New Story Edit 'One Way'

At this particular 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, Sam thought. In late March it presented such a thorough assault on one’s sense of direction, wrapping everything in its weightless expectation.  

He was going to be late. He doesn’t care. Truthfully, he hoped to be fired, so much more satisfying a fate than the half-assed corporate integrity he’d be subjected to in the form of fleeting, smug admonishment. His boss was tragic- that was the word really. Sam excuses this though, because so much of the country was in shambles right now; frayed in the noblest tatters of liberty. Sam sees his boss Joe as one of those blockheaded, strong-shouldered types from a distant, graying Midwestern suburb who’d moved here for the ‘quality of life.’ From what he 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 70^th 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 strode 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 thought. He noted 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 saw the bright glint of their metallic Shanghai Security Systems badges as he entered the revolving doors, and secretly wondered how targeted a pipe bomb planted in their offices on the 10^th floor could be.

The air conditioning was on too high again, Sam noted. 'Air conditioning in Seattle in March. Welcome to the 2075', he thought to himself. This steel and glass heart of Seattle's ego was beautiful in a way, he figured. It was such an affront to the mossy skyline that every citizen of the city seemed to share some hard opinion on it; good or bad. The ride alone up to the 63^rd floor was unusually silent, devoid of the hysterical sounds he felt were necessary on most days to deflate his inner mania so the workday could proceed as it was supposed to.  When he was exhumed from the sleek metal tomb and thrust into harsh fluorescent mediocrity 630-odd feet above the Pacific, Joe was not pleased.

“Sam, look- I really like you, man. You’re a great team player. But this can’t keep happening.”

Sam wanted to yawn, to run, to scream out into the awful rows of white-collar sweatshop partitions, but instead he did none of these things and looked Joe squarely in the eyes for the first time in a long while.

He first nodded 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 hated all of it right now, himself most of all. He thought he heard the protestors chanting some 63 stories below through the open window, and hoped they didn’t use the tear gas and the dogs today. 

 

 ‘When you are deprived of the space to make yourself whole, he thought, 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-“ Sam started to say, but he rigidly cut himself off. Sorry was such a limp abomination. “I don’t know if I can do this”, he continued with unsteady conviction. “I’m just not cut out for this type of work.”

He could scarcely believe his impudence.

‘Nobody is. That’s why you have to learn’, Joe countered evenly. Such honesty was rare for Joe. Sam wondered if his depression meds weren't working again.  There was a pregnant pause, weakened slightly by the fabulously gray sheets of drizzle cascading down endless windows towards Interstate-5 behind them. It was beautiful, Sam thought, 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', Joe said.

“What, does the board own your soul now too?”, Sam sneered.

‘Jesus, what is wrong with me today?’, he thought. If he focused on the silvery liquid sheets outside though, it seemed as if another, stronger man was speaking for him. His own body was just a ventriloquist’s puppet, an apparition of the 21^st Century mania. Joe’s eyebrows rose menacingly for a second, but his face was still possessed by some bland, implacable sadness.

 “I regret I can’t give you something more…” he began to say, but trailed off, lost in thought.

Joe paused and his eyes, those little round pinholes between earnest, fleshy slabs of American beef, squinted with indecision. Sam resisted the temptation to complete his sentence for him, as was his habit. So obnoxious, as his ex-girlfriend would have said.

“Interesting.”, Joe finally exhaled, the word a single sad note which caused 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 said flatly. Joe nodded distractedly, his face still sad and indecisive.

They left 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. Sam didn’t care. They deserved a little entertainment, a slight reprieve from the vague dehumanization of spreadsheets and Powerpoints.

 He should have 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 felt 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. It was, Sam thought, perhaps the hallmark of his generation.

Lloyd smiled at him knowingly as he passed his cubicle on route to the little storage-closet turned office he called 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 their nervous umbrella. 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 wealthy spectacle of Seattle’s east Lake Washington neighborhood playing out behind them. He wasn’t wonderful because he played these games of course, Sam thought, 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 would venture cautiously from their overpriced, pseudo-hip lofts beside the gaudy eye of the Space Needle over to Capitol Hill. There they would rub elbows with beautiful hipster girls and swill cheap beer, the countenance of the starving artist as fun as it was thin. The girls they met all seemed to work in the new fields of retail science 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 though: Sam 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. In a world where consumption trumped all though, he wasn’t sure anyone was really their own anymore. 

“So, you going to the show this Friday?”, Lloyd asked 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 knew Lloyd was 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 smiled despite himself. He felt 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 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 drew the blinds of the single meek window. The room was 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 spent several hours writing diligently, preparing sharp figures and concise numbers on Cascadia Resources latest oil project, a chunk of swampy, foreign land in the Northwest Territories.

 Suddenly, he felt a deep rumble and the 900-odd feet of the Columbia Tower sway slightly, like a house of cards against a breath. He wanted to believe it was an earthquake, the sequel to the big Snoqualmie 7.0 some ten years ago everyone had been waiting for. He stuck his head out the now cracked window and looked down 630 feet of clean, chilly air to the asphalt façade of 5^th Avenue. He wondered 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 was finally reached, he wondered how long he would 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 took a minute to notice Lloyd’s hand grasping his own and suddenly was is running, falling head over heels down flight after flight of crumbling stairs and into an unusually normal taxi whose driver took the hundred dollar bill from Lloyd with sweaty seriousness.

‘The Airport; Terminal B’, Sam heard Lloyd tell the cabbie in controlled tones. His eyes were like razors.

Sam looked up briefly and saw 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 heard 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 feelt in his coat pocket for his passport.

Shit.

‘I have it’, said Lloyd quietly. Sam 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 knew what they needed to do though, where they need to go, and Sam thought of how he had also has rehearsed this moment in his head so many times over the past few months.

Two tickets to Seoul in hand, they reached customs and the entrance to international departures. Cold-faced Google Plus © police checked passports with grim efficiency. Children wailed behind the neat partitions. Fat, balding businessmen with rivers of sweat between their brows bartered on behalf of their families. ‘Nine hundred thousand dollars’, Sam heard one of them plea. ‘One Million, please, just let us go’, another begged, his wife looking unnaturally bored behind him, her jewelry weighing down injected and polished skin. Sam saw a strong-shouldered man, an unshaken Mr. Clean standing with his wife and two small boys somewhere amidst the chaos beyond the partition. 

Was it Joe? He recalled he had some connections from his military past. Sam hoped he was safe.

They finally reached the agents and the entrance to the secure departures terminal. The policemen had now subbed out with several sharp-looking Chinese agents from Shanghai Security Systems. He handed them his passport as Lloyd did the same. The agent looked at them with cursory expertise. Somewhere beyond the airport, gunfire rings out in eerie regularity.

‘These are one way, right?’, he asks them, the fat man behind them now hysterical and sobbing.

‘One way’, Sam answers resolutely.