It's Called Disturbing

by Buddy Roy Baldry

  “It goe$ right over the pro$pect’$ head.” Wally Russ spoke up. He would not be one of the ranks learning something new from this gentleman, he was in on the ruse the entire time.

  “It goes right over the prospect’s head.” Travis Bunk held his hands out to Wally in congratulations. Tom could see others around the table nodding and he tried to make the light go on in his own eyes. His eyes, however, were not only unlit, they seemed to be transfixed by a knot in the grain of wood in front of them. Tom wiped the table with his palm as if that would smear the knot. He pulled his eyes away and toward the guest. The man knew somehow that Tom was the only one in the room who knew jack-shit about Capital Gains.

  “They don’t need a lot of mumbo-jumbo.” Wally said to the room.

  “They don’t need it.” The guest spoke louder, his eyes flicking to Wally in a veil of mild annoyance. This is my show. “But more than that. More than that.” He was near a whisper now. “They don’t feel it in here.” Hand to his chest. Now whispering so Tom had to lean forward to hear. Travis Bunk softly beat his chest with each syllable when he repeated: “They-Don’t-Feel-It-In-Here.” Tom felt his fingers unconsciously tapping along with the rhythm.

  “These people must be bothered enough, disturbed enough to make them want to buy. They must imagine a danger to their loved ones. They must put themselves in the position of worst-case-scenario. You tell the nice bedtime story to get the kids to sleep at night. You tell the real-life horror plausible nightmare to the parents after the kids are in bed. You pull back the curtain and show them the ugly reality that could happen anytime. Did you know one in two people will contract some form of cancer in their lifetime?” The guest stopped and pointed to Tom and the robust agent sitting next to him. “One of you will get cancer, it’s a fact. Now, who wants to risk leaving their family destitute? Which one of you?” Neither spoke up. Tom thought of Eddy and found he didn’t really give it much thought. Yet, he nodded alongside the man next to him. The premium from a new sale would mean money on the next cheque. Could he sell a policy to himself? What about Eddy?

  “Not a good idea,” The guest continued, “I have disturbed you, simple as that. A proven method for disturbing is outlined in my book. You will buy my product, not because of a bunch of statistics and percentages and mumbo-jumbo,” he gestured to Wally who nearly came to a blush, “You will buy my product because you have been disturbed. How do you feel now, knowing that you could be leaving the person you are closest to totally destitute because of a poor decision on your part?”

  He was looking and nodding at Tom. Tom’s eyes moved back and forth, wondering if it was a question he should be answering. And if he did answer, would he know the correct response.

  “I didn’t think so.” The guest leaned back, satisfied. As did everyone in the room, except Tom.

  “$o give u$ an example of thi$ in the field,” Wally challenged, to save face from his previous embarrassment in front of a lot of rookies.

  “Certainly, Walter,” The guest said, “Let’s role-play a bit.”

  “Certainly,” Wally said.

  The guest speaker’s face and demeanour changed, “Let me ask you this, Mr. Client,” To Tom, it looked as though he were mimicking someone, or trying on a caricature of himself. Chin tucked in, eyes focused hard on the center of his glasses, chest stuck out as far as it could. “You have a spare tire, don’t you?” He asked. Then his face changed again. His eyes bulged out and his lip hung slightly open, glistening wet that looked like drool. This was him playing the client’s part in the back and forth “Well, well,” He stuttered, “Waddya mean.”

  “A spare tire? In the back of your car?” He answered himself.

  $$$

  Tom left the meeting with two certainties. One: the guest speaker saw right through him and hated him. Two: Tom was going to have to read Travis Bunk’s book. Disturbing people made sense. It was so logical and simple, yet the guest speaker made it sound as though no one used his simple method. True, Wally never picked up a copy when he left the boardroom, but Tom could imagine Wally seething with envy. After all, the guest speaker couldn’t have weighed more than 85 kg.

