Business Secrets from the Stars

by David Dvorkin

  The temptation to mark the pamphlet up with spelling and punctuation and usage corrections in red ink and then mail it back to the 55th-floor office where it had originated was almost overwhelming, but Malcolm managed to resist the temptation.

  No, he reminded himself, to the place where the pamphlet’s writer officed. The word of the month was “office” used as a verb. Thus, Malcolm and all his fellow employees had recently received a memo announcing that Ted Jones had been put in charge of In-House Career Enhancement and that he would be officing on the 55th floor. It was from that very office that the pamphlet announcing the workshop had come.

  According to the intramural grapevine, Ted Jones was currently sleeping with a very important company vice president. It was clearly unwise to belittle this man who officed on the 55th floor and sexed in a power bed. Some of Malcolm’s fellow employees, conflating a useful British expression with a useful American one and coming up with something meaningless, liked to say that Western Bell was run by a good old boy network. They would have come closer to the truth if they’d said it was run by a good old bed network. Malcolm saw no point in endangering his job now, while literary success was still a distant dream.

  The pamphlet went on and on, for page after slick page, with photographs of happy groups of Successful Coworkers who had attended previous sessions of the workshop, and with quotations from them attesting to the impact of the workshop on their lives and their work. All in all, the telephone ratepayers of the state of Arapahoe had been soaked a pretty penny for this workshop even before it got under way. It was the kind of company extravagance that made Malcolm grind his teeth every time he encountered it. The thought of it filled him with guilt when he deposited his biweekly paycheck. Not that he would ever not deposit it. The monthly payments he had to make to keep Marlene in the manner to which the court had said she was entitled gave him little choice.

  Wednesday of the next week found Malcolm the lone wearer of blue jeans and running shoes in a room full of overdressed and overeager Successful Coworkers.

  They sat around an oval table of some heavy wood, a handsome piece of furniture, highly polished, and paid for by the long-suffering telephone ratepayers, who had no idea what their money had bought. The same, Malcolm thought, looking around the room and feeling out of place and trapped, could be said for the souls of his fellow workers. Those souls were also dense, impenetrable, well polished, and completely for sale. He pondered that analogy for a while, but it led him nowhere and he abandoned it.

  At nine on the dot, the instructor bounded into the room, grinning frantically. “Hi, everyone!”

  He was a young man, smooth of cheek and forehead, and, Malcolm felt sure, of brain. He was also tall, slender, handsome in a clean-cut way, with clear eyes and perfect teeth. His head was covered with thick, wavy dark hair and his clothes hung on him perfectly. He was every woman’s dream and every man’s nightmare.

  “Hi!” he said again. He sprang from the doorway to the front of the room and said, “I’ll be your facilitator today. My name’s Jack Jackson, but you can call me ‘Jack.’”

  And my parents grew me in a vat from alien spores, Malcolm thought. Or maybe it’s plastic surgery. Christ, look at them. They think this guy’s great!

  All the Successful Coworkers around him were staring at Jack “Jack” Jackson worshipfully. This was the man with the answers, the secrets of success, the holy knowledge. This was Important Stuff.

  “Now that you know my name,” Jack “Jack” Jackson said, “I think we ought to go around the table and introduce ourselves.” He pointed at a woman near him, who looked first flustered and then flattered. “We’ll start with you.”

  She pointed at herself and raised her eyebrows and batted her eyes at the facilitator, who was probably twenty years her junior.

  “Yes, that’s right, you,” Jack-Jack-Jack said. “Just give us your name, dear, and the name of your organization.”

  “Oh,” she said breathlessly, “I’m Rebecca Ortiz, and I work in New Products Marketing, and we’re right here on the 14th floor!”

  The facilitator nodded. “Becky. That’s great. And you?” He bent his boyish gaze on the man next to Rebecca Ortiz. The man answered, and Jack-Jack-Jack shortened his name immediately as well.

  Malcolm ground his teeth. Compulsive nicknamery. Another nickname nincompoop. How was he going to get through eight hours of this idiocy?

