Dragons - Chapter 56 (DRAFT)

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

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

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

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

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

“Taking some time off?”

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

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

“Going somewhere?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Hello?”

“Alan.”

“Yes?”

“It’s Ruthie.”

“Yes?”

“I forwarded your vacation request to Mary.”

“Yes?”

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

“Yes?”

“Now.”

“Yes. Okay.”

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

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

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

“You wanted to see me, Mary?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Alan, have a seat, please.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Mistakes in the conference program,” Mary said.

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

“Are you denying it?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“So?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Alan. Is that it?”

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

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

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

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

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

“And that is?”

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

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

“Yes, Mary. I understand.”

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

+ + +

“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.

Image Source
http://lres.com/heres-why-amcs-need-to-pay-close-attention-to-looming-regulatory-changes/businessman-in-the-middle-of-a-labyrinth/

2010 by Arthur C. Clarke

Arthur C. Clarke, I have found, is very good at writing science fiction that has enough science to satisfy, but not quite enough fiction. The details of orbital mechanics are there, and they don’t overburden the story, yet, oddly, his characters seem as lifeless and as interchangeable as the rocky moonlets orbiting a distant gas giant.

What he does really well in 2010 is make a coherent story out of the intentional incoherence of 2001. There is mystery here, but the mystery is eventually revealed and explained.

Now the long wait was ending. On yet another world, intelligence had been born and was escaping from its planetary cradle. An ancient experiment was about to reach its climax.

Those who had begun that experiment, so long ago, had not been men -- or even remotely human. But they were flesh and blood, and when they looked out across the deeps of space, they had felt awe, and wonder, and loneliness. As soon as they possessed the power, they set forth for the stars. In their explorations, they encountered life in many forms and watched the workings of evolution on a thousand worlds. They saw how often the first faint sparks of intelligence flickered and died in the cosmic night.

And because, in all the Galaxy, they had found nothing more precious than Mind, they encouraged its dawning everywhere. They became farmers in the fields of stars; they sowed, and sometimes they reaped.

And sometimes, dispassionately, they had to weed.

The great dinosaurs had long since perished when the survey ship entered the Solar System after a voyage that had already lasted a thousand years. It swept past the frozen outer planets, paused briefly above the deserts of dying Mars, and presently looked down on Earth.

Spread out beneath them, the explorers saw a world swarming with life. For years they studied, collected, catalogued. When they had learned all they could, they began to modify. They tinkered with the destinies of many species on land and in the ocean. But which of their experiments would succeed, they could not know for at least a million years.

They were patient, but they were not yet immortal. So much remained to do in this universe of a hundred billion suns, and other worlds were calling. So they set out once more into the abyss, knowing that they would never come this way again.

Nor was there any need. The servants they had left behind would do the rest.

On Earth the glaciers came and went, while above them the changeless Moon still carried its secret. With a yet slower rhythm than the polar ice, the tides of civilization ebbed and flowed across the Galaxy. Strange and beautiful and terrible empires rose and fell, and passed on their knowledge to their successors. Earth was not forgotten, but another visit would serve little purpose. It was one of a million silent worlds, few of which would ever speak.

And now, out among the stars, evolution was driving toward new goals. The first explorers of Earth had long since come to the limits of flesh and blood; as soon as their machines were better than their bodies, it was time to move. First their brains, and then their thoughts alone, they transferred into shining new homes of metal and plastic.

In these, they roamed among the stars. They no longer built spaceships. They were spaceships.

But the age of the Machine-entities swiftly passed. In their ceaseless experimenting, they had learned to store knowledge in the structure of space itself, and to preserve their thoughts for eternity in frozen lattices of light. They could become creatures of radiation, free at last from the tyranny of matter.

Into pure energy, therefore, they presently transformed themselves; and on a thousand worlds the empty shells they had discarded twitched for a while in a mindless dance of death, then crumbled into rust.

They were lords of the Galaxy, and beyond the reach of time. They could rove at will among the stars and sink like a subtle mist through the very interstices of space. But despite their godlike powers, they had not wholly forgotten their origin in the warm slime of a vanished sea.

And they still watched over the experiments their ancestors had started, so long ago.

Against this backdrop, Clarke attempts to tell a human story -- a story of astronauts and scientists and politicians -- but none of the details of that story linger very long in the memory. Perhaps they were not intended to.

+ + +

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.

Dragons - Chapter 55 (DRAFT)

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No, Mommy! No!”

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

“You will eat these peaches, young man.”

“I won’t! You can’t make me!”

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

“Jacob!”

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

“Jacob! You clean that up right now!”

“No!”

“You do what I tell you, young man!”

“No!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Jenny!”

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

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

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

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

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

“Are you all right?” I asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

+ + +

“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.

