How to Build a Career and Find Happiness During a Recession:
A Tragi-Comic Novel of Unemployment, Underemployment, Wall Street, Main Street and other Matters that Seemed to Matter at the Time
by Anonymous, Jr.
Sunday, August 2, 2009
Table of Contents
Chapter 25 and Epilogue
August 13
"Hey--hey you, come back with that," Dana heard from just down the mountainside. "Don't make me come up there after you. And stop laughing at me. You know perfectly well that monkeys can't laugh." It didn't sound like Tommy or Brent, and the Doctor never came up on the mountain, claiming a mortal fear of sharp inclines. "What the hell are you going to do with it anyway? Wait, don't eat it. You're supposed to be an Uncommonly Clever Monkey. Surely you realize that no one eats roses. Wait! Stop! Oh, never mind. No I don't want the stem back. And don't stick your tongue out at me, I know it didn't taste very good. But whose fault is that? In fact, what's your name? You're out of the analyst training program."
Finally Dana had enough information to place the voice. "Gwaf?"
"Dana?" I pushed my way though another fifty feet of what passed for a path on the Lesser Merrill Island interior. It was Dana. She was decidedly more sunburned than the last time I'd seen her, and maybe a bit sweatier, but I could live with that. We shared an embrace passionate enough to draw screeches of approval from the local monkey population, which thus far hadn't impressed me as any more clever than your average Jerry Springer audience. "I brought you a single red rose all the way from the mainland, but it was eaten by that monkey back there."
"Yea, I heard the argument."
"Shouldn't an uncommonly clever monkey know better than to eat a rose?"
"He'll know better the next time. But what are you doing here? Are you on vacation?"
"No, my career has merely taken an unexpected turn. I'm going to be working here from now on."
"Here? On Lesser Morrell Island?" Dana sounded more concerned than thrilled.
"I expected you to be slightly more ecstatic about this."
"I might be ecstatic. Just let me hear the rest of it before I decide."
"The good news is that I've solved your problem about giving Sarah something to hate. And as a bonus I can guarantee you that no more of the island's monkeys are going to be sold for medical experiments or eaten by the locals."
"That's wonderful. Now what's the bad news?"
"Johnston Brothers has hired the monkeys as research analysts and we're going to open a branch office here on the island."
"No."
"Yes. I have signed contracts."
"Signed contracts with the monkeys?"
"With the chief of the village. Our lawyers are relatively certain that he has power of attorney over the monkeys."
I didn't get a response. "Well? Do you hate me?"
"I'm thinking about it."
"It gives Sarah something to protest, it gets money to the village, it gives the monkeys a purpose in life other than swinging about like idiots and eating roses that don't belong to them. It really is a fairly decent plan."
"I'm still pretty sure I hate it."
"Even though it means we can be together?" I asked.
Dana put her hands on her hips and gave me her hardest look. She was trying to get tough with me, but I couldn't help but think that she was far too cute to pull it off. "Just one question," she said. "Did you do this despite the fact that it might make things worse for the monkeys, or did you do it because it might make things better for the monkeys."
"Dana, I didn't do this for money or for monkeys. I did this to be with you. I'd follow you to the ends of the earth."
"You didn't follow me to Spanish Guyana."
"Well any place that isn't a festering shit-hole. Don't ruin the moment. The point is I did it all for you. Wait...or would you love me more if I told you I did it for the monkeys? Cause I could go with either." I didn't get an answer. Just a kiss. But it was a hell of a kiss. Just the right amount of tongue. And I decided then and there that it was okay with me if the world didn't want to make sense, so long as every now and then it didn't make sense to my advantage.
Epilogue
"Another fine day at Bucklin," Kerns thought. Not so long ago, it was exactly the sort of day that would have scared the hell out of him. Aging 1960's radical Bobby Broula was on campus to deliver his usual fiery, rhetoric-laced speech about keeping up the fight and not trusting anyone over thirty. Broula was having something of a renaissance that fall, touring college campuses in celebration of the day years before when he'd burned his draft card on the White House steps, then rolled a joint at the Lincoln Monument because a few cameramen had complained that they'd arrived late and missed the first event. It was the 30th anniversary of the whole thing, and anniversaries ending in 0 always get particular attention, for no particular reason.
Today's Bucklin students didn't have draft cards to burn of course. A lot of them probably didn't even know what a draft card was. So they'd burned their student I.D. cards instead, right there in the lecture hall, so that Broula would respect them. That was just fine with Broula. It was fine with Kerns as well. Replacement IDs cost $50, $45 of which was pure profitfor Bucklin. And all of this was fine with the students, since their parents would pick up the tab. The only unfortunate consequence was that the student detailed to drive Broula to the airport after his speech had, in a fit of anti-war fervor, accidentally burnt his driver's license as well, and badly charred his car keys.
Kerns volunteered to drive Broula himself.
"Nice speech," he said during the ride. "The students really seemed interested."
"Yea," Broula chuckled, "Us radicals from the '60s are even more popular now than we were then. I feel sorry for all those guys who O.D.ed in the seventies and missed all the fun."
"I guess it must be gratifying to see your ideals taking hold."
Broula didn't respond.
"I said…"
"Yea, I heard you. I just don't know what to say to something like that. I mean, what do these kids have to do with our ideals? All we have in common is drug abuse and self righteousness--and the fact is a lot of us from the sixties cut that out once it became obvious the shit would kill us…I mean the drugs, not the self righteousness."
"Then what was that speech about?"
"That speech was about my $3,500 speaker's fee and a chance to sleep with the co-ed of my choice, not necessarily in that order."
"You don't say."
"Trouble is, my agent booked me to speak at a school in Oregon tomorrow afternoon. No layover on campus means no lay on campus. There goes half my motivation. Fuckin' redeye flights."
"Maybe you should explain these things to your agent."
"I would," Broula said. "But he'd probably expect to get 15% of the pussy for himself."
"I see your point."
"Oh well, I guess the money has to come first. Being a sixties radical is a full-time job these days. Who would have guessed that being anti-establishment would make me rich?"
"You sound pretty cynical about the whole thing."
"No, not all of it. I'm still proud that I stood up for what I believed in 25 years ago, and I still believe that was a lousy war they wanted me to fight. But what kind of person would I be if I never questioned anything I'd ever believed? And what kind of person would I be if I still thought a bunch of 18-year-olds had all the answers? No one thinks 15-year-olds have all the answers, and you can't learn that much in three years."
"So what do you think about this generation of college students?"
Broula shrugged his shoulders. "Oh, I guess they're no different from any other generation. They're going to do their level best to be against the establishment, even if most of 'em are only doing it to fit in. They'll vote for the candidate who's farthest to the left even if they drove to the polling place in the $40,000 Audi that Daddy bought them. And they'll listen to Woody Guthrie albums because anti-establishment liberals are supposed to listen to Woody Guthrie."
"Do they?" Kerns asked. "Still listen to Woody Guthrie, I mean."
"Well, maybe not, but they still listen to Bob Dylan, and Dylan was just trying to be Guthrie, so it's the same damn thing…except that no one can understand what the hell Dylan's saying."
Well, I guess that's pretty much the story.
In the years since, Dean Kerns has established himself as one of the top college administrators on the East Coast, thanks to his deft handling of the student-center affair and his uncanny ability to attract Pacific Island students to the school. Even his marriage seems stable, despite the fact that his wife once caught him helping a coed named Shauna out of her sweater.
Kerns also has benefited from the loss of his assistant. Thomas Prester Smith made it to Tierra del Fuego; that much has been confirmed through Argentinean travel records. Once there, he rented a row boat and, apparently, set off to the south in search of his destiny. The Drake Passage that separates South America from Antarctica is not an easy stretch of water to row under the best of circumstances, certainly not for a non-profit administrator with little experience in seamanship, even less upper-body strength, and certainly no understanding that the month of August falls in the middle of the winter in the Southern Hemisphere. It's unclear what happened next. An explorer did find some footprints once, just simple snowshoe tracks preserved in the ice, heading south towards the pole. They could have belonged to anyone, I suppose. Well, anyone walking alone without dogs, sleds, or supplies across Antarctica. So maybe Smith did reach Antarctica in his little boat. And maybe he found that it was the administrative homeland he'd always wanted, and decided to stay. On the other hand, maybe Smith met his end there on the barren Antarctic ice sheet, his carcass picked clean by hungry penguins. We might never know for sure. Whatever happened, the rented rowboat was never returned, and in the years that have passed Smith has racked up a rather hefty late fee.
In the meantime, Kerns named Roger his new Interim Associate Dean, and put him in charge the Dodge Aries owner / Plymouth Reliant owner parking lot dispute. Roger promptly bit them both.
Thanks to the influx of Johnston Brothers dollars, the Lesser Merrill Islanders now live like they're something other than extras from Clan of the Cave Bear, which is just as well, because that really was a terrible movie. A few of them even took me up on my offer to help them get into a top-flight American college. The very first graduate came back to Lesser Morrell Island and opened a resort. The resort's a bit tricky to get to, but it offers one perk that you can't find at any other vacation spot in the world. If you have a poorly thought out romantic encounter and wake up regretting it, all you need to do is walk over the international dateline to the other side of the island, where it's yesterday again and you haven't even considered it yet…Or so the resort's advertising claims.
Business is booming.
Sarah and the other environmentalists aren't too fond of the resort, but they have come to love Johnston Brothers' presence on the island, in as much as they hate it with a passion. They have something to be against, and that's all they ever wanted.
Timmy, as you might recall, made a fortune from his lawsuit against Shiveler's Supermarkets, then invested it with Johnston Brothers. I'm proud to say that Timmy's savvy investments in the market have made him a millionaire. Of course, he'd started out a multi-millionaire. But for Timmy, that's not so bad.
Life on Wall Street for Andy Keller and the rest is as it's always been: either monumentally great or suicidally awful, depending on when you call--although more often the former than the latter. Andy's personal portfolio now reaches well into seven figures, which he thinks should be enough to pay for his retirement, especially since most Wall Street salesmen keel over before they hit sixty.
Mr. Gwafinn eventually did get that exceedingly generous severance package he'd long wanted. Some time after my departure, he was able to convince the board that there were other non-Johnstons in the firm who could better manage the company. The board picked a relative newcomer to Wall Street to be the new CEO. Gwafinn bought himself a beach house in Florida and intends to spend his remaining years baking himself in the sun and attempting to catch fish.
As for my former roommate Dave Orr, my memories of him grow dimmer with each passing day. I can't seem to remember anything he ever did, or a single cause that aroused his passion. I phoned down Dave's parents once to see if they knew what had become of him. They claimed not to know who I was talking about.
I guess that just leaves Dana and I. We're still on Lesser Merrill Island, and we're still together. I run the Johnston Brothers office, Dana protests against the Johnston Brothers office. It's a simple life. But we're happy.
Years Later
An 800-pound silverback gorilla leaned back in its $2,000 antique leather desk chair and surveyed the scene outside its corner office. It was the last trading day before the Christmas holiday, and a light snow was falling on Wall Street. For the gorilla, this was the culmination of a hectic decade. It had scrapped its way up through the Johnston Brothers executive hierarchy in record time, and that morning had been named CEO.
The gorilla turned back towards its desk, and pressed the intercom button for its secretary. "Get a message off to Bob Gwafinn in our Lesser Merrill Island office," it grunted. "Tell him 'Nice work, but you're fired.' My kids need jobs, you know."
"Hey--hey you, come back with that," Dana heard from just down the mountainside. "Don't make me come up there after you. And stop laughing at me. You know perfectly well that monkeys can't laugh." It didn't sound like Tommy or Brent, and the Doctor never came up on the mountain, claiming a mortal fear of sharp inclines. "What the hell are you going to do with it anyway? Wait, don't eat it. You're supposed to be an Uncommonly Clever Monkey. Surely you realize that no one eats roses. Wait! Stop! Oh, never mind. No I don't want the stem back. And don't stick your tongue out at me, I know it didn't taste very good. But whose fault is that? In fact, what's your name? You're out of the analyst training program."
Finally Dana had enough information to place the voice. "Gwaf?"
"Dana?" I pushed my way though another fifty feet of what passed for a path on the Lesser Merrill Island interior. It was Dana. She was decidedly more sunburned than the last time I'd seen her, and maybe a bit sweatier, but I could live with that. We shared an embrace passionate enough to draw screeches of approval from the local monkey population, which thus far hadn't impressed me as any more clever than your average Jerry Springer audience. "I brought you a single red rose all the way from the mainland, but it was eaten by that monkey back there."
"Yea, I heard the argument."
"Shouldn't an uncommonly clever monkey know better than to eat a rose?"
"He'll know better the next time. But what are you doing here? Are you on vacation?"
"No, my career has merely taken an unexpected turn. I'm going to be working here from now on."
"Here? On Lesser Morrell Island?" Dana sounded more concerned than thrilled.
"I expected you to be slightly more ecstatic about this."
"I might be ecstatic. Just let me hear the rest of it before I decide."
"The good news is that I've solved your problem about giving Sarah something to hate. And as a bonus I can guarantee you that no more of the island's monkeys are going to be sold for medical experiments or eaten by the locals."
"That's wonderful. Now what's the bad news?"
"Johnston Brothers has hired the monkeys as research analysts and we're going to open a branch office here on the island."
"No."
"Yes. I have signed contracts."
"Signed contracts with the monkeys?"
"With the chief of the village. Our lawyers are relatively certain that he has power of attorney over the monkeys."
I didn't get a response. "Well? Do you hate me?"
"I'm thinking about it."
"It gives Sarah something to protest, it gets money to the village, it gives the monkeys a purpose in life other than swinging about like idiots and eating roses that don't belong to them. It really is a fairly decent plan."
"I'm still pretty sure I hate it."
"Even though it means we can be together?" I asked.
Dana put her hands on her hips and gave me her hardest look. She was trying to get tough with me, but I couldn't help but think that she was far too cute to pull it off. "Just one question," she said. "Did you do this despite the fact that it might make things worse for the monkeys, or did you do it because it might make things better for the monkeys."
"Dana, I didn't do this for money or for monkeys. I did this to be with you. I'd follow you to the ends of the earth."
"You didn't follow me to Spanish Guyana."
"Well any place that isn't a festering shit-hole. Don't ruin the moment. The point is I did it all for you. Wait...or would you love me more if I told you I did it for the monkeys? Cause I could go with either." I didn't get an answer. Just a kiss. But it was a hell of a kiss. Just the right amount of tongue. And I decided then and there that it was okay with me if the world didn't want to make sense, so long as every now and then it didn't make sense to my advantage.
Epilogue
"Another fine day at Bucklin," Kerns thought. Not so long ago, it was exactly the sort of day that would have scared the hell out of him. Aging 1960's radical Bobby Broula was on campus to deliver his usual fiery, rhetoric-laced speech about keeping up the fight and not trusting anyone over thirty. Broula was having something of a renaissance that fall, touring college campuses in celebration of the day years before when he'd burned his draft card on the White House steps, then rolled a joint at the Lincoln Monument because a few cameramen had complained that they'd arrived late and missed the first event. It was the 30th anniversary of the whole thing, and anniversaries ending in 0 always get particular attention, for no particular reason.
Today's Bucklin students didn't have draft cards to burn of course. A lot of them probably didn't even know what a draft card was. So they'd burned their student I.D. cards instead, right there in the lecture hall, so that Broula would respect them. That was just fine with Broula. It was fine with Kerns as well. Replacement IDs cost $50, $45 of which was pure profitfor Bucklin. And all of this was fine with the students, since their parents would pick up the tab. The only unfortunate consequence was that the student detailed to drive Broula to the airport after his speech had, in a fit of anti-war fervor, accidentally burnt his driver's license as well, and badly charred his car keys.
Kerns volunteered to drive Broula himself.
"Nice speech," he said during the ride. "The students really seemed interested."
"Yea," Broula chuckled, "Us radicals from the '60s are even more popular now than we were then. I feel sorry for all those guys who O.D.ed in the seventies and missed all the fun."
"I guess it must be gratifying to see your ideals taking hold."
Broula didn't respond.
"I said…"
"Yea, I heard you. I just don't know what to say to something like that. I mean, what do these kids have to do with our ideals? All we have in common is drug abuse and self righteousness--and the fact is a lot of us from the sixties cut that out once it became obvious the shit would kill us…I mean the drugs, not the self righteousness."
"Then what was that speech about?"
"That speech was about my $3,500 speaker's fee and a chance to sleep with the co-ed of my choice, not necessarily in that order."
"You don't say."
"Trouble is, my agent booked me to speak at a school in Oregon tomorrow afternoon. No layover on campus means no lay on campus. There goes half my motivation. Fuckin' redeye flights."
"Maybe you should explain these things to your agent."
"I would," Broula said. "But he'd probably expect to get 15% of the pussy for himself."
"I see your point."
"Oh well, I guess the money has to come first. Being a sixties radical is a full-time job these days. Who would have guessed that being anti-establishment would make me rich?"
"You sound pretty cynical about the whole thing."
"No, not all of it. I'm still proud that I stood up for what I believed in 25 years ago, and I still believe that was a lousy war they wanted me to fight. But what kind of person would I be if I never questioned anything I'd ever believed? And what kind of person would I be if I still thought a bunch of 18-year-olds had all the answers? No one thinks 15-year-olds have all the answers, and you can't learn that much in three years."
"So what do you think about this generation of college students?"
Broula shrugged his shoulders. "Oh, I guess they're no different from any other generation. They're going to do their level best to be against the establishment, even if most of 'em are only doing it to fit in. They'll vote for the candidate who's farthest to the left even if they drove to the polling place in the $40,000 Audi that Daddy bought them. And they'll listen to Woody Guthrie albums because anti-establishment liberals are supposed to listen to Woody Guthrie."
"Do they?" Kerns asked. "Still listen to Woody Guthrie, I mean."
"Well, maybe not, but they still listen to Bob Dylan, and Dylan was just trying to be Guthrie, so it's the same damn thing…except that no one can understand what the hell Dylan's saying."
Well, I guess that's pretty much the story.
In the years since, Dean Kerns has established himself as one of the top college administrators on the East Coast, thanks to his deft handling of the student-center affair and his uncanny ability to attract Pacific Island students to the school. Even his marriage seems stable, despite the fact that his wife once caught him helping a coed named Shauna out of her sweater.
Kerns also has benefited from the loss of his assistant. Thomas Prester Smith made it to Tierra del Fuego; that much has been confirmed through Argentinean travel records. Once there, he rented a row boat and, apparently, set off to the south in search of his destiny. The Drake Passage that separates South America from Antarctica is not an easy stretch of water to row under the best of circumstances, certainly not for a non-profit administrator with little experience in seamanship, even less upper-body strength, and certainly no understanding that the month of August falls in the middle of the winter in the Southern Hemisphere. It's unclear what happened next. An explorer did find some footprints once, just simple snowshoe tracks preserved in the ice, heading south towards the pole. They could have belonged to anyone, I suppose. Well, anyone walking alone without dogs, sleds, or supplies across Antarctica. So maybe Smith did reach Antarctica in his little boat. And maybe he found that it was the administrative homeland he'd always wanted, and decided to stay. On the other hand, maybe Smith met his end there on the barren Antarctic ice sheet, his carcass picked clean by hungry penguins. We might never know for sure. Whatever happened, the rented rowboat was never returned, and in the years that have passed Smith has racked up a rather hefty late fee.
In the meantime, Kerns named Roger his new Interim Associate Dean, and put him in charge the Dodge Aries owner / Plymouth Reliant owner parking lot dispute. Roger promptly bit them both.
Thanks to the influx of Johnston Brothers dollars, the Lesser Merrill Islanders now live like they're something other than extras from Clan of the Cave Bear, which is just as well, because that really was a terrible movie. A few of them even took me up on my offer to help them get into a top-flight American college. The very first graduate came back to Lesser Morrell Island and opened a resort. The resort's a bit tricky to get to, but it offers one perk that you can't find at any other vacation spot in the world. If you have a poorly thought out romantic encounter and wake up regretting it, all you need to do is walk over the international dateline to the other side of the island, where it's yesterday again and you haven't even considered it yet…Or so the resort's advertising claims.
