CHAPTER TWO
Gavin knew all about conversion through fear. It was what his job entailed. He was a telemarketer and he hated what he did. He hated the people had had to do it with. He hated what he had to wear. He hated the stupid things they’d make him say. He hated his boss. He hated his peers. He hated the company cheer. He hated the group motto. He hated everything about the job no less than he hated how good he was at it.
“You’re late.”
Gavin didn’t bother looking to where the words were coming from. He already knew who was sitting on the far side of those words; which mouth had flung them off their tongue like bloodied bait to a swiftly moving current.
“I said you’re late. You were supposed to log in, three minutes ago.”
The words were raining down with the chipper spirit and light drizzle that happened whenever The Brother spoke. He couldn’t raise his temper more than a smidgen of a degree without speaking with a scolded tongue; hissing and spitting through his words.
“There’s a team meeting in eleven minutes.”
Gavin tried to shake off his reality, but he couldn’t. It clinged to him like the musky smell of presaged death from an old man’s arid pores. He ignored his brother and went about flicking switches and unconsciously opening a host of programs in his computer.
He could already feel a wave of self-loathing lapping at his feet and its sea, building to wash upon his conscious shore. More than this job or what was tied to it, Gavin hated himself. He hated himself most days and he hated himself as he lay down to sleep and managed, even in his pre-dreams, to find a way to reduce himself to some title of mockery or insult. But it was here, at this desk where he fanaticized most about suicide.
“Alright guys” shouted The Brother over the manic buzz of hundreds of pleas from around the floor as table by table, desperation attended, in its human skin, the art of manipulation. “Listen, today is a special day. We have a new promotion that I’m gonna tell you guys about and you’re gonna love this. The customers are gonna love it. It’s just gonna be massive. It really is.”
He carried on like that for maybe another ten to fifteen minutes, dancing around an otherwise brittle and emberless fire, avoiding the obvious questions by trying to ignite the spark in each and every one of his sales team so that they could take this pile of crap, whatever it was, and sell it to financially delinquent pensioners and bored housewives.
“So tell us, Gavin, what’s the trick?”
They were looking at him.
All of them were.
He had been dreaming about wheeling his chair over to the far window, the one next to the pretty brunette who was always listening to Jeff Buckley and he was sure was hooked on either heroin or horse tranquilizers. In his daydream, nobody noticed him get up and wheel his chair through the maze of cubicles and nobody even blinked when he lifted it up over his head and swung wildly at the glassed wall. They noticed though when it smashed and the gusting wind blew hundreds of tiny shards back in their direction. They noticed too; when he stepped towards the edge and dove off into his sweet descent. And the smokers below had just enough time to jump out of his way so that the blood that splashed up didn’t dirty their lapels.
But now everyone was looking at him and he wasn’t bloody, broken and bruised and lying still; dying but not dead, on a pavement ten stories below. He was sitting on his chair and everyone had swiveled theirs around so that they were all staring at him. And they all looked so expectant and so god damn thrilled.
He’s done it.
He had ignited their fires.
“I gotta go to the bathroom,” said Gavin.
He didn’t wait for approval. He kicked his chair aside and stormed off the floor and down the stairwell to the bathroom. All the stalls were full. That didn’t matter, though. He wasn’t there to evacuate, not his lunch away. He just needed to throw some water on his face, for some chemical reaction to occur within his mind so that the idea of suicide remained as it should be, some kind of an exit as opposed to what it now seemed, as some kind of invitation.
There were people having sex in the first stall, someone negotiating a poorly cooked chicken in the second and what sounded like a cursing madman, unable to find his vein in the third. Gavin splashed some water on his face and stormed back out.
In the stairwell, he lit a cigarette and as he dragged back, he travelled with the smoke inside of himself. He went back along his tongue where the salted chips and hard candy had cut and blistered his gums. He went down his throat and into his lungs, passing, along the insides of his neck, the years of frustration and venting expression that he had swallowed for the sake of doing good; meeting targets, making friends, maintaining a career, making it matter, living by example and not upsetting, his mother and father. Every bit of his repression had left its mark; from the ground and hollowed cavities in his teeth to the ulcers that scarred and bled and burned in the back of his throat and in the pit of his stomach.
He could see it all.
“Hey, you can’t smoke in here” shouted a voice from the exit, far below.
Gavin looked over the railing. At the bottom of the stairs, leaning in from an open door stood The Security Guard. He wasn’t coming up any time soon so Gavin sat back on the stair and he watched the smoke drifting up from the tip of the cigarette into the stale musky air.
He finished his cigarette and threw the butt over the edge. The Security Guard was still cursing away down below. He had maybe made his way up two flights and he wasn’t so much shouting or throwing his words as he was, eschewing them at the foot of every desperate and panted breath. It sounded less like breathing and more like air spilling from a punctured tube.
“You reek,” said The Brother.
Gavin didn’t acknowledge him. He sat down at his desk; slumped in his chair, and while waiting for a customer to drop in on his line, he listened to music and flipped through images of nearly naked women in a magazine that someone had left on his desk.
“She’s hot.”
