady myself. I was dizzy and I had a headache. I left my office and began making my way down the hall, trailing my hand along one wall to keep myself on course and eventually made it to the office restrooms, glad that one of the single, unisex rooms was unoccupied. Not knowing who might have seen my awkward journey nor what they might have thought about it, I closed and locked the door behind me and made my clumsy way over to the mirror.

I tried to look at myself, tried to look into my own eye, convinced that there would be the bright red splotch of broken blood vessels there, but the visual distortion was now so great that I couldn’t see anything clearly. I was dizzier than ever, and I fumbled and stumbled my way over to the toilet and sat down on its lowered seat.

I closed my eyes and leaned my head as gently as I could against the cold tile wall next to the toilet. I still had no idea what was happening to me, but was now too disoriented and experiencing too much nausea to seriously contemplate any wild speculations. The shimmery waves of light and shadow continued to pulse and surge in the darkness of my tortured solitude, and I began to lose all sense of my body in space. Was I sitting upright? Was I laying down? Was I spinning helplessly through yawning space? I couldn’t really tell, but I was suspecting more and more that it was the latter.

An intense way of nausea hit me and I nearly vomited. Without opening my eyes -- it was too bright and painful to even open them a crack -- I slid myself down onto the floor between the wall and the toilet, pushed the seat up, and hung my head into the bowl. Without willing it, I started to retch -- once, twice, three times, each heave causing bright bursts of pain in my throat, in my neck, at my temples, and across the top of my head, but nothing but flimsy strands of mucus came up and into my mouth. When the retching was finished, I tried spitting them into the toilet bowl, but left most of the expulsion hanging off my chin and bottom lip.

I was dying. I had never experienced anything like this before, had no idea what it was, and found myself reasonably convinced that I was dying. The unisex bathroom was going to be my final resting place. Eventually, someone would have to break down the door and cart my mortal remains away.

Suddenly, there was a knock at the door. “Hello?” an unrecognizable voice said. “Is somebody in there?”

“I’ll be out in a minute!” I heard my own voice respond, exactly as if things were normal, as if it was simply the custodian, checking to see that the room was unoccupied before coming in to clean it.

I didn’t bother listening for the person -- whoever it was -- to knock or speak again. I didn’t even want to think about the fact that I was at the office, and that at some point, assuming I didn’t actually die, I would have to go back out there and face a group of mostly strangers and antagonists with my own overwhelming and undisclosed weakness. I suddenly had a vision of myself laying prostrate in front of Mary, fluids leaking from my orifices, begging her to help me, for the love of God, to call an ambulance.

Fuck that. I remembered the cell phone in my pocket. I wasn’t able to do anything with it, but I remembered it was there. If I should start to feel better, I realized, I might be able to pull it out of my pocket, call Jenny, and ask her to come get me. But how would she get me? She couldn’t come here and carry me out. I’d have to find a way to crawl downstairs without anyone seeing me. Crawl down to the parking garage and get in her car. I could do that. Couldn’t I?

All this thinking was making things worse. I dry heaved again, and then rested my head on the lip of the toilet bowl. Willing my worrying brain to be silent, and focusing only on the pulsing flashes that continued unabated on the inside of my eyelids, I zoned out, marking neither the passage of time nor my chances for a positive outcome.

Slowly, imperceptibly, the symptoms began to abate. At some point, I was able to open my eyes a bit, and could actually make out objects in the center of my vision and at the appropriate focal length. Experimentally, I lifted my head up and leaned myself back against the bathroom wall. I looked at my watch, trying to get a sense of how much time had passed, but since I didn’t mark the time I came in, it was difficult to come up with a precise estimate. Twenty minutes maybe? Surely no more than a half hour.

Now I did fish my phone out of my pants pocket. Flipping it open and squinting at it with one partially-opened eye, I pushed the necessary buttons to make my home phone ring. I placed it against my ear and waited patiently for Jenny to answer.

After four rings, our home answering machine picked up. I hung up on my end, and made the difficult dialing maneuver again. I got four more rings, and then the click of the answering machine picking up again.

Okay. Fine. I’m going to have to do this myself, then. I can do it. At least I think I can.

I did not move for at least ten more minutes. By that time I could hold both eyes partially open, and felt strong enough to push myself back up to my feet. This I shortly accomplished, and weakly made my way over to the sink. I splashed some water on my face. I dried my hands on some paper towels. I straightened my shirt as best I could.

Here goes.

I had only one objective in mind. Make it back to my office. Once there, I would re-evaluate my next step. Thinking too far ahead felt paralyzing. It was simpler, and somehow more achievable, if I only attempted one thing at a time.

Slowly, I opened the bathroom door. The light was even brighter outside and at first I had to shrink away from it. But I pushed myself forward. Thankfully, there was no one in the short corridor immediately outside the restrooms, and I used that space to carefully regulate my gait so that I could make it down the major thoroughfare without attracting any attention.

Or so I thought.

“Alan?” It was Ruthie. I was having trouble holding my head up, but I recognized the blouse and flouncy skirt. “Alan, are you all right?”

“No,” I said, seeing no reason to lie, and no reason to stop my forward progress. “No, I’m not feeling well. I’m going home.”

She reversed direction and began walking beside me. I felt her grip on my arm as I stumbled into the wall and stopped. Goddammit, the lights were just too bright out here. When I cracked my eyes open even a little, it felt like lightning shooting into my brain. Another wave of dizziness overcame me, and, like a marionette with its strings cut, I crumpled to the floor.

“Alan!” I heard Ruthie say, but I did my best to block her out, too. Even the sound of her voice hurt, and it felt like the only way to respond was to try and crawl inside my own navel. In my misery, I was no longer worried that I was going to die. More than anything else, I pathetically hoped that someone would kill me.

9

The next few hours were a blur. Ruthie must have helped me to my feet. She must’ve helped me back to my office. Offered to call someone: my wife, my doctor, 911, an undertaker -- someone. I must’ve chosen Jenny and this time Ruthie must’ve reached her. At some point Jenny appeared at my door and helped me out of my office, down the gauntlet of the office hallway, into the elevator, down into the parking garage, into her car, out onto the road.

She spoke to me, she must have; she was always speaking to me -- but I must not have answered her. I can remember sitting in the car, leaning pathetically against the window with my coat draped over my head, wanting to die. She must’ve gotten me home and out of the car and upstairs to our bedroom, where she must have helped me get under the bed covers with a tent of pillows over my head, turning off all the lights, lowering the shades, and closing the door.

All these things must have happened because that’s how I found myself a few hours later when I began to swim back to consciousness. Had I slept? I didn’t think so, but it was hard to know. Everything had hurt so bad, my head, the light, my eyes -- I had just curled myself up into a ball and had blocked everything else out.

Now I was feeling somewhat better. I sat up, surprised to find myself still in my work clothes, with my shoes flopped over and on top of each other on the floor. I swung my stocking feet out and sat precariously on the edge of the bed. With a croaking voice, I called out for Jenny.

The bedroom door opened slowly and my wife poked her head into the room.

“Yes?”

“What happened?”

She opened the door fully and stepped into the room. “You had a migraine. Are you feeling better?”

A migraine? Why did that sound familiar?

“Not really,” I said, realizing that there was an emptiness in my belly, but the thought of food was still making me nauseous. “Are you sure? I felt like I was dying.”

“Pretty sure,” she said, coming over and sitting gingerly next to me on the bed. “Both the Internet and the triage nurse agree, based on your symptoms.”

“What’s a triage nurse?” I knew what the Internet was.

“At the clinic,” she said, placing a hand on my back and giving me a gentle rub. “You have an appointment there this afternoon, if you’re feeling up to it.”

It was too much information, coming in too fast. The questions were exploding in my brain the way flashes of light previously had. I closed my eyes.

“What time is it?”

Jenny looked at the bedside clock. “One ten,” she said.

“Fuck,” I said, both believing and not believing it at the same time. “I have a call with Wes Howard at two.”

Even with my eyes closed I could sense the look that Jenny was giving me. “Can’t you reschedule it? Your doctor’s appointment is at three.”

I shook my head. “I can do both.”

Even I didn’t believe that, but there was nothing else that I could say. Like a hundred other things that had happened to me over the past several months, I was just going to have to start juggling another ball. 

“No, you can’t, Alan. You’re going to have to reschedule.”

I leaned into her heavily, and she wrapped her arm around me. “Can you do it for me?” I asked.

“You want me to call Wes Howard?”

“No,” I said. “The doctor’s appointment. Can’t you reschedule that?”

“Alan.”

“Please! Please, Jenny. I’m going to talk to Wes and then I’m going back to bed. I don’t think I can do anything else today.”

She started to argue with me, trying to convince me with her logic, but, as usual, it was a special kind of Jenny logic which presupposed that she was always right. Throughout our marriage, her arguments had always been presented more to persuade on that essential point, and not necessarily on the merits of any particular point of order. Mentally, I wasn’t up for the sparring match. I knew I would have to do that soon enough with Wes. I gently pushed her away.

“Please. Jenny. Just go make me something small to eat. I think I can eat something small. And then I can talk to Wes. Let’s at least get that done before we attempt anything else.”