Business is booming.
Sarah and the other environmentalists aren't too fond of the resort, but they have come to love Johnston Brothers' presence on the island, in as much as they hate it with a passion. They have something to be against, and that's all they ever wanted.
Timmy, as you might recall, made a fortune from his lawsuit against Shiveler's Supermarkets, then invested it with Johnston Brothers. I'm proud to say that Timmy's savvy investments in the market have made him a millionaire. Of course, he'd started out a multi-millionaire. But for Timmy, that's not so bad.
Life on Wall Street for Andy Keller and the rest is as it's always been: either monumentally great or suicidally awful, depending on when you call--although more often the former than the latter. Andy's personal portfolio now reaches well into seven figures, which he thinks should be enough to pay for his retirement, especially since most Wall Street salesmen keel over before they hit sixty.
Mr. Gwafinn eventually did get that exceedingly generous severance package he'd long wanted. Some time after my departure, he was able to convince the board that there were other non-Johnstons in the firm who could better manage the company. The board picked a relative newcomer to Wall Street to be the new CEO. Gwafinn bought himself a beach house in Florida and intends to spend his remaining years baking himself in the sun and attempting to catch fish.
As for my former roommate Dave Orr, my memories of him grow dimmer with each passing day. I can't seem to remember anything he ever did, or a single cause that aroused his passion. I phoned down Dave's parents once to see if they knew what had become of him. They claimed not to know who I was talking about.
I guess that just leaves Dana and I. We're still on Lesser Merrill Island, and we're still together. I run the Johnston Brothers office, Dana protests against the Johnston Brothers office. It's a simple life. But we're happy.
Years Later
An 800-pound silverback gorilla leaned back in its $2,000 antique leather desk chair and surveyed the scene outside its corner office. It was the last trading day before the Christmas holiday, and a light snow was falling on Wall Street. For the gorilla, this was the culmination of a hectic decade. It had scrapped its way up through the Johnston Brothers executive hierarchy in record time, and that morning had been named CEO.
The gorilla turned back towards its desk, and pressed the intercom button for its secretary. "Get a message off to Bob Gwafinn in our Lesser Merrill Island office," it grunted. "Tell him 'Nice work, but you're fired.' My kids need jobs, you know."
Chapter 24
After a month and a half on Lesser Morrell Island, the size and pace of Greater Morrell Island was almost too much for Dana to take. This quite surprised her, as Greater Morrell Island's size, frankly, wasn't very big and its pace, in all honesty, wasn't very fast.
An old pickup truck sped by at a speed approaching 25 miles an hour. Then it sped by again in the other direction. There was just the one road. The only options when you reached the end were to turn around or start a new life there. The population of Greater Morrell Island City, the only city on Greater Morrell Island, was officially 264--and there were those who suspected that the census taker had accidentally counted himself twice, or, some claimed, three times. At least 20% of that population must have been out on the street that morning, even if you only counted the census taker once. And that was more people than Dana had seen at any one time since she'd left Hawaii. She fought against that panicky feeling that prairie dogs get when they realize all the other prairie dogs have ducked back into their holes and something smells an awful lot like coyote breath. Dana reminded herself that she was a cosmopolitan person who only months earlier had felt right at home in New York City, except maybe when attempting to merge in traffic. Anyway, she had to remain strong; this wasn't a pleasure trip, it was a matter of life and death. Dana had convinced Sarah to join her for twice-monthly ferry trips to Greater Morrell Island. There were all sorts of things here on the larger island to dislike.
"Look, Sarah. I'll bet that truck doesn't get twenty miles to the gallon. And that policeman--he's carrying a baton."
But Sarah didn't need any encouragement. She dashed off to unionize the cashier at the local market, and wasn't about to be deterred by his argument that he owned the place. Dana decided to find the island's post office to see if there was any word waiting for her from One Planet, Bob, or her family. Her magazine subscriptions also had gone missing, but Dana considered this of secondary importance.
The Greater Morrell post office was a refreshing change from the hectic street. It was indoors--really indoors, mind you, not the in-tent or in-hut that she had come to consider indoors on Lesser Morrell Island. And like post offices worldwide, it offered exactly the sort of languid torpor that can be a pleasant respite from the fast-paced world. Dana breathed in the inertia.
Only someone coming from Lesser Morrell Island would have considered the post office at all remarkable. Like most post offices, it was in fact a utilitarian space. The building consisted of a single smallish room divided in half by a curtain. Dana's side of the curtain featured nothing but a wall of post-office boxes, a poster warning of an upcoming increase in the price of stamps, a deli-style number dispenser, a table, and a postal employee.
"Are you holding any mail for me?" Dana asked the employee.
"You'll have to take a number," the postal employee said, gesturing towards the number dispenser.
"But I'm the only one here."
"I'm here," he argued.
"I'm the only customer here, then."
"How can I be sure of that if you don't have the lowest number?"
So Dana took a number. It was 18. "I've got 18," she said. "Can you help me now?"
"I'm not sure," the man admitted, ashamed. "We don't have the funds for a digital number display, and I lost count a week ago."
"It seems like if there was someone with a lower number, they'd have to be around here someplace. We're the only ones in the building."
"Did you look under the front steps?" the man asked.
"Not specifically."
"Perhaps you should."
"How about if I promise that if someone comes in with a lower number before we're done, I'll let them go ahead of me."
The man thought for a moment, then nodded his head. "That is acceptable."
"Wonderful. I was just curious if you were holding any mail for me."
"One moment, I'll check," the postal employee said, and stepped behind the curtain into the sorting room. He returned six minutes later. "I don't think so, but I can't be sure, since I didn't know your name."
"It's Dana Davis," said Dana. "I'm living on Lesser Morrell Island."
The man didn't move.
"What's the matter now?"
"If you have a second request, you'll have to move to the back of the line."
"But…it's the same request…and there is no line."
The postal employee didn't budge.
Dana took another number. "I have number 19. Can you help me now?"
"I'm not certain. The odds that someone will show up with a lower number increase each time your number gets higher."
"Not really," Dana said. "I just had number 18, and now that you've helped number 18, we can establish beyond the point of doubt that it's time for you to help number 19."
"Ahhh," said the man. "You are correct. If I helped number 18, then it is now time to help number 19. The question of the numbers has haunted my dreams for many nights. I am in your debt. As a small gesture of my gratitude I will name my next child after you. What was your name again?"
"Dana Davis."
"Dana Davis Mallosopolloutu. It is a wonderful name for a child. Now I am off to sleep with my wife to get started on that child for you. Please come back tomorrow."
"Wait," Dana said. "I can't come back tomorrow. I'm living on Lesser Morrell Island, and the ferry only makes the trip back and forth twice a month, plus whenever someone offers the ferry captain $10 for a special trip. And anytime someone gives the ferry captain $10 he just uses it to get drunk and tells them to come back for the next scheduled run. I really would appreciate it if you could check to see if I have any mail waiting for me."
The man didn't move. Dana just nodded her head and took another number. "20" she said.
"Very good. You're next. How can I help you?"
"Is there any mail for me?"
"Name please?"
"Dana Davis," Dana said one more time.
"No, no mail," the man said.
"You're sure?"
"Of course I'm sure. I certainly would remember if there was any mail for someone who shared a name with my future child."
Then the phone rang, startling Dana, who had not heard a phone ring in some time, and startling the postal employee, who was easily startled. "It's like a madhouse here today," the postal employee said to Dana. "Three customers in ten minutes and now the phone rings." He took a deep breath and answered.
"Post Office," he said. Dana couldn't hear the other end of the conversation.
"Yes this is Greater Morrell Island."
"No, no one by that name lives here."
"Yes, I am sure. I would remember if there was someone living on Greater Morrell Island who shares a name with my future child and the woman she's named after on Lesser Morrell Island."
Dana now was intrigued enough by the half of the conversation she could hear to attempt to inquire about the other side of the debate, but the postal employee put her off with a decisive waggle of his index finger. He couldn't be expected to help two people at once.
"No, there is no way to call the one who lives on Lesser Morrell Island. There is no phone on Lesser Morrell Island. And if you want to speak to the one who is my child, you'll have to wait a minimum of nine months…and then another two to three years at least if you expect any sort of meaningful response. Perhaps even four or five years if the child is dim like its brothers."
Dana tried to snatch the phone away, but the postal employee was stronger than he looked.
"No, there is no mail service to Lesser Morrell Island either. You can arrange to have a message delivered on the ferry, but you must pay a special $10 ferry fee. Just send the letter along with the $10 to Greater Morrell Island Post Office Special Deliv…ooof." The postal employee suddenly dropped to the ground, curled up in a ball and struggled to catch his breath. Dana, seeing her opportunity, picked up the fallen receiver.
"I'm sorry, the postal employee can't talk right now. Someone has just crept up behind him and kneed him in the groin. But maybe I help you. I'm Dana Davis."
"Dana! It's really you?," I said. "It's me, Gwaf." I suppose I should have had something more profound to say after two months apart. But in my defense, I had been speaking to a government employee only moments before, which does tend to dull the senses.
My poor opening aside, we had exactly the conversation I'd hoped for. I told Dana about selling stocks on Wall Street, omitting certain relevant sections of my procedure for obtaining other firms' client lists. Dana told me about counting fruit bats and uncommonly clever monkeys on Lesser Morrell Island, and if she omitted any details of a similar nature, she hasn't fessed up to them yet. I was a bit put off by the fact that she had apparently taken to kneeing people in the groin, which wasn't the Dana I had known, but she promised she didn't intend to make a habit of it. We both agreed that living the life one had always wanted wasn't everything it was cracked up to be. The postal carrier then interrupted to ask Dana to relay to me that it might be a little longer than nine months before I could talk to Greater Morrell Island's Dana Davis, on account of the fact he didn't feel up to getting things rolling with his wife that afternoon. Then he excused himself to throw up.
I told Dana I'd work on a solution to her Sarah problem, and that in the meantime I'd remind One Planet where they'd sent her, and tell her parents not to bother with any further search parties to Spanish Guyana. In return, Dana swore she'd return to Greater Morrell Island to phone me every fortnight when the ferry made its run.
Our conversation was cut short when the ferry whistle signaled that it was time for the return trip. "Bob's right," Dana thought as she left the post office. "I never used to be the sort of person that kneed other people in the groin. That was always one of the things everyone liked about me. Men in particular. Now I'm not only kneeing people in the groin, I'm very much enjoying it, and considering doing so again should the opportunity present itself. Maybe I have changed." But Dana's train of thought was interrupted by a Greater Morrell Islander holding a slip of paper labeled "17." "Do you know if I've missed my turn?" the man asked. "I was sitting under the front stairs." Dana kneed the man in the groin then hurried to join a somewhat reinvigorated Sarah on the ferry. It was definitely time to head back home to Lesser Morrell Island. Issues involving number dispensers were exactly the sort of thing that could push a mailman over the edge.
I put down my receiver and stared out my apartment window at the train station. There was something about what Dana had said. The pieces were all there, I was sure of it. I just had to put them together…
There must be another, Smith thought. Maybe a survivor from some long-lost Antarctican tribe living down near the south pole. Maybe Santa Claus's evil twin. Someone who looked more Antarctican, anyway. Someone who could fill in for that worthless, unexceptional Roberto who had ruined Smith's perfect plan. There just had to be another one. His grand administrative dreams couldn't end like this. But neither the directory-information operator nor the college reference librarian could find a phone listing for anyone in Antarctica. Smith would have to go right to the source. Flights to Antarctica were closely regulated, a travel agent explained. In fact, all travel on the continent was severely restricted. Antarctic visitors are expected to have a worthwhile scientific objective. At very least, they're supposed to be billionaire adventurers attempting to ski across the thing to prove their superiority over all the other billionaires who had circumnavigated the globe in hot air balloons and now wouldn't shut up about it.
These restrictions would be an impediment to Smith's current objective, but he couldn't bring himself to be angry. Smith was in favor of regulation in all its forms, and was in fact quite impressed that an entire continent could be administered so closely. Antarctica must be an administrative nirvana, he thought. Clearly, this was somewhere Smith was meant to be. He arranged transit to Tierra del Fuego, the southern-most tip of Argentina. From there, he could find his way.
August 4
"Mr. Gwafinn, could we move our Thursday Tuesday lunch up to this morning?" I'd talked my way past Gwafinn's assistant Gloria. She'd been willing to look the other way since I was, after all, a relative.
Gwafinn checked his watch. It was 8:30 in the morning. "I'm really not ready for lunch just now, Bob. I just ate breakfast."
"We don't have to eat lunch. But I have a good idea that I need to discuss with you."
"I simply don't have time right now."
"Okay, then let me rephrase. I don't just have a good idea. I have a good idea about how to get the most out of your good idea."
"Well why didn't you say so in the first place? Come in, sit down." Gwafinn always had time for really good ideas, by which he meant his own. I spent the next five minutes laying out the details, then leaned back in my chair to await Gwafinn's response.
"So when you say 'Uncommonly Clever Monkeys'…"
"Rumor is they're the most intelligent monkeys in the world," I said. "And they live only on this one small island out in the middle of the Pacific."
"And you think we could lure them here to Johnston Brothers?"
"Not a chance. They like it where they are. It's a quality of life issue for them."
"You're sure?"
"It would be like trying to lure Louie Anderson out of an all-you-can-eat restaurant before closing time."
"So what are you proposing?"
"Why don't we go to the source. Set up an office on their turf, and sign them to exclusive contracts. We wouldn't have to pay New York City wages that way, and our analysts wouldn't get caught up in quarantine."
"Interesting."
"And there's an added bonus. I'm told their island straddles the international dateline. That means if the monkeys make stock picks that don't work out, we can just move a few feet east to where it's still yesterday and the recommendations never happened."
"Are you sure that's how a dateline works?"
"Are you sure it isn't?"
"Fair enough. But would the monkeys agree to this sort of thing?"
"Just between us, I've cultivated a relationship with the only living human who knows each and every one of these monkeys personally--that is, if you can know a monkey personally. Maybe she knows them monkeyally. But that's just semantics. Either way I have a feeling they'll listen to her."
Gwafinn stood and turned his back to the office, looking out his window and up Wall Street. "Bob, I'm going to be honest with you…I love it," he said. "But we have to move fast or someone else is sure to get wind of it. You're the one with connections, you'll have to take the lead."
"No problem."
"It means transferring to Lesser Morrell Island to run the branch office."
"I'm always willing to do my part."
"Glad to see you're such a team player."
"Just give me a raise, a five-year extension on my contract, and a golden parachute large enough to land an African elephant and I'm your man."
"That's my boy," Gwafinn said selling with pride. "Never forget the golden parachute. I agree to it all. Now, you take these files on our current analysts" he pushed a stack of manila folders across his desk "and see if any of our current crop of dullard monkeys are worth keeping before we sell off the lot of them for medical experiments. Gloria will call you when your new contract and the travel plans are ready to go."
Gwafinn buzzed Gloria while I grabbed the monkey files a few at a time and tucked them under my arm, stumbling over Gwafinn's antique rolodex stand in the process. When I caught my balance, I noticed that a piece of scrap paper previously stuck between two of the files had fluttered to the floor at my feet.
"There's more to life than Wall Street," I read. "That's an odd note to find on Wall Street," I thought. Then it struck me. "It's you," I said, looking at Gwafinn.
"What's me?" he asked, taking his finger off the intercom button.
I put the piece of paper on his desk. "You're the Ghost of Johnston Brothers. You're the one who's been leaving these notes for people all this time. No one's noticed because you slip the notes between files so they only appear on desks when things get reshuffled."
"Okay, you got me. But don't tell anyone."
"But why? If you wanted to change the way people act on Wall Street, why not just say and do what you believe, instead of leaving difficult-to-interpret notes for us to find?'
"Why not be more direct? I tried. Once. A long time ago. It was back when I was just a rookie research analyst. I was supposed to evaluate a re-hot Nifty Fifty company that made widgets. I knew the market for widgets was disappearing, and this company didn't even make a particularly high-quality widget to begin with. So I gave the stock a "Sell" rating. It cost me my career. I had to change my name and start over."
"Then the legends are true. Well, except for the part about you killing yourself and your corpse being hidden in the building's ventilation system."
"No, that's just dead rats you smell."
"And the notes are a last stab at providing guidance to young investment bankers."
"I had to do something to maintain my sanity. My other options were to give in and play along, or go ahead and kill myself."
"It's nice to have options," I noted. "And now you're doing this monkey project to show Wall Street how little sense it makes."
"No, I'm doing the monkey plan to get fired so I can pocket a bundle off my severance package. How was I to know people would think it's a good idea?"
"Can't you just quit?"
"Nope. I don't get the golden parachute unless I'm fired."
"Is it that nice of a golden parachute?"
"It's the best there is."
"Surly there's a better way than this to get fired."
"You'd think so, wouldn't you? But the board of directors is so desperate to keep the Johnston family out of power that they're willing to put up with anything from me. I've tried inappropriate sexual behavior, nepotistic hiring practices, extravagant spending on corporate accounts, and incompetence in each of its many flavors. They were all non-starters. Truth is, most of that is more or less expected from Wall Street executives. Total insanity was my last hope."
"Only instead of being declared insane, you were hailed as a visionary genius."
"I never have been a lucky man."
"But why try to get fired in the first place. I thought you driven Wall Street types kept working right up to the day you had heart attacks and died in your well-appointed corner offices."
"The driven Wall Street types, maybe. But that's not me. I only got into investment banking in the first place because I'd graduated from a small, liberal arts college without any particular skills, and with the simple goal of becoming fabulously wealthy. Wall Street seemed like my best bet."
"I think I know where you're coming from."
"You will keep quiet about all this, won't you?"
"No problem," I said. "But one more question: why did you change your name to Gwafinn of all things?"
"Gwafinn was my mother's maiden name--plus it was such a terrible name, I figured no one would think it was phony."
I took another step out the door. "Where was your mother's family from?"
"Midwest someplace."
"Kansas?"
"Maybe. Why?"
"I called my father the other day. Turns out my family used to spell it with two 'n's, too. They lopped off the extra one a couple generations back because they thought it was too ostentatious."
"Interesting," Gwafinn said, in a voice that implied he didn't really find it tremendously interesting. I took the monkey files started back to my desk.
"Oh Bob, one more thing," Gwafinn called before I reached the door. "If we're using Uncommonly Clever Monkeys as research analysts, what am I supposed to do with the 20 gorillas I hired yesterday?"
"Put them in management. Gorillas are well suited to leadership."
"Oooh, good idea. Gorillas run amok in the executive offices could be just the thing to get me fired."
By lunch everything was in place. My travel plans were set. My new contract was signed. My cardboard box was nearly filled with the varied and inconsequential personal items that had found their way to my office desk. My client list had been sold to Keller for a very reasonable percentage of future commissions. All that remained was to answer my phone, which had decided it wasn't going to let me leave without a fight.
"Former office of Bob Gwafin," I said in lieu of a greeting.
"Former? He's gone."
"Any minute now. Who may I tell me is calling?"
"It's Roger's owner."
"Roger's owner, the one dog's owner I don't mind speaking to right about now," I said. "How's everything going?"
"Swimmingly. I rule with an iron fist. I crush those who question my authority. I am the lord and master of all that I survey. I am a God. And thank you for asking."
"No, really."
"Well, I'm no longer pretending that I don't speak English when my office phone rings--and I seem to have earned the respect of my dog, Roger."
"Congratulations. That's astounding progress."
"Thanks. I owe it all to you. Well, you and Roger."
"How did things work out with your wife?"
"Extremely well. Turns out she was acting oddly because she thought I was cheating on her."
"So everything's back to normal on the home front?"
"Even better than normal. I'd had no idea that Katherine thought me capable of having an affair. I don't mind telling you it was a big boost to my confidence to learn my wife thought I was juggling two women when I'd thought myself only marginally capable of juggling one."