  When his turn came, he said, “My name is Malcolm Erskine, and I work in the New Ways to Get Money from the Widows and Orphans Office, more popularly known as the Waffen SS. We office down in the 25th subbasement. Our motto is, ‘If you’ve got a last penny hidden somewhere, we’ll find it.’”

  His coworkers looked at him in consternation, confusion, or hostility, depending on each individual’s degree of company loyalty and intelligence. However, JackJackJack was unfazed. Obviously, he didn’t listen to what anyone said. He heard only the name and then nicked it. “Mal,” he said, nodding, and turned his attention to the next Successful Coworker.

  “Yeah,” Malcolm muttered. “Mal. Short for Malcontent.”

  A lunch break was scheduled for noon. It seemed ten hours away, rather than three. Since only his body’s presence was required and not his brain’s, Malcolm tried to spend the rest of the morning working out plot details in the novel he was currently writing. It worked surprisingly well, and for him the morning was productive. He felt that he had indeed become a more satisfied human being. He was almost sorry to see noon arrive.

  Lunchtime! Teacher J-J-J says, “See ya in an hour! Have a good lunch, you guys!”

  The Successful Coworkers laugh.

  Why the laughter? Malcolm wondered. Was there a joke I missed? It was a feeling he had often had, going back to his childhood. Nowadays, Marlene and the court system played a renewed joke on him every month, and he still didn’t get the punchline.

  Bell rings! Captives free for one hour, rush to the playground!

  Malcolm fretted as he waited for the elevator. There was good stuff in his head from his morning’s musings and he knew that it would drift away if he didn’t get it into some permanent form soon. The elevator bell pinged, and Malcolm bulled his way to the front of the crowd so as to get on the elevator first. “Sorry, sorry, sorry,” he muttered insincerely. “Running shoes. Won’t hurt your toes.”

  A flash of insight: if all execudroids wore running shoes, there’d be fewer mortal injuries as they scrambled over one another on the road to the top. Perhaps he could use that insight in a book some day.

  Back at his desk (fifty-five minutes left), Malcolm yanked open the drawer in which he kept personal matters, pulled out a Tupperware container, pulled off the top, and began eating the lunch he had brought from home. Then he turned to his desktop computer and began processing words.

  Eating, typing, eating, typing. Just a writin’ fool. The outside world had vanished.

  The outside world hadn’t vanished entirely. Boss-radar alerted him to the passage of Jim Leiter, a man who had stopped climbing the corporate ladder a decade earlier and whom others now climbed over. Malcolm kept typing but also kept watching Leiter out of the corner of his eye, ready to save the chapter he was working on and substitute some work on his screen.

  Leiter passed by, deep in conversation with another boss of the same level. Malcolm heard the other man say to Leiter, “You’re lucky with Erskine. Works hard right through lunch, even in the middle of a workshop. Wish I had...” At which point they passed out of earshot.

  Yeah, that’s me, Malcolm thought. Just call me “Mal.” Short for “Malfeasance.”

  Uh-oh, the bell’s ringing again! The sad bell, the dolorous bell, the bell that calls the little barbarians back to the classroom.

  Malcolm’s face was appropriately long. The book — a tragic, gripping drama about an unsuccessful science-fiction writer — was going well and he hated to leave it in mid-grip.

  His Successful Coworkers, however, looked happy and chattered toge
ther about their eagerness to get back into the room and hear more wonders from Teach. Out of the mouth of a babe and suckling, Malcolm thought, wondering briefly what the rest of the quotation was and where it came from.

  J-J-J stood at the door to welcome them, each and every one, and he addressed each and every one by nickname, proving the value of the memory-aiding tips he had spewed out during the morning session. “Mal,” he said, nodding.

  Malcolm grinned brightly. “That’s me. ‘Mal.’ Short for ‘Maleficent.’”

  Christ, he thought, what a jerk, what a twerp, what a dork. This is endless. It’s all endless. Life is endless. Failure is endless.

  Failure is endless, he repeated, savoring the line. Not bad. Have to use it in a book some time.

