Everything

Fuck it.

Fuck it, burn it, and fuck it some more.

“The system is a failure,” the chuff man in a ripped, blood stained white-collar shirt with an undone tie and black dress pants and shoes slowly cracked his broad knuckles. “A goddamn failure, my friend.”

‘This isn’t the solution,’ I snipped the last chunk of fuzzy, black hair from my chin.

“Of course it is!” he jumped onto the top colorless stair of the seventh floor of the Orlando Marriot hotel.

Mere inches below my nose, his breath smelled of his cheap peppermint gum and chewing tobacco.

He flipped open a lighter.                                                            

“When you have a tumor.”

He engulfed the edge of a cigarette.

“You cannot just reduce its size. You must eradicate it completely.”

He wheezed a ring of smoke.

Neal Lence had always been a hipster, not of his own fault, though. When an individual becomes progressively more and more anti-cultural, they tend to ‘go with the flow’. As he explained, disconformity is the ultimate form of conformity. But Neal wasn’t conforming. Never had, never would.

Mr. Lence had a bad reputation at that hotel which would explain why it was completely empty now, less than a decade after we had moved in, with about half of the rooms up to federal regulation standards.

Only a single year prior, he had been forcibly removed from the staff of the University of Alabama on terms of ‘indoctrination’ or ‘teaching’ as he had come to refer to it as. As a result, Neal found much time on his hands.

Too much time?

Maybe.

Sort of.

Kind of.

It’s impossible to know.

Or is it?

No matter, none of this mattered to Neal.

No.

Neal was a renaissance man with little time for such concerns.

“We live in a perfect time for this, you know?” he chewed on the leftward corner of his fat, conflicted lower lip as he spoke. “Think of it: the perfect society!”

‘I thought that was impossible,’ I scratched my right cheek, recalling a conversation from years prior.

“That is exactly the point,” he smirked.

Neal could never be explicit in his language, always speaking indirectly. Spend all day with a guy like Neal for more than a few years and you’ll begin to question everything, even what is right in front of your eyes.

About two years prior to that night, my birthday, actually, Neal gave me a bag full of a gram or so of sand from a local beach. Confused, I asked him what it was. I still remember his answer to this day: “Today, it is sand. Yesterday it was firm sand. Before that it was gritty mud. And before that it was pebbles. Even before that it was a rock. Fast-forward a bit more and it was a bolder. More and it was a cliff. A little more and it was a mountain, an asteroid, cosmological dust, and before that it was in a goddamn star. Given any object, I can show you an infinite number of things, yet you choose to see it as simple sand. Don’t stop questioning even if something is as obvious as the ground you walk on.”

Mind-blowing, am I right?

Neal changes people.

Neal changes everyone.

Nobody is free.

 ‘Christopher wouldn’t want this,’ I coughed, dispending his trail of tobacco smoke.

“Chris is fucking dead. And we fucking killed Him.” 

Tightening the Rope

Wait.

Skip backwards around a decade or so before that night.

I didn’t know where the Marriot was and I certainly didn’t know who Neal Lence was. I was completely in the dark.

 

AynCorp, Building E, Floor 23, Human Relations Division, Call Coordinator. This was my life and it had been all of my life for the past seven years, ever since I got out of high school.

Ten hour work days, minimal health coverage, adequate pay, ‘The Corp’, as laborers had come to refer to it as, was a media giant.

Did you know that ninety percent of American media outlets are directed by or the property of no more than six companies?

Personally, my job was to listen to concerns from anybody who bothered to call and direct them to the proper phone line.

Did you know that the executive to nonexecutive pay raise ratio for the past half century is four-hundred and seventy-six to one?

I suppose you could call me the guy in charge of dealing with all of The Corp’s big ugly deals with politicians and all of the other ‘Corps’.

Did you know that one in two of all politicians have corporate ‘sponsorship’?

With just a little bit of thought, I had access to every single scandal and lie made by the Advertisement Division.

But I never told. It never even crossed my mind.

I fucking hated it.

‘AynCorp Call Coordination, where are you going?’ Gritting my teeth, I wondered if my red, striped tie could serve as a noose.

‘Hold,’ I pressed the necessary buttons, and away they were.

After, oh, so many years of the same thing every single day, your memories and present reality begin to blur into a blip in the back of your head.