  It was also a certainty in his head, at that moment, that he would read the book and learn the method. He did a facsimile of a strut to his office and closed the door behind him. He turned off the overhead lights and switched on his small desk lamp for mood. He opened Bunk’s book. When he was done reading the accolades from newspapers and other authors he never heard of, and the short preface in which the guest speaker told again, in writing, the spare tire scenario, Tom set the book down. He wrote in his day timer for the morning (which was fairly open) “Read chapter one of ‘Choose Your Own Reality’.”

  The “y” in the last word grew an elongated tail because as Tom was writing the phone rang. He felt his chest flutter and his mouth go dry. He stared at the phone until it rang again. He reached for the receiver and untangled the cord and punched line 1. Dial tone. Had he hung up on the caller? No. Line two was for him. It rang. He punched Line 2 and cleared his throat into the receiver. “Tom Ryder speaking.”

  “Mr. Ryder?”

  “Speaking,” he waited too long to say, and said it at the exact time the caller said “hello?” “Yes, speaking,” he repeated.

  “Hello, Mr. Ryder, this is Rebecca from underwriting.”

  “Oh?” Tom could not hide his surprise. Underwriting usually just emailed him things. Not that he had anything to communicate with them. He had sold a total of two policies since starting, both on himself. He was working up the courage to ask his mother and Uncle Rich next.

  “Hi. This is regarding policy #45933-002? We haven’t received the oral swab from this client.”

  “Oh?”

  “No. Did you send it in the package?”

  “Well, I thought I did,” Tom said. “but if you haven’t got it then I must not have.”

  “Not necessarily,” Rebecca said, her voice lost its previous edge. “There’s lots of things that can happen to it along the way.”

  “Really? Like what?” Despite himself, Tom laughed and leaned back in his chair when he heard Rebecca laugh.

  “I don’t know.” She said, “I’m new.”

  “Me too.”

  “Really?” Rebecca said, “A couple of newbies?”

  “I guess.”

  “How are things going for you?” Her voice relaxed. There was a light giggle just underneath her words, as though any minute she was going to break out into laughter. Tom suddenly felt the same sensation rising in his throat.

  “It’s all right,” he said, “I haven’t sold much, yet.”

  “Don’t worry, it will come. My husband did this for years.”

  “...”

  “And it was slow for him in the beginning, too. But he did quite well.”

  “Is he still in the business?” Those words sounded awkward to him. The Business.

  “No, he’s dead.” She said.

  Tom sat up in his chair and felt his neck go cold. Stupid. Stupid. “Oh, I didn’t realize...” How could he have realized? “I’m sorry.”

  “You’re sorry? Why? Did you kill him?”

  Tom could hear the background noise on Rebecca’s end. No discernable words or conversations, just a babble of voices. Then, through the fog, he heard his name, plain as day, shouted out in her office, a thousand miles away: “Ryder!” He thought he heard his name called.

  Rebecca’s voice was close to his ear now: “Oh, shit, I’m sorry. Sometimes people don’t get my jokes.” Her smile came through the telephone. “It was ten years ago - we married young. He was a hot-shot up and comer and he was killed in a car accident.”

  “That’s terrible,” Tom managed.

  “Mm, hmm... it’s water under the bridge, as they say. I’m past it; it was a long time ago. He’s been gone for longer than I knew him.” She paused. “I miss him still, though.”

  “I lost my father,” Tom said before he could stop himself. Why was h
e telling this woman about his father? How had this conversation taken this sort of turn where they would be sharing personal information? A stranger. “A few years ago. It’s not the same thing, I know...”

  “No, no...” Rebecca interrupted. “In some ways it’s more. I mean, your father, my God.”

  “It hurt,” Tom said, “It still hurts. I’m not sure if I ever quite got over it, yet.” There was the silence again. If Tom was waiting for his name to be called out like before, to be sure, it was only in his subconscious.

  “His name was Tom,” Rebecca whispered.

  “Who?”

  “My husband. His name was Tom. Like yours.”

