At this particular hour, or perhaps this peculiar hour, Seattle crystallized the way over-boiled maple syrup stuck to the edges of the pot on his boyhood farm in Vermont, both sugary and stubborn. It was the fog really- in late March it presented such a thorough assault on one’s sense of direction, wrapping everything in its weightless expectation.
He is going to be late. He doesn’t care. Truthfully, he hopes to be fired, so much more satisfying a fate than the half-assed corporate integrity he’d be subjected to in the form or fleeting, smug admonishment. His boss is tragic- that was the word really. Sam excuses this though, because so much of the country is in shambles right now; frayed in the noblest tatters of liberty. His boss is one of those blockheaded, strong-shouldered types from a distant, graying Midwestern suburb who’d moved here for the ‘quality of life.’ From what Sam can tell though, his work consumes most of this ‘quality’, so the added value seems marginal.
Joe was so earnest, so hopeful when he groveled before the fleshy board members in meetings on the 70th floor, his comically deflated biceps of former football glory quivering slightly with their approval. They usually shot him down without the slightest remorse- their brand of icy capitalism allowed now room for second-guesses.
Sam strides swiftly up the imposing stone steps in front of the Columbia Tower, the giant revolving doors before him the first step of indoctrination into feeling important and thus no longer having to really feel, he thinks. He notes that the protestors seem to have declined in numbers somewhat over the past few days. The private police of the new Republocratic Google Plus © coalition government assembled around the plaza seem bored and distracted. Sam sees the bright glint of their metallic Shanghai Security Systems badges as he enters the revolving doors, and secretly wonders how targeted a pipe bomb planted in their offices on the 10th floor could be.
The air conditioning is on too high again, Sam notes. Air conditioning in Seattle in March. Welcome to the 21st century. The steel and glass heart of man’s ego is beautiful in a way, he thinks. It was such an affront to the mossy Seattle skyline that every citizen of the city seemed to share some hard, polarized opinion on it. The ride alone up to the 63rd floor is unusually silent, devoid of the hysterical sounds he feels are necessary on most days to deflate his inner mania so the workday could proceed as it was supposed to. When he is exhumed from the sleek metal tomb and thrust into harsh fluorescent mediocrity 630-odd feet above the Pacific, his boss is not pleased.
“Sam, look- I really like you, man. You’re a great team player. But this can’t keep happening.”
Sam wants to yawn, to run, to scream out into the awful rows of white-collar sweatshop partitions, but instead he does none of these things and looks Joe squarely in the eyes for the first time in a long while.
Sam nods gravely, the way Joe’s sons probably did when he gave them some sage bit of coaching at the pewee football league game, wanting to please their father but also part of the cult of middling America. Sam hates all of it right now, himself most of all. He thinks he hears the protestors chanting some 63 stories below through the open window, and hopes they don’t use the tear gas and the dogs today.
‘When you are deprived of the space to make yourself whole, he thinks, to serve your own needs with equal vigor as you carry out someone else’s plans for your life, then this is what happens.’
“Joe, I’m really sorr-“ he starts to say, but rigidly cuts himself off. Sorry is such a limp abomination. “I don’t know if I can do this”, he continues with unsteady conviction. “I’m just not cut out for this type of work.”
He can scarcely believe his impudence.
‘Nobody is. That’s why you have to learn’, Joe counters evenly. Such honesty is rare for Joe. Sam wonders if his depression meds aren’t working again. There is a pregnant pause, weakened slightly by the fabulously gray sheets of drizzle cascading down endless windows towards Interstate-5 behind them. It is beautiful, its boringness so singular and relentless.
“Sam… trust me, I’ve wanted to fire you more times than I can remember. You’re too damn good though, I couldn’t do it in good conscience to the board.”
“What, does the board own your soul now too?”, Sam sneers.
‘Jesus, what is wrong with me today?’, he thinks. If he focuses on the silvery liquid sheets outside though, it seemed as if another, stronger man is speaking for him. His own body is just a ventriloquist’s puppet, an apparition of the 21st Century mania. Joe’s eyebrows rise menacingly for a second, but his face is still possessed by some bland, implacable sadness.
