“One after another, Terry Brabet had the other couples come out to the front and try again, only this time with the person with the outstretched arm concentrating their attention not on the force of the other person’s hand but, as Pamela had done, on the orange in the middle distance. For every couple the result was the same, even for Joe and me. The outstretched arms could not be moved. What was far more amazing than any of this was the group’s response to the exercise, their exhilaration, their euphoria, to which Brabet contributed from the sidelines by exhorting us with slogans from the posters on the wall.
“ ‘Good, Pamela, good. Grow beyond your comfort zone.’
“At the conclusion of this session, we were granted a fifteen-minute break. It was at this time that I approached Brabet. I started by buttering him up, telling him how inspiring I had found the last session. He told me there was nothing more satisfying to him than hearing that. He said that this was what he was all about, empowering people, helping them to help themselves. He seemed to believe his own cant. As he walked toward the door with a hand resting on my shoulder, it was not hard to believe that he was genuinely delighted by this level of praise from a consumer at the end of the very first hour of clearing over a hundred thousand dollars in four days. But then I started to explain that I was involved in a very delicate matter at work and that I really would need my phone back. We both knew it was a request, but I tried to dress it up as a statement. This is when his eyes changed shape, just briefly, as they looked into mine and registered commerce talking to itself. Brabet smiled a smile from the new economy where the customer is always riled. If he could have, he would have put me on hold so that Helen might fend off the request, but not before the disembodied voice of a third person had warned me that the request might be monitored for training purposes, that the enterprise realized my time was valuable and that my call was important to them. But this was a ‘live one-on-one’ situation, and he had to deal with it himself. He said he was sorry, but I knew the rules.
“ ‘But this is an extremely important matter, it’s just arisen. A matter of great commercial significance to the firm.’
“ ‘Your personal effectiveness is of great commercial significance to the firm too . . . Dennis. Sorry, no can do, Dennis.’
“By the time I had conveyed to Joe, through facial expressions and sign language, that my attempt had failed, I’d already decided that if we hadn’t somehow gotten a phone by the end of the day I would leave Brabet’s stalag to get one by hook or by crook and bring it back to Joe. With this decision made, I managed to keep my blood pressure down enough to survive the next session.
“You see, we knew we could leave if we had to—probably even Joe realized that—but before every session Brabet had Helen check everybody’s names off the list, so leaving was a last resort, not a first one. Between asking Brabet and going AWOL, there had to be other stratagems we could try. During the break, Joe tried the public phone in the reception area again, only to find he didn’t have enough change. You’re smiling, Alex. They’re small things, right? But small things can bring you undone. Anyway, you have to hear all this because it’s what eventually takes me right here, right to your door, via her.
“The next session in his ascending march toward the nirvana of inanity was devoted to teaching us how to juggle. Yes, I’m serious, how to juggle. The purpose of it, insofar as I could discern any, was to demonstrate that life’s difficult problems can be broken down so that they appear less difficult, something to that effect. Having juggled for us till we gasped at his skill, Brabet gave everyone, one by one, a turn at trying to do it with three red plastic balls in front of the rest of the group. Only one of us could. There was a guy from Sydney, and he was much better than Dr. Brabet. He was very quickly asked to sit down.”
“How do you do it?”
“You start with two balls in one hand and one in the other. You throw the two balls up in the air and the single ball in the other hand is thrown across to the hand that held the two balls. After a while quite a few of us were managing to pull this off, very slowly, maybe once every five minutes, but even this degree of success showed, Brabet claimed, that inherently precarious balancing acts could be broken down into manageable steps, steps which when undertaken quickly enough by someone practiced could not be seen to be discrete.
“The session went on for hours and with the cacophony of people’s laughter, their cursing, and their chasing after spilled plastic balls, Joe and I had a chance to confer. Joe had a simple plan with which it was hard to argue. At a convenient time, which we didn’t expect to arise until after the last session of the day, we would attempt to bribe Brabet’s assistant, Helen, to give Joe back his phone. Joe said he would do it. He would try to sweet-talk her. He was a salesman. In between throwing and chasing plastic balls, we figured that between the two of us, we probably didn’t have more than two hundred and twenty dollars cash on us. We both had credit cards, of course, but neither of us had planned on needing cash at a corporate retreat, much less needing to bribe someone. We just hoped the two hundred twenty would be enough.
“I told Joe that if it didn’t work, I was simply going to leave the following day and bring him back a phone. The idiot praised me for my audacity. Can you believe it! He knew as well as I did the consequences for both of us of not getting Sheere to change his mind, but he was somehow intimidated by the school-like discipline of Brabet’s regime. And he was far from the only one. You could see people stifling their resistance to hours of juggling; you could see them looking to Brabet for praise. Their rugged individualism, their enterprise, had completely evaporated, so successful had Brabet been in getting them to identify their participation and his approbation with career advancement and job security. Keeping a roll was important in this. Even though everybody could see that everybody else was there, by checking our names off a list each time, he was planting so many unspoken questions in our minds. What would the consequences be of missing a session? Who would get to read these attendance reports? What else was he noting about us?