Image Source
http://lres.com/heres-why-amcs-need-to-pay-close-attention-to-looming-regulatory-changes/businessman-in-the-middle-of-a-labyrinth/

The Tortilla Curtain by T. C. Boyle

Afterward, he tried to reduce it to abstract terms, an accident in a world of accidents, the collision of opposing forces -- the bumper of his car and the frail scrambling hunched-over form of a dark little man with a wild look in his eye -- but he wasn’t very successful. This wasn’t a statistic in an actuarial table tucked away in a drawer somewhere, this wasn’t random and impersonal. It had happened to him, Delaney Mossbacher, of 32 Pinon Drive, Arroyo Blanco Estates, a liberal humanist with an unblemished driving record and a freshly waxed Japanese car with personalized plates, and it shook him to the core. Everywhere he turned he saw those red-flecked eyes, the rictus of the mouth, the rotten teeth and incongruous shock of gray in the heavy black brush of the mustache -- they infested his dreams, cut through his waking hours like a window on another reality. He saw his victim in a book of stamps at the post office, reflected in the blameless glass panels of the gently closing twin doors at Jordan’s elementary school, staring up at him from his omelette aux fines herbes at Emilio’s in the shank of the evening.

Without question, I think T. C. Boyle consistently has the best opening paragraphs in all fiction. This opening paragraph of The Tortilla Curtain tells you much of what you’ll need to know for the journey ahead -- most especially who Delaney Mossbacher is and, obliquely, who his narrative doppelganger is going to be.

The whole thing had happened so quickly. One minute he was winding his way up the canyon with a backseat full of newspapers, mayonnaise jars and Diet Coke cans for the recycler, thinking nothing, absolutely nothing, and the next thing he knew the car was skewed across the shoulder in a dissipating fan of dust. The man must have been crouching in the bushes like some feral thing, like a stray dog or bird-mauling cat, and at the last possible moment he’d flung himself across the road in a mad suicidal scramble. There was the astonished look, a flash of mustache, the collapsing mouth flung open in a mute cry, and then the brake, the impact, the marimba rattle of the stones beneath the car, and finally, the dust. The car had stalled, the air conditioner blowing full, the voice on the radio nattering on about import quotas and American jobs. The man was gone. Delaney opened his eyes and unclenched his teeth. The accident was over, already a moment in history.

The man -- the flash of mustache -- is Cándido Rincón -- an immigrant from Mexico, in the United States illegally, a person scraping by as best he can with his young and pregnant wife. And his back story is very different than that of Delaney Mossbacher. After the accident, he lies outside, on the ground, beside a cooking fire, fighting back against pains both physical and otherwise.

The pain was like the central core of that fire, radiating out in every direction, and the dreams -- well, now he saw his mother, dead of something, dead of whatever. He was six years old and he thought he’d killed her himself -- because he wasn’t good enough, because he didn’t say his “Hail Marys” and “Our Fathers” and because he fell asleep in church and didn’t help with the housework. There was no refrigeration in Tepoztlan, no draining of the blood and pumping in of chemicals, just meat, dead meat. They sealed the coffin in glass because of the smell. He remembered it, huge and awful, like some ship from an ancient sea, set up on two chairs in the middle of the room. And he remembered how he sat up with her long after his father and his sisters and brothers and uncles and aunts and the compadres had fallen asleep, and how he’d talked to her through the glass. Her face was like something chipped out of stone. She was in her best dress and her crucifix hung limp at her throat. Mama, he whispered, I want you to take me with you, I don’t want to stay here without you, I want to die and go to the angels too, and then her dead eyes flashed open on his and her dead lips said, Go to the devil, mijo.

This is Candido’s world and it is utterly hidden from Delaney’s -- the two experiences twinned and juxtaposed in Boyle’s artful way -- two unknown twins marching through the same story without ever understanding the chords that connect them and their lives.

Even when Delaney is put into a similar circumstance as Candido -- forced to evacuate his home during a dinner party due to a sudden wildfire swooping down on his gated community -- he is too dim to perceive the irony.

He’d done his best. He’d managed to get his word processor and discs into the car in the ten minutes the police had given them between the first and final warnings -- a pair of cruisers crawling up and down the street with their loudspeakers blaring -- but that was about all. Ten minutes. What could you do in ten minutes? He was frozen with grief and anxiety … He was standing there in the garish light, the wind in his face and his entire cranial cavity filled with smoke, angry at the world -- What next? he was thinking, what more could they do to him?

He is too dim, but we aren’t. This is exactly the circumstance that Candido faces on a daily basis, but he faces it without a Land-Rover “packed to the windows with their cardinal possessions, the college yearbooks, the Miles Davis albums, the financial records, the TVs and VCRs, the paintings and rugs and jewelry.”

And the anger is the same. The anger that both men feel at their undeserved circumstances, each misdirected onto whatever scapegoat will suffice.

The subtext of Boyle’s novel is rife with metaphors of infestation.

The rain playing off the slick blacktop at the gate made him think of Florida and the way the roads would disappear under a glistening field of flesh when the Siamese walking catfish were on the move in all their ambulatory millions. He remembered being awed by the sheer seething protoplasmic power of them, their jaws gaping and eyes aglitter as they waddled from one canal to the next, and army on the march. No one, least of all the exotic aquaria importer who brought them into the country, suspected that they could actually walk, despite the powerful intimation of their common name, and they’d slithered right out of their holding tanks and into the empty niche awaiting them in the soft moist subtropical night. Now they were unstoppable, endlessly breeding, straining the resources of the environment and gobbling up the native fishes like popcorn. And all because of some shortsighted enthusiast who thought they might look amusing in an aquarium.

An invasive species. Covering the land and gobbling up everything in its path. And under Boyle’s sharpened prose, it is never quite clear if he is satirizing the border crossers like Candido, or the suburban dwellers like Delaney.

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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.