Colson Whitehead - Apex Hides the Hurt

Before they adjourned, he had asked the mayor, “How am I supposed to come to a conclusion?”

And she said, “Do what you usually do. You’re the expert.”

He had traveled abroad. In European hotels he watched European TV and on it European commercials. Be a tourist, walk the narrow streets, see one old church you’ve seen them all, but the commercials. It didn’t matter if you didn’t understand the language, a good name cut through. Does it sound like candy, does it sound like perfume, does it sound like a fancy car you would like to be seen in. These things cut across cultures. In European hotels he could get five countries’ programming in five different languages but it felt like home because he understood the names.

He had never seen a cucumber sandwich before. He was in foreign territory but the television brought him back, reassuring his ears with the common roots of their languages. He turned on the television and ate his cucumber sandwich a triangle at a time. And he felt better, sitting there with the sound off, as the light entwined itself along surfaces like blue vines. When he was finished, conditions or no, he unpacked.

. . . . . . . .

He had a new desk and a couple of new ties. He was on time and pretended to go-getting.

He got into the swing of things. New guys like him worked in teams. The top guys, the wage earners, worked solo, but most of the jobs were executed by teams, around a big desk in one of the conference rooms, and they brainstormed. They huddled over the material the client gave them, they sipped mineral water and sent people for doughnuts. Perhaps there was a slide of the particular thing projected on the wall so they could see it right there before them in its frustrated glory, and one of the team would lazily guide a laser pointer around contours. Sometimes a representative of the aluminum company or tampon company or manufacturer of plastic wedges might show up to explain matters in person. What it was and where they were trying to go. These representatives were too earnest, got on their nerves, threw off the rhythm of the meetings. There was a rhythm to the meetings. They got into a fever and testified, shouting out the words of imaginary languages, the names of polystyrene gods and Day-Glo deities. The contributions were doomed or had tiny imperfections and they kept going until they came up with the right name.

At first he kept his mouth shut because he still saw the job as an interim gig. He wasn’t cut out for corporate life. He believed himself to be of a different caliber than those men. Jocky white guys. He didn’t need the same things. The cheap posturing. The signature colognes. The obscure wafting. They scrambled and wanted to be heard by the men who wrote performance reviews and determined bonuses. They wore suspenders. So he sat and watched and whatever names he had he kept to himself. He listened. And if what they came up with was terrible, was prosaic, or even more unforgivable, something else’s name, he figured that’s the way things work in this crazy job. No skin off his back. Their hapless little creations flopped around like fish on asphalt and he couldn’t care less.

But the names. After two weeks of listening he was full of them. Every day the door cracked another half inch and he could see beyond the tiny rooms he had stumbled around in his whole life. He pictured it like this: The door opened up on a magnificent and secret landscape. His interior. He clambered over rocks and mountain ranges composed of odd and alien minerals, he stepped around strange flora, saplings that curtsied eccentrically, low shrubs that extended bizarre fronds. This unreckoned land of his possessed colors he had never seen before. Flowers burst petals in arrangements never considered by the natural world, summoned out of dirt like stained glass. These beautiful hidden things scrolled to the horizon and he walked among them. He could wander through them, stooping, collecting, acquainting himself with them until the day he died and he would never know them all. He had a territory within himself and he would bring back specimens to the old world. These most excellent dispatches. His names.

He couldn’t keep them to himself. He started out slow in the meetings, half mumbling the names. They got lost in the general mad chatter. At first it was not important to be heard. It was enough to merely utter the things, let them out. No one noticed and it was fine. After a time he would get a nod here and there at some contribution, and he projected a little zone around himself, a place of low pressure in the room where the rest of the team could expect a certain kind of weather. He gathered force. Then one day after a meeting, Mike Viedt put a hand on his shoulder and said, “Nice job in there.” Two meetings after that, instead of holding back, he halfheartedly tossed a name into the hurly-burly, nothing special, to the usual lack of response. Ten minutes later Mike said the name, offering it to the team as his own, and it stuck. They ended up giving it to the client. Mike took all the credit. And he felt — it was fine. He had a million of them in his territory. What had he lost? An unspectacular weed.

He was changed, though, he could not deny it. The next project they had, he discovered the name right off, he was sure it was the name, and he bided his time. There came a lull, there were always lulls. As one of the guys scrambled after the takeout menus so they could haggle over lunch options, he slapped his hands on the table. Not too loud, but enough to draw their attention. They assumed he was going to lobby for Thai. They looked at him and he said it: Redempta . It was the name. It stuck. They got paid. Not long after that he got his own office. He had to admit, it was pretty cool.

. . . . . . . .

The sun crept up, he heard some Main Street morning friskiness down below, and he finally fell back to sleep. He was busy battling various guised things in a dream he would not remember when he was awakened by a loud shriek.

“Housekeeping!”

The door threatened to splinter under her fist. “Housekeeping!”

He quickly looked around, but neither saw smoke nor smelled fire. Nor did he hear hotel guests running in the hall outside, robes tugged tight against their chests. No emergency, then. He mumbled, then repeated himself with more volume: “I’m okay!”

“I need to get inside!” the voice wailed. It sounded as if she were throwing her shoulder into the door. No, something heavier. Her cleaning cart.

“I’m okay!” he shouted once again.

“You should be up by now!” the woman thundered, and then all was quiet. Was there something he was supposed to do? He waited, and soon he heard the woman push her cart up the hall. After a few long minutes, he slipped his hand outside the room and noosed the doorknob with the DO NOT DISTURB sign, which featured a moody silhouette of sheep jumping over a fence. He noticed thin daggers of paint on the floor that had been knocked loose by the assault.

He dressed and limped over to see the Admiral. After his sleepless night, he needed a familiar face. It was not the first time he had been saved by the recognizable logo of an international food franchise, its emanations and intimacies. No matter what time zone you happened to be in, the Admiral’s doors pushed in with the same slight resistance, freeing the vapors of the latest excursion into Africa, South America, or Blend. He listened to the sound of the brewing machines, their staccato gurgling. It was black gold bubbling from the earth’s crust, the elemental crude. He approached the teenagers with a smile, and they smiled back. All over the nation teenagers served the sacred logos and he thanked God for the minimum wage. Who knew what kind of havoc the restless servants of Admiral Java might unleash upon the world if they cast off their yokes.