"That is an ego inflater."
"I might even go ahead and have an affair just to prove to myself that I'm up to the job."
"Mind some advice?"
"I'd love some."
"Don't."
"Okay, consider it done. Or consider it not done, if you prefer. You know, we make a good team. Let me know if you ever want to leave Wall Street. I'm certain I can find something for you in college administration. The money's terrible, but I think you'll find that the hours are a considerable improvement."
"Thanks. Maybe one day I'll take you up on that. But as it happens I've just today made a change of my own."
"Let me know if there's anything I can do."
"Since you mention it, there might be one thing."
"Name it."
"I'm talking off the top of my head here, but if there were some Lesser Morrell Islanders looking to enroll in college, would Bucklin be interested?"
"Sure, we'd take them. I was considering going in another direction with the student body, but I suppose I was getting a bit ahead of myself."
"What were you thinking of?"
"Well, there's this group here on campus claiming they deserve reparations because five or six generations back their ancestors were slaves. I figure I'd have all the students vote on it, then I'd expel the ones who vote against it, for their racial insensitivity. And right after I did done that, I'd expel the ones who voted in favor of it, for their insensitivity. Seems to me that anyone who thought being the distant descendants of slaves made them the victim of slavery would be guilty of diminishing the victimhood of those who actually were enslaved. And better to take the high road where insensitivity's involved, I always say."
"You'd be left in charge of a college with no students, of course."
"No faculty, either. I'd have them take part in the vote. You can fire even a tenured professor for insensitivity."
"Wouldn't not having students cut into the school's cash flow?"
"Oddly, no. Turns out the whole education thing has been something of a money loser for the college. We get a better return from the profits on our endowment investments."
"Don't you think you'd get lonely there on campus all by yourself."
"Yea, the students do kind of liven up the place. Like I said, it was just an idea. Maybe I'll have the vote, but put them all on probation instead of actually expelling them. The point is I could do it if I wanted to. It's a wonderful thing this self-confidence. I'm so glad you gave it to me."
I packed the last few personal items from my desk, waved goodbye to Keller, who was in the middle of a call and didn't bother to wave back, and boarded the elevator to begin my last commute to the suburbs. I'd only made it one floor when the elevator stopped and Rob Johnston got on board with his own cardboard box.
"Get replaced by a monkey?" I asked with what I hoped was sufficient compassion.
"Nah, I wasn't fired. I just couldn't take any more of the shrieking and biting."
"That's tough."
"It's okay. I'm not sure I was going to make it on Wall Street anyway. I thought if I had a good job at Johnston Brothers, all my problems would be solved. Turns out the only problem that was solved was the not-having-a-job problem. And once you have a job, you realize there are plenty of other problems that you hadn't previously considered. Like the problem that people expect you to be good at your job, and the problem that you can't stand your job."
"Yea, I see your point. So what are you going to do now?"
"Not sure. Maybe I'll teach. I've always wanted to teach. Or do woodworking. I've always liked woodworking. I'm pretty good at it, too."
"Maybe you could teach woodworking."
Rob brightened. "That's a great idea. Maybe I'll do that. So how about you? If I'm any judge of crap-filled cardboard boxes, it looks like you're leaving, too."
"I'm leaving New York, not the company."
"A transfer? Where are you headed?"
"I'm supposed to open a new branch office between the Toyko and Los Angeles offices," I said, a bit ashamed to be talking about a move up the pay scale while Rob's career was ending.
Rob picked up on my hesitance. "You don't have to be embarrassed about getting such a quick promotion, Gwaf. Not around me of all people. I might be a bit out of the loop sometimes, but eventually I put the names together and figured out how you got your job here without going through the training program. Don't worry, though, I won't hold it against you. It's not any different from how I got my job here."
"Rob, there's something I've got to confess to someone," I said. "But I need you to keep it quiet. Can I trust you?"
"No problem."
"I'm not really a Gwafinn. I'm just a Gwafin, one 'n'."
"Don't worry about it, Gwaf. Just between you and me, we haven't always been Johnstons. We used to be common, gutter-variety Johnsons, just like millions of other people. My great-great grandfather added the "t" so we'd stand out. That's when the family's fortunes really took off."
Our elevator reached the ground floor.
"Want to go grab a beer?" Rob asked.
"I better not. I've got a plane to catch and an apartment lease to break."
"Well, see you around," Rob said, because that's what people said, even when they wouldn't.
An old pickup truck sped by at a speed approaching 25 miles an hour. Then it sped by again in the other direction. There was just the one road. The only options when you reached the end were to turn around or start a new life there. The population of Greater Morrell Island City, the only city on Greater Morrell Island, was officially 264--and there were those who suspected that the census taker had accidentally counted himself twice, or, some claimed, three times. At least 20% of that population must have been out on the street that morning, even if you only counted the census taker once. And that was more people than Dana had seen at any one time since she'd left Hawaii. She fought against that panicky feeling that prairie dogs get when they realize all the other prairie dogs have ducked back into their holes and something smells an awful lot like coyote breath. Dana reminded herself that she was a cosmopolitan person who only months earlier had felt right at home in New York City, except maybe when attempting to merge in traffic. Anyway, she had to remain strong; this wasn't a pleasure trip, it was a matter of life and death. Dana had convinced Sarah to join her for twice-monthly ferry trips to Greater Morrell Island. There were all sorts of things here on the larger island to dislike.
"Look, Sarah. I'll bet that truck doesn't get twenty miles to the gallon. And that policeman--he's carrying a baton."
But Sarah didn't need any encouragement. She dashed off to unionize the cashier at the local market, and wasn't about to be deterred by his argument that he owned the place. Dana decided to find the island's post office to see if there was any word waiting for her from One Planet, Bob, or her family. Her magazine subscriptions also had gone missing, but Dana considered this of secondary importance.
The Greater Morrell post office was a refreshing change from the hectic street. It was indoors--really indoors, mind you, not the in-tent or in-hut that she had come to consider indoors on Lesser Morrell Island. And like post offices worldwide, it offered exactly the sort of languid torpor that can be a pleasant respite from the fast-paced world. Dana breathed in the inertia.
Only someone coming from Lesser Morrell Island would have considered the post office at all remarkable. Like most post offices, it was in fact a utilitarian space. The building consisted of a single smallish room divided in half by a curtain. Dana's side of the curtain featured nothing but a wall of post-office boxes, a poster warning of an upcoming increase in the price of stamps, a deli-style number dispenser, a table, and a postal employee.
"Are you holding any mail for me?" Dana asked the employee.
"You'll have to take a number," the postal employee said, gesturing towards the number dispenser.
"But I'm the only one here."
"I'm here," he argued.
"I'm the only customer here, then."
"How can I be sure of that if you don't have the lowest number?"
So Dana took a number. It was 18. "I've got 18," she said. "Can you help me now?"
"I'm not sure," the man admitted, ashamed. "We don't have the funds for a digital number display, and I lost count a week ago."
"It seems like if there was someone with a lower number, they'd have to be around here someplace. We're the only ones in the building."
"Did you look under the front steps?" the man asked.
"Not specifically."
"Perhaps you should."
"How about if I promise that if someone comes in with a lower number before we're done, I'll let them go ahead of me."
The man thought for a moment, then nodded his head. "That is acceptable."
"Wonderful. I was just curious if you were holding any mail for me."
"One moment, I'll check," the postal employee said, and stepped behind the curtain into the sorting room. He returned six minutes later. "I don't think so, but I can't be sure, since I didn't know your name."
"It's Dana Davis," said Dana. "I'm living on Lesser Morrell Island."
The man didn't move.
"What's the matter now?"
"If you have a second request, you'll have to move to the back of the line."
"But…it's the same request…and there is no line."
The postal employee didn't budge.
Dana took another number. "I have number 19. Can you help me now?"
"I'm not certain. The odds that someone will show up with a lower number increase each time your number gets higher."
"Not really," Dana said. "I just had number 18, and now that you've helped number 18, we can establish beyond the point of doubt that it's time for you to help number 19."
"Ahhh," said the man. "You are correct. If I helped number 18, then it is now time to help number 19. The question of the numbers has haunted my dreams for many nights. I am in your debt. As a small gesture of my gratitude I will name my next child after you. What was your name again?"
"Dana Davis."
"Dana Davis Mallosopolloutu. It is a wonderful name for a child. Now I am off to sleep with my wife to get started on that child for you. Please come back tomorrow."
"Wait," Dana said. "I can't come back tomorrow. I'm living on Lesser Morrell Island, and the ferry only makes the trip back and forth twice a month, plus whenever someone offers the ferry captain $10 for a special trip. And anytime someone gives the ferry captain $10 he just uses it to get drunk and tells them to come back for the next scheduled run. I really would appreciate it if you could check to see if I have any mail waiting for me."
The man didn't move. Dana just nodded her head and took another number. "20" she said.
"Very good. You're next. How can I help you?"
"Is there any mail for me?"
"Name please?"
"Dana Davis," Dana said one more time.
"No, no mail," the man said.
"You're sure?"
"Of course I'm sure. I certainly would remember if there was any mail for someone who shared a name with my future child."
Then the phone rang, startling Dana, who had not heard a phone ring in some time, and startling the postal employee, who was easily startled. "It's like a madhouse here today," the postal employee said to Dana. "Three customers in ten minutes and now the phone rings." He took a deep breath and answered.
"Post Office," he said. Dana couldn't hear the other end of the conversation.
"Yes this is Greater Morrell Island."
"No, no one by that name lives here."
"Yes, I am sure. I would remember if there was someone living on Greater Morrell Island who shares a name with my future child and the woman she's named after on Lesser Morrell Island."
Dana now was intrigued enough by the half of the conversation she could hear to attempt to inquire about the other side of the debate, but the postal employee put her off with a decisive waggle of his index finger. He couldn't be expected to help two people at once.
"No, there is no way to call the one who lives on Lesser Morrell Island. There is no phone on Lesser Morrell Island. And if you want to speak to the one who is my child, you'll have to wait a minimum of nine months…and then another two to three years at least if you expect any sort of meaningful response. Perhaps even four or five years if the child is dim like its brothers."
Dana tried to snatch the phone away, but the postal employee was stronger than he looked.
"No, there is no mail service to Lesser Morrell Island either. You can arrange to have a message delivered on the ferry, but you must pay a special $10 ferry fee. Just send the letter along with the $10 to Greater Morrell Island Post Office Special Deliv…ooof." The postal employee suddenly dropped to the ground, curled up in a ball and struggled to catch his breath. Dana, seeing her opportunity, picked up the fallen receiver.
"I'm sorry, the postal employee can't talk right now. Someone has just crept up behind him and kneed him in the groin. But maybe I help you. I'm Dana Davis."
"Dana! It's really you?," I said. "It's me, Gwaf." I suppose I should have had something more profound to say after two months apart. But in my defense, I had been speaking to a government employee only moments before, which does tend to dull the senses.
My poor opening aside, we had exactly the conversation I'd hoped for. I told Dana about selling stocks on Wall Street, omitting certain relevant sections of my procedure for obtaining other firms' client lists. Dana told me about counting fruit bats and uncommonly clever monkeys on Lesser Morrell Island, and if she omitted any details of a similar nature, she hasn't fessed up to them yet. I was a bit put off by the fact that she had apparently taken to kneeing people in the groin, which wasn't the Dana I had known, but she promised she didn't intend to make a habit of it. We both agreed that living the life one had always wanted wasn't everything it was cracked up to be. The postal carrier then interrupted to ask Dana to relay to me that it might be a little longer than nine months before I could talk to Greater Morrell Island's Dana Davis, on account of the fact he didn't feel up to getting things rolling with his wife that afternoon. Then he excused himself to throw up.
I told Dana I'd work on a solution to her Sarah problem, and that in the meantime I'd remind One Planet where they'd sent her, and tell her parents not to bother with any further search parties to Spanish Guyana. In return, Dana swore she'd return to Greater Morrell Island to phone me every fortnight when the ferry made its run.
Our conversation was cut short when the ferry whistle signaled that it was time for the return trip. "Bob's right," Dana thought as she left the post office. "I never used to be the sort of person that kneed other people in the groin. That was always one of the things everyone liked about me. Men in particular. Now I'm not only kneeing people in the groin, I'm very much enjoying it, and considering doing so again should the opportunity present itself. Maybe I have changed." But Dana's train of thought was interrupted by a Greater Morrell Islander holding a slip of paper labeled "17." "Do you know if I've missed my turn?" the man asked. "I was sitting under the front stairs." Dana kneed the man in the groin then hurried to join a somewhat reinvigorated Sarah on the ferry. It was definitely time to head back home to Lesser Morrell Island. Issues involving number dispensers were exactly the sort of thing that could push a mailman over the edge.
I put down my receiver and stared out my apartment window at the train station. There was something about what Dana had said. The pieces were all there, I was sure of it. I just had to put them together…
There must be another, Smith thought. Maybe a survivor from some long-lost Antarctican tribe living down near the south pole. Maybe Santa Claus's evil twin. Someone who looked more Antarctican, anyway. Someone who could fill in for that worthless, unexceptional Roberto who had ruined Smith's perfect plan. There just had to be another one. His grand administrative dreams couldn't end like this. But neither the directory-information operator nor the college reference librarian could find a phone listing for anyone in Antarctica. Smith would have to go right to the source. Flights to Antarctica were closely regulated, a travel agent explained. In fact, all travel on the continent was severely restricted. Antarctic visitors are expected to have a worthwhile scientific objective. At very least, they're supposed to be billionaire adventurers attempting to ski across the thing to prove their superiority over all the other billionaires who had circumnavigated the globe in hot air balloons and now wouldn't shut up about it.
These restrictions would be an impediment to Smith's current objective, but he couldn't bring himself to be angry. Smith was in favor of regulation in all its forms, and was in fact quite impressed that an entire continent could be administered so closely. Antarctica must be an administrative nirvana, he thought. Clearly, this was somewhere Smith was meant to be. He arranged transit to Tierra del Fuego, the southern-most tip of Argentina. From there, he could find his way.
August 4
"Mr. Gwafinn, could we move our Thursday Tuesday lunch up to this morning?" I'd talked my way past Gwafinn's assistant Gloria. She'd been willing to look the other way since I was, after all, a relative.
Gwafinn checked his watch. It was 8:30 in the morning. "I'm really not ready for lunch just now, Bob. I just ate breakfast."
"We don't have to eat lunch. But I have a good idea that I need to discuss with you."
"I simply don't have time right now."
"Okay, then let me rephrase. I don't just have a good idea. I have a good idea about how to get the most out of your good idea."
"Well why didn't you say so in the first place? Come in, sit down." Gwafinn always had time for really good ideas, by which he meant his own. I spent the next five minutes laying out the details, then leaned back in my chair to await Gwafinn's response.
"So when you say 'Uncommonly Clever Monkeys'…"
"Rumor is they're the most intelligent monkeys in the world," I said. "And they live only on this one small island out in the middle of the Pacific."
"And you think we could lure them here to Johnston Brothers?"
"Not a chance. They like it where they are. It's a quality of life issue for them."
"You're sure?"
"It would be like trying to lure Louie Anderson out of an all-you-can-eat restaurant before closing time."
"So what are you proposing?"
"Why don't we go to the source. Set up an office on their turf, and sign them to exclusive contracts. We wouldn't have to pay New York City wages that way, and our analysts wouldn't get caught up in quarantine."
"Interesting."
"And there's an added bonus. I'm told their island straddles the international dateline. That means if the monkeys make stock picks that don't work out, we can just move a few feet east to where it's still yesterday and the recommendations never happened."
"Are you sure that's how a dateline works?"
"Are you sure it isn't?"
"Fair enough. But would the monkeys agree to this sort of thing?"
"Just between us, I've cultivated a relationship with the only living human who knows each and every one of these monkeys personally--that is, if you can know a monkey personally. Maybe she knows them monkeyally. But that's just semantics. Either way I have a feeling they'll listen to her."
Gwafinn stood and turned his back to the office, looking out his window and up Wall Street. "Bob, I'm going to be honest with you…I love it," he said. "But we have to move fast or someone else is sure to get wind of it. You're the one with connections, you'll have to take the lead."
"No problem."
"It means transferring to Lesser Morrell Island to run the branch office."
"I'm always willing to do my part."
"Glad to see you're such a team player."
"Just give me a raise, a five-year extension on my contract, and a golden parachute large enough to land an African elephant and I'm your man."
"That's my boy," Gwafinn said selling with pride. "Never forget the golden parachute. I agree to it all. Now, you take these files on our current analysts" he pushed a stack of manila folders across his desk "and see if any of our current crop of dullard monkeys are worth keeping before we sell off the lot of them for medical experiments. Gloria will call you when your new contract and the travel plans are ready to go."
Gwafinn buzzed Gloria while I grabbed the monkey files a few at a time and tucked them under my arm, stumbling over Gwafinn's antique rolodex stand in the process. When I caught my balance, I noticed that a piece of scrap paper previously stuck between two of the files had fluttered to the floor at my feet.
"There's more to life than Wall Street," I read. "That's an odd note to find on Wall Street," I thought. Then it struck me. "It's you," I said, looking at Gwafinn.
"What's me?" he asked, taking his finger off the intercom button.
I put the piece of paper on his desk. "You're the Ghost of Johnston Brothers. You're the one who's been leaving these notes for people all this time. No one's noticed because you slip the notes between files so they only appear on desks when things get reshuffled."
"Okay, you got me. But don't tell anyone."
"But why? If you wanted to change the way people act on Wall Street, why not just say and do what you believe, instead of leaving difficult-to-interpret notes for us to find?'
"Why not be more direct? I tried. Once. A long time ago. It was back when I was just a rookie research analyst. I was supposed to evaluate a re-hot Nifty Fifty company that made widgets. I knew the market for widgets was disappearing, and this company didn't even make a particularly high-quality widget to begin with. So I gave the stock a "Sell" rating. It cost me my career. I had to change my name and start over."
"Then the legends are true. Well, except for the part about you killing yourself and your corpse being hidden in the building's ventilation system."
"No, that's just dead rats you smell."
"And the notes are a last stab at providing guidance to young investment bankers."
"I had to do something to maintain my sanity. My other options were to give in and play along, or go ahead and kill myself."
"It's nice to have options," I noted. "And now you're doing this monkey project to show Wall Street how little sense it makes."
"No, I'm doing the monkey plan to get fired so I can pocket a bundle off my severance package. How was I to know people would think it's a good idea?"
"Can't you just quit?"
"Nope. I don't get the golden parachute unless I'm fired."
"Is it that nice of a golden parachute?"
"It's the best there is."
"Surly there's a better way than this to get fired."
"You'd think so, wouldn't you? But the board of directors is so desperate to keep the Johnston family out of power that they're willing to put up with anything from me. I've tried inappropriate sexual behavior, nepotistic hiring practices, extravagant spending on corporate accounts, and incompetence in each of its many flavors. They were all non-starters. Truth is, most of that is more or less expected from Wall Street executives. Total insanity was my last hope."
"Only instead of being declared insane, you were hailed as a visionary genius."
"I never have been a lucky man."
"But why try to get fired in the first place. I thought you driven Wall Street types kept working right up to the day you had heart attacks and died in your well-appointed corner offices."
"The driven Wall Street types, maybe. But that's not me. I only got into investment banking in the first place because I'd graduated from a small, liberal arts college without any particular skills, and with the simple goal of becoming fabulously wealthy. Wall Street seemed like my best bet."
"I think I know where you're coming from."
"You will keep quiet about all this, won't you?"
"No problem," I said. "But one more question: why did you change your name to Gwafinn of all things?"
"Gwafinn was my mother's maiden name--plus it was such a terrible name, I figured no one would think it was phony."
I took another step out the door. "Where was your mother's family from?"
"Midwest someplace."
"Kansas?"
"Maybe. Why?"
"I called my father the other day. Turns out my family used to spell it with two 'n's, too. They lopped off the extra one a couple generations back because they thought it was too ostentatious."
