Apex Hides the Hurt

by Colson Whitehead

  He wondered if he could do what they were asking of him. There was still a chance he might get off the hook if they didn’t agree to his stipulation. It was simple, albeit a tad unusual. If the clients were going to hire him, they had to let the name stand for a minimum of one year. They could change it after that, but only after a year had passed.

  When he composed this little fine print, his intention was that it would force them to consider the process—his process—with the appropriate gravity. These people were not his usual corporate clients. Corporate clients knew the rules of the game, and it was rare that they refused to accept one of his names. Oh, it happened occasionally that a client lacked the necessary imagination, or suffered from long-standing character deficits, or maybe there was some backroom intrigue that suddenly put this or that project on hold. In a case like this, however, especially when dealing with such a green group, the chance of encountering that random X factor was considerably higher. The object in question was a town. There was family and clan to think about, and their bickering. There was heritage and history involved, and their inscrutable demands. It simply made sense. He was a pro, they had called him in for a reason, and he did not want to waste his time.

  As he sat on the edge of the bed, hunkered over the cart, it occurred to him that by forcing such exacting conditions on his clients, he hoped to use their refusal as an excuse. To hide his fear behind the impassive façade of the uncompromising professional. The sad shake of the head that said: I have a list of principles. By removing the possibility of failure, he could return home to his convalescence rooms and continue to sulk, pretending that he still possessed his power. Word would get back to the firm and his colleagues would say, Man that guy is tough.

  Before they adjourned, he had asked the mayor, “How am I supposed to come to a conclusion?”

  And she said, “Do what you usually do. You’re the expert.”

  He had traveled abroad. In European hotels he watched European TV and on it European commercials. Be a tourist, walk the narrow streets, see one old church you’ve seen them all, but the commercials. It didn’t matter if you didn’t understand the language, a good name cut through. Does it sound like candy, does it sound like perfume, does it sound like a fancy car you would like to be seen in. These things cut across cultures. In European hotels he could get five countries’ programming in five different languages but it felt like home because he understood the names.

  He had never seen a cucumber sandwich before. He was in foreign territory but the television brought him back, reassuring his ears with the common roots of their languages. He turned on the television and ate his cucumber sandwich a triangle at a time. And he felt better, sitting there with the sound off, as the light entwined itself along surfaces like blue vines. When he was finished, conditions or no, he unpacked.

  . . . . . . . .

  He had a new desk and a couple of new ties. He was on time and pretended to go-getting.

  He got into the swing of things. New guys like him worked in teams. The top guys, the wage earners, worked solo, but most of the jobs were executed by teams, around a big desk in one of the conference rooms, and they brainstormed. They huddled over the material the client gave them, they sipped mineral water and sent people for doughnuts. Perhaps there was a slide of the particular thing projected on the wall so they could see it right there before them in its frustrated glory, and one of the team would lazily guide a laser pointer around contours. Sometimes a representative of the aluminum company or tampon company or manufacturer of plastic wedges might show up to explain matters in person. What it was and where they were trying to go. These representatives were too earnest, got on their nerves, threw off the rhythm of the meetings. There was a rhythm to the meetings. They got into a fever and testified, shouting out the words of imaginary languages, the names of polystyrene gods and Day-Glo deities. The contributions were doomed or had tiny imperfections and they kept going until they came up with the right name.

  At first he kept his mouth shut because he still saw the job as an interim gig. He wasn’t cut out for corporate life. He believed himself to be of a different caliber than those men. Jocky white guys. He didn’t need the same things. The cheap posturing. The signature colognes. The obscure wafting. They scrambled and wanted to be heard by the men who wrote performance reviews and determined bonuses. They wore suspenders. So he sat and watched and whatever names he had he kept to himself. He listened. And if what they came up with was terrible, was prosaic, or even more unforgivable, something else’s name, he figured that’s the way things work in this crazy job. No skin off his back. Their hapless little creations flopped around like fish on asphalt and he couldn’t care less.

  But the names. After two weeks of listening he was full of them. Every day the door cracked another half inch and he could see beyond the tiny rooms he had stumbled around in his whole life. He pictured it like this: The door opened up on a magnificent and secret landscape. His interior. He clambered over rocks and mountain ranges composed of odd and alien minerals, he stepped around strange flora, saplings that curtsied eccentrically, low shrubs that extended bizarre fronds. This unreckoned land of his possessed colors he had never seen before. Flowers burst petals in arrangements never considered by the natural world, summoned out of dirt like stained glass. These beautiful hidden things scrolled to the horizon and he walked among them. He could wander through them, stooping, collecting, acquainting himself with them until the day he died and he would never know them all. He had a territory within himself and he would bring back specimens to the old world. These most excellent dispatches. His names.