  Post-prandial sleepiness took over. There was to be no working out of plot details this afternoon. Instead, J-J-J’s nattering kept merging with dreams, out of which Malcolm would jerk suddenly awake, looking around in short-lived panic to see if anyone had noticed his drooping eyelids and bowing head.

  But his Successful Coworkers were all too absorbed in listening to JJJ to notice Malcolm. Their pens scratched busily on their burgundy-leather-encased ruled tablets.

  Oh, God, Malcolm cried within the safety of his mind, they’re taking notes!

  While he was nodding with sleepiness, they were nodding in agreement with JJJ’s insights into the business world — a world which Malcolm believed to be so lacking in depth that insights into it are physically impossible. The shock of seeing everyone else take all of this nonsense so seriously kept Malcolm awake for a full ten minutes.

  During that time, JJJ was able to rattle off three points of vital importance for becoming more dynamic, a better salesman, and a happier person within the telephone company environment. With each point, he extended another finger, starting with his index finger, and waved his hand in the air, so that at the end he was giving a manic Boy Scout salute.

  “One!” JJJ cried happily to the roomful of wide-eyed, small-brained, busily scribbling listeners. “A customer never buys anything. You sell him something!”

  Scribble, scribble, scribble.

  “Two! You can go just as far in this company as you decide to! No one promotes you! You promote yourself! Golly! Look at Ted Jones! He started out as a lineman, and look at him now! You can do the same thing he did!”

  There was a slight pause as all the Successful Coworkers thought about Ted Jones’s route to the top and wondered if they really wanted to take it themselves, but then the scribble, scribble, scribble began again.

  “Three! Capitalism was ordained by God, right there in the Bible, so the more you do to advance it in the world and in your personal lives, the better everything will go for you now and in the afterlife.”

  Malcolm expected an even longer pause after this bomb, but there was no pause at all. The Successful Coworkers nodded vigorously and scribbled furiously.

  Malcolm sighed in defeat and drifted back into sleep.

  He was rushing down a long corridor toward a gigantic old man sitting in judgment over the souls of the newly dead. The old man sat behind a battered gray-painted metal desk. He had a very long, white beard splattered with food stains.

  “Who’s this?” the old man roared in a voice that shook the Heavens. “Malcolm Erskine, eh?”

  Malcolm recognized him immediately. It was his grandfather, old Tibbs Erskine, source of childhood nightmares, a ghastly ancient whose death fifteen years earlier Malcolm had celebrated with a bottle of fairly good champagne.

  The real Tibbs Erskine had had a hoarse, gravelly voice. Not this Tibbs.

  “Gotcha now,” Tibbs bawled, leering at his hated grandson. He peeled back his thin lips, exposing those big, pointed, grayish yellow teeth that Malcolm had seen so often in nightmares much like this one. Tibbs opened and closed his mouth rapidly a few times, his powerful teeth snapping together. “Heh, heh, heh. Filthy kid. Cleanliness is next to godliness. Lesson you never learned.”

  He wagged his long forefinger at Malcolm, displaying a ragged, dirty fingernail. “Lessee, now. Questions for the defendant. Yes, indeedy. Number one: ‘Dja ever resist being sold a bill of goods, eh? Didja? Ever in your life?”

  Not that Malcolm could remember. And even if he had ever resisted being conned, falling for Marlene more than made up for that. He looked at his feet and muttered, “No.”

  “Hah!” Tibbs Erskine checked something off on a clipboard that materialized in his hand. “Did you go just as far in your career as you wanted to, rather than let other people decide how far you could go? Huh? Didja, huh?”

  Malcolm glared at the ground and shuffled his feet. “No.”

  “Speak up, you godawful little turd!” The very ground shook. Those teeth snapped and snapped, sounding like thunder. “I can’t hear you! You’re as worthless as your father was at your age. Speak up!”

  “NO!”

  Tibbs Erskine glared down from his immense height. “Don’t raise your voice to me, Sonny. Must be your damned mother’s blood. Okay, last question. Have you always and ever and in every way and in every place and at every opportunity preached capitalism and condemned all forms of collectivism?”