I think she would have argued with me some more but, oddly, Jacob came to my rescue, appearing at our door and also asking for something to eat. It made me wonder for the first time where he had been through my whole ordeal. Jenny didn’t bring him to the office, did she? But if she didn’t, where had he been? Jenny hadn’t left him home by himself, had she?

More questions causing more pain. I had to push them away, and gave my wife another gentle shove. Please. Jenny. Go.

Thankfully, she did, taking our son quietly with her, and I gave myself just two more minutes of dark silence, before getting shakily to my feet and getting myself positioned for my phone call at two. I looked in the corner where I usually kept my briefcase, saw that it wasn’t there, and realized that it, along with all my notes for the upcoming leadership meeting were likely back at the office -- my “To Do” list likely still open on my computer screen and my folders haphazardly stacked in the stand-up file I traditionally kept at my elbow.

I considered shouting downstairs to Jenny. Had she grabbed my briefcase and brought it or anything else home with us? But I decided against it, suspecting that shouting was something that would likely put me back in the dark hole I had just emerged from. Then I considered making my way downstairs to look for my briefcase and to ask Jenny about it, but dismissed that idea just as quickly. In my current state, I’d likely trip on the stairs and wind up breaking my neck.

For the first time I realized that the lump of my cell phone was still in my front pants pocket. I pulled it out and sat back down on the edge of the bed. I flipped it open, squinting at the light of its little screen in the dark room, and began hunting through my list of contacts. Was Wes Howard there? Had I ever called him on my cell phone before? I quickly determined that the answer to both questions was no.

I looked up and sighed. I slowly went through my options, while listening to the sounds of Jenny clunk and clatter around in the kitchen. I found a different contact, dialed the number, and pressed the phone against my ear.

“Good afternoon, Ruthie MacDonald speaking.”

“Ruthie. It’s Alan.”

“Alan! Oh my god. How are you?”

“I’m okay,” I said. “Hey, I need you to do me a favor.”

“Where are you?”

“Can you-- What?”

“Where are you?”

“I’m home. I just woke up from a long nap, and realized that I have a call with Wes Howard at two.

“Are you feeling better? Everyone here is very worried about you.”

At first I thought Ruthie was being her usual motherly self, but something about her tone when she said ‘everyone’ made me suspicious.

“Are they?”

“Yes! You gave everyone quite a scare. You looked like you were dying.”

I kept my eyes focused on the fraying laces of my overturned shoes. “I felt like I was dying. But I think I’ve slept it off, whatever it was. You can tell Mary not to worry. I’m still in the land of the living.”

There was a strange silence on the line, and I had to pull the phone away from my ear to make sure I was still connected.

“Ruthie? Are you there.”

“Yes, Alan. I’m glad you’re feeling better. What can I do for you?”

There was that strange tone again, this time on the ‘I’m’. I shook my head to dismiss it, but had to stop when even that made me dizzy.

“I need Wes’s number. I didn’t bring any of my files with me and it’s not in my phone. Can you give it to me?”

“Sure,” she said, as I listened to her fingernails clicking away on her keyboard. “Do you have something to write with?”

“Yes,” I said, holding the phone in the crook of my neck to free up the hands needed to retrieve a notepad and pen from the nightstand. “Go ahead.”

She gave me the number and I wrote it down. “Okay, thanks.” I said.

“Take care of yourself, Alan.”

“Uh huh,” I said, my mind already pivoting to the next phone call I would need to make. “You, too.”

10

The call with Wes Howard happened at two. I was under the blanket, with my cell phone lying between my ear and the pillow, my hand holding an unseen pen against an unseen pad of paper, but it happened as it had to. Evidently, as it was fated to.

Before two Jenny returned with some food, a grilled cheese sandwich and a few carrot sticks, but I had to wave it and her away. The very smell made me nauseous. Thank you. I love you. But not now. Take it away. Please, Christ, take it away.

Also before two I had some time to think about a few things.

I thought about Ruthie MacDonald, and the strange shifts in tone she had just used in our phone conversation. Had there been some secret message in there? When she had said ‘Everyone here is very worried about you,’ I remained convinced that she had, in fact, been referring only to Mary, and that ‘worried about you’ was a euphemism for Mary’s rage and disappointment with me. I was a failure in Mary’s eyes, too weak and fragile to even complete a day in the office. But then came ‘I’m glad you’re feeling better,’ and then it had been clear that Ruthie was not just referencing herself, but was, in fact, referencing herself to the specific exclusion of Mary, that she was secretly pulling for me, and that she had my back in whatever final confrontation was looming. Or was I reading too much into it? In my addled state, I had no definitive way of knowing.

I also thought about Paul Webster, and the almost threatening tone that he had taken in our short phone conversation earlier that day. He had known a lot about what was going on in the office, not just the departures of Susan and Michael and, of course, Gerald, but also the way things were piling up on top of me as a result and, likely, the way Mary was using the situation to force me to the point of utter failure. Paul had seemed to offer me a way out, probably similar to the one he had offered Gerald, but there had been something dark and sinister in his words. I didn’t trust him. ‘If you play your cards right,’ he had told me, ‘you may be the one sitting in that corner office of hers.’ That seemed almost farcical to me. A desperate play from the outer darkness. Best ignored. Designed, perhaps, to push me even closer to Mary.

I also thought about Bethany Bishop, and both the gruff interaction we had had that morning in the break room, and the difficult conversation we had had a few days before, when she had said Wes Howard was spreading lies about her, and I had said that Gerald had said some nasty things about me. There had been a time when the two of us would have supported each other against such challenges, but it felt very much like that time had now passed. The two of us had been drifting apart over the last several weeks, and that seemed smart and good from where I was currently sitting, but it left a whole basket of doubts and fears swirling around in the pit of my stomach. Was she going to be the next one to go? And when she did, would the weight of what was left behind crush me once and for all? Those were dark and scary thoughts, but with my call with Wes Howard moments away, I found myself helplessly wondering what kind of lies he had been spreading about her, and whether those lies had anything at all to do with me.

At two, I dialed Wes’s number, and settled back into my cocoon.

“Hello?”

“Wes? It’s Alan Larson calling.”

“Alan! Well, what do you know? We speak at last.”

I had no idea what he meant by that, but I tried to turn the discussion towards the upcoming leadership meeting.

“Straight to business, eh? Well, sure. We can play things that way if you want.”

I didn’t know what other way we could conceivably ‘play things,’ and I didn’t want to. “I heard you had some changes to the committee rosters that we should implement before the meeting.”

“You’re goddamn right I do, Alan. I’ve got a lot of fucking changes I want you to make.”

I had heard about the cursing before -- that Wes was known to use it when almost no one else did -- but even so, it surprised me. It wasn’t just a casual part of his speech pattern. There was something dark and sinister about it, the words punctuating his speech like they thrilled him.

“Uh huh,” I said in response. “What are they?”

He then began to read them off to me. He was obviously referring to the packet of committee rosters I had sent him. I could hear the punctuated flipping of pages as he cast his judgment on the obscenities that he saw before him.

He would begin with something like, “You’ve got Neil Richards coming in as the chair of the Bylaws Committee,” as if putting that particular person in charge of that particular committee had been my idea, and not the result of the slow, inexorable turning of the organization’s wheel of leadership ascension. He then would disparage the person. “Neil Richards couldn’t find his own asshole with both hands and a funnel.” And then he would order a change with a tone of obviousness that clearly questioned the competence of the people around him. “Kathleen Meyer is your gal for the Bylaws Committee. That woman might be the only person in this whole organization who has even read the fucking bylaws.” And, of course, in nine cases out of ten, the person suggested wouldn’t even have experience on the committee Wes was appointing them to lead.

After about three or four of these, I attempted pushing back.

“Wes, William Gilbert isn’t even on the Conference Planning Committee. Maybe you should pick someone with some experience with what the committee does.”

I was greeted with an icy silence.

“Wes?”

“I don’t remember asking for your fucking opinion, Alan. So, did you get that one or not? I said Bill Gilbert to chair the goddamn Conference Planning Committee. All right?”

Okay, then.

Things went on like that for a brutal half hour. During it, I felt able to slowly swim my way back towards full consciousness, almost like Wes’s abuse was exactly the tonic I needed to get over my migraine or whatever the hell it was. Before long I was sitting upright on the edge of my bed, the phone held in the crook of my shoulder while I wrote down my instructions on the pad of paper on my lap. As for the instructions, there were a lot of them, far more than I thought I could pull off before next week’s leadership meeting. But I knew better than to give Wes any sense of that.

“Is that all?” I asked when it seemed like Wes was winding down, when I suspected that he had reached the end of the committee roster packet I had sent him. I didn’t tack ‘sir’ on the end of my question, but I made sure that it was implicit in my tone.

“For these stupid committees, yes,” Wes hissed in my ear. “But there is one more thing you and I need to discuss.”

“Uh huh,” I said, acknowledging a fact rather than a true need.

Wes paused. When he spoke, his voice had clearly shifted. “You’re not going to cause me any problems, are you Alan?” The authoritarian was gone, replaced by a sweet-talking manipulator.

“I don’t know what you mean, Wes.” I honestly didn’t know what he meant. What could I do to cause him problems? It took everything I had just to stay out of the way of the problems he was creating.