  He couldn’t keep them to himself. He started out slow in the meetings, half mumbling the names. They got lost in the general mad chatter. At first it was not important to be heard. It was enough to merely utter the things, let them out. No one noticed and it was fine. After a time he would get a nod here and there at some contribution, and he projected a little zone around himself, a place of low pressure in the room where the rest of the team could expect a certain kind of weather. He gathered force. Then one day after a meeting, Mike Viedt put a hand on his shoulder and said, “Nice job in there.” Two meetings after that, instead of holding back, he halfheartedly tossed a name into the hurly-burly, nothing special, to the usual lack of response. Ten minutes later Mike said the name, offering it to the team as his own, and it stuck. They ended up giving it to the client. Mike took all the credit. And he felt—it was fine. He had a million of them in his territory. What had he lost? An unspectacular weed.

  He was changed, though, he could not deny it. The next project they had, he discovered the name right off, he was sure it was the name, and he bided his time. There came a lull, there were always lulls. As one of the guys scrambled after the takeout menus so they could haggle over lunch options, he slapped his hands on the table. Not too loud, but enough to draw their attention. They assumed he was going to lobby for Thai. They looked at him and he said it: Redempta. It was the name. It stuck. They got paid. Not long after that he got his own office. He had to admit, it was pretty cool.

  . . . . . . . .

  The sun crept up, he heard some Main Street morning friskiness down below, and he finally fell back to sleep. He was busy battling various guised things in a dream he would not remember when he was awakened by a loud shriek.

  “Housekeeping!”

  The door threatened to splinter under her fist. “Housekeeping!”

  He quickly looked around, but neither saw smoke nor smelled fire. Nor did he hear hotel guests running in the hall outside, robes tugged tight against their chests. No emergency, then. He mumbled, then repeated himself with more volume: “I’m okay!”

  “I need to get inside!” the voice wailed. It sounded as if she were throwing her shoulder into the door. No, something heavier. Her cleaning cart.

  “I’m okay!” he shouted once again.

  “You should be up by now!” the woman thundered, and then all was quiet. Was there so
mething he was supposed to do? He waited, and soon he heard the woman push her cart up the hall. After a few long minutes, he slipped his hand outside the room and noosed the doorknob with the DO NOT DISTURB sign, which featured a moody silhouette of sheep jumping over a fence. He noticed thin daggers of paint on the floor that had been knocked loose by the assault.

  He dressed and limped over to see the Admiral. After his sleepless night, he needed a familiar face. It was not the first time he had been saved by the recognizable logo of an international food franchise, its emanations and intimacies. No matter what time zone you happened to be in, the Admiral’s doors pushed in with the same slight resistance, freeing the vapors of the latest excursion into Africa, South America, or Blend. He listened to the sound of the brewing machines, their staccato gurgling. It was black gold bubbling from the earth’s crust, the elemental crude. He approached the teenagers with a smile, and they smiled back. All over the nation teenagers served the sacred logos and he thanked God for the minimum wage. Who knew what kind of havoc the restless servants of Admiral Java might unleash upon the world if they cast off their yokes.

  They kept the plastic surfaces clean and everything was plastic. The shop was so immaculate that it looked like it had opened yesterday, but if someone pulled out a photo from 1872 showing palominos tied up in front, he would not have suspected monkey business. A degree of fastidiousness was a big part of the franchise agreement, one of the deep and numerous responsibilities of those in Admiral Java’s family. They had to stick to the rules if they were going to use the name. Even the farthest colony received weekly newsletters from HQ outlining the specials, the recent hairnet edicts, the latest volleys in the great sanitizer debate. Any customer might be an emissary from the home office come to check compliance, register corruption in tiny boxes on legal-sized paper. Spies were everywhere. My limp is a weak disguise, he said to himself. The medium Sumatra arrived superbly. He dropped audible dimes into the tip cup.

  This was the world he moved in, a place of compacts and understandings. It was safe in that embassy. He knew how things worked again. Steam snaked out the sip hole. He commandeered one of the people-watching stools in the window and found that dangling there was more comfortable than the four-poster bed he had slept in the night before. Across the square he saw the dark entrance of the Hotel Winthrop, the frosted glass, the somber gleam of brass in the sick light. The rain had diminished and redoubled through the night, wishy-washy, and now murmured to a drizzle. But he knew it was going on for a while. His foot continued to throb. Since his misfortune he had a farmer’s ken and understood weather arriving.

  Behind the window of Admiral Java, peeking past the name stenciled on the glass, he was able to take a more accurate survey of the town’s makeover. They had the new computer chain, the sneaker chain, the convenience-store chain, Admiral Java of course. Affirmations of a recognizable kind of prosperity and growth. More than half of them were clients of his (former) firm. If he had not suffered a misfortune, his heart would have swelled. He would have been the grandma stooping in her garden to check on how the tomatoes were coming along. Instead he had to settle for a recollection of pride, and heat through the recyclable container.

  In between the chain stores and the old stalwarts, he found representatives of that contemporary brand of establishment, the kind that dressed itself in rustic sincerity but adhered to the rapacious philosophy of the multinational. They were easily spotted despite their camouflage. The homey flower shop run by women in long dresses who had forced out the previous mom-and-pop operation, the pricey home-furnishing store where expense crouched behind the subterfuge of calligraphic price tags, the restaurant that had changed hands but maintained the fifties furnishings and quaint original signs for the kitsch factor. Old-fashioned was a name after all, he had attached it to a new brand of lemonade or pie on many an occasion. The Hotel Winthrop was not the only holdout of what had been, but from his vantage point on the swiveling Admiral’s stool it was the axis. The tallest building on the square, the looming accusation.