"Interesting," Gwafinn said, in a voice that implied he didn't really find it tremendously interesting. I took the monkey files started back to my desk.
"Oh Bob, one more thing," Gwafinn called before I reached the door. "If we're using Uncommonly Clever Monkeys as research analysts, what am I supposed to do with the 20 gorillas I hired yesterday?"
"Put them in management. Gorillas are well suited to leadership."
"Oooh, good idea. Gorillas run amok in the executive offices could be just the thing to get me fired."
By lunch everything was in place. My travel plans were set. My new contract was signed. My cardboard box was nearly filled with the varied and inconsequential personal items that had found their way to my office desk. My client list had been sold to Keller for a very reasonable percentage of future commissions. All that remained was to answer my phone, which had decided it wasn't going to let me leave without a fight.
"Former office of Bob Gwafin," I said in lieu of a greeting.
"Former? He's gone."
"Any minute now. Who may I tell me is calling?"
"It's Roger's owner."
"Roger's owner, the one dog's owner I don't mind speaking to right about now," I said. "How's everything going?"
"Swimmingly. I rule with an iron fist. I crush those who question my authority. I am the lord and master of all that I survey. I am a God. And thank you for asking."
"No, really."
"Well, I'm no longer pretending that I don't speak English when my office phone rings--and I seem to have earned the respect of my dog, Roger."
"Congratulations. That's astounding progress."
"Thanks. I owe it all to you. Well, you and Roger."
"How did things work out with your wife?"
"Extremely well. Turns out she was acting oddly because she thought I was cheating on her."
"So everything's back to normal on the home front?"
"Even better than normal. I'd had no idea that Katherine thought me capable of having an affair. I don't mind telling you it was a big boost to my confidence to learn my wife thought I was juggling two women when I'd thought myself only marginally capable of juggling one."
"That is an ego inflater."
"I might even go ahead and have an affair just to prove to myself that I'm up to the job."
"Mind some advice?"
"I'd love some."
"Don't."
"Okay, consider it done. Or consider it not done, if you prefer. You know, we make a good team. Let me know if you ever want to leave Wall Street. I'm certain I can find something for you in college administration. The money's terrible, but I think you'll find that the hours are a considerable improvement."
"Thanks. Maybe one day I'll take you up on that. But as it happens I've just today made a change of my own."
"Let me know if there's anything I can do."
"Since you mention it, there might be one thing."
"Name it."
"I'm talking off the top of my head here, but if there were some Lesser Morrell Islanders looking to enroll in college, would Bucklin be interested?"
"Sure, we'd take them. I was considering going in another direction with the student body, but I suppose I was getting a bit ahead of myself."
"What were you thinking of?"
"Well, there's this group here on campus claiming they deserve reparations because five or six generations back their ancestors were slaves. I figure I'd have all the students vote on it, then I'd expel the ones who vote against it, for their racial insensitivity. And right after I did done that, I'd expel the ones who voted in favor of it, for their insensitivity. Seems to me that anyone who thought being the distant descendants of slaves made them the victim of slavery would be guilty of diminishing the victimhood of those who actually were enslaved. And better to take the high road where insensitivity's involved, I always say."
"You'd be left in charge of a college with no students, of course."
"No faculty, either. I'd have them take part in the vote. You can fire even a tenured professor for insensitivity."
"Wouldn't not having students cut into the school's cash flow?"
"Oddly, no. Turns out the whole education thing has been something of a money loser for the college. We get a better return from the profits on our endowment investments."
"Don't you think you'd get lonely there on campus all by yourself."
"Yea, the students do kind of liven up the place. Like I said, it was just an idea. Maybe I'll have the vote, but put them all on probation instead of actually expelling them. The point is I could do it if I wanted to. It's a wonderful thing this self-confidence. I'm so glad you gave it to me."
I packed the last few personal items from my desk, waved goodbye to Keller, who was in the middle of a call and didn't bother to wave back, and boarded the elevator to begin my last commute to the suburbs. I'd only made it one floor when the elevator stopped and Rob Johnston got on board with his own cardboard box.
"Get replaced by a monkey?" I asked with what I hoped was sufficient compassion.
"Nah, I wasn't fired. I just couldn't take any more of the shrieking and biting."
"That's tough."
"It's okay. I'm not sure I was going to make it on Wall Street anyway. I thought if I had a good job at Johnston Brothers, all my problems would be solved. Turns out the only problem that was solved was the not-having-a-job problem. And once you have a job, you realize there are plenty of other problems that you hadn't previously considered. Like the problem that people expect you to be good at your job, and the problem that you can't stand your job."
"Yea, I see your point. So what are you going to do now?"
"Not sure. Maybe I'll teach. I've always wanted to teach. Or do woodworking. I've always liked woodworking. I'm pretty good at it, too."
"Maybe you could teach woodworking."
Rob brightened. "That's a great idea. Maybe I'll do that. So how about you? If I'm any judge of crap-filled cardboard boxes, it looks like you're leaving, too."
"I'm leaving New York, not the company."
"A transfer? Where are you headed?"
"I'm supposed to open a new branch office between the Toyko and Los Angeles offices," I said, a bit ashamed to be talking about a move up the pay scale while Rob's career was ending.
Rob picked up on my hesitance. "You don't have to be embarrassed about getting such a quick promotion, Gwaf. Not around me of all people. I might be a bit out of the loop sometimes, but eventually I put the names together and figured out how you got your job here without going through the training program. Don't worry, though, I won't hold it against you. It's not any different from how I got my job here."
"Rob, there's something I've got to confess to someone," I said. "But I need you to keep it quiet. Can I trust you?"
"No problem."
"I'm not really a Gwafinn. I'm just a Gwafin, one 'n'."
"Don't worry about it, Gwaf. Just between you and me, we haven't always been Johnstons. We used to be common, gutter-variety Johnsons, just like millions of other people. My great-great grandfather added the "t" so we'd stand out. That's when the family's fortunes really took off."
Our elevator reached the ground floor.
"Want to go grab a beer?" Rob asked.
"I better not. I've got a plane to catch and an apartment lease to break."
"Well, see you around," Rob said, because that's what people said, even when they wouldn't.
Chapter 23
At 11:55 the man moved cautiously from behind his file cabinet.
"It's only 11:55," Smith warned.
"That's okay, my boss won't complain about the extra five minutes."
"He sounds like a very good boss."
"No, he was a very bad boss. But those are his legs you see sticking out from under the copy machine, and they haven't moved much in the past day or two, so as I said, I don't expect he'll mind.
The man walking towards Smith wore thick glasses with black plastic frames of the sort that were very popular among engineers in the 1960s who were starting to go bald on top. The man walking towards Smith was starting to go bald on top. He was clothed in a simple gray wool suit--or the tattered remains of a simple gray wool suit, anyway, which was still impressive considering that the heat in Spanish Guyana forced even the sheep to wear cotton. "Now, we can finally meet," he said. They exchanged the handshake.
"My brother," the man said, and they embraced.
"You may call me Thomas," said Smith.
"And my name is Luis. I welcome you to my lunch hour with pleasure. It has been days since I have seen another administrator. All of my colleagues who survived the shelling were conscripted into the military. I would have been conscripted, too, had I not hidden behind a stack of purchase requisition forms."
"That was quick thinking," said Smith.
"I was lucky. Had I worked any faster the week before, the piles of forms around my desk waiting to be processed would have been insufficient to provide cover."
"That is a brave and harrowing tale," said Smith. "You are a fine administrator."
"Thank you my brother," Luis said. "Now, state your business."
"Non-profit," said Smith.
"Ah, non-profit," Luis' eyes teared up behind their thick glass lenses. "Long have I dreamed of non-profit. Here, my business is for-profit. That is no life for an administrator."
"Better times," Smith comforted him. "There will be better times ahead."
"In the meantime, I will do what I can to help you in your quest. Please explain the situation."
"I'm on a vital administrative mission," Smith said. "I am not at liberty to go into details, but suffice it to say it involves intra-office politics, life-and-death consequences, and the very future of the world as we know it."
"Intra-office politics, you say? That is important. I will make this one of my very top priorities. In what non-demanding way can I help?"
"I need to find someone," Smith explained.
"Something's definitely up at Johnston Brothers," Hue Llwellan fretted. Llwellan was vice president in charge of Wall Street rumors and general paranoia for Mornall & Swain. He was very good at his job. "First they have a big round of layoffs from their research staff and won't talk to the media about it. That's odd enough on its own: when we fire people, we always talk to the press--layoffs are good for our share price. Now I get word that half the sales staff just put down deposits on Porsches."
"Porsches?" asked CEO Alan Mornall. "In this market? Could it be a cover? You know, refundable deposits."
"No, they're non-refundable. I've looked into it."
"968s?"
"911s," said Llwellan.
"911s? Jesus. You're right. This doesn't add up. Well, there's only one way to know for sure. Hire someone away from them so we get the story."
"Anyone in particular I should hire."
"Start with whoever you can get cheap, then move up the ladder until you get answers. In fact, get an intern first--that will cost us next to nothing."
"This wasn't going to stay secret forever," Gwafinn said. "We knew that right from the start. No idea in history has remained secret forever. Or at least if one has, I've never heard of it." Word had reached Gwafinn that Mornall & Swain had hired away a Johnston Brothers intern. It was well known on Wall Street that Johnston Brothers had the least-trained and, of late, worst-smelling interns this side of the hog-rendering district. Thus, the only conclusion was that the competition was looking for some information…or perhaps for subjects to use in an unsanctioned medical experiment, but those sorts of things were usually handled quietly through third-world intermediaries.
"There's only one way to prevent bad press," Gwafinn continued. "And that certainly is not by keeping quiet. If you keep quiet, you let your enemies determine the facts. But if you speak first, you get to say what's what. If you do a good enough job of it, your enemies won't have a chance, even if your facts aren't fact-facts in terms of their actually being facts, if you follow."
"Uh…" I said.
Gwafinn unlocked the top drawer of his filing cabinet and removed a memo. Only bad news ever came out of locked drawers. Good news is kept in unlocked drawers, since if anyone got a look, it could only help one's public image or share price.
"Bob, tell the clerical staff to fax copies of the monkey study to all of our major clients together with this memo I wrote concerning our new research staff. Once that's done, you and the equity sales staff can start calling our clients with the monkey's first homerun pick." Gwafinn paused. "What stock did they select, anyway?"
"I believe it was Montgomery Technologies."
"Never heard of it."
"No reason you would have. It's not much of a company."
"They must have done something to get the monkey's attention."
"They colorize old movies for television."
"There you go. Cutting-edge technology."
"Except that everyone hates watching colorized movies."
"So what keeps them going?"
"They've branched out into de-colorizing new movies."
"Is there a market for that?"
"If there were, people could just turn down the color setting on their televisions."
"Well, I'm not going to argue with a monkey. I'd look silly trying. Get the sales staff to work pushing Montgomery."
"I need some guidance."
"What? Who is this?" I asked. It was the first caller of the afternoon that hadn't mentioned monkeys at least once in his opening sentence.
"It's Roger's owner. Sorry to bother you in the office like this, but I really need some more advice. The alumni department tracked you down for me. They're very good with that sort of thing."
"Yes, I know. Listen, this really isn’t a good time. Lot going on here today. Anyway I'm trying to shift away from the spiritual guidance work and into equity sales. Perhaps there's someone down at the Native American Observatory you could ask."
"I checked. There's just this guy named Curt who keeps going on about how the alumni department is blackmailing him. He really wasn't much help. Couldn't you spare a moment?"
"Maybe just a moment. Shoot."
"I think my wife's cheating on me."
"I've got your advice. Ready?"
"I'm ready."
"No, she isn't," I said.
"That's it? That's your advice?"
"That's it."
"I've heard better."
"It's really deceptively wise," I said. "I'm rather pleased with it, considering the short notice. Look at it this way: do you love your wife? Do you want to remain married?"
"More than anything."
"Then trust me, she isn't having an affair."
"But how can I know that that's true?"
"I didn't say it was true. I said it was my advice. For all I know your wife sells $20 blow jobs on street corners, the point is it doesn't matter."
"That would matter to me," said Kerns, who had never before even considered this a possibility.
"Let me put it this way. Either my advice is correct and she isn't having an affair, in which case you're worrying over nothing. Or my advice is incorrect, in which case your worrying about your wife's waning interest in you can only serve to undermine your already shaky self-confidence and give her all the more reason to look elsewhere for a real man. If you just believe she isn't cheating on you, then your confidence will improve, and your chances of saving your marriage will improve as well. Either way, you're better off if you just take my advice that she isn't cheating on you."
"Uh…"
"But you really have to believe it."
"I have to believe my wife isn't having an affair?"
"That's right."
"And the truth means nothing?"
"The truth means everything. But it's up to you to decide what the truth is. That's something I've just figured out myself recently. Got it?"
"I guess."
"Anything else? I asked.
"No, that was all…Wait, actually there is something. Do you know someone named Dana Davis?"
"Yes, I know her," I said, bracing for the inevitable horrendously bad news.
"There was a letter addressed to you at the Native American Observatory from her. The paranoid guy named Curt didn't know what to do with it."
"There was? Do you have it?"
"Yes, I've got it right in front of me."
"Read me the return address. Where was it sent from?"
"Oh, let's see here," Roger's owner said. "It says 'One Planet, Madison Avenue, New York City.' Need the zip code?"
"No, that's okay. But does it have a postmark?"
"It's a little smudged…I think it says 'Greater Merrill Island'."
"Where?"
"Greater Merrill Island. As I recall, it's the larger of the two Merrill Islands. Although I'm not sure of that. It could be the smaller. No…no, the more I think about it, the more certain I am that it's the larger."
"And these islands are where?"
"Oh, that I wouldn't know."
"Listen carefully. It's very important that you do two things right now," I said, trying to remain calm. "First, you need to mail that letter to me at this address," I gave him the address of my New Jersey apartment.
"And second?"
"Second, you need to invest in technology stocks." Roger's owner did both. The way I figured it, if he was going to lose all his money in a divorce, he might as well lose some of it in the market first. Better I get a cut than some sleazy divorce lawyer.
July 30
Luis the administrator did not know how to find the person Smith needed. But he did know how to get in contact with the Spanish Guyanian Administrators' Back-Office Army, a military/administrative organization valiantly handling the paperwork for both the government and the rebel forces. Taking both sides, they had decided, was a sensible, cover-the-bases approach to civil war from a risk-management perspective. If it was written on a piece of paper in Spanish Guyana, a Captain in the Back-Office Army assured Smith, they had a copy of it, and often more than one copy, just to be safe. For a fellow administrator on a vital mission, it would be their pleasure to help. In exchange for a small bribe.
It was money very well spent. Within days Smith was in contact with the Antarctic boy and his middle-manager father. A meeting was arranged in a secret administrators' document depository just outside of Spanish Guyana's capital city, Pila de Basura. Smith thought it best not to venture into the city itself, which was currently was under the control of roving gangs. In fairness it should be noted that in mere weeks in power, the roving gangs had reduced the local crime rate by eight percent and illiteracy by six percent. But roving gangs have such a bad reputation.
The boy was Roberto Valasquez. He had attended all the best schools, his father Santos said, which in Spanish Guyana meant they had both books and teachers who understood what books were for, at least in a broad sense. As an added bonus, Roberto was fluent in English, his father added, which could only work to the boy's benefit once he was enrolled in Bucklin. Santos loved the idea of an American college for his son, almost as much as he loved the idea of a full scholarship. Young Roberto's college fund had taken something of a beating of late, what with world currency markets currently valuing Spanish Guyanian Pesos on par with small slips of blank paper the size and shape of Spanish Guyanian pesos.
"My boy, he will be conscripted into the army if he remains here in Spanish Guyana," Santos moaned. "And if he manages to escape that, he surely will be conscripted into the other army. You can see what we're up against."
"Yes, yes. It's quite tragic," Smith said.
"Sure, they'd probably put him in the army paperwork division, to take advantage his administrative heritage and limited upper-body strength. But even so, what chance does a boy of this sort have in the military? He would be torn to bits by their strict filing protocols." Santos grabbed hold of Roberto's weak upper arm and shook it about to prove his point. "He is not a hardened administrator like you and I."
"Then it looks like we can help each other," said Smith.
The Administrative Underground slipped Smith and his prize back out of the country. Smith's plan was coming together.
August 2
"Smith, is there a press conference going on in the main auditorium?" Kerns asked when he arrived that morning.
"Now that you mention it, I do believe I saw a press conference there when I walked by. Funny, that."
"And what is this press conference about?"
"Most of them are about generating awareness for ideas or products," Smith explained. "Or such is my understanding. It's not really my field."
"Yes, yes. But what specific idea or product is this press conference meant to promote awareness of?"
"You know, I really couldn't say."
"You don't know?" Kerns asked.
"I couldn't say."
"I take it your repeated use of the phrase 'I couldn't say.' Is your way of subtly evading the issue."
"I couldn't say that either," Smith said.
"Well, since no one knows anything about this press conference, I guess I'll just go and tell them that there's been a mistake and they can leave."
"I'll take care of it," Smith said, beating Kerns to the office door. "And now that I think about it, as long as the press, the college board of regents, and select members of faculty are assembled, I might just wander by and say a few words. Seems a shame to waste a perfectly good press conference."
"Funny how no one seems to know why this press conference is there," Kerns noted. "Press conferences don't usually just pop up on their own."
"Probably a statistical anomaly," Smith said. "A few reporters wind up in the same place by a coincidence, than other media outlets figure they better have someone there, too, so they won't get left out should something happen."
"And the board of regents and select members of the faculty?"
"That's a bit harder to explain…"
"Smith, why don't you just admit that you called this press conference. You're obviously planning something."
"No, really. I never plan anything. Plans just lead to scheduling conflicts."
"Go ahead and deny it, but I'm coming to your press conference," Kerns said. "Just keep in mind that whatever you're trying to pull off, I'm going to be there to stop you." It was the first direct challenge Kerns had made in his life. And it felt good.
A funny thing had happened the day the monkey plan got rolling. Montgomery Technology shares rallied. The company hadn't made any announcements or signed any new contracts. They hadn't colorized any old movies that day or de-colorized any new ones. No progress had been made in settling the lawsuit from the man turned down for employment because of his physical disability--specifically, color blindness. In fact, most of the staff had spent their morning calling other, better, firms in search of more promising jobs. So the employees had been as surprised as anyone to learn that their stock had rallied right from the opening bell. They'd been downright amazed when it soared farther still in the afternoon, since all anyone at Montgomery had done since lunch was track the value of their stock options. By the close of business, the company was worth four times as much as it had been that morning. It was a stunningly successful day. And considering how little effort Montgomery employees had expended in accomplishing this feat, the firm's CEO informed the financial press that he was confident they could do it again, tomorrow. Johnston Brothers' clients were equally thrilled. For all this had occurred on the very day that Johnston Brothers tasked its massive sales force with pushing the stock.
From that day on there was no hiding the monkey plan from the financial press. There also was no debating the media's reaction.
They loved the idea.
What choice did they have? The monkeys already had made a fortune. And the journalists knew that no one lasted long on Wall Street criticizing anything that made money. In fact, very few lasted long on Wall Street criticizing things that had never made money, but that someday might. Sure, a few curmudgeonly sorts griped that the Montgomery stock only had rallied because there was suddenly a wave of demand for the shares from Johnston Brothers customers. But money was money and pesky details were decidedly not money, so no one paid the critics much mind. Johnston Brothers' customers had made a huge profit, and everyone was happy.
Only it couldn't last. If there's one lesson that can be learned from the relatively large number of countries that followed Russia into Communism, it's that no good idea, and very few bad ones besides, ever goes unstolen. Within days the rest of The Street had adopted the new "Jungle Thinking" approach to financial analysis. Johnston Brothers' star chimps were flooded with lucrative offers to jump to the competition--or they would have been, if only they'd known how to answer their phones. Rebuffed by this unintentional and unexpected loyalty, desperate Wall Street human resource directors resorted to more drastic measures. The Bronx Zoo was forced to add extra security guards around the monkey house. Medical experimenters began skipping right from mice to unemployed humans to cope with escalating monkey prices.