“Because I could make life very difficult for you,” he said as if not even hearing me, as if he had prepared a script and he was going to finish it before even listening to what I had to say. “I know what’s going on between you and Mrs. Bethany Bishop.”

With the mention of Bethany’s name my mind started racing. What was he saying? What did he think was going on? Is this the lie Bethany was talking about?

“You’ve been a very naughty boy, Alan. Dipping your wick in someone else’s honeypot like that. I wonder what Mary would do if she were to find out? That might cause you a lot of trouble, but not as much, I’ll bet, if your wife was to find out. She’s pregnant, isn’t she? With your second, if I’m not mistaken.”

I was speechless. He thought I was sleeping with Bethany? I knew that wasn’t true, but it was about the last thing I would want him talking to Mary -- or Jenny -- about. In fact, the very idea that he would talk to Jenny -- about anything -- enraged me. Who the hell did this asshole think he was?

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Wes,” I said, trying to keep my voice as neutral as possible.

“No use denying it, Alan,” he said. “The truth of it slips out under whatever tight control you think you have. What a fucking amateur you are. I’ve seen the two of you together and, frankly, it disgusts me. With all the young women in that office of yours, why on earth would you choose to fuck old horseface? Do you have to put a bag over her head when you get down to business? I know I would.”

I felt sick, but it wasn’t the migraine returning. I felt sick to my stomach, like I was going to puke and shit at the same time. It suddenly occurred to me to start recording this conversation, and I pulled the phone away from my face, desperately trying to figure out how to make that happen and realizing that I didn’t have a clue.

“Or take her from behind,” I could still hear Wes saying, his voice tinny and small through the phone’s embedded earpiece. “She does have a nice ass, at least. I’ll give her that.”

“Wes,” I said, putting the phone back against my ear. “I have to go now.”

“Sure, sure,” Wes said smoothly. “I understand. I’ve given you a lot to think about. Just don’t think too much. The cards are what they are, and I have the stronger hand. Stay the fuck out of my way, and you can keep fucking whoever you want. I don’t care. But cross me, and I’ll make sure your whole world comes caving in on you. Okay?”

“Okay, Wes.”

“Grand. Let me know if you have any trouble getting a hold of any of my new committee chairs. Most of them will already be expecting your call.”

And with that he hung up, the phone going dead in my hand.

11

I threw the phone on the bed and rush-stumbled my way into the bathroom, really thinking I was going to vomit. I shut the door and crouched down beside the toilet like I had done earlier in the day in the office, except the toilet in my own house wasn’t cleaned as regularly, and the familiar but sickening smells made me retch immediately. In an instant I was willing it, embracing it, giving myself over to it. Yes. Yes! Get the sickness out, push it out, purge it, now and forever. But still, nothing would come up but phlegm and stomach acid, stinging my lips and dripping uselessly into the bowl.

“Alan? Are you all right? Alan?”

It was Jenny, gently tapping at my bathroom door.

“Yes,” I said, coughing, spitting, drooling. “Yes, I’m all right. Just felt like I had to throw up again.”

It was a lie and the truth at the same time, exactly the kind of strange dichotomy that had characterized so much of our marriage. I pulled down the toilet seat, knowing that it was likely to be cleaner than the rim of the bowl, and laid my head down upon it.

“Do you need anything?”

“No,” I said. “No. I’ll be okay. Just give me a few minutes.”

“There’s still time to make that doctor’s appointment. If you’re feeling up to it.”

What? A doctor’s appointment? When? What time is it now? Should I? Shouldn’t I? Could I?

“Alan?”

Fuck. “Just give me a few minutes, okay?”

There was no response from Jenny, but I watched as her shadow moved away from the light at the bottom of the door.

“Where’s Daddy?” I heard Jacob say distantly, a frightened curiosity in his voice.

“He’s in the bathroom, honey. Come on, let’s go watch one of your videos.”

When they were clearly gone, I lifted my head up and sat back against the bathroom wall. I didn’t know what I was feeling, but it wasn’t good. I didn’t think I was going to throw up anymore, but I wasn’t entirely sure. Regardless, I had no compelling desire to get up and go back to whatever it was that was waiting for me on the other side of the bathroom door. Sitting there, still in my work shirt, rumpled slacks, and loose socks, I entertained the idea that I would simply sit there forever, wedged between the toilet bowl and the small laundry basket filled with Jacob’s bath toys. They included a set of squeezy animals that were designed to take in water and then spit it out in a steady stream from a tiny hole in their mouths. There was a hippo, a frog, a fish, and a turtle, each a different color but each obviously rendered in the same design program and birthed on the same injection molding machine. I plucked the turtle out from the basket, the yellow paint on some segments of its shell long since flaked off to reveal the unblemished orange rubber beneath.

A long time ago, when Jacob was just able to sit up unassisted in the bathtub, I remember playfully giving each of these little animals a name -- Henry Hippo and Freddy Frog -- but now, for the life of me, I couldn’t remember what they had been. As I held the nameless turtle up and examined it closely, it seemed to smile back at me, keeping the secret of its identity to itself. When I squeezed him, a few drops of mildewy water bubbled out of his face.

So Wes Howard thought I was sleeping with Bethany Bishop. In my confused state, I started to obsess over that, desperate to figure out how he had come to that conclusion. I’ve seen the two of you together, he had said, but where? I tried to think of all the times that the three of us had been in the same room together, and was able to conjure up only a tiny number of instances -- all of them in some kind of work setting, and none of them where it had only been the three of us alone. The idea that I had somehow signaled with my behavior that Bethany and I were sleeping together in one of those situations seemed impossible for me to believe -- especially since Bethany and I were not, in fact, sleeping with each other.

No, I had done nothing to give Wes the idea, so someone must have told him. Someone with an ax to grind against me. That seemed a lot more plausible. Because Bethany and I were friendly with one another. At least until recently, we had been friends, and now I realized that there were any number of times that people from the office would have seen us being friendly to one another. I thought of all the lunches we had had together in the Cellar -- sitting by ourselves but in full view of others. All the times I had innocently held her chair for her, or retrieved some forgotten item for her, or touched her hand as we talked about our lives and our marriages.

Who? Who would want to start such a rumor against me? I started running through a Rogue’s Gallery in my mind, seeing each of their faces in the bright bathroom air and, with each appearance, the fanciful reason why they might want to sabotage me, each probably more ludicrous than the last. Gerald Krieger: angry at the way I had torpedoed his client-stealing scheme. Michael Lopez: angry at the way I had humiliated him in front of the others. Susan Sanford: angry at the way I had refused to protect her and her team from Wes’s predations. Amy Crawford: angry at the way I had gotten her fired. Mary Walton: angry at the way I had failed her and hoping to drive me into an early grave. Bethany Bishop: angry at the way I had started to shun her and--

My thoughts stopped in midstream. Not me, I realized suddenly. Everyone in the gallery probably hated me and would love to see me fail, but what if the rumor hadn’t been started to destroy me. What if it had been started to destroy Bethany. And what if Wes had started it himself?

“Wait a minute,” I said out loud to the squeezy turtle. “Does that make any sense at all?”

The turtle smiled cryptically back but said nothing.

Bethany had said that Wes was spreading rumors about her, talking to the junior members of her team about her, but had not told me what those rumors were. If, like Susan, Bethany was standing between Wes’s meat hooks and the young women that worked for her, it would fit Wes’s pattern to start spreading rumors about her. With Susan, it had been about her incompetence and her prudishness. With Bethany, could it be about her infidelity and sluttiness?

But if it was Wes who started such a rumor, why would he tell me about it? When he spoke to me, he certainly sounded like he believed it, not at all like he knew that he had made it up. Or was that part of his plan?

Ugh. I threw the turtle across the room, and he bounced mindlessly off the back of the door and landed on the floor under our pedestal sink -- exactly the hard-to-reach place that everything dropped on our bathroom floor seemed to end up. I buried my face in my hands. What the fuck was going on? And what was I going to do?

Whoever had started the rumor, Wes Howard was now using it to blackmail me into doing his bidding. It wasn’t true, but evidently that didn’t matter. Even if Wes knew it wasn’t true, what would stop him from telling Mary -- or Jenny -- that it was true? He certainly had no scruples when it came to this kind of thing. One way or the other, he was going to get his way, and the only thing I had to do was play along.

But with what, exactly? What was it that Wes wanted me to play ball on? A bunch of meaningless committee appointments? Who cares? Did it really matter if Neil Richards or Kathleen Meyer was the chair of the Bylaws Committee? It certainly didn’t matter to me.

You know it’s not going to end there.

I looked up, thinking wildly for an instant that someone else had spoken. I looked over to where the turtle had landed, and I could just see his laugh-lined eye peering at me from behind the porcelain.

No, it’s not. It’s going to start with committee appointments, but it’s going to progress to other things. What other things? Anything illegal? Immoral? 

I rubbed my eyes, trying to blot out the images that had arisen -- ridiculous, yet oddly compelling things that a man as unprincipled as Wes Howard could try to involve me in, could try to use me and the organization I worked for to give him access to. They weren’t hard to imagine. They fell into the three essential categories of the corrupt: money, women, and power -- things like embezzlement, like sex trafficking, like ritual murder. I didn’t know where I could draw a line. Everything seemed completely unbelievable and entirely possible at the same time.