“For the rest of the day and into the night Joe made a point of subtly ingratiating himself with Brabet’s assistant. He chose to help her collect the balls when finally the crash course in juggling was over. When she took the roll after lunch, he engaged in some self-deprecating chitchat, the substance of which I couldn’t hear but the tone of which was sufficiently audible to be nauseating.
“There were two sessions in the evening. Even by the start of the first one, people were getting fairly tired. Again, we were put into pairs not necessarily of the same sex and not necessarily with our roommates this time. Helen made sure the lights were turned off and as Brabet spoke quietly in a voice that was intended to be calming or soothing, she lit small candles in glasses that had been placed strategically around the room, giving it an ethereal quality. This time there was not the usual blaring of ‘Celebration’ announcing the beginning of the session but rather the tinkle of a triangle. They had done this before.
“In the first session, one of us in each couple was supposed to lie on our back and the other was supposed to massage our temples.”
“Isn’t that a little invasive?”
“Oh, Alex, it gets worse. Then he asked us to do something to each other’s ears . . . that’s just too silly to mention.”
“Up to you, Dennis.”
“Well, the point is that by the start of the second session, which was also a candlelit one introduced by the tinkling of a triangle, people on the whole were so relaxed they were almost sleepy. This time, he had us sitting on mats in groups of three and four. People were too tired to question the fact that the chairs, each of which had been our personal responsibility, had been taken away from us, which is to say that in the space of twelve hours, twenty adults who had been deemed in some way above average had, with expert help, regressed to infancy.
“In the candlelight Terry had us kneeling and leaning forward so that our foreheads were touching. Then he went around
in hushed tones allocating a topic for discussion to each group and the person to start it off. I could hear some of the topics he’d allotted: your childhood, your first kiss, the loss of your virginity. Terry, as though anticipating their reluctance to dive into their topics, walked softly around from group to group prompting them. Gradually they started talking, some so warming to their subjects that they couldn’t stop. A woman in our group—Pamela, it turned out—had been the victim of child molestation. She began talking and was soon crying. Nearby groups stopped to listen to her. We were embarrassed. Our heads were still touching.
“A man in another group, a bald, stocky guy, started talking about the horrible time he’d had as a child, being picked on, and being rejected. He also started crying.”
“What did you do?”
“Me? I wasn’t going to tell these people anything. There was a woman there in another group, kind of plain, not what you’d call unattractive but . . . you know . . . she didn’t wear makeup, her hair was all over the place. I knew her, sort of vaguely. Well, she was talking about her failure to form lasting relationships. We could hear her when Pamela’s heaves became longer and more evenly spaced. The other woman, the plain one with the unruly hair, she was talking openly about how things tended not to work out for her romantically, but she seemed to be coping okay with the telling. That is, until Terry stopped by and started pushing her. ‘Why do these relationships always fail? What do these relationships have in common?’ For Christ’s sake, they have her in common. Well, after a while she was in tears too. I wasn’t going to let Brabet anywhere near me, the real me.”
“What were you feeling when these other people were crying?”
“I was angry.”
“Angry?”
“You bet I was angry. I was angry with Brabet for doing that to all those people. I was angry with myself for being there in the first place. I was angry with Joe for pretending to go along with it all and for getting me in this shit with Donald Sheere. I was even a little angry at those saps for spilling their life stories like that. It was embarrassing. It was uncomfortable for everybody.”
“Did you think of doing anything about it?”
“Yes, and I did.”
“What did you do?”
“I tried to make Pamela feel better. Joe and I both did.”
“What did you say?”
“I told her to stop talking about what had happened to her. I told her she didn’t have to tell us these things if she didn’t want to.”
“And what did Pamela do when you said this? Dennis? . . . Dennis? Why does it affect you in this way to tell me this? Why do you think you’re crying now? . . . Were your heads touching?”
“Yes. Yes, they had to be.”
“Why?”
“Brabet said they had to be. We had to lean in with our foreheads touching. I told you.”
“Did you touch Pamela when she started to cry?”
“Our foreheads . . .”
“Other than your foreheads?”
“No.”
“You didn’t pat her or . . . ?”
“No.”
“Put your arm around her?”
“No. What’s your fucking problem, Alex? What are you getting at?”
“I’m not getting at anything.”
“Well, if you’re not getting at anything, why are you asking these stupid questions?”
“Why are you crying, Dennis?”
“I . . . I told her to shut up.”
“Why did you tell her that?”