“I regret I can’t give you something more…”
Joe paused and his eyes, those little round pinholes between earnest, fleshy slabs of American beef, squinted with indecision. Sam resists the temptation to complete his sentence for him, as is his habit. So obnoxious.
“Interesting.”, Joe finally exhales, the word a single sad note which causes his looming pectoral muscles to rise and settle slightly beneath his starchy Brooks Brother’s shirt like Saint Helens before eruption.
“One more week”, Sam says flatly. Joe nods distractedly, his face still sad and indecisive.
They leave the little break room next to Joe’s mildly palatial corner office, the cubicle dwellers in the main room quickly returning to their buttons and screens, pretending not to have overheard. He doesn’t care. They deserved a little entertainment, a slight reprieve from the vague dehumanization of spreadsheets and Powerpoints.
He should be ashamed of himself, should have seen his father’s no-nonsense, pockmarked face boring into his failures equally out in the fallow brown fields of northern Vermont or amongst the futuristic angles of downtown Seattle, but instead he feels nothing. It was a wonderful apathy- appalling and stimulating at the same time, like watching porn in the college dormitories while your roommate was out, awaiting their unthinkable interruption.
Lloyd smiles at him knowingly as he passes his cubicle on route to the little storage-closet turned office he calls his own.
‘Well-played, Sam. You’re lucky he likes you so damn much.’
Lloyd was one of these Koreans adopted by progressive, outdoorsy upper middle class white people and coddled under the nervous umbrella of both their physical and cultural fragility. He was wonderful though; he’d played all the ‘right’ games- his Yale economics diploma shared equal space in his cubicle with a photo of him aside a half-dozen raucous, red-faced boys clutching a sailing trophy, the obscene spectacle of Seattle’s east Lake Washington neighborhood playing out behind them. He wasn’t wonderful because he played these games, of course, but because he saw the awful inequities for what they were and enjoyed them anyways, the lovely obscenity of pale white capitalism. He was tall and striking, his hair styled in the way only Asian men of a particular social stature seemed capable of doing, both suave and comical.
On weekends, and sometimes weeknights if ‘corporate morale was low’, as Joe liked to say, they ventured cautiously from their overpriced, pseudo-hip lofts beside the gaudy eye of the Space Needle over to Capitol Hill. Here they would rub elbows with beautiful hipster girls and swill cheap beer, the countenance of the starving artist as fun as it was thin. They all worked in retail and images, the debt of their $500,000 retail science degrees from Harvard or Stanford hanging over them like a scythe.
Sure, there were ‘real artists’ here; Oliver envied them in secret fury, their easy style, the effortlessness they managed to cast over the shadow of food stamps and teary 3AM phone calls to parents about ‘fucking it all up.’ Regardless of who’d liked a band when or ‘discovered’ some Kafkaesque dive bar in east Cap Hill first, he hoped his style merely overlapped theirs instead of pantomiming it, though in a world where consumption trumped all, he wasn’t sure anyone was really their own anymore.
“So, you going to the show this Friday?”, Lloyd asks him with practiced casualness.
‘What, RhinoBear or whatever the fuck they are called putting on falsetto’s in testicle-suffocating jeans about some cliché lost love?”
‘Yeah, something like that, Mr. judgmental.”
“Oh stop…”, Sam retorted, but he knows Lloyd is right.
“You’re as bad as me. Besides, I have to finish this monthly by tomorrow afternoon or Joe’s going to can me for real.”
“But isn’t that what we want now, rebellious young one?”
Sam smiles despite himself. He feels flooded, awash in strange emotions not his own, the endless drizzle just a mask he could place at will over life’s absurdities.
‘Yah, ok, I’ll go. You’re buying my ticket though.’
‘Oh really? Ok, sillyface.’