Tap, tap, tap.

“Alan? Alan, are you all right, honey?”

It was Jenny, back at the door.

“I’m okay,” I said, lying, and knowing that it wouldn’t be the last one I told her. Most of me wanted to tell her -- wanted to get in front of the lie rather than risk having her hear it from Wes -- but some small piece of me wasn’t up to it. At least not then.

“I really think you should keep that doctor’s appointment,” Jenny said, lovingly. “If you’re feeling up to it, that is.”

I considered my options. I was feeling sick to my stomach, but I was certain that had more to do with Wes Howard than any migraine I might or might not have had.

“Yeah, okay,” I said, slowly getting to my feet, and flushing the toilet, mostly for show.

“I’ll drive you,” Jenny said. “If we leave in the next ten minutes we’ll be able to make it.”

I opened the bathroom door, and saw my wife standing there in her bare feet, the worry on her face even more prominent than her pregnant belly.

“Okay,” I said, giving her an awkward hug. “Let me change into something else first.”

12

My wife drove me to the doctor’s office late that terrible afternoon. She must’ve left Jacob with a neighbor or something, because I don’t remember him being along for the ride, but I do remember pulling up to that same gulag-like clinic that we had recently taken him to. Jenny actually had to help me out of the car. I was that unsteady on my feet. Even with my eyes closed behind a thick pair of sunglasses it was still too bright outside, and she carefully led me like a blind person into the central processing nexus and then down one of the spoke-like arteries to sit in one of the waiting room chairs.

I remember sitting there with my eyes closed, feeling Jenny’s presence next to me, listening to the soft ambient noises of the clinic, and trying not to think about anything. There was so much, and it was all so overwhelming, that the allure of wiping my mind absolutely clean seemed the most inviting of all. The muffled voices from the nurses station, the persistent cough of the transient patients, the staccato opening and closing of doors, and the rhythmic pulsing of air through the air handling system -- they all merged together into a kind of lullaby, and I felt myself drifting off, not to sleep, but to some other welcome form of mindless oblivion.

“Alan Larson?”

“Over here,” I heard Jenny say after a short pause, and then turning towards me, “Alan, honey, they’re ready for you.”

I opened my eyes and slowly nodded my head.

“Do you want me to go in with you?”

“No,” I said, rising from my chair, leaning heavily on Jenny’s arm to regain my feet. “No, I’ll be all right. You wait here.”

The light seemed tolerable and I could clearly see the nurse -- a man with the build of a linebacker -- waiting for me at the door that led to the examination rooms. I began walking confidently towards him and he stood aside so that I would have uncontested access to the passage.

“Okay,” I heard Jenny say behind me. “I’ll be here when you get back.”

Inside the nurse -- his nametag said “Ray” -- led me back to one of the examination rooms, where he weighed me, took my temperature and my blood pressure. When he asked me why I was seeing the doctor today I told him that I was having my first migraine attack, and he gave me a sympathetic look.

“Migraines are awful,” he said. “My mother gets them, and they usually put her down for an entire day.”

I nodded my head knowingly. “They’re no fun,” I said.

“Okay,” Ray said, standing up and getting ready to leave the room. “The doctor will be with you in a few minutes.”

“Okay.”

I don’t know how long I was in that small examination room by myself, but, contrary to what Ray had predicted, it was a whole lot longer than a few minutes. For a little while I just sat there, my eyes barely open, my mind trying to bring back the emptiness that I had momentarily achieved in the waiting room. But that proved elusive, the change and the near absence of any ambient sounds having the opposite effect on my disposition. Are these little rooms soundproof? I wondered suddenly, remembering the times we had brought Jacob here and the way I had to hold him down in order for the nurse to administer those endless childhood vaccinations, his shrill, plaintive voice screaming in absolute terror and frenzy. I strained my ears to see if I could pick up the noise of any similar human suffering going on around me. Sadly -- or not, depending on your point of view -- there was nothing. No sounds at all. Just the steady and untrammeled rush of blood in my own vessels shushing and rushing in my ears.

I stood up and went over to look at the poster on the wall. Each of the examination rooms here had one, dedicated to a variety of medical conditions or anatomical systems. They could be used, I supposed, as educational tools by the doctors, pointing out the inner workings of a patient’s condition in colorful medical illustrations -- although I couldn’t remember any doctor I had seen here ever even referring to one. The room I was in must’ve been used to see pregnant women, because its poster was headlined PREGNANCY AND BIRTH. It was dominated by the figure of a nude woman, her belly swollen with a full-term fetus, fully visible in a kind of cut away view, its head already in its fateful position against her cervix, and its little face both wrinkled and wisened. The woman herself -- her dark hair framing a face that was neither caucaisian, asiatic, nor hispanic, but some hybrid of the three -- looked at me with a serene wisdom of her own, knowing fully the role she and all like her were to play, and accepting it as both inevitable and foreordained. All around her was a series of smaller illustrations, each related to her and her condition, the largest of which was an exploded view of her own reproductive organs, showing the emergence of her ovum from her ovary, its pursuit and fertilization by a cloud of wriggling spermatozoa, its long journey down her Fallopian tube, and its eventual implantation in the wall of her uterus.

I worked my way around the examination table -- sure enough, equipped with stirrups for gynecological exams -- and wandered over to the small counter and set of cabinets that sat in the far corner. Here was the sink where doctors washed their hands, and on the counter sat an array of glass jars, each stuffed to overfilling with a series of examination tools -- tongue depressors, cotton swabs, rubber gloves, and so on. Without embarrassment I began opening the cabinet doors, and was surprised to find the cupboards largely bare. Several extra boxes of rubber gloves, a few folded examination gowns, and some bottles of antiseptic hand soap.

I didn’t know what kind of surprise I was expecting -- is this where the doctors kept their medical experiments gone wrong: malformed fetuses kept in formaldehyde jars, just like the ones that sat on the countertop -- but the surprise came not from the contents of their cupboards but from the sudden opening of the examination room door and the swift and unexpected entry of the physician that would decide my fate.

“Well, now, what seems to be--” the doctor began, an older man with a bald pate and a white coat, stopping suddenly at the sight of his patient, not waiting patiently in the chair like he had been expecting but, evidently, rifling through their cabinets in search of something. My hands, in fact, at that moment were in the process of stuffing an examination gown back into a cupboard that had already twice proved of insufficient dimensions to contain its disrupted fabric and that of its brethren.

The doctor looked at me suspiciously for a moment and then seemed to collect himself. “Were you told to put on one of those gowns?” 

My first instinct was to run, and I believe if he hadn’t been standing in the doorway I might have done just that. The irrationality of the impulse surprised even me, but there it was, an intense need to flee, to get out of the tiny, suffocating, controlled space and back out into the wide unknown, futilely tamping down the chaos that otherwise threatened to overwhelm me.

“Yes,” I said, welcoming the lie as far easier than explaining what I was doing looking through their cabinets. “Yes,” I said again. “But one wasn’t put out for me. I didn’t know where else to look.”

The doctor shook his head, and carefully shut the door behind him without, I noticed, turning his back on me. “That’s not necessary,” he said. “Why don’t you come and have a seat?” He gestured to the patient chair I had previously vacated.

I did so obediently, and I watched him as he rolled a stool out from under a small table affixed to the wall in the very corner of the room and settled himself down upon it. Under his white coat he wore a dress shirt, tie, and what looked like an uncomfortable pair of slacks. He hooked his loafered feet on the chrome rim of the stool and dropped the file he had brought in with him on the table.

“So,” he said. “What brought you in here today?”

I looked absently at the file he had seemed to discard. It was manilla and only contained a few loose pieces of paper, one of which was poking its goldenrod hue out from behind the folder’s cover. On the folder’s exposed tab was a large white sticker emblazoned with a capital letter L, and a smaller companion on which someone had typed -- evidently on an old-fashioned typewriter -- my last name comma first name.

“My wife thinks I’m having a migraine.”

“She does? What do you think?”

That drew my attention away from the folder. Given the look on the doctor’s face, I got the distinct impression that was how he intended it. I looked down at the tag pinned to the breast pocket of his coat: a medical ID, with an outdated picture of the same man, and a name laserprinted in clear bold type. BLAIR comma Leland. 

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve never had a migraine before.”

“Are the lights in here bothering you?”

“A little.”

The doctor reached behind him and flipped off the light switch. For a moment we were plunged into absolute darkness, but then he pulled the door open a crack, allowing enough light from the hallway to spill into the room so that we could still see each other.

“Is that better?”

“Yes,” I said. “It is.”

In the partial darkness, the doctor sat and studied me for a few moments. He crossed his arms over his chest. “Your name is Alan, right? Alan Larson?”

“Yes.”

“Alan, I’m Dr. Blair.”

He extended a hand and I shook it. I struggled to place him. Now in the dim light it was even harder to be sure, but I don’t think I had ever seen him before.

“Your badge says Leland.”

He looked at me quizzically. Not offended. At least I didn’t think so.

“I hate that ‘i’m the doctor and you’re the patient shit’. Always makes me feel like a child.”

I think he actually smiled. “My friends call me Lee.”