Soon no investor would trust a stock pick unless it came from a monkey, or at very least a ringed-tail lemur. Shares of Red Lion Supermarkets took an unprecedented drubbing. Thousands of human financial analysts suddenly found themselves out of work. But they were resourceful sorts, and did their best to take advantage of the changing culture of Wall Street, opening banana daiquiri bars and climbing gyms throughout the area.
There was plenty of glory to go around as well. Gwafinn's picture was soon on the cover of every financial periodical in the world--or at least those that couldn't swing an interview with the real star, Chimp #8. But the glut of imitators also represented a problem. With other ideas, in other fields, patents are used to protect innovators from exactly this sort of thing. But as Gwafinn had learned to his chagrin, you can't patent a monkey. Imitation might be the sincerest form of flattery, but flattery translated poorly to Johnston Brothers' quarterly report.
"We have to stay ahead, Bob," Gwafinn said, fuming behind his large office desk. "We cannot be seen as just one of many monkey-analyst firms. Just watch; in a few months no one will even remember that we were the first." Gwafinn was wearing a safari outfit, complete with pith helmet. "I suppose I should have realized that we would have imitators. But how could I have known it would happen so fast?" Gwafinn banged a fist on his desk, then took a deep breath. Well, no point living in the past. It looks like we're going to need another bold move."
"Maybe we could go back to human analysts," I suggested. "We could pick up some good ones cheap, now that everyone else is laying them off."
"The contrarian approach? No, too soon, too soon. If you want to be a contrarian, you have to wait at least six months, maybe even a year. Act any sooner than that, and everyone will think you're behind the times, instead of realizing you're ahead of them. Anyway, I've got a better idea. Take a look at these numbers." Gwafinn slid a computer print out across the desk towards me. "What do you see?" he asked.
"It looks like our monkeys' picks haven't done as well since all the other firms on the Street have had monkeys picking stocks as well."
"That's right. Our monkeys have been on Wall Street only a week, and already they're burning out. Burnout happens to human analysts, too, and there's only one thing to do when it does."
"Vacations?"
"Replacements. We've got to get new analysts."
"More monkeys?"
"No, no. Monkeys clearly aren't cut out for this kind of work, long term. Too much pressure. What we need to do is find someone with the stock picking ability of a monkey, but the strength and dedication of a human."
"Meaning?"
"We're switching to gorillas. 'Bigger monkeys, bigger profits.' Wait, let me write that down, it could be useful for our marketing department." He jotted his catchy monkey phrase down. "Gorillas are tough s.o.b.'s and they're smarter than the monkeys that we've been using. They're the perfect analysts. They might even be smart enough to take over the corporate finance department. What do you think?"
"Uh, I don't know, sir, I'll ask around."
"Do that. I've already arranged for 40 gorillas to be shipped in for interviews."
"Interviews with gorillas? That ought to take care of some of the overstaffing down in human resources, anyway."
"An excellent point, Bob. We keep trying to lay off those people, but they're the human resources department, so they always hire themselves back."
I got up to leave.
"This is a smart move," Gwafinn said. "An analyst shouldn't be able to sleep in the drawers of his own desk."
"Yes sir."
An oddly mischievous smile flashed on Gwafinn's face. "You think I'm insane, don't you?" he asked.
"Why do say that?" I evaded.
"I'm not, you know. Someday I hope I'll be able to make you understand that. In the meantime, all I ask is that you believe in me."
"On the bright side," I thought on my way back to my desk, "at least I work for a firm that's open to new ideas."
"Thank you all for coming," Smith began. It was a full house. Smith knew just what to say to journalists to get them to show up at a news conference. He'd said there would be food served. All the local news people had arrived right on time and stuffed themselves full of Danish. Smith had little doubt that the trip would be worth their effort on more than just the breakfast-pastry front. He strongly suspected that their stories would be picked up by all the national networks and newswires. "I realize it was short notice," Smith continued. "But we are here to witness a totally unique event in the history of campus diversity. And I, Assistant Dean Thomas Prester Smith, am privileged to be a part of it…That's P-R-E-S-T-E-R," he spelled, unprompted. "S-M-I-T-H" he added just to be safe. "So without further delay I'd like to introduce to you Bucklin College's newest student, the only Antarctican in the world," Smith announced with a flourish. "Roberto Something-or other." Roberto stepped from behind the curtain and crossed the stage to a hushed audience.
"Hello," he said in halting English. "My name is Roberto. I'm very happy to be here."
"Be quiet Roberto," Smith whispered. "They already know your name. Just stand here and act like an Antarctican."
Roberto stood smiling in front of the crowd. There were a few scattered flashbulbs, but, oddly, no awed gasp.
"I'll take your questions," Smith prompted. But there was no response. The silence was becoming uncomfortable, and Smith was about to start talking about his heroic journey into a war zone when someone else did speak. Someone way in the back of the crowd, whom Smith couldn't quite see--although the voice did sound familiar. "But," this voice said, "he's just like everyone else!"
A rumbling bubbled up from the crowd. It was true--this boy was just like everyone else. A little bit of an accent, sure. Perhaps even enough skin tone to qualify as a racial minority. But he was just a kid like all the other kids on all the other campuses across the country.
"No, he's not like everyone else," Smith shouted over the gathering tumult. "He's an Antarctican. We have papers to prove it."
"Say something, Roberto," Smith said, desperate.
"Hello, my name is Roberto," said Roberto. "I'm very happy to be here."
But it was too late. The cameras were shutting off, the reporters departing to cover the region's real news that day, a man down the coast in Harforth who had grown a 14-pound tomato. Even the assembled members of Bucklin's board of directors were leaving without so much as a promotion thrown Smith's way. "Wait!" Smith yelled after the shrinking crowd. "He's different. He's special."
"Call us back when you've grown a really big vegetable," advised the reporter from the Bridgeton Weekly Sun, before he headed for the exit with the rest of his colleagues. The reporter turned back just before he reached the door to add "or caught a really big fish." Then they were gone. Smith slumped forward onto the podium.
"Hello, my name is Roberto," consoled Roberto. "I'm very happy to be here."
"I thought your father said you were fluent," Smith moaned. "Is that all the English you know?"
"No," said Roberto. "It just seemed like the thing to say."
"Information."
"Yes, I need a number in Greater Morrell Island," I said. Dana's forwarded letter still hadn't arrived, but I was tired of waiting.
"Where?"
"Greater Morrell Island. I believe it's the larger of the two Morrell Islands, but I can't be certain of that."
"Sir, this is Manhattan information. Unless Greater Morrell Island has an apartment in town I'm not going to be able to help."
"So how am I supposed to find a number on Greater Morrell Island?"
"Try Greater Morrell Island information."
"And how can I find the number for that?"
"How should I know? All I can tell you is there's no listing here in the city."
"How can you call yourself information?" I asked.
"No listing," she explained, and billed my account $1.50.
I made a second call.
"Reference desk."
"Do you have the phone book for Greater Morrell Island?" I asked.
"One moment."
The New York Public Library is known for its skilled reference librarians. And for its numerous sleeping vagrants. But as the sleeping vagrants rarely answered the phones, I felt safe in assuming I was speaking with one of the former.
"Sort of," the reference librarian answered a few minutes later.
"Sort of?"
"We have the phone listings, but I'm not certain I'd call it a phone book."
"More of a booklet?"
"More of a leaflet."
"A leaflet? For the whole island?"
"A small leaflet. And it's only printed on one side. Would you like me to fax it to you?"
"Thank you," I said. "That would be very helpful."
Only it wasn't very helpful. None of its listings sounded at all like someplace where I could find Dana, and I read through all 22 of them twice. I considered calling a few at random, but as it was the middle of the day here, it figured to be the middle of the night there, if there was anything to this round Earth theory that had become so popular. I'd wait for the morning, by which I mean the evening, to make my call.
"Problem?" Keller asked.
"Turns out my girlfriend might not be caught in a war zone after all."
"Well that's a kick in the teeth," Keller said, and went back to pushing the latest monkey-endorsed shares.
"It's only 11:55," Smith warned.
"That's okay, my boss won't complain about the extra five minutes."
"He sounds like a very good boss."
"No, he was a very bad boss. But those are his legs you see sticking out from under the copy machine, and they haven't moved much in the past day or two, so as I said, I don't expect he'll mind.
The man walking towards Smith wore thick glasses with black plastic frames of the sort that were very popular among engineers in the 1960s who were starting to go bald on top. The man walking towards Smith was starting to go bald on top. He was clothed in a simple gray wool suit--or the tattered remains of a simple gray wool suit, anyway, which was still impressive considering that the heat in Spanish Guyana forced even the sheep to wear cotton. "Now, we can finally meet," he said. They exchanged the handshake.
"My brother," the man said, and they embraced.
"You may call me Thomas," said Smith.
"And my name is Luis. I welcome you to my lunch hour with pleasure. It has been days since I have seen another administrator. All of my colleagues who survived the shelling were conscripted into the military. I would have been conscripted, too, had I not hidden behind a stack of purchase requisition forms."
"That was quick thinking," said Smith.
"I was lucky. Had I worked any faster the week before, the piles of forms around my desk waiting to be processed would have been insufficient to provide cover."
"That is a brave and harrowing tale," said Smith. "You are a fine administrator."
"Thank you my brother," Luis said. "Now, state your business."
"Non-profit," said Smith.
"Ah, non-profit," Luis' eyes teared up behind their thick glass lenses. "Long have I dreamed of non-profit. Here, my business is for-profit. That is no life for an administrator."
"Better times," Smith comforted him. "There will be better times ahead."
"In the meantime, I will do what I can to help you in your quest. Please explain the situation."
"I'm on a vital administrative mission," Smith said. "I am not at liberty to go into details, but suffice it to say it involves intra-office politics, life-and-death consequences, and the very future of the world as we know it."
"Intra-office politics, you say? That is important. I will make this one of my very top priorities. In what non-demanding way can I help?"
"I need to find someone," Smith explained.
"Something's definitely up at Johnston Brothers," Hue Llwellan fretted. Llwellan was vice president in charge of Wall Street rumors and general paranoia for Mornall & Swain. He was very good at his job. "First they have a big round of layoffs from their research staff and won't talk to the media about it. That's odd enough on its own: when we fire people, we always talk to the press--layoffs are good for our share price. Now I get word that half the sales staff just put down deposits on Porsches."
"Porsches?" asked CEO Alan Mornall. "In this market? Could it be a cover? You know, refundable deposits."
"No, they're non-refundable. I've looked into it."
"968s?"
"911s," said Llwellan.
"911s? Jesus. You're right. This doesn't add up. Well, there's only one way to know for sure. Hire someone away from them so we get the story."
"Anyone in particular I should hire."
"Start with whoever you can get cheap, then move up the ladder until you get answers. In fact, get an intern first--that will cost us next to nothing."
"This wasn't going to stay secret forever," Gwafinn said. "We knew that right from the start. No idea in history has remained secret forever. Or at least if one has, I've never heard of it." Word had reached Gwafinn that Mornall & Swain had hired away a Johnston Brothers intern. It was well known on Wall Street that Johnston Brothers had the least-trained and, of late, worst-smelling interns this side of the hog-rendering district. Thus, the only conclusion was that the competition was looking for some information…or perhaps for subjects to use in an unsanctioned medical experiment, but those sorts of things were usually handled quietly through third-world intermediaries.
"There's only one way to prevent bad press," Gwafinn continued. "And that certainly is not by keeping quiet. If you keep quiet, you let your enemies determine the facts. But if you speak first, you get to say what's what. If you do a good enough job of it, your enemies won't have a chance, even if your facts aren't fact-facts in terms of their actually being facts, if you follow."
"Uh…" I said.
Gwafinn unlocked the top drawer of his filing cabinet and removed a memo. Only bad news ever came out of locked drawers. Good news is kept in unlocked drawers, since if anyone got a look, it could only help one's public image or share price.
"Bob, tell the clerical staff to fax copies of the monkey study to all of our major clients together with this memo I wrote concerning our new research staff. Once that's done, you and the equity sales staff can start calling our clients with the monkey's first homerun pick." Gwafinn paused. "What stock did they select, anyway?"
"I believe it was Montgomery Technologies."
"Never heard of it."
"No reason you would have. It's not much of a company."
"They must have done something to get the monkey's attention."
"They colorize old movies for television."
"There you go. Cutting-edge technology."
"Except that everyone hates watching colorized movies."
"So what keeps them going?"
"They've branched out into de-colorizing new movies."
"Is there a market for that?"
"If there were, people could just turn down the color setting on their televisions."
"Well, I'm not going to argue with a monkey. I'd look silly trying. Get the sales staff to work pushing Montgomery."
"I need some guidance."
"What? Who is this?" I asked. It was the first caller of the afternoon that hadn't mentioned monkeys at least once in his opening sentence.
"It's Roger's owner. Sorry to bother you in the office like this, but I really need some more advice. The alumni department tracked you down for me. They're very good with that sort of thing."
"Yes, I know. Listen, this really isn’t a good time. Lot going on here today. Anyway I'm trying to shift away from the spiritual guidance work and into equity sales. Perhaps there's someone down at the Native American Observatory you could ask."
"I checked. There's just this guy named Curt who keeps going on about how the alumni department is blackmailing him. He really wasn't much help. Couldn't you spare a moment?"
"Maybe just a moment. Shoot."
"I think my wife's cheating on me."
"I've got your advice. Ready?"
"I'm ready."
"No, she isn't," I said.
"That's it? That's your advice?"
"That's it."
"I've heard better."
"It's really deceptively wise," I said. "I'm rather pleased with it, considering the short notice. Look at it this way: do you love your wife? Do you want to remain married?"
"More than anything."
"Then trust me, she isn't having an affair."
"But how can I know that that's true?"
"I didn't say it was true. I said it was my advice. For all I know your wife sells $20 blow jobs on street corners, the point is it doesn't matter."
"That would matter to me," said Kerns, who had never before even considered this a possibility.
"Let me put it this way. Either my advice is correct and she isn't having an affair, in which case you're worrying over nothing. Or my advice is incorrect, in which case your worrying about your wife's waning interest in you can only serve to undermine your already shaky self-confidence and give her all the more reason to look elsewhere for a real man. If you just believe she isn't cheating on you, then your confidence will improve, and your chances of saving your marriage will improve as well. Either way, you're better off if you just take my advice that she isn't cheating on you."
"Uh…"
"But you really have to believe it."
"I have to believe my wife isn't having an affair?"
"That's right."
"And the truth means nothing?"
"The truth means everything. But it's up to you to decide what the truth is. That's something I've just figured out myself recently. Got it?"
"I guess."
"Anything else? I asked.
"No, that was all…Wait, actually there is something. Do you know someone named Dana Davis?"
"Yes, I know her," I said, bracing for the inevitable horrendously bad news.
"There was a letter addressed to you at the Native American Observatory from her. The paranoid guy named Curt didn't know what to do with it."
"There was? Do you have it?"
"Yes, I've got it right in front of me."
"Read me the return address. Where was it sent from?"
"Oh, let's see here," Roger's owner said. "It says 'One Planet, Madison Avenue, New York City.' Need the zip code?"
"No, that's okay. But does it have a postmark?"
"It's a little smudged…I think it says 'Greater Merrill Island'."
"Where?"
"Greater Merrill Island. As I recall, it's the larger of the two Merrill Islands. Although I'm not sure of that. It could be the smaller. No…no, the more I think about it, the more certain I am that it's the larger."
"And these islands are where?"
"Oh, that I wouldn't know."
"Listen carefully. It's very important that you do two things right now," I said, trying to remain calm. "First, you need to mail that letter to me at this address," I gave him the address of my New Jersey apartment.
"And second?"
"Second, you need to invest in technology stocks." Roger's owner did both. The way I figured it, if he was going to lose all his money in a divorce, he might as well lose some of it in the market first. Better I get a cut than some sleazy divorce lawyer.
July 30
Luis the administrator did not know how to find the person Smith needed. But he did know how to get in contact with the Spanish Guyanian Administrators' Back-Office Army, a military/administrative organization valiantly handling the paperwork for both the government and the rebel forces. Taking both sides, they had decided, was a sensible, cover-the-bases approach to civil war from a risk-management perspective. If it was written on a piece of paper in Spanish Guyana, a Captain in the Back-Office Army assured Smith, they had a copy of it, and often more than one copy, just to be safe. For a fellow administrator on a vital mission, it would be their pleasure to help. In exchange for a small bribe.
It was money very well spent. Within days Smith was in contact with the Antarctic boy and his middle-manager father. A meeting was arranged in a secret administrators' document depository just outside of Spanish Guyana's capital city, Pila de Basura. Smith thought it best not to venture into the city itself, which was currently was under the control of roving gangs. In fairness it should be noted that in mere weeks in power, the roving gangs had reduced the local crime rate by eight percent and illiteracy by six percent. But roving gangs have such a bad reputation.
The boy was Roberto Valasquez. He had attended all the best schools, his father Santos said, which in Spanish Guyana meant they had both books and teachers who understood what books were for, at least in a broad sense. As an added bonus, Roberto was fluent in English, his father added, which could only work to the boy's benefit once he was enrolled in Bucklin. Santos loved the idea of an American college for his son, almost as much as he loved the idea of a full scholarship. Young Roberto's college fund had taken something of a beating of late, what with world currency markets currently valuing Spanish Guyanian Pesos on par with small slips of blank paper the size and shape of Spanish Guyanian pesos.
"My boy, he will be conscripted into the army if he remains here in Spanish Guyana," Santos moaned. "And if he manages to escape that, he surely will be conscripted into the other army. You can see what we're up against."
"Yes, yes. It's quite tragic," Smith said.
"Sure, they'd probably put him in the army paperwork division, to take advantage his administrative heritage and limited upper-body strength. But even so, what chance does a boy of this sort have in the military? He would be torn to bits by their strict filing protocols." Santos grabbed hold of Roberto's weak upper arm and shook it about to prove his point. "He is not a hardened administrator like you and I."
"Then it looks like we can help each other," said Smith.
The Administrative Underground slipped Smith and his prize back out of the country. Smith's plan was coming together.
August 2
"Smith, is there a press conference going on in the main auditorium?" Kerns asked when he arrived that morning.
"Now that you mention it, I do believe I saw a press conference there when I walked by. Funny, that."
"And what is this press conference about?"
"Most of them are about generating awareness for ideas or products," Smith explained. "Or such is my understanding. It's not really my field."
"Yes, yes. But what specific idea or product is this press conference meant to promote awareness of?"
"You know, I really couldn't say."
"You don't know?" Kerns asked.
"I couldn't say."
"I take it your repeated use of the phrase 'I couldn't say.' Is your way of subtly evading the issue."
"I couldn't say that either," Smith said.
"Well, since no one knows anything about this press conference, I guess I'll just go and tell them that there's been a mistake and they can leave."
"I'll take care of it," Smith said, beating Kerns to the office door. "And now that I think about it, as long as the press, the college board of regents, and select members of faculty are assembled, I might just wander by and say a few words. Seems a shame to waste a perfectly good press conference."
"Funny how no one seems to know why this press conference is there," Kerns noted. "Press conferences don't usually just pop up on their own."
"Probably a statistical anomaly," Smith said. "A few reporters wind up in the same place by a coincidence, than other media outlets figure they better have someone there, too, so they won't get left out should something happen."
"And the board of regents and select members of the faculty?"
"That's a bit harder to explain…"
"Smith, why don't you just admit that you called this press conference. You're obviously planning something."
"No, really. I never plan anything. Plans just lead to scheduling conflicts."
"Go ahead and deny it, but I'm coming to your press conference," Kerns said. "Just keep in mind that whatever you're trying to pull off, I'm going to be there to stop you." It was the first direct challenge Kerns had made in his life. And it felt good.