Itching.

Hurting.

Boiling.

“Your responsiveness percentile has dropped tremendously this quarter.”

My boss was fat. Skinny up until the point where the picture frame of his wife disappeared from his penthouse office on floor one-hundred and one, then, Mr. K, at least as I had come to know him as, became an overweight slob.

K could be described as predictable, to say the least.

Red ties on Fridays.

Blue ties on Mondays.

Bow ties on Wednesday.

Nothing on any other day of the week. K loved his ‘breaks’.  

‘I’ve just been really tired the past few weeks, sir,’ I bit my tongue.

“Whatever the situation, I’m going to have to dock a quarter of your pay.” He kept his face buried in his laptop monitor.

‘Of course. Understood, sir.’

Fucking brute.

On my way home, I counted thirteen smiling couples, five laughing children, and seven men happily drinking a pint at the local bar. Twenty-five living entities better off than me.

Once home, at least that night in particular, I wanted to die.

Warm tears ran down my face.

My eyelids twitched.

I popped my thin knuckles.

My tie restricted against the middle of my throat, and I bit the rightward corner of my thin, curled bottom lip.

Suddenly, a knock came from the door. This knock evolved into several knocks into many knocks.

My lips began to glow deep blood red with a dark blue tint around the meeting point of my knife-like teeth and lower lip.

Scratching came from between the walls and adjacent rooms.

My temples pulsed.

My vision blurred.

My ears rang.

The walls of my shitty apartment rushed towards my forehead, slowly at first, then faster and faster.

Popping. All I heard was popping within my own head. My mind was on fire.

Images of my past began to appear. My mom, dad, younger brother, first girlfriend, my room was crowded to the limit within a few moments. 

Then, something wonderfully horrible happened: I held on. 

Seeing the Chains

The blood was everywhere. Not a single spot of my Coke-stained carpet was spared. With dribbles of saliva irregularly mixed in, the most concentrated puddle lied within my half-open mouth, now on the floor.

Licking my lips, I added more and more saliva to the mixture as I spit the half pint of blood wrapped around my slightly crooked teeth. Suddenly, it occurred to me in quite an unfortunate sense: I was weak and I was scared. I was not ready for death, oblivion, or seeing my family again, but above all else, I wasn’t ready to face Judgment. God knows I wasn’t. And I knew I wasn’t.

Having opened a half-busted mailbox on the first floor of the Ninth Colonial apartment complex, I flipped through mostly useless letters including Corp memos and several outdated coupons, rust powdering over the right side of my right hand.

“Remove the green, and the masters remove the interest,” the large, well-built man in leather to my right said (possibly to himself), examining a crumpled letter with a respectful United States Internal Revenue Service wax-stamp melted to it.

 ‘It could be worse, you know?’ I began awkwardly, rubbing my now thoroughly orange hands together. Neal would later call my ignorance my most ‘admirable’ trait. Strangely, I would not understand what he meant for several years after.

“My father told me that when I was a child. Now he works in an office.” His smirk broadened to almost a frown. “But if it could ‘always get worse’, what do we have to look forward to?”

I paused and thought for several long, worrisome seconds.

“Scary, isn’t it?” His hand ran through his straight, uncombed mass of hair before extending it in front of my shoulder. “Neal Lence.”

Then, we were at a local superstore. Food, appliances, novelties, they had every single modern ‘necessity’. On that day, and even now, I couldn’t explain it, but there was an atmosphere that Neal imposed upon you that made you want to listen and follow. 

 “Do you know what is in water?” Neal took a large sip from the light leather jug that hung from his belt.

‘Not particularly.’ My right eyebrow flinched up, obviously confused.

“Natural water is made of Hydrogen and Oxygen, two of the most abundant elements in the observable universe. Do you know what is in this shit?” He held up some bottled water from the shelf. “Fluoride and Potassium Chloride.”

My eyes widened as my head jerked back slightly. ‘I-I had no idea.’

“Nobody does.” Neal explained as he left the store with several bottles of water within the bowls of his jacket. He didn’t even have his wallet with him. “That is why this little society of ours needs people like me. Disconformity is the dying man’s medicine, my friend.”