I looked at him skeptically. He definitely wasn’t my friend, but I decided not to push it. I had already done far more than I had ever dared do before and my heart was thumping in my chest like it was ready to leave without me.

“Okay, Lee.”

His smile softened a little, probably recognizing that it could never completely remove the wall that stood between us. 

“Can you tell me what happened to you today?”

What happened to me today. I knew he was asking about my symptoms, but a lot had happened to me today, and his question caused the fear and the shame that I worked so hard to keep at bay to well up within me. I choked back a sob, terrified that so much seemed so close to the surface, and that such an innocent inquiry could tap into it so quickly.

“Well,” I said, struggling to compose myself. “It started at my desk at work this morning. I started having trouble seeing my computer screen.”

“What do you do?”

“There was-- Wait. What?”

“For a living. What do you do for a living?”

What did I do for a living. Oh fuck, buddy, if only I could tell you in a way you would understand. In a way anyone would understand.

“I work in an office,” I said.

“...okay,” he said, obviously expecting more. I was loath to give it to him, but he seemed insistent.

“I sit at my desk. I type things into my computer. I have meetings with people. I send emails. I talk to people on the phone. Sometimes I get on airplanes and stay in hotels.”

“All right,” he said. “And today you started having trouble seeing your computer screen?”

So then I told him the story. About how I first thought something was wrong with my screen, but then realized the occlusion was in my vision, about the shimmering waves and the dizziness, about the dry heaves and the floor of the public bathroom, about the painful light and the pounding in my temples, about the dark room and the disorientation, about the sickening smell of food and the unsteadiness on my feet. And while I told him all of these things, beneath them all, running in the same current but at a lower and more dangerous amperage, were all the unspoken things that were likely the true cause of my affliction. The extra work that had been piled on my shoulders, the lack of confidence that Mary put very much on display, the hopeless expectations that Eleanor Rumford measured me by, the dangerous game that Wes Howard had sucked me into, the lack of confidence I had in my ability to retain and lead my team, the lingering and diminishing connection with Bethany Bishop, the uncertainty about the new position I was interviewing for and the fear of being found out, the burden that I was increasingly becoming on my wife, her own hidden inadequacies papered over with bravado and emotional distance, and my aching inability to understand or accept the son who loved me in ways that both frightened and angered me. If I’d had my wits about me, these are the “symptoms” that I would have described to Dr. Leland Blair, but he wasn’t that kind of doctor and I wasn’t that kind of patient.

But it overwhelmed me nonetheless, my emotions seizing up as if they had grasped the live wire of my dysfunction and uncertainty, and before I could finish my litany I was crying, the tears coming unwillingly and uncontrollably. Then I began to blubber, my entire face melting with what felt like syrupy bile coming out of my nose and eyes.

The doctor placed a reassuring hand on my knee and handed me some tissues. “There, there,” he said, exactly like he was comforting a small child. “It’s all right. It’s all right.”

It was madness. I looked down into the abyss and let myself fall in.

“I’m sorry,” I said, blowing my nose into the tissues he had handed me and then absently using them to wipe away some of my tears. “I don’t know why I’m here. I know I’m broken, broken inside, but I don’t know what you or anyone else can do to fix me. I can’t feel anything soft or warm without realizing how empty and hollow it is. My son, my wife, my friends, my co-workers, my clients -- they’re nothing to me. They’re forever separate. I can’t see them. It’s as if they don’t even exist. I’m alone. No matter how many people are around me, it’s as if I’m alone and always will be. I don’t know how to go on living like this.”

I dropped my face into my hands and let a fresh wave of sobs overtake me. If it weren’t for the reassuring pats he continued to place on my knee, I wouldn’t have known that anyone else was there with me. I was at the bottom of a well and there wasn’t any way that I could see to climb back out.

“Are you here alone, today?”

“What?”

“Are you here alone today? Is there someone waiting for you? To take you home?”

It took me longer than usual to put the necessary thoughts together, first to understand, and then to respond. “My wife is here. She’s out in the waiting room. She’s eight months pregnant.”

He nodded reassuringly and then spoke in his best doctor voice. He told me he was going to write me two prescriptions -- one for the migraines and the other for anxiety. He gave me the short set of instructions for how and when to take each. But then he said he was also going to give me a referral to a counselor -- someone I could speak to privately and confidentially, and who could help me sort through some of the challenges I was facing. The counselors were here at this clinic, and he strongly encouraged me to give them a try.  

“All right?”

I looked at him blankly, not really understanding anything he had said.

“All right,” I said.

He wrote out the scripts and handed them to me. Sniffling, I took the pieces of paper from him and began shuffling them and scanning each one with uncomprehension.

“Do you want me to ask someone to bring your wife back here?”

“What?” I asked, looking up at him.

“Do you want your wife to come get you? Or can you make it back to her by yourself?”

“No,” I said, the intensity of my shame overcoming me, almost bringing the acrid tears back. “No, I can find my way. Just give me a few moments to collect myself.”

He tapped me on the knee again before rising from his chair. “Take all the time you need.” Then, seemingly without my observation, he was gone and the door had been closed behind him. 

13

Jenny wanted to know everything. She was reserved at first -- looking up like an expectant father when I came back into the waiting area -- and only asking me about how I was feeling and how things ‘had gone’ as she walked me down the long hallways and out of the clinic. By the time we were back in the car, however, her intense need to know and to control could be held back no longer. Even as she was backing our vehicle out of its parking space, the interrogation began.

Which doctor did I see? What did he say? What did I tell him? What did he think was wrong? Did he prescribe me anything? What was it? How often and how long was I to take it? What did it do and how did it work? When was I supposed to go back? How was I feeling? What did I think? 

I only answered a handful of her questions and none of them to her satisfaction. I told her about the two medications Blair had prescribed -- one for the migraines and one for anxiety -- and as soon as the word anxiety slipped out of my mouth I immediately regretted it.

“Anxiety?” Jenny said, sounding legitimately surprised. “Why did he prescribe you something for anxiety?”

Yeah. What did I have to be anxious about? I closed my eyes and rested my head on the car window. “I don’t know, Jenny. I guess he thought it would help with the migraines.”

She continued to needle me but I did my best to tune her out after that. If this was how she was going to react to the anxiety medication there was no way I was going to tell her about the counseling referral. I had already made sure to stash that piece of paper in a separate pocket from the other two so there’d be no chance of some accidental mixup. We went to the pharmacy and I waited in the car while she filled the prescriptions. The business day was over and the office was closed so I decided not to check my messages, knowing that as soon as we got home I was going to pop my two pills and then go back to bed. In all the universe, there wasn’t anything I wanted more.

It was full dark when I awoke again, and at first I didn’t even know where I was. And I felt strange -- nauseous but not nauseous, dizzy but not dizzy, sick but not sick. In a way I felt like I was floating, but not peacefully on air. If this was floating, then I was floating in a vat of pudding full of needles.

I looked over at the clock, and could just make out the time through the two pill bottles that had been left on the dresser in front of it. 2:17 AM. Jenny was asleep next to me and our ceiling fan swirled on its lowest setting above me.

Dear, Christ. What had I done?

That question seemed to comprise my entire painful universe. It was unfocused and overwhelming; not just one fear but thousands, all crowding in on me like gleeful demons, eager to drag their latest foolish supplicant to hell. 

I fumbled with the wet sheet covering me and fell out of bed. I had tried to stand, but neither my legs nor my inner ears were along for that ride and I found myself quickly sprawled out on the area rug that dominated the open floor space of our small bedroom. I remember smelling the carpet fibers -- a strange combination of mothballs and long-forgotten grime -- and believing for a moment that I was paralyzed, that the toxic cocktail Blair had given me had short-circuited my nervous system. I tried to swallow and started coughing, dry-in-the-chest but wet-in-the-mouth spasms that momentarily replaced my consciousness.

“Alan?”

It was Jenny, dragged out of sleep by the sounds of my nocturnal terror.

“Oh, my God! Alan!”

In a moment she was over me, her face hovering down near mine, cooing at me, hushing me, telling me everything was going to be all right.

I tried to get up, but couldn’t, collapsing back down into the useless pile I had become. “I’m going to be sick,” I managed to say between coughs. My head was pounding -- like the migraine I had experienced earlier had been but a prelude.

“Not here!” Jenny practically shouted. “Oh, God, Alan! Not here!”

There was nothing worse in Jenny’s universe than vomit deposited anywhere other than a toilet. The stinking rug offending my nostrils, I knew, could be easily replaced. We had picked it up on sale at a home goods store for $39.99, and even when I wasn’t face down on it, I hated it. It would have been a pleasure to vomit on it, to show it who was boss, but Jenny, I knew, would absolutely lose her damn mind.

With great effort, I pushed myself up and shakily started crawling towards the bathroom. A wave of dizziness almost overwhelmed me, but it lessened when I closed my eyes.

“Alan! What are you doing! Are you all right?”

I had no ability to answer her, single-mindedly focused as I was on my movements and destination. The needle-laden pudding was still there, and I was pushing my way through it, my extremities stinging and tingling as if they had all fallen asleep and were coming back to life at the same time. Shakily, unsteadily, I started making slow progress.

“Mommy?”