  “No shit?”

  $$$

  Tom felt somehow compelled to take the sneaky back door on his way home from work. His feeble headlights barely found the road. Thankfully, the streetlights opened a patch of pavement and Tom could adjust according to the painted lines, watching the red flare of taillights in the vehicle just ahead. Drops of rain spat on his windshield and he grew tired of clearing it every few seconds, so he turned the wipers on low. More than necessary, perhaps, but it was darker just ahead, and it looked wetter as his internal compass guided him on a different way home.

  Then there were trees. He remembered this. The SuperStore on the right. A graveyard a few blocks further up on the left. And it should be lit up with six of those overhanging lights. That one there. What the fuck? What is an i-scheduler? No, you idiot, you’re looking at the backside of the billboard. As he passed the i-scheduler advertisement he looked in his rearview mirror as long as he dared without colliding into the cars next to him. It was well lit. He couldn’t make out the writing but he watched just in time as the glasses dissolved. See? He looked ahead and peeked back only once or twice until the billboard became a blur of white against the dark sky. Until in his mirror, hanging in the middle of blackness, was the pulsing red glow of the city just below the horizon.

  The mannequins flashed him and twisted their shoulders seductively when Tom pulled into his driveway. Tom avoided the nippleless breasts until a chill dripped down his spine and found a tingling pool above his ass. Get some fucking curtains. Now, and every time, the walk down the crumbling cement stairway to his home with the bulb burnt out seemed more frantic. The last leg. But anything could happen between here and inside. His foot sometimes overstepped the bottom step and it felt like finding, by accident, the deeper part in the water. Disorienting. Seemingly harmless, yet some have drowned.

  Blindly, he dipped his hand into the mailbox and clutched at the envelopes inside, fishing them out and filleting the flyers right where he stood, by feel. His one hand held the mail and the other turned the knob and found it not giving. He alternated between searching his pocket for keys and ringing the doorbell until he heard Eddy’s muffled voice from behind the door. “What? Holy shit.”

  “Hey. Let me in!” He shouted at the door.

  “For... something... something... something...” Her voice was lost in the clicking of a lock and then her departure. He turned the knob and walked into complete darkness. In a few seconds, he could see candles of various sizes set around the apartment. In the corner Eddy sat cross-legged on the floor, shining a flashlight up at herself, her face glowing and floating in the center of Tom’s vision.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Tom asked the floating face.

  “What do you mean?” Snap went the flashlight. Now only the three small scented candles lit the place. On an end table, Tom noticed four or five burned-out party sparklers. She saw him looking. “Well I had to get to the flashlight somehow, all the lights were off.”

  “And the other candles?”

  “They were already lit,” she said. “The furnace doesn’t seem to be working.”

  Then Tom became aware of how cold it was in the apartment. His coat was still on, but he could feel the chill. There was no warmth hitting him in the face. There was no comfort here. He decided to leave the coat on. “The furnace?”

  “I tried to turn it up and nothing happened. It didn’t make a sound.”

  “It didn’t kick in?” He asked.

  “I guess not. It didn’t make that sound when I usually turn up the heat, you know, that whhooomph sound.”

  “Hmmm...” Tom said. “I’ll check the pilot light, I guess.” He beckoned Eddy to follow him with her candle. They stepped slowly down the hall to the furnace closet. He glanced behind him to make sure she was doing all right, and her body seemed to float along in the darkness without a head. “Hold the candle up.” He said. She complied, and her face looked hollowed out now, no body, but cavities for eyes and an elongated shadow of a nose, her mouth shaped in a frightening grimace. “A little lower.” He told her.

  Once inside the small closet, with Eddy holding the candle, Tom struggled with the faceplate of the furnace. It scraped and scratched until he was able to remove it and set it gently against the wall. He peered up into the darkness of the mechanism. He knew a little about the workings of the furnace. When he was small, maybe three or four or five, he would wake in his bed in the middle of the night, wondering about the darkness all around him. He would take his blanket and step out of his room into the silence. Always, he found his way to the furnace, which, in their old house had no separate room. It was in the middle of the living room, tucked away in a corner, inconspicuous to anyone who lived there and saw it often. He would make a bed for himself with the blanket and a pillow and stare up through the slats in the furnace’s front panel. The small pilot light would burn steadily and blue. He would watch it flicker and feel his eyes flicker with its rhythm. Then, without warning, but as though he knew it was going to happen, the pilot light would ignite a row of yellow flame along its insides, right in front of his eyes. They would dance and illuminate the mechanical organs of the furnace until just as suddenly the row of flame disappeared and the lone blue flame was there again, comforting him until the next performance. He knew this much: you needed an initial flame to light the others, which in turn would make the heat necessary to warm the house.