A funny thing had happened the day the monkey plan got rolling. Montgomery Technology shares rallied. The company hadn't made any announcements or signed any new contracts. They hadn't colorized any old movies that day or de-colorized any new ones. No progress had been made in settling the lawsuit from the man turned down for employment because of his physical disability--specifically, color blindness. In fact, most of the staff had spent their morning calling other, better, firms in search of more promising jobs. So the employees had been as surprised as anyone to learn that their stock had rallied right from the opening bell. They'd been downright amazed when it soared farther still in the afternoon, since all anyone at Montgomery had done since lunch was track the value of their stock options. By the close of business, the company was worth four times as much as it had been that morning. It was a stunningly successful day. And considering how little effort Montgomery employees had expended in accomplishing this feat, the firm's CEO informed the financial press that he was confident they could do it again, tomorrow. Johnston Brothers' clients were equally thrilled. For all this had occurred on the very day that Johnston Brothers tasked its massive sales force with pushing the stock.
From that day on there was no hiding the monkey plan from the financial press. There also was no debating the media's reaction.
They loved the idea.
What choice did they have? The monkeys already had made a fortune. And the journalists knew that no one lasted long on Wall Street criticizing anything that made money. In fact, very few lasted long on Wall Street criticizing things that had never made money, but that someday might. Sure, a few curmudgeonly sorts griped that the Montgomery stock only had rallied because there was suddenly a wave of demand for the shares from Johnston Brothers customers. But money was money and pesky details were decidedly not money, so no one paid the critics much mind. Johnston Brothers' customers had made a huge profit, and everyone was happy.
Only it couldn't last. If there's one lesson that can be learned from the relatively large number of countries that followed Russia into Communism, it's that no good idea, and very few bad ones besides, ever goes unstolen. Within days the rest of The Street had adopted the new "Jungle Thinking" approach to financial analysis. Johnston Brothers' star chimps were flooded with lucrative offers to jump to the competition--or they would have been, if only they'd known how to answer their phones. Rebuffed by this unintentional and unexpected loyalty, desperate Wall Street human resource directors resorted to more drastic measures. The Bronx Zoo was forced to add extra security guards around the monkey house. Medical experimenters began skipping right from mice to unemployed humans to cope with escalating monkey prices.
Soon no investor would trust a stock pick unless it came from a monkey, or at very least a ringed-tail lemur. Shares of Red Lion Supermarkets took an unprecedented drubbing. Thousands of human financial analysts suddenly found themselves out of work. But they were resourceful sorts, and did their best to take advantage of the changing culture of Wall Street, opening banana daiquiri bars and climbing gyms throughout the area.
There was plenty of glory to go around as well. Gwafinn's picture was soon on the cover of every financial periodical in the world--or at least those that couldn't swing an interview with the real star, Chimp #8. But the glut of imitators also represented a problem. With other ideas, in other fields, patents are used to protect innovators from exactly this sort of thing. But as Gwafinn had learned to his chagrin, you can't patent a monkey. Imitation might be the sincerest form of flattery, but flattery translated poorly to Johnston Brothers' quarterly report.
"We have to stay ahead, Bob," Gwafinn said, fuming behind his large office desk. "We cannot be seen as just one of many monkey-analyst firms. Just watch; in a few months no one will even remember that we were the first." Gwafinn was wearing a safari outfit, complete with pith helmet. "I suppose I should have realized that we would have imitators. But how could I have known it would happen so fast?" Gwafinn banged a fist on his desk, then took a deep breath. Well, no point living in the past. It looks like we're going to need another bold move."
"Maybe we could go back to human analysts," I suggested. "We could pick up some good ones cheap, now that everyone else is laying them off."
"The contrarian approach? No, too soon, too soon. If you want to be a contrarian, you have to wait at least six months, maybe even a year. Act any sooner than that, and everyone will think you're behind the times, instead of realizing you're ahead of them. Anyway, I've got a better idea. Take a look at these numbers." Gwafinn slid a computer print out across the desk towards me. "What do you see?" he asked.
"It looks like our monkeys' picks haven't done as well since all the other firms on the Street have had monkeys picking stocks as well."
"That's right. Our monkeys have been on Wall Street only a week, and already they're burning out. Burnout happens to human analysts, too, and there's only one thing to do when it does."
"Vacations?"
"Replacements. We've got to get new analysts."
"More monkeys?"
"No, no. Monkeys clearly aren't cut out for this kind of work, long term. Too much pressure. What we need to do is find someone with the stock picking ability of a monkey, but the strength and dedication of a human."
"Meaning?"
"We're switching to gorillas. 'Bigger monkeys, bigger profits.' Wait, let me write that down, it could be useful for our marketing department." He jotted his catchy monkey phrase down. "Gorillas are tough s.o.b.'s and they're smarter than the monkeys that we've been using. They're the perfect analysts. They might even be smart enough to take over the corporate finance department. What do you think?"
"Uh, I don't know, sir, I'll ask around."
"Do that. I've already arranged for 40 gorillas to be shipped in for interviews."
"Interviews with gorillas? That ought to take care of some of the overstaffing down in human resources, anyway."
"An excellent point, Bob. We keep trying to lay off those people, but they're the human resources department, so they always hire themselves back."
I got up to leave.
"This is a smart move," Gwafinn said. "An analyst shouldn't be able to sleep in the drawers of his own desk."
"Yes sir."
An oddly mischievous smile flashed on Gwafinn's face. "You think I'm insane, don't you?" he asked.
"Why do say that?" I evaded.
"I'm not, you know. Someday I hope I'll be able to make you understand that. In the meantime, all I ask is that you believe in me."
"On the bright side," I thought on my way back to my desk, "at least I work for a firm that's open to new ideas."
"Thank you all for coming," Smith began. It was a full house. Smith knew just what to say to journalists to get them to show up at a news conference. He'd said there would be food served. All the local news people had arrived right on time and stuffed themselves full of Danish. Smith had little doubt that the trip would be worth their effort on more than just the breakfast-pastry front. He strongly suspected that their stories would be picked up by all the national networks and newswires. "I realize it was short notice," Smith continued. "But we are here to witness a totally unique event in the history of campus diversity. And I, Assistant Dean Thomas Prester Smith, am privileged to be a part of it…That's P-R-E-S-T-E-R," he spelled, unprompted. "S-M-I-T-H" he added just to be safe. "So without further delay I'd like to introduce to you Bucklin College's newest student, the only Antarctican in the world," Smith announced with a flourish. "Roberto Something-or other." Roberto stepped from behind the curtain and crossed the stage to a hushed audience.
"Hello," he said in halting English. "My name is Roberto. I'm very happy to be here."
"Be quiet Roberto," Smith whispered. "They already know your name. Just stand here and act like an Antarctican."
Roberto stood smiling in front of the crowd. There were a few scattered flashbulbs, but, oddly, no awed gasp.
"I'll take your questions," Smith prompted. But there was no response. The silence was becoming uncomfortable, and Smith was about to start talking about his heroic journey into a war zone when someone else did speak. Someone way in the back of the crowd, whom Smith couldn't quite see--although the voice did sound familiar. "But," this voice said, "he's just like everyone else!"
A rumbling bubbled up from the crowd. It was true--this boy was just like everyone else. A little bit of an accent, sure. Perhaps even enough skin tone to qualify as a racial minority. But he was just a kid like all the other kids on all the other campuses across the country.
"No, he's not like everyone else," Smith shouted over the gathering tumult. "He's an Antarctican. We have papers to prove it."
"Say something, Roberto," Smith said, desperate.
"Hello, my name is Roberto," said Roberto. "I'm very happy to be here."
But it was too late. The cameras were shutting off, the reporters departing to cover the region's real news that day, a man down the coast in Harforth who had grown a 14-pound tomato. Even the assembled members of Bucklin's board of directors were leaving without so much as a promotion thrown Smith's way. "Wait!" Smith yelled after the shrinking crowd. "He's different. He's special."
"Call us back when you've grown a really big vegetable," advised the reporter from the Bridgeton Weekly Sun, before he headed for the exit with the rest of his colleagues. The reporter turned back just before he reached the door to add "or caught a really big fish." Then they were gone. Smith slumped forward onto the podium.
"Hello, my name is Roberto," consoled Roberto. "I'm very happy to be here."
"I thought your father said you were fluent," Smith moaned. "Is that all the English you know?"
"No," said Roberto. "It just seemed like the thing to say."
"Information."
"Yes, I need a number in Greater Morrell Island," I said. Dana's forwarded letter still hadn't arrived, but I was tired of waiting.
"Where?"
"Greater Morrell Island. I believe it's the larger of the two Morrell Islands, but I can't be certain of that."
"Sir, this is Manhattan information. Unless Greater Morrell Island has an apartment in town I'm not going to be able to help."
"So how am I supposed to find a number on Greater Morrell Island?"
"Try Greater Morrell Island information."
"And how can I find the number for that?"
"How should I know? All I can tell you is there's no listing here in the city."
"How can you call yourself information?" I asked.
"No listing," she explained, and billed my account $1.50.
I made a second call.
"Reference desk."
"Do you have the phone book for Greater Morrell Island?" I asked.
"One moment."
The New York Public Library is known for its skilled reference librarians. And for its numerous sleeping vagrants. But as the sleeping vagrants rarely answered the phones, I felt safe in assuming I was speaking with one of the former.
"Sort of," the reference librarian answered a few minutes later.
"Sort of?"
"We have the phone listings, but I'm not certain I'd call it a phone book."
"More of a booklet?"
"More of a leaflet."
"A leaflet? For the whole island?"
"A small leaflet. And it's only printed on one side. Would you like me to fax it to you?"
"Thank you," I said. "That would be very helpful."
Only it wasn't very helpful. None of its listings sounded at all like someplace where I could find Dana, and I read through all 22 of them twice. I considered calling a few at random, but as it was the middle of the day here, it figured to be the middle of the night there, if there was anything to this round Earth theory that had become so popular. I'd wait for the morning, by which I mean the evening, to make my call.
"Problem?" Keller asked.
"Turns out my girlfriend might not be caught in a war zone after all."
"Well that's a kick in the teeth," Keller said, and went back to pushing the latest monkey-endorsed shares.
Chapter 22
July 28
The next time it was nearly much more serious than a scratch on the neck. A Lesser Morrell Island fisherman had been miles from shore when he discovered that his canoe was sinking. Someone, it seems, had drilled a series of holes, then plugged them temporarily with tree sap so the leak wouldn’t become apparent until the fisherman was well out at sea. The fisherman had tried to keep the craft afloat long enough to return to land, but it is notoriously difficult to bail and paddle at the same time, unless one is very, very skilled with one's feet. To the fisherman's dismay, he discovered that he was not.
The canoe sank, leaving the fisherman alone to bob on the surface and await his own certain death. Or what seemed likely to be his certain death anyway. As it happened, the fisherman was rescued and carried to land on the back of a passing tuna, if his account is to be considered accurate. The fisherman theorized that the tuna must have heard about the positive press dolphins received for their occasional good deed, and figured a few tuna-centered rescue stories might convince people to switch to tasty mackerel-salad sandwiches instead.
The canoe--and thus the evidence--was at the bottom of the ocean, since the tuna had drawn the line at towing the man's boat. But even without evidence, Dana was certain that Sarah was behind the near disaster. Sarah's behavior had been increasingly odd ever since the genocide discussions, to the point where most agreed that she had replaced the doctor as the island's chief nut case, although the doctor remained confident that he might yet rally and make a game of it. As Sarah had drifted ever further towards the sanity-challenged end of the mental-health spectrum, the island's others activists distanced themselves from her cause. Brent had been largely unsupportive ever since it had become clear that explosives would not be necessary. Jeff maintained that he was still for the plan, but not to the extent of actually seeing it through. Tommy had found a new home among the natives, most of whom were too nice to come right out and tell him to fuck off. Even Laura decided she "had too many things on her plate," which was her nice way of saying that if Sarah wasn't going to let her be in charge, then she could go to hell. The defections left Sarah increasingly isolated, and isolation never really has been known to improve anyone's mental health. The past few nights Sarah hadn't even returned to her tent in the activists' camp to sleep.
"It might take days or even weeks," Dana decided when news of the canoe sinking reached the activists, "but I'm going to track Sarah down."
Twenty minutes later, Dana found her. The search had moved along much faster than she had expected, on account of the fact that Sarah was not so much hiding as she was making loud hammering sounds.
"What are you doing?" Dana asked.
"Hammering," Sarah explained, without looking away from her work.
"That much I'd gathered. But why are you hammering nails into a tree?"
"It's called spiking. You put the nail into the tree at the level a logger would cut it down. Then when his chainsaw hits the nail, the chain snaps, whips around and slices him open. It's environmental. Cuts down on logging."
"Yes, I've heard of tree spiking," Dana said. "But they don't even have chainsaws here. When they want to take down a tree, they use a sharpened rock."
Sarah stopped her pounding for a moment. "Still can't hurt," she decided, and went back to hammering.
"Sarah, would you stop that for a second? I want to talk to you about the canoe sinking."
"There's been a canoe sinking?" Sarah asked, interested.
"But no one was killed. He was rescued by a fish."
"A fish? Do you mean a dolphin?"
"No, he says it was a tuna."
"I knew the dolphins would be smart enough to take my side," Sarah said. "Stupid tuna. Can't see the big picture."
"So you admit you've been killing people?"
"On the record or off the record?"
"On the record."
"No."
"Okay, then off the record."
"Still no."
"Why did you ask 'on or off the record' if you were going to give the same answer to both?"
"I just like the way it sounds. I'm thinking about going to law school some day."
"Sarah, just admit you've been trying to kill people. It's not really a crime. It's a disease, like using drugs."
"I won't admit I've done anything wrong. Hard decisions had to be made. As the political voice of the island, it was my job to make them."
"First of all, you're not the political voice of the island. The villagers never elected you to any post. They choose their leader the same way they've chosen their leaders for generations: they pick their fattest, and thus most successful, fisherman. It's not our place to argue with their traditions."
"You're taking the side of a despotic, phallo-centric power structure?"
"Despotic? Their leader's only in charge of deciding when it's time to fish. And since it's time to fish whenever the sun is out, it's not as though one leader is very much different from another. As a leader all you've brought to this island is attempted murder."
"That's not true."
"Sure it is."
"Well, even if it is true, it's not the truth I've decided to go with."
"Do you even care that people are being hurt by your high-minded theories?"
"Don't hand me that," Sarah retorted. "There's not an activist in the world who doesn't think the same way. We're all in favor of expanding the welfare system. Sure, everyone knows welfare just creates a cycle of welfare dependence for generations, but that's no excuse to be against it. We're all against big business, even though without big businesses Americans wouldn't have enough money to feed themselves, much less give to the charities that pay people like us to improve the world by being against big business. Welfare is the right thing, and being against corporate America is the right thing, just like what I'm doing here is the right thing. We're activists working for a noble cause. Consequences are irrelevant. Morality is below us."
"Don’t try to confuse the issue. We're talking about killing, and it has to stop. One man has been badly scratched. Another nearly drowned."
"But surely the natives understand that it's in their best interest," Sarah pleaded. "Surely they'll listen to reason."
"You need help. Why don't you come talk to the doctor. He's not a psychiatrist, but he does have considerable personal experience with borderline insanity."
Sarah didn't argue. In fact she looked near tears.
"Come on back to the camp, it's going to be okay," Dana said. Sarah just slumped down at the base of the tree and stared at the ground. "Sarah?"
"It's just…it's just this place," Sarah said at last. "There's no one here to protest against. And when I do protest against something, it's always something thousands of miles away that couldn't care less that I'm protesting against it. Maybe I should just go home."
"Don't give up so easily. Why don't you come back to the camp with me. We'll have something to eat, and then we'll try to think of a solution."
"I have a solution."
"A solution that doesn't involve killing."
"Oh. I don't have one of those."
With the sales department squarely on his side, Gwafinn's monkey idea didn't seem likely to end very soon. This was particularly distressing to the head of the research department, H. Kensington Johnston, H. Kensington to friends, of which he had none. It was distressing because he was now more zookeeper than research director, and it was distressing because of his rather unfortunate allergy to pet hair. Some within the Johnston Brothers hierarchy were of the opinion that at least one, and possibly both, of these tweaks to H. Kensington Johnston was Gwafinn's true motivation for his monkey initiative. I wasn't so certain. But I had to concede that it very well might have been a factor in his thinking. What other explanation was there for Gwafinn's having had dog hair shipped in and glued to the monkeys when told that the monkey hair had had little effect?
Mostly I steered clear of the monkey debate. I had my own plan to consider. If I didn't get things rolling quickly, news of Gwafinn's monkey plan would leak and the name Gwafinn, and by extension the name Gwafin, would be anathema on Wall Street. If I wasn't a certified success by then, I'd certainly be certified the son of a certifiable head case, then promptly fired. The key to my plan was finding those previously churned investors. After giving the matter considerable thought, I decided that the best solution was to hang out in bars and try to pick up women. When the chips are on the line, you've got to go with what you know. I'd just have to find the right bars and the right women. In this case, the right bars figured to be the upscale ones around Wall Street, and the right women were those who had-just-been or knew-they-would-soon-be laid off from secretarial or administrative-assistant positions at investment banks. Fortunately, there were plenty of these around, owing to the unfortunately poor economy. Anyone in this position would be depressed and anxious to get back at their former employers. All I'd have to do is seduce them into turning over client lists. Granted, it was a somewhat sleazy plan, but I had an iron-clad defense if the SEC tried to take my license to sell securities away: I'd never gotten my license in the first place. Let's see them talk their way out of that one.
I gave it a try that afternoon at a place I knew a block from Wall Street. The lunch crowd dispersed, heading back to their offices to spend a productive afternoon attempting to conceal their cocktail intake. I sized up the presumably unemployed figures who remained, and selected an empty bar stool next to a woman who looked just exactly like what I would have expected a depressed recently laid off Wall-Street secretary to look like.
"Excuse me, are you okay?" I asked.
"I'll be all right." She didn't look up from her cocktail.
"Please, tell me what's wrong. I want to be your friend."
"You want to know?" At least she looked at me this time.
"Yes, I want to know."
"Then you're not really my friend."
"What?"
"A friend would offer to hear my problems because he liked me, not because he really wanted to know. In fact, a friend would listen to my problems despite the fact that he hates listening to them. If you really want to know my problems then you're just being nosey."
"I see. So if I value the time I spend trying to help you, then I'm just prying--but if I find listening to you irritating, then I'm a friend."
"That's right."
"Then I've got some good news for you. The very sound of your voice bugs the hell out of me."
"That's better," the woman said. "I'm just depressed because I just lost my job."
"On Wall Street."
"Uh huh, Mornall & Swain."
"Good firm," I said, because that's what you're supposed to say when someone else mentions their employer.
"They're horrible," the woman corrected. It was my mistake. The rules of etiquette decree that one should reflexively complement another person's place of employment only up to the moment that person is fired. Then you should start in with the criticisms.
"You're right, of course, they're just terrible," I said. "When I said they were a good firm I meant they were a good firm back when you worked for them."
The woman fixed me with one of those looks that are so popular among those who want you to know that they know you're up to something. I retorted with a smile that I hoped said "I can be trusted," or at very least "Maybe I can't be trusted, but at least I floss after meals."
"Are you just hitting on me, or are you trying to seduce me into turning over client lists," she asked, showing considerable savvy for someone who couldn't hold a job.
"Uh…just hitting on you," I lied.
"Don't lie. You're an even worse liar than you are a seducer. Christ, with the kind of money on the line here, the least they could do is send someone around who's capable of a quality seduction."
"I could try again. I'm sure I could do better."
"No, no, I don't mean to be so critical. It's just that I've had a very bad day, what with getting fired and all. I'm sure you did your best. As it happens, I'm not very pleased about being fired, so I'll give you the client lists."
"Oh," I said. "Okay."
"You sound disappointed."
"I'll be all right."