Following several strange conversations concerning my family and life, Neal and I found ourselves at the Colonial once again. Full circle, it seemed.

“Alright, I need to ask. Why did you hold on?” Neal stopped in his tracks on the fourth set of stairs in the stairwell.

Confused, but with a hint of realization as to what he was talking about, I asked, ignorantly, ‘What do you mean?’

“You slipped today before we met in the lounge, but you decided to hold on at the very last moment. I’m asking you why.” A crooked smile crept upon his face.

I knew exactly what he was talking about. He knew.

Very soon I would finally discover a very powerful skill that Neal had either developed or been born with: he was infinitely clever. Give him a very small piece, and he could show you the whole picture and more.

A slice? No; a whole.

 A page? No; a novel.

A grain of salt?

‘I don’t know, to be quite honest,’ I blushed a light bubble-gum pink as the words spewed.

“You had a reason. You had a goal. You had an incentive. Otherwise, you’d be dead.”

‘You just don’t understand what it’s like. What it’s like to feel like you are falling every day of your life, only to find yourself atop the safe goddamn cliff once you hit the bottom. It is worse than death.’

“The slave is most oppressed the moment before his emancipation.” His mouth formed a left-centered (which was right-centered from my perspective) smirk as he quickly pulled his leather sleeve up to his shoulder, revealing deep, bulging, and red, yet old and healed scars covering his left wrist and forearm. There must have been no fewer than three hundred individual marks. “In a world worse than death and oblivion, we make our own reasons, pleasures, and values. That’s why the ‘schemers’ will always collapse under their own weight. That is what makes freedom taste so much sweeter than iron chains.”

‘T-Thanks.’ My mouth had hung open during Neal’s speech to the point that saliva had dripped down my chin. ‘That really brings things into perspective, Neal.’

“That’s the point,” Neal proposed a crooked grin with his face muscles. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a schemer to scheme.”

It was at this moment that I first realized just how free Neal Lence truly was. He was unemployed, yet had not a speck of care in his life.

Was that the goal?

Was that the purpose?

But if it was, what was the incentive?

We were all in rusted chains, and Neal Lence sought to make us pay for it.   

Six

“We are a symbol of unity in a globally commercial community of utter and complete chaos.” K appeared to be in a rather forthcoming mood this morning, standing with almost perfect posture and speaking without slurs.

His tie was completely black over his suddenly nice and neat suit and dress shirt, obviously appealing to the six corporate ‘analyzers’, at least as K referred to them as, plumped down in the unusually nice leather chairs. But we, and by ‘we’, I mean I, knew what their job actually was: kill off the dead weight.

About every other month or so Upper Corp sends down a few officers to bless us with their mere presence and to assist with ‘productivity.

There was just one minor problem.

It was bullshit.

All of it.

The analyzers were just here to figure out who’s paycheck they could absorb without experiencing an overweighing cost on their own as a result.

As Neal would eventually put it: “As soon as those in charge of the means of production see that there is a demand to provide labor to them, they discover the greatest resource of all: unlimited stock value. The corporate officer does not see human beings; the corporate officer sees potential market fluctuations, some positive and some negative. Thus, the officer, and the corporation in general, grow an incentive to exploit those positive fluctuations for profit and minimize those negative fluctuations. You are not a human worker, you are an investment.”

He always seemed to be able to point out the fucked up part of any given situation in society, right?

“As a result, we are being forced to expand AynCorp into many different markets. In the past week, we have entered five-hundred and twenty-three local markets each with surplus profit potential.” He looked straight at the officers.

I slowly began to realize the face that, aside from five of the six officers and me, not a single person in the room was paying attention to the bullshit-spewing machine that was fat, bulbous, balding K.

“As unfortunate or fortunate as you all may view this as,” he shifted his view to the thirty-or-so section heads from all over the building present for the meeting, “our hand is being forced. We need to specialize this branch to compensate for market expansion. So we are going to have a few analyzers from relatively high up help us with this adaptation.”

How could they be so ignorant?

Was Neal right? Was I just a number to them?

Impossible.

Why would they pay my salary if that was the case?

Why would I have such a free contract with them?

I was confused.

No.

I was angry.

With who?

Myself?

Neal?

The Corp?

The officers?

K?

I had no idea, and that, indeed, was the truly horrifying part.