It was That Girl. She was kind of like every other girl only she sat beside him and she made a friend out of their company. She was pretty and she was really smart too though she wore naivety as an accessory, I guess, so that she could fit in; probably so she didn’t make her boyfriend feel like an inane jerk, more than his own musings every could.
Gavin used to like her. Like every girl he met, he grew infatuated. When he first saw her, he thought only about seeing her naked. After some time though that changed. He still liked her and though they flirted harmoniously, he knew, as he had learned from every of his infatuations, that she found in him a friend, but she sought in another; her affliction, her lover.
“I wish I had her body,” said That Girl.
Gavin didn’t need to look at her or the magazine. There would have been no comparison. That Girl’s beauty was like incense. She had a sexiness that lingered long after she had left your sight. It was the intelligent and subtle tinge of aroma that affected every next thing that you did.
But Gavin couldn’t tell her how beautiful she was. He hadn’t the courage to scare her away or to have her closer than she already was.
“She’s not that pretty,” he said.
What he meant to say was, you’re far prettier.
“Hey, can I tell you something? It’s kind a weird” said That Girl.
This was about how every conversation started, with something weird.
“So I did something, a surprise for my stupid boyfriend.”
She used the adjective stupid whenever she referred to that other guy.
“What did you do?”
Gavin had no idea what a beautiful and smart girl would do to surprise her stupid boyfriend. He knew what he would do to surprise her, though if he was ever her stupid boyfriend. It wouldn’t be something big and expensive, but it would be a lot of small things like remembering important things about her and what she liked; things like her favourite flower or a song she really liked or maybe a memory from her childhood
that was really important. And he wouldn’t just give those things to her wrapped in some two dollar paper so she just ripped off the wrapping and gave him the thankyou that he wanted all along. No. he’d be subtle. He’d sneak in early and he’d leave the flowers at reception so that when she walked past, whatever problem or annoying thing she was thinking about before she arrived got washed away as the bright reds and yellows and blues coloured the greyness in her eyes and the sweet scent of spring, weathered the autumn of her soul, that struggle she bore in every day and in every other guy that she dated, that browned and cracked and picked away at her petals.
What he wouldn’t do would be to pull out her chair at a restaurant or open doors for her and be brutish and patronizing in his cavalry like most guys did. They’d be chivalrous to the point of absurdity like a car that can go from zero to ironic in half a second. Inasmuch as he would want her to stumble across; incidentally, the gifts that he had laid for her, he wanted her to, to find him in that fated manner.
“So I shaved myself, you know,” she said, pointing below the table. “Down there.”
Gavin tried to think of something other than the picture she was painting and he had no idea at all of what to say.
“My pee went everywhere,” she said.
Gavin smiled and That Girl started snorting and laughing. This was what she had meant by weird.
“That’s neat,” said Gavin, all of a sudden remembering his second grade teacher, an angry Yugoslav with a penchant for racist jokes and forcing children of all denominations to say morning prayers.
It didn’t work.
“It feels so weird.”
As she was saying it, she was squirming in her seat and the insult of their friendship just became all the more apparent. Could she really be this naïve?
“And whenever I do a pee,” she said, “it goes in all directions. I hope my stupid boyfriend likes it.”
“I hope he fucking dies,” Gavin thought.
“It’s my birthday,” she said.
“Really?” said Gavin.
He knew, though. She said it the first time he saw her when they were in training. She said it and he never forgot.
“My stupid boyfriend didn’t remember.”
“So you did the… You know, the surprise, for him even though he forgets your birthday?”
“I know, he’s a jerk.”
Gavin sighed.
The phone clicked.
Information poured on his screen.
“Hi, this is Gavin calling from BestYet telecommunication services. Am I speaking to Ms. Delaware?”
“This is she?”
She sounded defensive. They all did at first.
“Ms. Delaware… You don’t mind if I call you Tracy do you?”
“That’s fine,” she said. “What do you want?”
“Listen I know you’re busy and time is money but listen, if I can save you money then in the end, I’m saving you time.”
“Go on,” she said.
As he spoke, Gavin flicked through an assortment of green screens seeing numbers and words and digits and markers and as his subconscious ran on an automated charm, his conscious mind sorted through the facts and built a profile of Tracy. He found out her desires, how she likes to spend her time; seeing what sites she visits when she’s in need of being entertained and he could see, from the calls she made to a fortune line, that she was the type of woman who found reason through her aboding fears. And he found, on the last page, her aboding fear.
“So Tracy,” he said, using a tone more like an oncologist or a seasoned pilot. “I see your daughter has just turned sixteen. That’s amazing. You must be so proud. I don’t have any kids, not at the moment, but I want to have a whole bunch. I don’t think I could deal with them growing up, though. It must be tough, this growing independence you know, from the moment she’s born, every stage of her development has her nearing your heart but furthering herself from your touch. I think for me, that would be the hardest thing, having to let them go.”
“Well, it’s nature. I mean it’s not easy. She was an adorable baby. Never cried you know, not even a wince. It was tough, though, you’re right. When she stopped feeding I felt like I’d lost my little girl and every day it just seemed like she was getting another inch away from me. It’s the way it is, though. One minute they’re quiet and still and they’re poking their little finger into your mouth when they feed and the next, they’re asking to borrow your car keys.”