"Don't be like that," the woman said. "You can tell me."
"It's just that, well, I was expecting a bit more intrigue. I mean, I didn't so much seduce you out of the client lists as you just decided to give them to me."
"There's no reason to be depressed about it. Everything worked out okay."
"Still, shouldn't we at least sleep together first? I kind of figured that's the way this sort of thing would work."
"Yea, I suppose you're right," the woman conceded.
So we went back to her place, and I left with a more relaxed outlook on life and a list of thirty names, a handful of whom actually bought into the no-churning pitch and signed on as my clients.
July 29
Reaching Spanish Guyana turned out to be more difficult than Smith had expected. Mostly this was on account of a civil war they'd decided to throw, which seemed to Smith a rather trivial reason to interfere with his important administrative mission. Eventually Smith had resigned himself to a flight into a neighboring Guyana--his choice of French Guiana or the original Guyana classic--followed by a short drive down the Inter-Guyana Highway. As it happened, Spanish Guyanian troops had taken to appropriating any vehicle faster than a donkey, a fact that greatly troubled local car rental agencies, although it was just fine with local donkey rental agencies. Smith rented himself a donkey and set off towards the Spanish Guyana war zone, only mildly concerned that the Bucklin College Travel Expense Reimbursement Voucher Forms did not specifically mention a per-diem limit for donkey rentals.
The border crossing had been a surprisingly simple affair. With most everyone in Spanish Guyana ready to offer a bribe to get out, the guards hardly wasted a moment on the solitary man on the rented donkey heading in. Once in Spanish Guyana, Smith knew exactly what to do. Only six miles into the country he saw what he needed. It was crude in construction--and even cruder in its current state of destruction--but there was no question about it; this was the bombed-out remains of an office building. The smoking shell of a copy machine removed all doubt. Cautiously, Smith dismounted his rental donkey. Where there were office buildings there were…
"Halt or you'll be in violation of office protocol," someone shouted in Spanish from behind a battered filing cabinet.
…there were office administrators.
"Do you speak English?" Smith called back.
"You need to sign in in the visitor's guest book in the lobby before you're allowed to enter the offices upstairs," said the voice, now in English. "It's building policy. They'll issue you a pass."
"Where's the lobby?" Smith asked.
"The second floor collapsed into it during the shelling. Perhaps you should look below the second floor."
Smith took a step forward, into the shattered remains of the second floor. "Halt. I won't warn you again, you can't enter the second floor until you sign in in the lobby guest book. I have a staple gun. I do not wish to use it, but these are desperate times."
Smith could not see the man behind the file cabinet, but he took the threat seriously. "But how can I get to the lobby guest book without stepping in the second floor now that the second floor is in the lobby?"
"I, myself, cannot see how it would be possible," the voice said.
"Then we're at an impasse."
"I'm afraid so."
"Perhaps I don't need to come in. Perhaps you can answer my question while I stand out here."
"Answering questions for passersby is not in my job description."
"What is in your job description?"
"Excuse me, sir, but did you not hear what I just said?"
"Sorry. But I'm on a very important mission. You see, I'm an administrator, like yourself."
The man considered this new information. "But how can I know that?" he asked. "How can I be 100% certain, so that there's no chance of my being held accountable for the mistake if it's not true?"
"I think you know how," Smith said. "Just shake my hand."
"Ah, the handshake." Like Smith, this man was a member in good standing of the Worldwide Administrators' Guild. Founded in the 13th century by administrators working in the back office of the European masonry industry, the administrators' guild had grown into a global organization with strong religious overtones and plenty of social drinking. An administrator could wander anywhere on the planet and still identify other administrators through the secret Administrator's Guild handshake, which was just like a regular handshake, only limper. Members of the Guild were sworn to aid other administrators in any way they could--or at very least to schedule a block of time to help them at some point in the future, so long as doing so wasn't in violation of any written company rules. "But you cannot come in, and I cannot leave the remains of my office until my lunch hour. It is company policy. We are at least forty feet apart. Our arms could not possibly reach."
"I understand. I will wait in the shade of my donkey until your lunch hour. When will that be?"
"It's the usual South American lunch hour. Noon until three."
It was already eleven. Smith would not have to wait long.
John Driscoll was the first of the interns to take part in this bold new venture in securities analysis. He wasn't selected at random; the chimps had shown a particular fondness for throwing their sell signals his direction. Some people just have a way with animals. Driscoll gazed into the research department from the safety of the intern room. Until the day before, the intern room had been the office of department head H. Kensington Johnston. It had been re-christened when Johnston had landed in the hospital with a severe allergic reaction, compounded by multiple monkey bites.
Driscoll's fellow interns stapled the stock listings to his only suit. "Be careful, that's my only suit," Driscoll cautioned. But when he thought about it, a few staples were less of a problem for a suit than the other option, a thin glaze of monkey excrement. The monkeys seemed to know that something was about to happen, Driscoll thought. They were working themselves into a frenzy. Perhaps it was the presence of the firm's board of directors behind the Plexiglas screen by the door. The monkeys could be surprisingly perceptive about office politics.
Driscoll was correct. The monkeys could tell that something was up. Anticipation was building in the research room. Like new employees in any field, most of the monkeys had been anxious and agitated ever since they first became research analysts that Monday morning. Chimp #8 was the exception. While his colleagues flew into a fury whenever an intern encroached on their territory, Chimp #8 saw that the interns were only there to provide them with food and fresh copies of the Wall Street Journal. Like the others he was a bit overwhelmed by his new environs, but he was willing to give them a chance. It was certainly roomier than the cage he had endured after his capture. And--thus far, at least--it was refreshingly short on lions and research scientists, two antagonists that could quickly derail the long-term plans of any monkey. Chimp #8 glanced again at the Hewlett-Packard Series 9000 Model 715/33 workstation on his desk and hoped his lack of computing experience wouldn't be held against him.
Before he had a chance to take another stab at the database analysis program, Chimp #8 saw an intern enter the room. "He isn't here to feed us," #8 noted to himself with mild displeasure. Chimp #8 considered the situation as his co-workers registered their displeasure with the intrusion in their usual messy yet unequivocal way. No food, and no attempt to steal his soiled copy of the Journal. Now Chimp #8 was confused. At a loss for what to do, he turned his attention to the people behind the Plexiglas screen. Chimp #8 knew power when he saw it. Those were the people calling the shots. The Bald One in particular. He was the alpha male. Today The Bald One was doing something unusual. He was holding something small and shinny--something that looked very familiar to Chimp #8. The Bald One cracked open the door that led from his Plexiglas enclosure into the research room. He looked Chimp #8 right in the eye. Then he turned towards the intern, who was busy ducking and dodging airborne sell signals. The Bald One pulled his arm back and let fly with the shinny thing.
Driscoll the intern let loose a scream of sufficient volume to grab all the chimps' attention. The monkeys paused for a moment, unsure of the cry's meaning. It wasn't a lion. They would have noticed a lion. They were pretty good at that. Perhaps it was a research scientist, they thought. Then they noticed the silver dart protruding from the intern's backside. The chimps all knew how that felt. They'd experienced the same thing before being put in cages and shipped off to this place. Soon the intern would fall asleep, they guessed. And then he'd be locked in a small cage. Well, at least he wasn't hanging from a tree branch fifty feet off the ground when it happened. Most of the chimps retreated to the safety of their filing cabinets and desk drawers to avoid any subsequent darts.
But not Chimp #8. Chimp #8 was trying to put the clues together. The dart--it looked so familiar. He glanced down at his desk. There they were, arranged neatly in his pencil holder. Chimp #8 picked one up and studied it. He saw The Bald One, now safely back behind his Plexiglas, looking straight at him and nodding his head. The Bald One pointed towards the intern and made a throwing motion. Chimp #8 looked at the intern. The man was trying to escape back into the office from which he had emerged from a minute before, but the other interns were holding the door shut. What the hell, Chimp #8 thought, and let fly.
"Yes!" yelled Gwafinn.
"Aaugh," yelled Driscoll the intern, who had taken this one in the upper left thigh. Chimp #8 was in for a surprise as well; a banana fall onto his desk from a chute that had been installed the week before as part of the firm's new, more cost-effective, analyst bonus program. In the intern room, Gwafinn's voice was heard over the intercom. "Okay, you can let that intern out now."
Gwafinn remained calm. But all around him board members--the non-Johnston board members anyway--were cheering. Chimp #8 enjoyed his bonus banana, as his colleagues looked on jealously. "It wouldn't be long now," Gwafinn thought. "There's nothing that can't be accomplished once jealousy gets involved." Of those on hand for this historic event, only the interns joined the Johnstons in their displeasure.
The board was tempted to rush over to the intern room for a look at Chimp #8's first pick. But the smell in the intern room was almost as bad as it was in the monkey room. "Send over the page the chimp hit," Gwafinn said over an intercom. Then he thought better of accepting the stained newspaper. "Scratch that. Send over a Xerox of it. And slip it under the door. You people smell awful."
In the intern room the mood was indeed dark. Driscoll had taken two darts, plus the usual coating of chimpanzee defecation. Juliana Hopkins, a fellow intern, claimed that the first dart had been thrown by the CEO. But then the other interns had long suspected that Juliana might be a chimp sympathizer. Driscoll was laid across a desk in the interns' room, the newspaper carefully removed and Xeroxed. The stock listing had blocked most of the monkey's assault, but Driscoll's odor was not pleasant, and it was doubtful that his shoes would ever regain their original shine. "This had better look good on my resume," Driscoll observed.
For the first time in his life, Kerns was a Big Man On Campus. This, frankly, was a bit depressing, in as much as he'd spent the past 35 years of his life on campuses, and he was rather tall. But Kerns was enjoying himself far too much to dwell on his decades as a Largely Irrelevant Man On Campus. Now when he ventured into a faculty office or dining hall, professors would ask him to join them. Kerns had always wondered what it felt like to be asked to join a group, and he found it was every bit as wonderful as he had imagined. And that was just the half of it. Once he was among a group, he no longer was afraid to voice his opinions. If he had something to say, everyone would listen. Kerns still didn't open his mouth much, but now his silence was one born of superiority, not fear.
There was only one remaining dragon to slay, and Kerns was married to it. Katherine had hardly spoken to him since her return from Cancun. True, the first week-and-a-half of that poor communication had been mainly Kerns' fault, in as much as he had spent it hiding in an attic. But the other week-and-a-half was on Katherine's shoulders, pure and simple. Kerns had been disappointed when Katherine had not commented on his new competency. He had been disturbed when she hadn't thanked him from solving the building shortage problem, which seemed the least she could do, since French Literature had been scheduled to merged with geology, and Katherine had never shown any great interest in rocks. And he had been downright depressed when she didn't so much as say goodnight before turning off the light each night, as a 'goodnight' is precious little action to ask of a partner in bed.
There was only one rational conclusion, Kerns decided, and it was exactly the same as the irrational conclusion he already had jumped to. Katherine was having an affair, and would soon leave him. All that remained was to divide up the possessions and arrange a custody-sharing schedule for the dog. He should have known life wouldn't let him be happy.
"How's the no-churning plan going?" Keller asked.
"Great," I said "I have three new clients with half the list still to call--and I've gotten laid. It is, in many ways, the perfect plan."
"Except that you're more-or-less required not to churn these clients once you've got 'em, so you're never going to get rich off their commissions."
"I couldn't have churned them anyway. My high moral standards wouldn't have allowed it."
"These the same high moral standards that allow you to prostitute yourself for client lists?"
"Okay, I grant you that technically I might be prostituting myself. But it's a minor issue at best, since the plan would be going even better if I wasn't insisting on the sex."
"Fair enough. But what about the ethics of cheating on your girlfriend?"
"There's a war involved. I get an automatic dispensation."
"How do you figure?"
"When there's a war, the 1,000-mile, one-month limit comes into play. As long as you're at least that far apart for at least that long you get to cheat without guilt, because you might never see each other again."
"Bullshit. You just made that rule up."
"It's a well-established rule. Except in Europe, where you have to convert the miles to kilometers, which can get a bit tricky."
"I'm going to stick with my earlier 'bullshit'."
"There's more, too. If we're separated by war for more than a full year I get to father a child out of wedlock and look back on the affair with bittersweet memories even if Dana does later turn up alive."
"Thing is, buddy, it's your girlfriend who's in the war zone, not you. Shouldn't she be the one to get the sexual dispensation?"
"She can't do that to me."
"But you can do it to her?"
"Look, we're talking about cultural customs here. Historical precedent clearly says it’s the guy that gets to cheat. Anyway whose side are you on?"
"I'm on your side, Gwafster, I'm just yanking your chain."
"If anyone was yanking my chain, I wouldn't have to cheat in the first place."
"So precisely what, as you see it, is your responsibility to this girlfriend of yours on the fidelity front?"
"I have to do my best to avoid cheating."
"And this is your best?"
"It's my best. Fortunately, that isn't very good."
"You could be against me," Dana offered over a plate of seaweed. "I wouldn't mind so much."
"It's nice of you to offer," said Sarah. "But I really need to be against something that gives me that warm glow of social outrage. You're far too nice."
Sarah had lapsed into a deep sleep after her return to the activists' camp, her days of intense righteousness having taken a toll. Now that she was awake, refreshed, and slightly more coherent, Dana was anxious to help her find a solution before there were any more well-intentioned potentially lethal attacks.
"I could be meaner," Dana said. "To be honest, I've even felt like punching a few people recently."
"But you'd punch all the right people. It wouldn't be the same."
"Maybe I could do something damaging to the planet," Dana persisted. "As long as you promise we can undo it once you're done being outraged by it. I know. I could dig for oil. I'll go get my spoon"
"It just wouldn't work. I've tried doing this half way, and see where it got us? I became a murderer."
"An attempted murderer. There's a world of difference."
"Are you calling me ineffectual?"
"No, no. I was trying to be understanding."
"See? That's exactly the sort of thing that makes you so hard to dislike."
"And let's not forget that your heart was in the right place," Dana said.
"Well, of course my heart was in the right place. I would never have killed anyone in a bad cause. That would be wrong."
"No one's questioning your values," Dana assured her. "Let's just get back to work coming up with something for you to be against. How about rocks? There are an awful lot of rocks on the island."
"What am I supposed to have against rocks?"
"Lots of things: they're uncomfortable to sit on, they don't contribute to charities, and they were used as weapons throughout prehistory."
"Sure, in prehistory. But they seem to have reformed their ways."
"True, no one seems to be working on any laser-guided rocks," Dana admitted. "But at least there are plenty of them here to dislike."
"Thanks for trying to help," Sarah said. "But I'd feel silly protesting against rocks. What's the point? Everyone already knows I'm superior to rocks. What else have you got?"
"Let's see…you can't be against animals or plants. That would be wrong. And frankly the plants, the animals, and the rocks are about all we've got to work with here on the island, aside from the natives and the activists…You're sure I can't sell you on the rocks?"
"It's hopeless. I might as well go back to the murdering. At least it was proactive."
"Just give me some time. A month. A few weeks at least. I'm sure I can come up with something."
"You better make it fast. I can't go on feeling this unproductive much longer."
The next time it was nearly much more serious than a scratch on the neck. A Lesser Morrell Island fisherman had been miles from shore when he discovered that his canoe was sinking. Someone, it seems, had drilled a series of holes, then plugged them temporarily with tree sap so the leak wouldn’t become apparent until the fisherman was well out at sea. The fisherman had tried to keep the craft afloat long enough to return to land, but it is notoriously difficult to bail and paddle at the same time, unless one is very, very skilled with one's feet. To the fisherman's dismay, he discovered that he was not.
The canoe sank, leaving the fisherman alone to bob on the surface and await his own certain death. Or what seemed likely to be his certain death anyway. As it happened, the fisherman was rescued and carried to land on the back of a passing tuna, if his account is to be considered accurate. The fisherman theorized that the tuna must have heard about the positive press dolphins received for their occasional good deed, and figured a few tuna-centered rescue stories might convince people to switch to tasty mackerel-salad sandwiches instead.
The canoe--and thus the evidence--was at the bottom of the ocean, since the tuna had drawn the line at towing the man's boat. But even without evidence, Dana was certain that Sarah was behind the near disaster. Sarah's behavior had been increasingly odd ever since the genocide discussions, to the point where most agreed that she had replaced the doctor as the island's chief nut case, although the doctor remained confident that he might yet rally and make a game of it. As Sarah had drifted ever further towards the sanity-challenged end of the mental-health spectrum, the island's others activists distanced themselves from her cause. Brent had been largely unsupportive ever since it had become clear that explosives would not be necessary. Jeff maintained that he was still for the plan, but not to the extent of actually seeing it through. Tommy had found a new home among the natives, most of whom were too nice to come right out and tell him to fuck off. Even Laura decided she "had too many things on her plate," which was her nice way of saying that if Sarah wasn't going to let her be in charge, then she could go to hell. The defections left Sarah increasingly isolated, and isolation never really has been known to improve anyone's mental health. The past few nights Sarah hadn't even returned to her tent in the activists' camp to sleep.
"It might take days or even weeks," Dana decided when news of the canoe sinking reached the activists, "but I'm going to track Sarah down."
Twenty minutes later, Dana found her. The search had moved along much faster than she had expected, on account of the fact that Sarah was not so much hiding as she was making loud hammering sounds.
"What are you doing?" Dana asked.
"Hammering," Sarah explained, without looking away from her work.
"That much I'd gathered. But why are you hammering nails into a tree?"
"It's called spiking. You put the nail into the tree at the level a logger would cut it down. Then when his chainsaw hits the nail, the chain snaps, whips around and slices him open. It's environmental. Cuts down on logging."
"Yes, I've heard of tree spiking," Dana said. "But they don't even have chainsaws here. When they want to take down a tree, they use a sharpened rock."
Sarah stopped her pounding for a moment. "Still can't hurt," she decided, and went back to hammering.
"Sarah, would you stop that for a second? I want to talk to you about the canoe sinking."
"There's been a canoe sinking?" Sarah asked, interested.
"But no one was killed. He was rescued by a fish."
"A fish? Do you mean a dolphin?"
"No, he says it was a tuna."
"I knew the dolphins would be smart enough to take my side," Sarah said. "Stupid tuna. Can't see the big picture."
"So you admit you've been killing people?"
"On the record or off the record?"
"On the record."
"No."
"Okay, then off the record."
"Still no."
"Why did you ask 'on or off the record' if you were going to give the same answer to both?"
"I just like the way it sounds. I'm thinking about going to law school some day."
"Sarah, just admit you've been trying to kill people. It's not really a crime. It's a disease, like using drugs."
"I won't admit I've done anything wrong. Hard decisions had to be made. As the political voice of the island, it was my job to make them."
"First of all, you're not the political voice of the island. The villagers never elected you to any post. They choose their leader the same way they've chosen their leaders for generations: they pick their fattest, and thus most successful, fisherman. It's not our place to argue with their traditions."
"You're taking the side of a despotic, phallo-centric power structure?"
"Despotic? Their leader's only in charge of deciding when it's time to fish. And since it's time to fish whenever the sun is out, it's not as though one leader is very much different from another. As a leader all you've brought to this island is attempted murder."
"That's not true."
"Sure it is."
"Well, even if it is true, it's not the truth I've decided to go with."
"Do you even care that people are being hurt by your high-minded theories?"
"Don't hand me that," Sarah retorted. "There's not an activist in the world who doesn't think the same way. We're all in favor of expanding the welfare system. Sure, everyone knows welfare just creates a cycle of welfare dependence for generations, but that's no excuse to be against it. We're all against big business, even though without big businesses Americans wouldn't have enough money to feed themselves, much less give to the charities that pay people like us to improve the world by being against big business. Welfare is the right thing, and being against corporate America is the right thing, just like what I'm doing here is the right thing. We're activists working for a noble cause. Consequences are irrelevant. Morality is below us."
"Don’t try to confuse the issue. We're talking about killing, and it has to stop. One man has been badly scratched. Another nearly drowned."
