Coming of Age: Volume 1: Eternal Life

by Thomas T. Thomas

  “Thanks, Ted. I appreciate your confidence in me.”

  He reached into the box again. “For that, I get a donut.”

  * * *

  “And hell followed after,” John Praxis murmured to himself, echoing The Book of Revelation, as he followed the financial news.

  After more than a decade of benchmark interest rates in the sub-single digits, the straps had come off when the U.S. government essentially defaulted on its obligations. Everyone understood that the Federal Reserve had tried to stimulate a flagging economy by holding down the cost of money—and thereby hold down the interest the government would have to pay on the national debt—while at the same time trying to prime the economic pump by printing trillions of dollars in “quantitative easing.” With the failure of this monetary policy, the laws of economics took over. Within two weeks, the federal funds rate shot up to twenty percent, and the interest that banks charged their best customers went to twenty-five. The interest rates that the average person paid in mortgages and car loans went above thirty percent. Revolving debt like credit and charge cards went to fifty percent. The national economy, which had been promising recovery for almost all of that same decade, rolled over and died.

  He didn’t really blame the Chinese for starting the landslide. The real culprit was a generation or more of powerful men who sat around long tables of polished hardwood, dribbling cigar ashes and imagining they were smarter than everyone else on the planet. The seeds of collapse probably dated back to 1971, when the Nixon Administration took the country off the gold standard, ended the Bretton Woods system of exchange rates, and turned the U.S. dollar into a fiat currency.

  Ever since then, these masterminds had played chicken with the U.S. economy, theorizing about how much stress the monetary system could stand and then pushing against that limit, then out beyond it, into the void. What had started as calculated risks eventually required bold moves to recoup the losses, and after the bold moves came the desperate gambles. These were not wise or good men, but they dabbled like sorcerers with complex equations that pretended to control forces no one could fully understood, let alone foresee the consequences three steps down the road. When you played with other people’s money, you took risks you would never attempt with cash from your own pocket. Economic charlatans! Witch doctors! Fools!

  But then, having mentally vented his spleen on the folly of the age, John Praxis refocused his mind on the meeting at hand and matters within his own company. What to do? What to do? What to do?

  “Three more customers have put their projects on indefinite hold, pending a filing for bankruptcy,” Richard was saying. He started counting off on his fingertips. “The Coshocton Towers development, the Stirling Chemical headquarters, and the Georgia Gophers stadium renovation. All told, about nine percent of our backlog.”

  “Is that adjusted for being down seven percent last week?” Leonard asked.

  “Ah, yeah,” Richard replied. “Nine percent currently.”

  With every week’s erosion, Praxis realized, it was taking less and less of a bite to weaken them more and more. Where did it end? … Short of losing their last customer and declaring bankruptcy themselves?

  “Are we cutting staff as projects wind down?” he asked his sons.

  “Well, yes,” Richard said. “With the usual benefits.”

  “What benefits are those?” Leonard asked.

  “Severance, COBRA, ERISA …”

  “But keeping core staff?”

  “Well, of course.”

  “Okay, then.”

  “What’s that?” Praxis asked. “Who are you defining as ‘core staff’?”

  “Oh, um,” Richard began, looking at the ceiling. “Accounting, Legal, Human Resources, Information Technology—all the backroom functions that keep us going.” These were also the parts of Richard’s personal empire.

  “But you’re cutting those groups proportionally, too?” Praxis suggested.

  “Well, that gets tricky. You see, there are minimum levels below which—”

  “I don’t think you understand,” Praxis said. “We are not operating in normal times anymore. We’ve just run out of road, and like that coyote who chases the big blue bird, we’ve gone airborne. Revenue is going to be down a third to a half this year, and next year looks to be worse. We have to consolidate. And where you can’t consolidate, liquidate and outsource. All hands on deck!”

  He could see Leonard and Richard taking covert, eyes-only glances at one another.

  “Does that include family, too?” Leonard asked. “Or the senior executives holding personal shares—shares granted to them in your day and in Grandpa Sebastian’s?”

  Praxis could see where he was going with that. Callie was in the middle of construction on the Mile High Performing Arts Center outside of Denver. It was a major complex with a concert hall, opera house, and three museums—celebrating modern art, history, and science—plus an aquarium, all with the latest technological enhancements. If that project went belly up, was John Praxis going to call for sending baby sister out into the cold? When all of Richard’s departments were outsourced, would he be expected to go as well? And a number of those shareholding executives were Praxis’s personal friends and supporters on the Board of Directors. If all the projects in their various divisions were eventually to disappear, was he in favor of divesting them as well?

  “We’ll burn that bridge when we come to it,” he replied, knowing it was a dodge.

  “You going on record with that?” Leonard asked with a cruel grin.

  “Don’t mock me, son,” he said. “This isn’t the time.”