It was Jacob. We had evidently woken him up, and he was standing in our bedroom doorway. From my position I could only see his stocky legs, his bare feet, and the tail end of the blanket he must’ve been holding. He was effectively blocking my path.

“Move!” I said, my voice begging more than ordering.

“Jacob!” Jenny shouted, much more sternly. “Let your father through!”

A kind of impasse followed, one I didn’t have the energy to sustain. In the small confines of our bedroom, Jenny was behind me and had no way of getting to Jacob, and Jacob, evidently, was either too frightened or too stubborn to move. In short order, my arms gave out on me, and I was back down on the floor, my face, fortunately, past the limits of the rug and now resting against the section of dusty hardwood floor right before the entryway.

“Fuck it,” I said, more to myself than to anyone else. “I’ll just die here.”

In the roaring silence that followed, nothing else seemed to matter. When I started vomiting, I barely heard the screaming commotion that surrounded me.

14 

We were up to nearly four in the morning -- me getting sick and Jenny cleaning it up multiple times -- before the room would stop spinning and things were calm enough that I could contemplate going back to bed. It was a bad reaction to the medicine Blair had given me. I couldn’t really know that for sure, but in the moment that’s what I decided had happened and no one was going to talk me out of it.

“Throw them away,” I told Jenny, never wanting to see the offensive little pills again.

She tried to reason with me, asked me not to act rashly, to give the medicine a chance to work.

“Fuck the medicine,” I told her, climbing back into bed and pulling the covers up over my head. “It’s poison. I’m not taking any more.”

She must’ve stopped arguing with me, and I must’ve fallen back to sleep, because the next thing I remember was the alarm clock going off. The covers were still over my head and I had to fight against them to free myself from their cocoon before I could stumble across the room and extinguish the offending noise.

“Are you okay?”

I looked back at the bed. Jenny was an enormous shape under the blankets, her face framed in the dim light by the glowing cream-colored pillowcase, Jacob’s tousled mop of hair just visible below her left cheek. The alarm may have woken her up, or she may have been laying like that awake through the passing few hours of the early morning. There was no way to tell.

I considered her question for a moment. Without even thinking about it, I realized I had bounded out of bed in my usual manner and there I stood, upright, on both feet, without a trace of dizziness or disorientation fogging up my brain.

“Yes,” I said. “I think so.”

“Are you going to work?”

Work. The word was like an incantation, conjuring up a thousand thoughts that had lain dormant and more or less forgotten. There was something on my calendar today, something important, but I had a hard time pinpointing it. It wasn’t the leadership meeting, was it? The terror of that thought almost giving me a heart attack. No, that was later this week. I was leaving on Thursday. What was it?

“Don’t you have that call with Steve Anderson today?”

That was it. “Yes. Yes, I do.”

“Why don’t you stay home and take it here?”

The thought of that seemed to terrify me even more. No, no, I should take it in the office. I’ve got a lot of things that still need to get done before next week’s leadership meeting. I can’t afford another day out of the office. When it’s time for the call with Steve, I can close my office door and minimize the distractions. It’ll be all right. It’ll be fine.

“Alan?”

It was only then that I realized that I hadn’t said any of my inner monologue out loud.

“I’m fine,” I said. “I’m going to the office.”

“Okay,” Jenny said, in one of her rare moments of acquiescence. “But do me a favor. Get dressed in Jacob’s room. I need to sleep in today.”

I knew better than to argue with that. I quickly gathered the items I would need and then quietly left the bedroom, shutting the door behind me. A shower, a quick breakfast, packing a bag lunch, and a short drive later I found myself at the office, riding the elevator up from the parking garage and walking down the long, interior wall of the building to my office. It was not lost on me that less than twenty-four hours ago I had been practically crawling along that same wall, using its planar geometry like a blind man desperate to find some small safe haven. Whatever had afflicted me, migraine or something else, was now equally a memory. I was tired, but no more so than any other day. And my throat was a little sore. But otherwise I felt ready to tackle whatever the day was planning to throw at me.

The call with Steve was not until 1 PM that afternoon -- 1 PM Central, that is. Steve’s assistant had confirmed it for 2 PM Eastern and that was 1 PM Central. I felt confident that I was not going to make that mistake again. I would also make sure that I had a completely empty bladder.

I kept to myself as much as I possibly could that morning, working for most of it with my office door closed. Part of me hoped that it looked natural -- I had a lot of phone calls to make, following up on all the volunteer committee changes that Wes Howard had demanded, and office protocol often looked favorably on those who closed their doors during long phone calls so as not to disturb all the other drones busily going about their tasks -- but another part of me didn’t really care. I just wasn’t up to interacting with people that morning. The phone calls alone were likely to exhaust me.

Hello? Yes, Mr. Richards? Neil Richards? It’s Alan Larson calling. Yes, that Alan Larson. Yes. Yes, I am looking forward to the leadership retreat next week, and that’s actually why I’m calling. Our incoming chair Wes Howard has taken another look at the pending committee rosters and has decided to bring some fresh faces onto some of the key committees. He asked me to call and thank you for your service on the Bylaws Committee, and also to inform you that he will be asking Kathleen Meyer to chair the committee next year. Yes. Yes, sir, I understand that Eleanor had previously asked you to serve as chair, and Wes would very much like you to continue serving on the committee, but he has decided to tap Kathleen for the role of chair. Yes. Yes, it is his decision as incoming chair. I’m glad you understand. No. No, please. We very much wish you will still attend next week’s leadership meeting. Wes is hoping to speak with you personally there, and your contributions there will be an important part of setting our plans for the future. Yes. Yes, thank you. We’ll see you. Thank you. Good-bye.

That was a good one and most of them were not good ones. Everything I said about Wes was a lie. Wes Howard didn’t care if people like Neil Richards stayed on their committees or if they came to the leadership retreat. He wasn’t going to speak to them personally and he would probably laugh at any contributions they would try to make. All of that was lies, but they had to be told. What else was I supposed to tell the people that Wes had rejected? The truth? That Wes Howard didn’t give a shit about anyone except Wes Howard?

I did that until quarter to twelve and then darted down to the breakroom to retrieve my bag lunch so I could eat it at my desk. There were a few people milling about in there, some of them waiting for the long line of microwaves to warm up their frozen meals, but no one stopped me or even tried to speak to me. In a flash I was behind my closed office door again, spreading a few napkins down on my desk surface to catch the crumbs.

I had planned to spend the last hour before my call with Steve preparing for that discussion, and only at that moment realized that Steve really hadn’t given me anything in particular to prepare. I tried to remember what it was that he had said to me in the Emerald Club at Logan Airport -- something about their plans for the future of the organization and wanting to hear my ideas.

And then my heart stopped. He wanted to hear my ideas. Not about the stupid standardized test they had given me, but about the future of their organization. That’s what Steve was going to be calling me about in… in sixty-three minutes, and I hadn’t prepared a goddamn thing.

I pushed my lunch aside and turned to my computer, calling up the organization’s website and reading as much as I could as quickly as I could. There. Their mission and strategic objectives. And there. Their Board of Directors, Steve’s smiling face staring back at me from the computer screen. And there. Their list of committees and each of their purposes. The site was organized like almost any similar organization, full of facts, but absent any kind of larger context. Where were the challenges they were facing? The dysfunction that probably existed around their Board table? The programs that failed to achieve their intended purposes from lack of funding? I wasn’t going to find any of that on their website, and that’s really what I needed if I was going to invent something plausible for my ideas on how to move the organization forward.

Suddenly there was a knock at my door. I looked up, my eye catching the time on its journey to the door (12:21 PM), and saw Bethany’s form practically pressed against my door’s glass, still cracked from the punch Gerald had given it.

She was probably the last person I wanted to talk to, especially with only thirty-nine minutes to go before my phone interview, so I gave her a stern look, pointing first to my watch and then to my phone. I’m busy! I’m making calls! But she met my pantomime with her own worried look, holding up two fingers and then pointing to her own watch. Reluctantly, I waved her in. She shut the door quietly behind her and stood with her back to it.

“No time for lunch, eh?”

I spread my hands over my half-eaten sandwich and carrot sticks. “I’ve got too many calls to make,” I said. “Wes practically re-wrote the entire committee roster and I have to reach everyone before they start getting on airplanes.”

“You’ve been holed up in here all morning,” she said, her voice laden with emotional overtones. “I was hoping you’d have a few minutes for me today.”

“Maybe later,” I said, roughly. “Can I come find you at the end of the day?”

She hitched her breath, somewhat painfully, and sighed. “I suppose. It’s kind of important. I’m quitting.”

“You’re what?”

“I wanted to do it first thing this morning, but I didn’t have the nerve to interrupt you.”

“Bethany, did you say you were quitting?”

She seemed to steel herself, choking back tears that had suddenly come into her eyes. “Yes, Alan. I am. I just can’t take it here any more. But I wanted to tell you before I made it official. I’m meeting with Mary at one.”

This was way too much information for me to assimilate. I just stared slack-jawed back at her, a single thought echoing again and again in my mind. She’s quitting. She’s quitting. She’s quitting.

“Alan,” she pleaded. “Say something.”

I shook my head mindlessly. “What is there to say? Is it because of me?”