Sam respected Lloyd chiefly because while he could hold his own if he wanted to with the Cro-Magnon masculinity of the still pimply 20-somethings they liked to call the “finance bros’, he refused to succumb to their mindlessness.
Lloyd and him could talk about anything- the way the movement of Joe’s pecs secretly predicted the weather, which of the timelessly stylish ‘downtown girls’ they’d obsessed over, how they both held their passports at night sometimes when the riots got bad. Sam’s was a gift of his Scottish birthplace; Lloyd’s a vestige of a past and a family who couldn’t keep him.
Returning to his office, Sam draws the blinds of the single meek window. The room is flooded with the ambiguous light of late winter in the inner reaches of the Pacific, the muted pastels that both encouraged and thwarted work. He spends several hours writing diligently, preparing sharp figures and concise numbers on Cascadia Resources latest gold project, a chunk of swampy, foreign land in the Northwest Territories.
Suddenly, he feels a deep rumble and the 900-odd feet of the Columbia Tower sway slightly, like a house of cards against a breath. He wants to believe it is an earthquake, the sequel to the big Snoqualmie 7.0 some ten years ago everyone has been waiting for. He sticks his head out the now cracked window and looks down 630 feet of clean, chilly air to the asphalt façade of 5th Avenue. He wonders how the brief seconds will feel, watching the windows blur as they speed by in increasing finality- first Seattle Light & Power, then Pacifica Investments, and finally the morbid floors where Goldman Sachs created inequity from thin, conditioned air. When the asphalt is finally reached, he wonders how long he will feel- he’d always heard it was instantaneous, but what did instantaneous really mean? The brief pain would be redemption, the way the one ounce gold coin minted by his company he carried in his pocket felt when it pressed firmly against his thigh, its force protection from an enemy world.
Lost in thought, he takes a minute to notice Lloyd’s hand grasping his own and suddenly he is running, falling head over heels down flight after flight of crumbling stairs and into an unusually normal taxi whose driver takes the hundred dollar bill from Lloyd with sweaty seriousness.
‘The Airport; Terminal B’, he hears Lloyd tell the cabbie in controlled tones. His eyes are like razors.
Sam looks up briefly and sees the sad concrete and brick edifices of the Capital Hill projects across the highway, the single smokestack spine of the old lumber mill a middle finger thrust at the tasteless memorials to high-rise capitalism filling the skyline to the west. He hears a low rumble and knows it is the tower, but he doesn’t look back. He thinks it sounds like god muttering; wondering what the hell is going on. The rain is now firm and insistent, driving itself in dull tantrums across the chasms of downtown.
He feels in his coat pocket for his passport.
Shit.
‘I have it’, says Lloyd. He is filled with unspeakable relief. He’d forgotten Lloyd knew he kept it in his office desk drawer.
The airport is a madhouse, the suave efficiency of Seattle blended with the chaos of a Delhi street market. Lloyd knows what they need to do though, where they need to go, and Sam thinks of how he also has rehearsed this moment in his head many times over the past few months.
Two tickets to Seoul in hand, they reach customs and the entrance to international departures. Cold-faced Google Plus © police check passports with grim efficiency. Children wail behind the neat partitions. Fat businessmen with rivers of sweat between their brows barter on behalf of their families. ‘Nine hundred thousand dollars’, Sam hears one of them plea. ‘One Million, please, just let us go’, another begs, his wife looking unnaturally bored behind him, her jewelry weighing down injected and polished skin. Sam sees a strong-shouldered man, an unshaken Mr. Clean standing with his wife and two small boys somewhere amidst the chaos beyond the partition. Is it Joe? He recalls he had some connections from his military past. Sam hopes he is safe.
They finally reach the agents and the entrance to the secure departures terminal. The policemen have now subbed out with several sharp-looking Chinese agents from Shanghai Security Systems. He hands them his passport as Lloyd does the same. The agent looks at them with cursory expertise.
‘These are one way, right?’, he asks them, the fat man behind them now hysterical and sobbing.
‘One way’, Sam answers resolutely.