  * * *

  Antigone Wells spent all day Thursday working on bankruptcy filings. Because she was a partner in the firm, it was considered beneath her position to actually fill out the forms for petition, application, lists of creditors, schedules of assets. So instead, Wells pretended to review the work that the paralegals were doing and that Carolyn and Sully had already checked. “Quality control,” she called it. But as she waded through the folders on her desk—Chapter 7’s, Chapter 11’s, the rare Chapter 12 for a farmer or fisherman, Chapter 13’s for people with assets—it occurred to her that clients in bankruptcy were unlikely to be paying clients, and a good many of the individuals and smaller businesses wouldn’t remain any kind of client in the future. As the day rolled grimly forward, the magnitude of the disaster impressed itself upon her.

  She and her associates would be in and out of court for months, maybe years, as they followed each petition through to discharge. That might look like steady work, but the process would slowly, inexorably, break them. It was almost like an algebra problem—or more likely the finely chopped incremental summations of calculus. Given their annual budget for salaries, office rent, phone service, utilities, and other expenses, how fast can you take clients out of the billing cycle before assets of the firm are returned to zero? And then, who does the bankruptcy filing for Bryant Bridger & Wells, LLC when they no longer have any lawyers on staff?

  All in all, it was six o’clock by the time she left the office, with gym bag in hand, a black cloud of doom over her head, and an hour to get across town to the community center for her first karate class. There she found that the only place to change was in the ladies room with four other women, where she stripped out of her business suit, nylons, and heels and put on sweat shirt, sweat pants, and tennis shoes. Then she went down the hall to the exercise room with the mirrors and the ballet bar, where she was invited to dump her bag with her street clothes and purse in a corner and remove her tennis shoes and bobby socks.

  “I’m more comfortable in shoes,” she told the young man who seemed to be in charge. He wore a brown belt made of folded and stitched canvas that tied in a complicated knot to hold his immaculate white uniform jacket closed.

  “We all practice barefoot,” he said. “It’s customary.”

  “See here, young man. I would really prefer to wear my shoes.”

  “You should cal
l me ‘sensei,’ ma’am. And as to shoes, see the class rules.”

  When she registered and paid her class fees to the community center’s representative, Wells discovered that she was also required to sign a waiver indemnifying the center, the class teachers and organizers, the International Okinawan Karate Organization, and all the other students against any injury she might suffer as a result of class participation. She also was explicitly promising to obey all rules, conform to the dress code—which included barefoot practice—and do whatever the senseis required of her. As a lawyer she knew the waiver was not binding and she could break it in court in about thirty seconds. But as this was her first day in a new environment, she decided to go easy on them and not press the issue. She signed and handed back the pen.

  “Ha-ji-may!” shouted another sensei on the other side of the room, and everyone hurried to get into formation—five ranks wide and ten rows deep. Before Wells could decide where to stand, the first sensei pulled her and a half-dozen other students, obvious beginners, out of line and assigned them to a young woman wearing a green belt.

  “Hi, I’m Judy,” the girl said. “I’ll get you started on the basics.” She took them over to a corner away from the others, lined them up, and showed them the “ready stance.”

  Wells thought she already knew how to stand, but she was wrong. As Judy worked with each student individually, using curt comments, gentle molding pressure with her hands, and little slaps and pushes up and down their bodies, Wells discovered just how much she had to learn: feet parallel according to imaginary lines running between the second and third toes back through the heel, weight evenly distributed, knees straight but not locked, pelvis forward, back straight, shoulders back, head up, elbows back, and hands curled into fists on top of her hipbones. She supposed that Marines going through boot camp had to know all this, but even they wouldn’t spend fifteen minutes just learning how to brace in the “ready stance.”

  When they all were standing like toy soldiers to Judy’s satisfaction, the girl showed them how to make a real fist: first joint of each finger folded flat against the third joint, then folded again until the nails bit into their palms, and thumb folded over index finger. The girl molded their wrists flat against an imaginary line running from between the index and middle fingers back through the elbow. The result was a fist rigid with tension and yet self-supporting, like a box.

  “Practice making that fist and holding it straight,” she said.

  “So do we ever get to move?” Wells asked.

  “Right now. We call this first stance ‘seisan.’ ”

  The girl took the ready stance and moved her right leg and foot forward in a sweeping arc, lightly skimming the floor, still parallel with those invisible lines. She planted it at the outer corner of an imaginary box, with her feet shoulder width apart. Her center of gravity had only moved about six inches. She showed them how by glancing down she had sight lines past her bent forward knee to her toes on the right and inside her straight back leg to her toes on the left. Through the whole movement, Wells noted, the girl’s head stayed in the same plane, without bobbing up and down. She moved smoothly, mechanically, like a robot.

  Then Judy had them all practice that swinging step, forward and back, right foot, left foot. The wonder of it was, for all of Wells’s clumsiness since the stroke, she never once lost her balance or started to fall during the exercise. Keeping her feet panted in stance or skimming the ground, and minding the even distribution of her weight, she felt more in control, more confident. She found a new center of balance just below and behind her navel.

  “That should do it,” Judy said.

  “Do what?” Wells wondered aloud.

  “Get you through the first stance,” the girl said.

  Wells was startled to find the ninety-minute class was over.

  “Go home and practice what you’ve learned tonight,” Judy said. “A little bit every day. Stand straight, make a fist, step in, step back. Next week we’ll work on punches and kicks.”