The question appeared to make her uncomfortable. She started to answer it multiple times, but never seemed able to let more than half a syllable escape her lips.

It enraged me. I guess there’s no other word for it. Standing there, in her bargain basement business suit, with her mousy face and thick calves, looking to me, TO ME, to save her from the embarrassment of having to tell me that I was the cause of her problems, that I was the reason she was leaving the company. It was too much for me to take. In that moment, I hated her. I hated her and anything I might have ever felt for her.

“Get out,” I told her, struggling to keep myself from shouting.

“Alan, please.”

“Just get out of my office, Bethany. Go tell Mary what a monster I am. Tell her how I wasn’t able to protect you from all the stalking predators that surround you -- the real ones and the ones you conjure up from your own fear and inadequacy. Get, the, fuck, out, and never talk to me again.”

Now she was crying, thick, milky tears coming down her heavily made-up face, and that enraged me even more. She’s a clown. A fucking clown! It felt like bombs were constantly going off in my head, and I stood up, shooting up like a jackrabbit, not with any clear intention, but just needing to flee, or to fight.

Bethany must have thought the latter, because I saw the fear in her eyes as she turned, fumbling first with the door knob and then stumbling her way out of my office. I soon followed her, pure instinct taking over, pausing only to scoop up the remains of my lunch and to make sure that my cell phone was in my pocket. I had a call, you see, maybe the most important call of my life, now in thirty-two minutes, and if I was going to take it, I would have to be far away from the scene of this crime. 

15

I took the call with Steve Anderson sitting on a bench in the small city park that adjoined our office building. Without intending to, I found a bench with a clear view of the building and the floor that our company squatted on. And during the conversation with Steve, I could not initially keep my eyes off the windows on that floor, especially the corner where I knew Mary’s office to be, and the dark shapes moving around behind them.

“Alan!” Steve’s friendly voice said at the very beginning, sounding more like an old college friend than a potential new boss. “I’m so glad we were able to find time for this discussion.”

“Of course,” I said, wondering if he thought I would have been too busy to take his call. “It’s my pleasure.”

“Although, I’ll confess, if things go the way I’m expecting them to, I suspect you’ll be doing much more of the talking than me.”

I wasn’t sure if that was meant as an ice-breaking jest or a serious challenge. I decided to treat it with the same ambivalence. “That’s no problem. I’m ready to dazzle you.”

“Well, okay! Let me set the stage for you.”

Steve then went on to summarize the history of our discussions and the opportunity that was being laid on the table. He talked briefly about the organization, the leadership position that was available, and a few takeaways from the interview that had been conducted in Boston. Nothing he said was any news to me, and for a moment, I wondered if there was a third party on the line with us, someone for whom such a summary would have been helpful. I listened patiently, my eyes on Mary’s office. It was now a few minutes past one, and Bethany was undoubtedly in there, saying whatever it was that she was going to say.

“So, now here we are,” Steve was saying. “You’ve had some time to reflect on the opportunity and, hopefully, some time to research us and some of the challenges we’re facing. Let’s, for the sake of this discussion, assume that you’ve been hired, and running our organization is now your responsibility. What are some of the things that you’d do in your first week on the job?”

It was my turn to speak. My subconscious mind knew that, but my conscious attention was still on the office tower windows, trying to peer through them and see what was going on.

“Alan? Are you there?”

“Yes,” I said quickly. “Yes, I am, Steve. Sorry, you broke up a little. Can you repeat that question?”

There was a short pause and then Steve did, and while his words fell again against my eardrum I realized that as much as I might think my fate was being determined without me up in Mary’s office, in fact, this conversation with Steve was the more pressing opportunity to take an active hand in my own success or failure.

“So, Alan. What would you do in your first week on the job?”

“I wouldn’t wait for my first week, Steve. As soon as it was official, as soon as you put me in charge I would be on the phone, calling around to all the Board members; yes, to introduce myself to them, but more importantly, to hear from them, to hear privately, one-on-one, what each thought about the current state of the organization -- the good, the bad, and the ugly.”

There was another pause on the line. I let it happen, waiting for Steve to say something, anything, before I dared speak again.

“Very good,” he said. “Go on.”

I stood up, turned my back on the office building, and then did exactly that. “I have a few ideas of my own. Membership, first and foremost, I think. Shoring up a declining membership seems like the very first order of business, but I can’t pretend as an outsider to understand all the dynamics that are causing that. You guys are a lot closer to the problem and, as members themselves, the Board likely has a better understanding of what works and what doesn’t. I will need to gather all that intelligence before my first day if I’m going to have the kind of impact that you’re looking for.”

“Try that,” Steve said.

“What?”

“Try that on me. Now. If you get the job, I’ll be one of the Board members you call, so you can prequalify me now. I’d like to see what kind of questions you’d ask me.”

“Okay,” I said, as I started walking down one of the paved footpaths that snaked around and through the city park. There was a nervous energy inside me that needed an outlet, and the exertion helped me think as I began questioning him, exactly as I thought I would if I had, in fact, been offered the job.

Steve played along in kind, feeding me the information I requested, speaking candidly about the threats and opportunities he saw facing his organization. There were times when I had to pull more details out of him, times when I confidently offered my own thoughts and advice, and times when he politely pulled me back on point. It was surprisingly easy, unlike any interview I had ever been a part of. Within minutes any pretense of us being antagonists was gone. I wasn’t trying to trick him and he wasn’t trying to trap me. We were partners, each of us with a needed perspective if we were going to solve the problems we were discussing.

It was fun. And it went on for far longer than I ever would have thought. The quick review I had performed of the organization’s website helped me, but I’m not sure that was even necessary. Steve freely offered any information I needed. It was okay if I didn’t know something about the organization. I knew enough to know what questions to ask. And, more important than that, I knew what to do with the information he provided. Maybe for the first time in my life, I felt like one of the grown-ups in the room. I was a professional. A doctor. Taking a patient’s history, assessing his symptoms, making a diagnosis, and prescribing a course of action.

At one point Steve interrupted the flow. “Alan, this has been a very informative discussion. I regret that I didn’t reserve more time on my schedule.”

I looked at my watch. It was eleven minutes after two.

“I’d be happy to schedule another call if you want to continue the discussion.”

“That won’t be necessary. At least not presently. In all our discussions, I neglected to ask if you had any questions for me.”

I thought for a second. “I don’t think so,” I said. “Other than your timetable for making your decision.”

“I’ll have to report back to the Executive Committee,” he said. “We have a call scheduled for Friday to discuss the remaining candidates for the position. I expect that we will make a decision on that call and start informing people early the following week.”

“Very good,” I said. “Thanks for your time today, Steve.”

“Thank you, Alan. You take care now.”

The line clicked off. I looked around at my surroundings. I was still in the park, but at practically the farthest point I could be from my office building.

16

As I walked back to the office I thought a lot about some of the last words Steve had said.

At least not presently.

That one stuck with me the most. I had asked him if he wanted to schedule another call to continue our discussion, and he had said that it wasn’t necessary. At least not presently. It was more his tone than the words themselves, but they left me with the decided impression that I had passed some kind of test, and that there were only a few more formalities to move through. Steve had seemed to signal, intentionally or otherwise, that we would be speaking again and that, when we did, it would be on a new and different footing.

Discuss the remaining candidates.

And that one gave my exuberance pause. There were other candidates still being considered? Those words reminded me of the stage management I had been subjected to in Boston, ostensibly to keep me from accidentally bumping into other candidates, but which instead left me with the impression that they were hiding from me the fact that there weren’t any other candidates. And again, Steve’s tone seemed to communicate something different than the words themselves, something along the lines of that original impression. The remaining candidates, right? You’re a professional, Alan. You understand that I have to pretend that there are other candidates. That’s how this game is played.

Either way, I felt extremely confident. I thought I had nailed it. I would have wagered a large sum of money that I was going to get offered the job. In fact, I remember standing in the elevator lobby of my office building, watching the lighted numbers slowly count their way down to my level, and seriously considering the idea of not getting into the elevator car when it arrived. There was likely a shitstorm waiting for me up on the eleventh floor, and maybe, just maybe, it was something I no longer really needed to wade into. 

I could just leave. I could just go home and never go back to that awful place. In a few days, Steve would have his conversation with the Executive Committee, they would discuss the ‘remaining candidates,’ make their decision and, a few days after that, I would receive (and almost certainly accept) their offer. With that prospect before me, what was the point of subjecting myself to more of the pain and suffering that comprised my current employment?

It would be a risk, I supposed. I felt confident, but maybe I was misreading the situation again. Maybe there really were other candidates, and one of them was going to get the offer next week instead of me. Then where would I be? Unemployed with no real prospects on the horizon. That felt scary -- terrifying, in a way, knowing how much Jenny and Jacob and the new baby were depending on me -- but, at the same time, it also felt liberating. So I don’t get the new job? So what? There were other jobs out there, and I would certainly get one of them eventually. And without the drama and dysfunction of my current position getting in the way, I could better dedicate myself to getting one of them. We had some money in our savings account. We could make it for a few months if we had to. 

I thought about calling Jenny, and was in the process of fishing my cell phone out of my pocket when the elevator dinged and its doors opened before me. Standing in the car was Bethany Bishop, a cardboard box filled with the personal effects from her office in her arms. We both froze upon recognizing the other. I’m not sure what expression sat on my face, but Bethany looked like she had just given birth.