  They were even getting an Outfit Outlet, so he was implicated. At the end of the block, a brick two-story building was quarantined by blue plywood. While he couldn’t make out the letters on the posters along the fence, he knew what they said. COMING SOON OUTFIT OUTLET. The familiar stacked O’s were the giveaway, the slim ovals in the infinity configuration. If you didn’t recognize it, they had failed. Walk five blocks in any major city and you were bound to come across an Outfit Outlet. He had named the store a few years back. The parent company was a successful purveyor of low-priced low-quality goods that had decided it wanted a different piece of the action. So the same sweatshops stitched together flashier clothes from the same fabrics, and midwifed profit. The new member of the corporate family was doing well, due in no small part to the name, of course. Of course. Not that the work they did was shoddy. It was hard to walk into an Outfit Outlet and not find something, even if it was a lowly sock, that did not serve a purpose in your wardrobe or the persona you connived to project to the world.

  It was nice when he thought something up and the marketing people ran with it, coming up with an appropriately smart logo or campaign or tagline or something that looked nice heaving on T-shirts. In the case of the Outfit Outlet infinity design, the marketers had even displayed a sort of coy self-consciousness about the business of the franchise. Whether everybody was in on the joke or not, it was hard to argue with a cotton T.

  Would they demolish the old building rather than preserve the façade? No stopping the double O. They grew up fast. Such things happened in a blink, the things you name go on without you. Had the fence been there yesterday? He couldn’t remember. He felt reduced again, half erased. Instead of being comforted by the familiar stores and reliable logos, they reminded him that this was the longest he had been out of his house since his misfortune. When he left Winthrop in a few days, the store would probably be open for business, with the mandated pop CDs on shuffle, that month’s colors laid out for discovery of your size. Some people drive miles to watch foliage; he had heard of people who made regular pilgrimages to the windows of Outfit Outlet to watch the colors change.

  Maybe that last part isn’t true, but it should be.

  . . . . . . . .

  Muttonchops saw him cross the threshold and poured a draft. He supposed the bartender wanted to let him off easy, after having witnessed the quick damage wrought the night before by the Winthrop Cocktail. When he reached for his wallet, the bartender sneered or appeared to sneer and informed him that everything was on the house, per instructions. The bartender nodded to the portrait of a Winthrop elder on the wall in confirmation, per his tic. The dust on old Winthrop’s face did not stir. Something still consumed the founding father’s attention outside the frame after all those years, a loping fox or an escaping slave. No, he corrected himself: there weren’t slaves this far west—the bartender himself had told him that the town had been founded by freed slaves. So it had to be something else. He tipped Muttonchops a buck. When he left the bar later, the dollar was still there, and one or two more, and for all he knew the bartender dropped them in the garbage once he was out the door.

  The day had drained away without incident. He’d had his coffee and returned to his room, noting happily that the DO NOT DISTURB sign had kept the place free from intruders. He napped to the sound and flicker of a twenty-four-hour news station. There had been a bombing, and retaliation. No word from his sponsors. He ate dinner in his room and declared it cocktail hour.

  Outside the bar, the lobby was busy with talk of names and how many nights, as tired pilgrims leaned at reception to deliver credit cards to the world of incidental charges. The quiet of the previous night was at an end. No more fretful scanning for the horizon; this ghost ship had found the shipping lanes again. There were six other patrons. They sipped and squeezed limes into their drinks and commented on the accommodations and the journey. Talking about details, giving them a hearing, helped tame the lo
ss of beloved routine. Someone asked, “What time is it there?” The slang of everyday exile, of in-between places like airports and hotel bars.

  He tried to figure out how old the coasters were and what sort of maintenance they required. Did human hands scrubbing attain that faded suppleness, or did dishwashers achieve it easily with a switch? A spray from an aerosol can, the name of it pointing to both the scientific and the traditional. Apply Weathertique for that lived-in look that will make your house into a home. Also a verb. Did you Weathertique the chair yet, dear? Too many syllables, he decided. He felt a bit Weathertiqued himself.

  It did not take long for the couple sitting next to him at the bar to interrupt his noodling. Jack and Dolly Cameron. He’d overheard them talking about houses they’d passed on the way to the hotel, as they formed from exteriors conjectures about interiors that might meet their needs. Behind that window or that one was a family room, surely there was room for a home office and a place for visiting in-laws to sleep twice a year. The man addressed the side of his face. “You here for the Help Tour?”

  “Help Tour? No—”

  “Not everybody’s here for the conference, Jack.” She smiled.

  “It’s a natural question,” her husband snapped. She looked down at her drink and he continued, “Everybody in here is on some kind of business. Why else would they be here?” Jack returned his attention to him. “What’s your line of work?”

  “Consulting.”