Colson Whitehead - Apex Hides the Hurt

The joint was packed. He shuffled through. You could have called it Happy Hour, had Muttonchops not been glowering behind the bar. The bartender poured him a beer as soon as he sat down on the single empty barstool. He pictured the shuttle buses, one by one, as they navigated the twisty roads from the big city, full of Lucky’s recruits, buckled up and secure. The visitors dispersed once they hit the elevator, but only briefly. They washed their faces and flossed and then they made their way down here.

Freedom. He whistled. If he’d offered up Freedom in a meeting, he’d have been run out of town, his colleagues in full jibber behind him, waving torches. It was like something from the B-GON days, an artifact of the most pained and witless nomenclature. Roach B-GON, Rat B-GON. Hope B-GON. Freedom was so defiantly unimaginative as to approach a kind of moral weakness.

He didn’t hear the punch line. Only the laughter. Like everyone else at the bar, he turned to find the source of the racket, and there was Lucky, in the back of the room, in his Indian Vest, surrounded by his weekend guests. Lucky was in raconteur mode, he could tell by the job-well-done smirk on the man’s face. The laughter continued as one man initiated another round of braying; no one wanted to be the first to stop. They were a pretty mixed group, Lucky’s future business partners and incipient flunkies — put a picture of Sterling Winthrop’s laborers next to a picture of Lucky’s multiculti crew and caption the tableau CHANGING TIMES. Jack Cameron, the man he’d met last night, hadn’t been a representative sample. The crowd in the corner could have been an Apex ad, to tell you the truth, so well-hued were they.

Lucky spotted him at the bar and winked and started over. The Help Tourists stepped aside, each one attempting to catch Lucky’s eye. This was how people reacted when you had the touch. It was how he’d pictured Albie Winthrop on his walks through town, before he’d met the man. Not that diminished thing whose empty kingdom he had just departed. He despised himself his earlier generosity toward Albie. Be a man, for Christ’s sake, he should have told him. Not indulged his weakness.

“Hello, friend!” Lucky said. “I can tell from your face that you met with our favorite son.”

“You’re right.”

“You need a drink, then,” Lucky opined, and invited him to join their table. Without instruction, Muttonchops placed six cans of Brio on a platter, which Lucky carried to the back of the room. Man of the people. He followed. As the two men jostled their way through, the assembled surreptitiously checked him out, trying to gauge his importance, and what was with the limp. Lucky dispensed the cans of Brio and introduced him with a chipper “This is the man who’s going to put our little town on the map — literally!”

He endured the usual round of questions about the nature of his profession before the subject turned to the new wireless standard. Apparently the new wireless standard was quite precocious. He kept silent. He took notice of his placement in the group. The words cordoned off occurred to him. Although the eight of them were gathered in a perfect circle — broken only now and then by someone leaning over the table to pick up a Brio — he felt exiled, a physical disengagement. This was not mere disinterest made into a palpable thing; Lucky possessed a zone of power. The computer entrepreneur and his Help Tourists were separated from him by invisible barbed wire that maintained a border. There is within, and there is without.

“It was such a quick ride down from the airport,” observed a young Latino woman. CFO of some fledgling e-commerce outfit. Router of arcane information. Repetitive stress injury candidate, fiddling with the levers on her office chair. She said, “I didn’t realize we were so close.”

Lucky smiled. “No traffic, you can make it in an hour. Some people even commute from the city. We don’t recommend it, but it’s an option.” He took a sip of Brio. “I know some of you are worried that you’ll miss all that a big city has to offer. It’s a huge fucking thing to move out here, I know that. It’s a big idea, but if you were afraid of big ideas, I wouldn’t have asked you here.”

He noticed that he was the only one drinking beer. Follow the leader. He wondered exactly what percentage of life came down to good marketing skills. He settled on 90 percent. The other ten was an antacid, to help settle things.

Lucky said, “Gimme 2.0, my friends, give me 2.0. One thing you’re going to learn this weekend is that I’m always looking for Version 2.0. One of our teams finishes a project — they’ve been busting their asses day and night — they finish it, show it to me, and what do I say? ‘Good job — but what’s Version 2.0?’ Because whatever it is, it’s not good enough. You can always tweak it, there are always ways to make it better. So I say: I love this town, but what’s the next thing? Where’s 2.0? I’ll tell you. You’re 2.0, we’re 2.0, my friend the consultant standing right here, looking like the Sphinx come to town, he’s 2.0.” Lucky squinted at him. “What do you think of that, friend?”

He said, “Hmm.”

Lucky slapped him on the back and turned to his audience. “He’s working! He’s taking it all in! That’s the burden of genius! Wouldn’t have it any other way.” Lucky looked at the can in his hand. “God, I love this stuff!”

Somebody said, “I’ve never had it before, but it’s really good!” and the rest of them agreed heartily.

He quickly finished off his beer and limped upstairs. When he got back safely to his room, he stepped on the note that had been slipped under the door. It was written in a maniac scrawl, what happened when the right-handed switch it up and use their left. It read, “I have honored your request for PRIVACY but will admit to ownership of a rising anger at your refusal to allow ME entrance. This HEAVY FEELING sits on my chest. WHO do you think you are?”

He looked around. His mess was as it had been. Nothing had been touched.

. . . . . . . .

The number-six adhesive bandage in the country wanted to re-create itself as the number-two adhesive bandage in the country. There was no use trying to overtake Band-Aid, the number-one adhesive bandage. Band-Aid had recognition and fidelity across generations and generations. Generations and generations of accidents and the scars to remind people of what Band-Aids had helped them through. The name was the thing itself, and that was Holy Grail territory. But you could try to catch up with that, become number two, by claiming a certain percentage of future accidents as your own. So men schemed.

Enter the whiz kid consultant. “Not me,” he always joked when he told the tale, “although I’m flattered, really. I’m referring to the hypothetical bespectacled whiz kid who thought up multicultural adhesive bandages.” Said whiz kid was another of his kind, a lonesome operative doing the same work, believing and disbelieving the same half-assed philosophies. He pictured him strutting down the aisles of drugstores, hands clasped behind his back, surveying the latest advances in adhesive-bandage technology, factotum trailing. The clear strip. The happily colored adhesive strips for children, with their little stars and turtles and crescent moons. The waterproof wonders and the antibiotic-soaked specials. The adhesive bandage had come of age while O and M was still trying to save a few cents on substandard gum formulas. The drugstores had ample shelf space, there was always more room for adhesive-bandage innovation. The antifungal sprays could be displaced to a niche in Aisle 6. This consultant, his opposite number and brother, he wished he knew his name, told his clients that what they needed was a hook.