In a moment, the elevator doors started to close, and that prompted action -- the two of us reaching out simultaneously to prevent their movement. My arms were freer, and I had an easier time accomplishing the maneuver.

“Bethany,” I said. “What are you still doing here?”

She shook her head, as if determined to not fall into a trap. “Mary had to put off our meeting,” she said quickly. “They just finished interrogating me. Now they’re looking for you.”

She sounded exhausted, but I detected a small lift in her voice at the end. Yes, I thought. I’m sure they are looking for me.

“Stand aside, Alan.”

That woke me from my reverie and I realized I was effectively blocking her exit from the elevator car. Mindlessly, I stepped aside, continuing to hold the elevator door open with my hand. Without another word she charged forward, her heels clicking on the tiled lobby floor as she made her way to the parking structure. I watched her go, watching as she hitched her box on one wide hip in order to free a hand to open the door, and then disappear inside. In the same mindless fashion, I stepped inside the elevator and pushed the little button with the number eleven stamped on it.

I don’t know what I thought about on the short ride up to my office floor. I probably didn’t think about anything. I was probably incapable of any real thought at that point. Somewhere, deep inside my brain, instinct had likely taken over. There would be an ordeal to suffer through, I knew, and it would serve me better than my constantly vacillating consciousness.

When the doors opened, I entered the office complex and immediately made my way down to Mary’s office.

Ruthie saw me coming. She looked at me with some mixture of contempt and compassion, and stood up to silently escort me into the corner office she traditionally guarded. Inside I found both Mary and Don, sitting together at the conference table. Three small pendant lights hung down over the table, only two of them working, their sharp illumination lighting them as if actors on a stage.

“Well, Mister Larson, there you are.”

It was Don doing the talking, and I took that to be an extremely bad sign. As Ruthie closed the door behind me, I felt like I was being locked in a room with two angry dogs, one of them rabid.

“Where the fuck have you been?”

And he was swearing. Not good at all.

“I was eating my lunch in the park,” I said, having prepared that much of the lie.

As I strolled over to stand just below the small dais on which Mary’s conference table sat, I saw Don’s beady eyes shift to the decorative clock in Mary’s award case, then back to me. “It’s two twenty-six. You’ve been gone since before twelve. Do you always take such a long goddamn lunch?”

I looked at Mary, and caught her eyes boring into me, her lips pressed so tightly together I couldn’t see the shade of lipstick she was wearing. I thought that maybe they weren’t both angry dogs. I thought that maybe Don was the dog and Mary was holding his leash.

“Not always.”

Don flinched as if I had tried to hit him. “Do you think this is funny? Do you know what happened while you were ‘eating your lunch’ in the park?”

“Why don’t you tell me, Don?”

“Sit down and I will, goddammit. I’ll tell you not just what happened but what the fuck is going to happen next. And you’re not going to like it.”

“Then I think I’d prefer to stand.”

I’m not sure what it was that was keeping me calm. Facing Don was always a terrifying prospect, and when Don’s back was up -- as it appeared to be now -- it usually caused people to wilt, weep, or wet their pants. It was probably an aftereffect of the conversation I had just had with Steve, and the confidence that it had given me that I wasn’t such a loser after all. But I’d like to think that I would have been able to remain calm even without that support. I had seen Don destroy people before, and I remembered telling myself whenever I saw it, that eventually, inevitably, his anger would turn and be directed at me; and that when it did, I was not -- EVER -- going to give that fat fuck the satisfaction of seeing me crumble before him.

“All right, smartass, have it your way.” Not without effort, Don worked himself up to his feet, almost toppling his chair over backwards as he did so. “While you were out ‘eating your lunch’ in the park, Bethany Bishop was in this office, resigning her position, and telling us -- guess what? That you were the reason for her departure.”

I looked over at Mary, who had remained seated, her arms now crossed over her chest. She looked nothing but uncomfortable to me, the way someone facing dental surgery might.

“That’s four by my count, Alan. Susan Sanford, Michael Lopez, Gerald Krieger, and now Bethany Bishop. Four of your direct reports who have left the organization and who have cited you and your inadequacies as the primary reason they were leaving.”

I flipped my eyes back to Don. “You fired Gerald, and you only did that because I told you what he was doing to undermine our position with our largest client.”

Don shook a chubby fist at me. “You're goddamn right I fired him, Alan! And after the things he told us about you I wanted to fire you, too, but Mary decided to save your sorry ass.”

I remembered the cracked glass in my office door, cracked when Gerald punched it on his perp walk out of the building. You’re a dead man, Alan! You’re a fucking dead man!

“She saved my sorry ass?” I said, incredulous, and turned back to Mary. “Is that what you did? Working me to death is saving my sorry ass?”

Don started barking at me again, but I kept my gaze focused on Mary, and she eventually held up a hand to muzzle him. She still looked uncomfortable, like trying to swallow a slippery eel, but when she spoke, there was an icy coldness in her voice.

“The things that Bethany said about you are almost unbelievable, Alan. As challenging as things have been around here for you, even I didn’t think you would stoop to such a level.”

They were the first words in the drama that gave me any kind of pause. I blanched. There’s no other word for it. Remembering the lies that Wes Howard threatened to spread about me and Bethany, and the familiarity that we had shown in the office and at the recent conference, I suddenly feared the lies that Bethany may have decided to spin about me. 

“She’s lying.” It seemed the safest and most all-encompassing thing to say.

“Is she?” Mary asked. “Then you’re not trying to undermine my authority?”

Wait a minute. What? 

“Don’t just stand there with that ridiculous look on your face, Alan. Tell me if the things Bethany said about you are true.”

“What did she say?”

Don suddenly huffed with exasperation. “Oh, for fuck sake, Mary. Let’s just fire him already!”

Mary raised her hand to him again. “Just a minute, Don. I want to hear him deny it, if he can.”

“Deny it?” I said. “I don’t even know what I’m denying. Tell me what she said about me!”

And Mary did just that. Evidently, Bethany had really decided to throw me under the bus on her way out the door. According to Mary, she said that she was leaving because she could no longer work for a supervisor who was actively working against the leadership of the company and the clients it represented. Bethany said that I had frequently talked with her about both Mary and Don, expressing my opinion that they were corrupt and incompetent, running the company for their own personal enrichment and setting everyone who threatened them up for failure and termination. According to Bethany, it was me, not Gerald, who had been conspiring to steal the client from the company, and that I had tried to recruit her into my diabolical scheme. On top of all of that, I had evidently been inappropriate with her -- especially as she began to push back against my plans of conquest -- calling her names, insulting her, and threatening to fire her.

It was a lot -- most of it without a iota of truth to it. But there was one thing, the idea that I thought Mary was a moron, and that I had shared that opinion with Bethany in times of heartfelt intimacy -- that was true. The idea that she would share that with Mary, that felt worse than all the other lies she told about me. And, as I looked into Mary’s eyes as she summed up and demanded an accounting from me, I could see that this was the item that had hurt her the most, too.

“So, tell me, Alan. What am I to believe? Bethany was very convincing, with enough facts and figures to support many of her claims. Is anything she said true? Do you really have such a low opinion of… of the company?”

I stammered before I could form any kind of coherent response. “I… I don’t… I don’t know what to tell you, Mary. She’s lying. She’s… She’s mad at me, and she evidently wants to see me suffer.”

“What is she mad at you about?”

This last was from Don, who was still standing on the opposite side of the table from me, and had evidently been listening and waiting for an opportunity to poke his sharp stick back into my side. I looked at him, then back to Mary, then back to him.

“It’s… It’s complicated,” I said. “Bethany and I are friends. Just friends. At least we used to be. We recently had a falling out.”

Mary unexpectedly rose to her feet. “I don’t think I want to hear it, Alan. Whatever was going on between you and Bethany, I’m confident that it isn’t going on anymore. The two of us are supposed to get on the same airplane tomorrow and attend the leadership meeting that Wes Howard will be chairing. I spoke to Wes this morning and, believe it or not, he spoke positively about the work you have been doing to adjust and support his vision. I think he’s expecting to see you there, and I’m not sure that we should act on this situation until after this meeting is successfully completed.”

Don began to sputter again, but Mary waved him aside. “We’re not letting you off the hook, Alan. We’re just delaying any action we decide to take until after the meeting. There’s just one thing I want to know. Can I trust you?”

“What?” I said, not knowing what to think, much less say.

“Look me in the eye, Alan. I want you to look me in the eye and tell me that you are going to behave yourself. That you are going to attend this meeting like a good soldier and do exactly what you are told.”

It was evidently too much for Don to take. He threw up his arms, cursed, and stormed out of the room, saying that he wanted no part of this. The commotion gave me a moment to gather a mere handful of my wits together, to realize the depth of the dysfunction I was experiencing, and what I needed to do if I wanted to keep receiving a paycheck.

Mary turned back to me. “Tell me, Alan. Tell me what I need to hear.”

“I promise, Mary. I’m not working against you, and I’ll do what is required of me at this meeting.”

Slowly, she nodded her head, clearly making a decision in her mind.

+ + +

“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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