  Later, as Wells bent to put on her socks and tennies, she was surprised to find how stiff she was. Just by standing and stepping, curling her fingers, and pulling back on her elbows, she had used muscles that hadn’t moved in years. She wasn’t sure she wanted to continue with this. It all seemed so finicky and precise. But a tiny voice inside her suggested this was the way of true knowledge. Law school had been made up of such little pieces and parts, too, all finicky and pedantic. Maybe that was the only way to learn anything that stuck in your brain and lasted.

  She decided to give karate another week.

  * * *

  When he got home that night, Praxis decided it was time to discuss the realities with Adele. He had already missed dinner, so after he made himself a bowl of soup in the microwave and spooned it down, he went to find his wife. As usual, she was in the “family room” watching television. She slumped in her favorite chair and stared with heavy-lidded eyes at the screen—some show that paired contestants in flashy, beaded outfits doing the tango. He wasn’t even sure Adele was awake, until she reached for the glass of neat bourbon on the end table by her elbow.

  “Dear, we have to talk …”

  Adele slowly shifted her gaze to his face. At the same time her hand lifted the remote and muted the television. “So talk,” she said.

  He sat down next to her. “The boys and I have been going over the books at the company, and it looks pretty bad. Since interest rates have shot up—”

  “You know I don’t understand that stuff,” she interrupted.

  “Well, the economy’s in bad shape. Projects are closing down. We’re losing customers. Revenues are going to be way off this year.”

  “You’ll figure something out.” She didn’t say this as a form of encouragement. It was her way of dismissing the problem.

  “My take-home will be way down as a result.”

  “Huh!” It was more a grunt than a comment.

  “We’re going to have to start economizing.”

  That caught her attention. “How? Where do we ever go? What do we ever do? You spend all the money around here.”

  “I’m going to be looking at my expenses, too,” he said quickly. “But they’re mostly on company accounts, and those will be cut back automatically. I was thinking of the Jag. You hardly ever take it out. You don’t drive anymore. So—”

  “You leave my XK alone! I bought it with my allowance.”

  “And I pay insurance and upkeep. That’s a hell of a bite—”

  “Not open for discussion,” she said. So the ruby red coupe, which last time he looked sat under a thick layer of dust, would continue to molder in the garage.

  “I was thinking we might move to a smaller house. Even get an apartment. Property values here in Sea Cliff are holding, so far, and I think we could get out from under the mortgage and taxes—”

  “You’re not taking my house,” she said distinctly. “You want my car. Now you want my house. I earned this house. All those years in the jungles and deserts, practically dying of dysentery, bored out of my skull. This is my life now. You’re not going to take it away because you’ve got money trouble.”

  “All right, we keep the house,” he agreed, then paused.

  It was hopeless, he knew, trying to change her ways after all these years. But the Thunderbolt and its aftermath had given him a new perspective. Rather than swimming aimlessly, like a fish in the open ocean, he now sensed the flow of time. He knew he was swimming upstream, against strong currents, toward the inevitable end of life. Time—and his ability to meet it head on, overcome it, survive it—had become important to him. He wanted her to share this sense of renewal, of fighting the inevitable, too. She had been strong once. She could be strong again.

  “You know,” he said finally, even though he understood it was a mistake, “you might feel better if you started taking better care of yourself. Maybe get some exercise. Maybe you could, sometime, come out for a run with me. …”

  Adel
e just stared at him. Then she raised her drink in mock salute. “I’m glad you’re enjoying your exercises, John. They’ll probably save your life. Good luck with that.” Then she poured rest of the bourbon down her throat, looked back at the television, and turned up the sound.

  3. The Twenty-Nine Points

  Ted Bridger stopped by Antigone Wells’s office with another gray folder, another case for her and her team. She tried to smile as she reached for it.

  “You’ll enjoy this one,” he said. “We’re going after your old friends at Praxis Engineering. Seems they’ve been stiffing their suppliers on accounts payable, and one of them finally decided to sue.”

  Wells paused with her hand out, fingers touching but not yet clutching the cardboard cover. “I don’t know if I can take this,” she said.

  “What? The St. Brigid’s suit against them was your great triumph. Don’t you want to go back for another bite of the apple?”

  “I—uh—I’m not sure, but I think Praxis has us on retainer.”

  “You think? Not sure? Who am I talking to here? My trusted senior partner who eats defendants for breakfast? Or those regenerated cells which are now giving you brain farts?”

  “I’m all right, Ted. It’s just that I met the chairman, John Praxis, and he was so impressed with our handling of the case against them he wanted to put me on retainer.”

  “When was this?”

  “In the hospital.”

  “I thought so. You refused, of course.”

  “Well, he asked so nicely. And he’s not a bad man. I gather it was just his legal team pressing that silly force majeure defense. John himself seems pretty responsible.”

  “I think you’ve gone soft in the head—no offense, Antigone.”

  “Well …” She grinned. “It’s a bit of a blur, but he did mention putting us on retainer, although I don’t actually remember accepting.”