  “N —”

  “Ah hah!” Tibbs Erskine bellowed, cutting off his grandson’s reply. He jammed his thumb down on the desk, depressing a huge red button that Malcolm was sure hadn’t been there before.

  The floor beneath Malcolm vanished and he started falling. Far below him, a great pit of fire roared, its flames writhing up toward him eagerly.

  He kicked in reflexive panic and awoke. He looked around quickly, but his Successful Coworkers were still intent on JJJ’s words of wisdom, and no one had noticed his movement.

  The dream, he realized — and it was a very depressing realization — was better than anything he had ever written.

  * * * * *

  The second seed was provided by Malcolm’s still-new agent, a young woman named Judith Tillen, who was quickly learning why both Malcolm’s first agent and his wife had dumped him.

  “I wanna be rich,” Malcolm whined. “Why aren’t I rich?”

  Why aren’t I? Judith thought. Why don’t I have at least one fabulously successful client, fifteen percent of whose royalties would make me rich, too? Then I could handle only those clients I really liked. Which is to say, those who don’t whine.

  “Because you’ve never had a hit, Malcolm. In fact, you’ve never even had a moderate success.”

  Malcolm glared at her for a moment, then relaxed against his side of the booth. “Yeah, you’re right.”

  They were in the coffee shop of the hotel where the World Science Fiction Convention was being held. The hotel was filled with the socially unusual young readers of the fiction and the embittered middle-aged writers of it. The former came to these conventions to see the latter and to socialize with each other. The latter came to pretend that they were there to get to know the former, but they were really there to booze with each other, to badger their agents, and to lick the boots of any editors in attendance. The agents attended to do business with the editors and to let their clients get their badgering and whining out of their systems. The editors attended because their boots needed a spit shine.

  The convention was usually held on Labor Day weekend, usually in America, and usually in some city where the heat and humidity in early September are frightful. This year, it was being held in Indianapolis, and the heat and humidity were frightful.

  Malcolm had gone to college only fifty miles from here, at Indiana University. He remembered the summers as being hot and humid, but not this oppressive. His body must be having more and more trouble dealing with the heat because of age. God, he thought, now I’m getting old, too. Old and unsuccessful. I’ll be one of those unshaven, drunken wrecks I see stumbling around these conventions. Look, someone will say, isn’t that what’s-his-name? And someone else will say, Oh, yeah, Erskine. Didn’t he sell a few books a few decades ago that no one ever read?
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  “And every year,” he told Judith, “there’s a whole batch of new, young writers coming up that everyone goes ga-ga over, which pushes people like me further and further down on the publishers’ lists. This is a young man’s genre.”

  “That’s not really fair. There are plenty of older writers doing very well.”

  “Yeah, but they became famous when they were still young. I don’t mean that only young writers can write this stuff. I mean that publishers aren’t interested in discovering anyone who’s already past thirty, or who’s had books published that didn’t do well. How well you write has nothing to do with that. If you don’t hit it young, and on the first try, they aren’t interested.”

  Embarrassed, Judith looked down at her dessert. Pecan pie, and far from the wonderful variety she had found only in the South, but at least she was closer to the South here than she was in New York.

  “There’s a lot of truth in that, Malcolm. But you really are a fine writer, with a polished technique and all the other craftsmanship an experienced writer develops.” She meant that quite sincerely, and saying it made her feel — for the moment, anyway — warmer toward her luckless client. He was a pretty good writer, and he did deserve greater success, and acknowledging that to herself made her more sympathetic toward his whining and self-pity. “I don’t know what to tell you, Malcolm. Maybe you ought to try something in a different genre.”

  “Well, I have thought about doing an expose of the software business. Rip the lid off it and show all the nasty little wriggling white things hiding in the darkness.”

  Oh, God, Judith thought. “I think the audience might be a bit limited.”

  “Oh, I suppose so. And the little nasty wriggling white things are few and far between. The main ugly truth about the software business is that it’s so fucking boring, and that wouldn’t make for much of an expose.”