  “Do you have matches?” he asked.

  “Just a second,” Eddy said and swam away in the dark. He heard her stumbling around in the apartment while he lay there, his eyes involuntarily closing now and then, threatening to stay closed for a long time. Maybe they were closed for a long time. Maybe he slept.

  “Here you go.” Eddy appeared out of nowhere and his hands reached for the lighter. He flicked it and held it into the mechanics. His own meek yellow flame looked small and empty in the guts of the furnace. There was nothing happening. He found the knob and read the instructions.

  Push and hold in knob

  Light pilot light

  Hold knob for three seconds after lighting

  Release

  Tom did as he was instructed and waited. Nothing. Darkness. Cold. He tried again. Nothing. There would be no reassuring blue light, there would be no dancing yellow soldiers standing all in a row. If the furnace was his amusement park as a child that would lull him to sleep, then this particular park seemed closed for the winter months. The ferris wheel, the salt-n-pepper shaker standing still and useless without someone to start them up. All the popcorn and refreshment stands boarded. “I don’t know.” He admitted.

  “Should I call someone?” Eddy asked.

  “If the power is out, the phone will be out too,” he said.

  “I know,” Eddy said. “I’ll Google it. We can figure out how to start the furnace.” Her voice was excited.

  “Google it? On the computer?”

  “Duh,” Eddy said.

  “No computer, Eddy. The power is out. Use your phone.”

  “But if the power is out we have no wi-fi,” she whined.

  Tom did not bother to consider the logic of this. “Well, what are you doing sitting here in the dark, anyway? Is it just our house?” He asked. He slid out of the furnace room and they made their way back down the hall. He followed the glow of Eddy’s back. He
fumbled his way through the kitchen and found a beer in the darkened fridge.

  “Not like I had a choice,” Eddy said from somewhere in the living room.

  “What?”

  “The lights won’t go on. They went out about three and they won’t go back on,” she said.

  “Did you check the breaker?” He asked and when she didn’t answer he tried to make his way through the dim light to the bedroom, where the breaker box was located at the back of the closet. He reached for one of the candles on his way. Moving his clothes aside he held the flickering light to the switches. They were all in the on position.

  “Is the power out?” he yelled from the bedroom.

  “Um, I think so,” Eddy shouted back, yet the irony was still apparent.

  Tom gave her the finger when he came back to the living room. Her eyes were shrouds and he wasn’t sure she noticed. “I mean, is everyone’s power out?”

  “No,” She said and shone the flashlight at the ceiling. “Not the mannequins. They got lights. They got it made, up there.”

  Tom looked at the ceiling; the peripheral glow cast his elongated and jumpy shadow across the walls. “Then what the fuck?” He whispered.

  “Maybe because we didn’t pay the power bill,” Eddy said.

  “Why didn’t we pay the power bill?” He asked innocently.

  “Because we don’t have any money, dipshit.”

  “Oh,” Tom said. “I thought you were going to take care of all that.”

  “Tom?” She said in the dark. “Are you kidding? I’m volunteering. I’m frigging sick of giving my time to everyone else. Fuck.”

  “Well, should we phone somebody?”

  “With what phone?” She was in the living room now. “They all work, on the power too, Tom. That’s what you said. Should we check the news on TV Tom? Duh.”

  “Let’s Google it.”

  “Fuck you, ok,” she said.

  “What do we do?”

  “Use your cell phone and call the company and tell them how much we can pay,” she said. “Then tell them to turn it back on.”