"But surely the natives understand that it's in their best interest," Sarah pleaded. "Surely they'll listen to reason."
"You need help. Why don't you come talk to the doctor. He's not a psychiatrist, but he does have considerable personal experience with borderline insanity."
Sarah didn't argue. In fact she looked near tears.
"Come on back to the camp, it's going to be okay," Dana said. Sarah just slumped down at the base of the tree and stared at the ground. "Sarah?"
"It's just…it's just this place," Sarah said at last. "There's no one here to protest against. And when I do protest against something, it's always something thousands of miles away that couldn't care less that I'm protesting against it. Maybe I should just go home."
"Don't give up so easily. Why don't you come back to the camp with me. We'll have something to eat, and then we'll try to think of a solution."
"I have a solution."
"A solution that doesn't involve killing."
"Oh. I don't have one of those."
With the sales department squarely on his side, Gwafinn's monkey idea didn't seem likely to end very soon. This was particularly distressing to the head of the research department, H. Kensington Johnston, H. Kensington to friends, of which he had none. It was distressing because he was now more zookeeper than research director, and it was distressing because of his rather unfortunate allergy to pet hair. Some within the Johnston Brothers hierarchy were of the opinion that at least one, and possibly both, of these tweaks to H. Kensington Johnston was Gwafinn's true motivation for his monkey initiative. I wasn't so certain. But I had to concede that it very well might have been a factor in his thinking. What other explanation was there for Gwafinn's having had dog hair shipped in and glued to the monkeys when told that the monkey hair had had little effect?
Mostly I steered clear of the monkey debate. I had my own plan to consider. If I didn't get things rolling quickly, news of Gwafinn's monkey plan would leak and the name Gwafinn, and by extension the name Gwafin, would be anathema on Wall Street. If I wasn't a certified success by then, I'd certainly be certified the son of a certifiable head case, then promptly fired. The key to my plan was finding those previously churned investors. After giving the matter considerable thought, I decided that the best solution was to hang out in bars and try to pick up women. When the chips are on the line, you've got to go with what you know. I'd just have to find the right bars and the right women. In this case, the right bars figured to be the upscale ones around Wall Street, and the right women were those who had-just-been or knew-they-would-soon-be laid off from secretarial or administrative-assistant positions at investment banks. Fortunately, there were plenty of these around, owing to the unfortunately poor economy. Anyone in this position would be depressed and anxious to get back at their former employers. All I'd have to do is seduce them into turning over client lists. Granted, it was a somewhat sleazy plan, but I had an iron-clad defense if the SEC tried to take my license to sell securities away: I'd never gotten my license in the first place. Let's see them talk their way out of that one.
I gave it a try that afternoon at a place I knew a block from Wall Street. The lunch crowd dispersed, heading back to their offices to spend a productive afternoon attempting to conceal their cocktail intake. I sized up the presumably unemployed figures who remained, and selected an empty bar stool next to a woman who looked just exactly like what I would have expected a depressed recently laid off Wall-Street secretary to look like.
"Excuse me, are you okay?" I asked.
"I'll be all right." She didn't look up from her cocktail.
"Please, tell me what's wrong. I want to be your friend."
"You want to know?" At least she looked at me this time.
"Yes, I want to know."
"Then you're not really my friend."
"What?"
"A friend would offer to hear my problems because he liked me, not because he really wanted to know. In fact, a friend would listen to my problems despite the fact that he hates listening to them. If you really want to know my problems then you're just being nosey."
"I see. So if I value the time I spend trying to help you, then I'm just prying--but if I find listening to you irritating, then I'm a friend."
"That's right."
"Then I've got some good news for you. The very sound of your voice bugs the hell out of me."
"That's better," the woman said. "I'm just depressed because I just lost my job."
"On Wall Street."
"Uh huh, Mornall & Swain."
"Good firm," I said, because that's what you're supposed to say when someone else mentions their employer.
"They're horrible," the woman corrected. It was my mistake. The rules of etiquette decree that one should reflexively complement another person's place of employment only up to the moment that person is fired. Then you should start in with the criticisms.
"You're right, of course, they're just terrible," I said. "When I said they were a good firm I meant they were a good firm back when you worked for them."
The woman fixed me with one of those looks that are so popular among those who want you to know that they know you're up to something. I retorted with a smile that I hoped said "I can be trusted," or at very least "Maybe I can't be trusted, but at least I floss after meals."
"Are you just hitting on me, or are you trying to seduce me into turning over client lists," she asked, showing considerable savvy for someone who couldn't hold a job.
"Uh…just hitting on you," I lied.
"Don't lie. You're an even worse liar than you are a seducer. Christ, with the kind of money on the line here, the least they could do is send someone around who's capable of a quality seduction."
"I could try again. I'm sure I could do better."
"No, no, I don't mean to be so critical. It's just that I've had a very bad day, what with getting fired and all. I'm sure you did your best. As it happens, I'm not very pleased about being fired, so I'll give you the client lists."
"Oh," I said. "Okay."
"You sound disappointed."
"I'll be all right."
"Don't be like that," the woman said. "You can tell me."
"It's just that, well, I was expecting a bit more intrigue. I mean, I didn't so much seduce you out of the client lists as you just decided to give them to me."
"There's no reason to be depressed about it. Everything worked out okay."
"Still, shouldn't we at least sleep together first? I kind of figured that's the way this sort of thing would work."
"Yea, I suppose you're right," the woman conceded.
So we went back to her place, and I left with a more relaxed outlook on life and a list of thirty names, a handful of whom actually bought into the no-churning pitch and signed on as my clients.
July 29
Reaching Spanish Guyana turned out to be more difficult than Smith had expected. Mostly this was on account of a civil war they'd decided to throw, which seemed to Smith a rather trivial reason to interfere with his important administrative mission. Eventually Smith had resigned himself to a flight into a neighboring Guyana--his choice of French Guiana or the original Guyana classic--followed by a short drive down the Inter-Guyana Highway. As it happened, Spanish Guyanian troops had taken to appropriating any vehicle faster than a donkey, a fact that greatly troubled local car rental agencies, although it was just fine with local donkey rental agencies. Smith rented himself a donkey and set off towards the Spanish Guyana war zone, only mildly concerned that the Bucklin College Travel Expense Reimbursement Voucher Forms did not specifically mention a per-diem limit for donkey rentals.
The border crossing had been a surprisingly simple affair. With most everyone in Spanish Guyana ready to offer a bribe to get out, the guards hardly wasted a moment on the solitary man on the rented donkey heading in. Once in Spanish Guyana, Smith knew exactly what to do. Only six miles into the country he saw what he needed. It was crude in construction--and even cruder in its current state of destruction--but there was no question about it; this was the bombed-out remains of an office building. The smoking shell of a copy machine removed all doubt. Cautiously, Smith dismounted his rental donkey. Where there were office buildings there were…
"Halt or you'll be in violation of office protocol," someone shouted in Spanish from behind a battered filing cabinet.
…there were office administrators.
"Do you speak English?" Smith called back.
"You need to sign in in the visitor's guest book in the lobby before you're allowed to enter the offices upstairs," said the voice, now in English. "It's building policy. They'll issue you a pass."
"Where's the lobby?" Smith asked.
"The second floor collapsed into it during the shelling. Perhaps you should look below the second floor."
Smith took a step forward, into the shattered remains of the second floor. "Halt. I won't warn you again, you can't enter the second floor until you sign in in the lobby guest book. I have a staple gun. I do not wish to use it, but these are desperate times."
Smith could not see the man behind the file cabinet, but he took the threat seriously. "But how can I get to the lobby guest book without stepping in the second floor now that the second floor is in the lobby?"
"I, myself, cannot see how it would be possible," the voice said.
"Then we're at an impasse."
"I'm afraid so."
"Perhaps I don't need to come in. Perhaps you can answer my question while I stand out here."
"Answering questions for passersby is not in my job description."
"What is in your job description?"
"Excuse me, sir, but did you not hear what I just said?"
"Sorry. But I'm on a very important mission. You see, I'm an administrator, like yourself."
The man considered this new information. "But how can I know that?" he asked. "How can I be 100% certain, so that there's no chance of my being held accountable for the mistake if it's not true?"
"I think you know how," Smith said. "Just shake my hand."
"Ah, the handshake." Like Smith, this man was a member in good standing of the Worldwide Administrators' Guild. Founded in the 13th century by administrators working in the back office of the European masonry industry, the administrators' guild had grown into a global organization with strong religious overtones and plenty of social drinking. An administrator could wander anywhere on the planet and still identify other administrators through the secret Administrator's Guild handshake, which was just like a regular handshake, only limper. Members of the Guild were sworn to aid other administrators in any way they could--or at very least to schedule a block of time to help them at some point in the future, so long as doing so wasn't in violation of any written company rules. "But you cannot come in, and I cannot leave the remains of my office until my lunch hour. It is company policy. We are at least forty feet apart. Our arms could not possibly reach."
"I understand. I will wait in the shade of my donkey until your lunch hour. When will that be?"
"It's the usual South American lunch hour. Noon until three."
It was already eleven. Smith would not have to wait long.
John Driscoll was the first of the interns to take part in this bold new venture in securities analysis. He wasn't selected at random; the chimps had shown a particular fondness for throwing their sell signals his direction. Some people just have a way with animals. Driscoll gazed into the research department from the safety of the intern room. Until the day before, the intern room had been the office of department head H. Kensington Johnston. It had been re-christened when Johnston had landed in the hospital with a severe allergic reaction, compounded by multiple monkey bites.
Driscoll's fellow interns stapled the stock listings to his only suit. "Be careful, that's my only suit," Driscoll cautioned. But when he thought about it, a few staples were less of a problem for a suit than the other option, a thin glaze of monkey excrement. The monkeys seemed to know that something was about to happen, Driscoll thought. They were working themselves into a frenzy. Perhaps it was the presence of the firm's board of directors behind the Plexiglas screen by the door. The monkeys could be surprisingly perceptive about office politics.
Driscoll was correct. The monkeys could tell that something was up. Anticipation was building in the research room. Like new employees in any field, most of the monkeys had been anxious and agitated ever since they first became research analysts that Monday morning. Chimp #8 was the exception. While his colleagues flew into a fury whenever an intern encroached on their territory, Chimp #8 saw that the interns were only there to provide them with food and fresh copies of the Wall Street Journal. Like the others he was a bit overwhelmed by his new environs, but he was willing to give them a chance. It was certainly roomier than the cage he had endured after his capture. And--thus far, at least--it was refreshingly short on lions and research scientists, two antagonists that could quickly derail the long-term plans of any monkey. Chimp #8 glanced again at the Hewlett-Packard Series 9000 Model 715/33 workstation on his desk and hoped his lack of computing experience wouldn't be held against him.
Before he had a chance to take another stab at the database analysis program, Chimp #8 saw an intern enter the room. "He isn't here to feed us," #8 noted to himself with mild displeasure. Chimp #8 considered the situation as his co-workers registered their displeasure with the intrusion in their usual messy yet unequivocal way. No food, and no attempt to steal his soiled copy of the Journal. Now Chimp #8 was confused. At a loss for what to do, he turned his attention to the people behind the Plexiglas screen. Chimp #8 knew power when he saw it. Those were the people calling the shots. The Bald One in particular. He was the alpha male. Today The Bald One was doing something unusual. He was holding something small and shinny--something that looked very familiar to Chimp #8. The Bald One cracked open the door that led from his Plexiglas enclosure into the research room. He looked Chimp #8 right in the eye. Then he turned towards the intern, who was busy ducking and dodging airborne sell signals. The Bald One pulled his arm back and let fly with the shinny thing.
Driscoll the intern let loose a scream of sufficient volume to grab all the chimps' attention. The monkeys paused for a moment, unsure of the cry's meaning. It wasn't a lion. They would have noticed a lion. They were pretty good at that. Perhaps it was a research scientist, they thought. Then they noticed the silver dart protruding from the intern's backside. The chimps all knew how that felt. They'd experienced the same thing before being put in cages and shipped off to this place. Soon the intern would fall asleep, they guessed. And then he'd be locked in a small cage. Well, at least he wasn't hanging from a tree branch fifty feet off the ground when it happened. Most of the chimps retreated to the safety of their filing cabinets and desk drawers to avoid any subsequent darts.
But not Chimp #8. Chimp #8 was trying to put the clues together. The dart--it looked so familiar. He glanced down at his desk. There they were, arranged neatly in his pencil holder. Chimp #8 picked one up and studied it. He saw The Bald One, now safely back behind his Plexiglas, looking straight at him and nodding his head. The Bald One pointed towards the intern and made a throwing motion. Chimp #8 looked at the intern. The man was trying to escape back into the office from which he had emerged from a minute before, but the other interns were holding the door shut. What the hell, Chimp #8 thought, and let fly.
"Yes!" yelled Gwafinn.
"Aaugh," yelled Driscoll the intern, who had taken this one in the upper left thigh. Chimp #8 was in for a surprise as well; a banana fall onto his desk from a chute that had been installed the week before as part of the firm's new, more cost-effective, analyst bonus program. In the intern room, Gwafinn's voice was heard over the intercom. "Okay, you can let that intern out now."
Gwafinn remained calm. But all around him board members--the non-Johnston board members anyway--were cheering. Chimp #8 enjoyed his bonus banana, as his colleagues looked on jealously. "It wouldn't be long now," Gwafinn thought. "There's nothing that can't be accomplished once jealousy gets involved." Of those on hand for this historic event, only the interns joined the Johnstons in their displeasure.
The board was tempted to rush over to the intern room for a look at Chimp #8's first pick. But the smell in the intern room was almost as bad as it was in the monkey room. "Send over the page the chimp hit," Gwafinn said over an intercom. Then he thought better of accepting the stained newspaper. "Scratch that. Send over a Xerox of it. And slip it under the door. You people smell awful."
In the intern room the mood was indeed dark. Driscoll had taken two darts, plus the usual coating of chimpanzee defecation. Juliana Hopkins, a fellow intern, claimed that the first dart had been thrown by the CEO. But then the other interns had long suspected that Juliana might be a chimp sympathizer. Driscoll was laid across a desk in the interns' room, the newspaper carefully removed and Xeroxed. The stock listing had blocked most of the monkey's assault, but Driscoll's odor was not pleasant, and it was doubtful that his shoes would ever regain their original shine. "This had better look good on my resume," Driscoll observed.
For the first time in his life, Kerns was a Big Man On Campus. This, frankly, was a bit depressing, in as much as he'd spent the past 35 years of his life on campuses, and he was rather tall. But Kerns was enjoying himself far too much to dwell on his decades as a Largely Irrelevant Man On Campus. Now when he ventured into a faculty office or dining hall, professors would ask him to join them. Kerns had always wondered what it felt like to be asked to join a group, and he found it was every bit as wonderful as he had imagined. And that was just the half of it. Once he was among a group, he no longer was afraid to voice his opinions. If he had something to say, everyone would listen. Kerns still didn't open his mouth much, but now his silence was one born of superiority, not fear.
There was only one remaining dragon to slay, and Kerns was married to it. Katherine had hardly spoken to him since her return from Cancun. True, the first week-and-a-half of that poor communication had been mainly Kerns' fault, in as much as he had spent it hiding in an attic. But the other week-and-a-half was on Katherine's shoulders, pure and simple. Kerns had been disappointed when Katherine had not commented on his new competency. He had been disturbed when she hadn't thanked him from solving the building shortage problem, which seemed the least she could do, since French Literature had been scheduled to merged with geology, and Katherine had never shown any great interest in rocks. And he had been downright depressed when she didn't so much as say goodnight before turning off the light each night, as a 'goodnight' is precious little action to ask of a partner in bed.
There was only one rational conclusion, Kerns decided, and it was exactly the same as the irrational conclusion he already had jumped to. Katherine was having an affair, and would soon leave him. All that remained was to divide up the possessions and arrange a custody-sharing schedule for the dog. He should have known life wouldn't let him be happy.
"How's the no-churning plan going?" Keller asked.
"Great," I said "I have three new clients with half the list still to call--and I've gotten laid. It is, in many ways, the perfect plan."
"Except that you're more-or-less required not to churn these clients once you've got 'em, so you're never going to get rich off their commissions."
"I couldn't have churned them anyway. My high moral standards wouldn't have allowed it."
"These the same high moral standards that allow you to prostitute yourself for client lists?"
"Okay, I grant you that technically I might be prostituting myself. But it's a minor issue at best, since the plan would be going even better if I wasn't insisting on the sex."
"Fair enough. But what about the ethics of cheating on your girlfriend?"
"There's a war involved. I get an automatic dispensation."
"How do you figure?"
"When there's a war, the 1,000-mile, one-month limit comes into play. As long as you're at least that far apart for at least that long you get to cheat without guilt, because you might never see each other again."
"Bullshit. You just made that rule up."
"It's a well-established rule. Except in Europe, where you have to convert the miles to kilometers, which can get a bit tricky."
"I'm going to stick with my earlier 'bullshit'."
"There's more, too. If we're separated by war for more than a full year I get to father a child out of wedlock and look back on the affair with bittersweet memories even if Dana does later turn up alive."
"Thing is, buddy, it's your girlfriend who's in the war zone, not you. Shouldn't she be the one to get the sexual dispensation?"
"She can't do that to me."
"But you can do it to her?"
"Look, we're talking about cultural customs here. Historical precedent clearly says it’s the guy that gets to cheat. Anyway whose side are you on?"
"I'm on your side, Gwafster, I'm just yanking your chain."
"If anyone was yanking my chain, I wouldn't have to cheat in the first place."
"So precisely what, as you see it, is your responsibility to this girlfriend of yours on the fidelity front?"
"I have to do my best to avoid cheating."
"And this is your best?"
"It's my best. Fortunately, that isn't very good."
"You could be against me," Dana offered over a plate of seaweed. "I wouldn't mind so much."
"It's nice of you to offer," said Sarah. "But I really need to be against something that gives me that warm glow of social outrage. You're far too nice."
Sarah had lapsed into a deep sleep after her return to the activists' camp, her days of intense righteousness having taken a toll. Now that she was awake, refreshed, and slightly more coherent, Dana was anxious to help her find a solution before there were any more well-intentioned potentially lethal attacks.
"I could be meaner," Dana said. "To be honest, I've even felt like punching a few people recently."
"But you'd punch all the right people. It wouldn't be the same."
"Maybe I could do something damaging to the planet," Dana persisted. "As long as you promise we can undo it once you're done being outraged by it. I know. I could dig for oil. I'll go get my spoon"
"It just wouldn't work. I've tried doing this half way, and see where it got us? I became a murderer."
"An attempted murderer. There's a world of difference."
"Are you calling me ineffectual?"
"No, no. I was trying to be understanding."
"See? That's exactly the sort of thing that makes you so hard to dislike."
"And let's not forget that your heart was in the right place," Dana said.
"Well, of course my heart was in the right place. I would never have killed anyone in a bad cause. That would be wrong."
"No one's questioning your values," Dana assured her. "Let's just get back to work coming up with something for you to be against. How about rocks? There are an awful lot of rocks on the island."
"What am I supposed to have against rocks?"
"Lots of things: they're uncomfortable to sit on, they don't contribute to charities, and they were used as weapons throughout prehistory."
"Sure, in prehistory. But they seem to have reformed their ways."
"True, no one seems to be working on any laser-guided rocks," Dana admitted. "But at least there are plenty of them here to dislike."
"Thanks for trying to help," Sarah said. "But I'd feel silly protesting against rocks. What's the point? Everyone already knows I'm superior to rocks. What else have you got?"
"Let's see…you can't be against animals or plants. That would be wrong. And frankly the plants, the animals, and the rocks are about all we've got to work with here on the island, aside from the natives and the activists…You're sure I can't sell you on the rocks?"
"It's hopeless. I might as well go back to the murdering. At least it was proactive."
"Just give me some time. A month. A few weeks at least. I'm sure I can come up with something."
"You better make it fast. I can't go on feeling this unproductive much longer."
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