“Thank you all for your time, and let’s get through this as smoothly possible.” K, using his wrist, smeared the puddle of saliva that had formed around the corners of his lips across his face. As he did so, the officers, each with a clipboard, took steps towards K at the front of the room.

I smiled widely. Images of K’s name being checked off all of their little corporate rosters filled my head. It was beautiful.

 Now aware that I was the only non-managerial individual in the room, I laughed and entered the crowded, golden elevator.

A peace of sorts had overcome my mind. This peace so radical, I failed to hear K calling my name.

But I didn’t care.

No, not at all.

The corporate atmosphere of that meeting was new to me. Brand new. I was lost, scared, confused, but I was happy. 

The Invitation

Explaining the occurrences of the Corp meeting to Neal Lence after running into him in the mail room once again felt like talking to a mirror. With a few ‘uh-huh’s and ‘yeah’s thrown in, Neal just sat there, absorbing every sentence, word, and character.

“Is that surprising to you?” His face faintly reminded me of officers from several hours earlier.

‘What do you mean?” I raised my right eyebrow. Even now, Neal always seemed to make simple questions complex. The questions themselves were very simple and easy to answer, but there was something about his tone; his uncaring smile or the nonchalant cracking of his knuckles perhaps. Whether or not he did this purposefully was not clear to me then, but now I understand.

“Was it surprising? You saw these things happen at a meeting, but are you shocked? Disappointed?” He cleared his throat prior to gulping ale from a glass cup.

I thought for a moment. ‘I don’t know.’

“You are a slave to the market, my friend.”

‘I am no slave,’ I stated, quite foolishly in hindsight.

“Why do you work for this company of yours?” Both of his eyebrows jolted upward in exact unison with his leftward smirk.

‘Because they pay me, I guess.’ I felt a sudden dissatisfaction with my answer.

“Tell the slave that they chose their chains and you increase productivity while minimizing resistance. You are a slave to the system that you serve.” Neal slowly leaned back into his cushioned booth seat with a wide grin upon his face.

‘Managers don’t have that type of power, Neal. They are fucking assholes, but they aren’t the fucking illuminati,’ I replied with an ignorant and laughing tone in my voice.

I’ll never forget what Neal Lence said next in that small, shitty bar. “No your managers don’t. Their managers don’t either. Not even the managers of the managers of the managers of your managers have that power on their own. You are not fighting and individual. You are not fighting a group of people. You are fighting a system. But what is this system? You face the system which created all that you believe in. You face your god. You face your best friend. You face your mommy, daddy, and brothers and sisters. You face the police. You face the courts. You face the military. You face the voting population. But more so than any of the others, you face yourself. You work for AynCorp. You are part of the system, and that is why you must separate yourself from that system. I have no job because I hated myself when I had a job. Serving my masters with absolute obedience.”

I had bullets in my chest. Neal caught me on one foot, and brought me to the ground. He had the ability to take a regular conversation and shift it into the most intense and status-destroying battle you will ever see. ‘Damn.’ I stuttered about, attempting to phrase my words properly. ‘I never thought-‘

“Of course you didn’t,” Neal interrupted quickly. “There are some things that few of us can learn on our own. Those things must be taught or shown.” He placed his left pinky into his mouth, chewing on it before he spoke again. “I know these things, and I have a proposition that may help you out if you are interested.”

‘And what would that be?’ I suddenly began to stare intently at the pinky of my right hand. I had no idea why. I didn’t think. I just stared.

“I’m going on a ‘retreat’ down in New Hampshire for the weekend. I’m staying with some old friends of mine. I think it would really give you some time to clear your head and get shit straightened around.”

‘I really appreciate the offer, Neal.’ I extended my hand in front of his left shoulder. ‘But I just don’t know about that. I have so much going on right now.’

I’d soon find that Neal was well known for making those he knew regret their own tendencies such as saying ‘thank you’, smiling, or the more relevant shaking of hands. “I’m leaving tomorrow morning at seven o’clock sharp.” He took my hand, placing his silver watch into it, just before standing up. “Sometimes,” Neal started as he placed his arm onto my shoulder with a solid grip to it, “we just need to let go, and fall to the bottom.”    

Impressum

Tag der Veröffentlichung: 25.09.2013

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