“Oh, so she’s driving?”
“She just got her permit.”
“She has a car and she doesn’t have a cell phone?”
“Well, we can’t afford a cell phone for her, not a post-paid plan anyway. It’s just so expensive. And she doesn’t need one anyway. The phone is for just in case I need to contact her. So I can always reach her. Her credits work fine for that.”
“But what if she needs to reach you?”
“Well, she has her friends with her. If she has no credit, she can use one of their phones or she can reverse charge if she really wants.”
“Picture this. It’s late, Stephanie had just dropped off her friend and she’s on her way back home and it’s raining really heavy, like last night, and she doesn’t see the cat at first up ahead but when it darts across the road, she swerves to miss it but she has no idea that the car would slip and slide the way it does. She tries to correct, but the wheel rips from her hands. And she pulls them over her face as the car clips a curb and rolls down an embankment. It’s dark, it’s raining heavy, her emergency lights are blinking but where the car is wrapped around a tree at the bottom of a steep hill, it’ll be a while before anyone notices the accident at all. She reaches for her phone to call her mother. Not ask for help or to send an ambulance because she knows it’s too late. She wants only, in her last breath, to tell you that she loves you. And her shaking hand holds the cell while her twitching thumb struggles to press every button. She finds the contacts and she finds your name; ‘mum’. She presses the button and inside she is cold and her blood is freezing. She can’t feel her injuries, but she knows they’re bad. She pulls the phone up to her ear and she waits, hoping to hear your voice so that if she should die, then she wouldn’t die alone. But all she hears is the beeping sound of a phone with no credit. And you’ve never been further from her than you were at that second. Could you live with that?”
She might have had a cold. She might have, but she didn’t. The sniffling on the other end of the line was from the tears that she was trying to hold back. How could she? How could she leave her daughter to die alone at the bottom of a ditch?
How could she?
“Tell me about your best plans,” she said.
They all marveled; That Girl, The Brother and everyone else who was standing around and within an earshot. Gavin put her on the most expensive plan. The cheapest was out of her budget so what harm could come from being further out of one’s budget. It’s what he was taught how to do. It was in no way, what he wanted to do.
The Brother clapped his hands. He was gathering everyone’s attention and he was about to speak but Gavin put down his headset and he deleted his private files from the computer before he turned to his brother and venom in his eye.
“I quit,” he said.
The Brother looked stern and offended.
“You can’t quit. Don’t be a fool. I won’t accept your resignation. Listen that was great, exactly the type of selling that inspires the heart and soul of this company. You should be proud. Here, you can wear the red ribbon.”
He was holding a sash or something. It was red and the best salesperson got to wear it for the day while they made calls. It would make him the envy of all in the office to be seen wearing the sash.
“Fuck your sash. I quit. Fuck this job and fuck you. You think that was good? Scaring that woman into being contracted into something she can’t afford? We’re fucking criminals. This job is sick.”
“Please stop using that language. I’m not go
ing to fire you, but I think we can make a suitable action plan to create new challenges that help to…”
“Go. Fuck. Yourself.”
The whole floor oohed and aahed.
“Gavin, you’re embarrassing me,” The Brother said, leaning and whispering into Gavin’s ear.
“Fine,” he said.
They had an internal messaging system. It linked every computer not only on every floor but in every branch in the entire country. It was a quick way of instant communication and it made the internal practices more efficient but for what Gavin was about to do, it was a wonder that nobody had thought of it before.
A red button flashed on every screen on every computer on every floor in every building in every city of their entire country and every flashing red button was marked urgent and everyone read, in the entire company, the same venting expression that Gavin had scraped from his ulcerated throat.
‘BestYet management couldn’t organize a cheap fuck in a discount brothel’.
In a second, about the time it took for him to pack his bag and to wink at That Girl, every manager loaded their nerving looks and peeked over their computers while directors barged their heads out of the cracks in their doors.
Gavin left the floor and for the first time, it was oh so quiet. He left without saying a word and without much fight or debate. He felt light and free and he wished he could continue, to sharpen his words and cut through every polite ideal and tear the whole to shreds.
Before he left the floor, Gavin took from inside his bag, a single flowering stem and he placed it inside a small glass that was sitting on the reception’s table. He wondered if she would notice it. He wondered if at all that she cared. He hoped she would. It was better to imagine the cat alive and to leave the box sealed than to have to lather one’s stomach with more residual self-loathing.
Before getting on the bus, Gavin passed a tennis club. He had never played tennis before in his life. He thought, “why not?” The door was open so he popped his head in. He saw a bunch of guys and girls on the courts and they were smashing the balls around like they were experts and they would probably attest to just being average. Gavin felt embarrassed and silly just looking. Then a guy came up to him. He looked kind of manic, but in a welcoming way and he had a t-shirt with a picture of The Mona Lisa and it had the word ‘Nihil’ underneath.
“You want a free lesson?” he asked.
“I don’t think so,” said Gavin.