“Because I couldn’t stand it. I couldn’t stand hearing what was done to her. I couldn’t stand the way she vomited it all out to complete strangers. Not only did she not have any shame, she didn’t have any sense. It would get around. It would be known in the offices of every affiliate around the country. She was committing career suicide.”
“Career suicide?”
“Sure. Absolutely. People would look at her differently after that. They weren’t going to promote her knowing what had happened to her. They’d tiptoe around her. They’d ignore her if they could. They’d see her as an unstable bomb . . . one that could go off at any time.”
“That seems grossly unfair.”
“Of course it’s unfair, but fairness doesn’t enter into it and she should have known that. Within weeks of the retreat, she’d handed in her resignation. I don’t know where she went.”
“Is that really the way you see your work environment?”
“Alex, have you been asleep? I’m telling you in minute detail the way I see my work environment. It includes Dr. Terry Brabet reducing these people to tears one Saturday night in a dimly lit rec hall at the foot of the mountains. And I’m telling you they weren’t going to get to me.”
“Okay, go on.”
“It was after midnight by the time the session ended. Even though everybody was exhausted, Brabet’s little contingent of camp followers remained clustered around him. It was all Joe needed in order to get a moment alone with Helen. He told her that the last session had really taken it out of him. She said that that one always particularly affected people. I was listening in. He was pretty smooth. He started telling her about his son who had been kidnapped only a few months earlier and the effect it had had on his family. It was true. Someone really had taken his son.
“Well, this caught her interest. She’d read about it, apparently, and was very sympathetic. She asked him if he wanted to raise it at a session the next day. She could raise it privately with Terry first. And this is where he was particularly brilliant. He told her that he didn’t know if he was ready to bare it all publicly but . . . and then he sort of stumbled as though he was a little embarrassed or nervous. He looked at her, then away and then back again before speaking.
“ ‘I’m not sure what I’d say. I wouldn’t want to break down in front of everybody and . . . I don’t know that I’d be able to control myself. Look, I hope you don’t take this the wrong way but . . . I don’t know exactly why, but I feel I can talk to you. Things have been very difficult for me since it all happened. I have . . . I don’t know if this is allowed but I have a little brandy that I brought up. I like to use it to relax at home when I don’t have time to do all the stretching I should be doing. It’s just that I haven’t really . . . strange as it might sound . . . haven’t really had anyone around that I felt comfortable debriefing with and—’
“ ‘What about your wife?’
“ ‘Well, see that’s . . . I’m afraid to say, that’s part of the problem. See, it was her boyfriend who took him.’
“ ‘You’re kidding? Her boyfriend kidnapped your son?’
“ ‘Yep. That’s what it looks like.’
“ ‘That’s incredible. I think I read something in the paper about this but—’
“ ‘Helen, can we talk about this somewhere else? I don’t know that I want other people to know. I’m not even sure I want Terry to know, and that’s one of the things I thought maybe we could talk about. Do you like brandy?’ ”
9. “There’s no question that Joe is a great salesman. It’s a gift. I couldn’t have done that and that’s why it wasn’t absolutely impossible that, given half a chance—which meant, more particularly, given a telephone that could receive calls as well as make them—he might just have been able to change Sheere’s mind. Of course, Sheere was no sweet-smelling sad little Rubenesque assistant to a charlatan, but Joe had a knack for pitching a customized line just to get his foot in the door.
“Helen asked where his roommate was, and Joe told her that I liked going for long walks before retiring. Can you believe that? He said it, and she believed it long enough to start knocking back the brandy in our room.”
“What did you do?”
“Well, he got a chance to throw my coat to me through the door of our cabin and, huddled in it, I sat outside, on the ground, beneath an open window listening to Joe trying to coax the phone from her. The sooner he succeeded the sooner I could go to bed. They drank out of pl
astic cups. It was all we had. I heard him pour the brandy. He was smooth as he spoke, so fluent, it might have been the truth.
“ ‘Things had been incredibly busy at work, still are. Maybe that’s why I didn’t twig to them. I had no idea she was still seeing him.’
“ ‘Still?’ Helen asked incredulously.
“ ‘Well, he was her ex-boyfriend. They’d gone out years ago, before we were married. I didn’t think she’d seen him since then. We certainly never talked about him. She never mentioned him. In hindsight maybe that was suspicious in itself.’
“ ‘Oh, you poor man. It sounds like everyone’s worst nightmare.’
“ ‘Yes, I suppose it is. My marriage is all over except for the shouting. I’m still kicking myself for not having seen it coming.’
“ ‘Doesn’t sound like you have any call to blame yourself.’
“ ‘That’s sweet of you to say, but I guess it was not enough just to get her the house she wanted near the beach and everything.’
“ ‘It sounds lovely.’
Seven Types of Ambiguity Page 36
