Matt Cowper - The Clerk

Though he’d called his father a “tyrant” for signing him up, he’d settled down and come to understand the value of the ILTC. The worst part was that it took place during summer vacation, that hectic time of endless beach days and nighttime (mis)adventures with tourist girls. He’d also have to miss work, but he was sure Vernon would give him time off. It was only two weeks, after all…

So, a few months later, he happily flew from Raleigh to Washington, D.C., where the ILTC Opening Ceremony was held. A grinning female staffer met him at the airport; she was even holding a printed sign with his name on it. He was, she explained, the only one she was picking up at the moment; his flight had been later than those of the other Young Leaders. As the staffer pumped his hand energetically, Thomas wondered if her smile was going to split her face asunder. He was also impressed by the tightness of her skirt and her skyscraper-high heels. As she led him out of the airport at a brisk pace, babbling about something or other, Thomas watched the twin mounds of her ass bounce beneath the black fabric.

But the staffer soon dumped him in a dorm room at George Washington University and disappeared. It being summer, the campus was deserted, and the ILTC had acquired an entire dorm hall to house its prodigies. As Thomas unpacked, he tried to chat with his roommate, a tall and flat-faced Lithuanian, but as the Lithuanian’s English was poor, he ended up lying on his bed in an awkward silence and counting the ceiling tiles.

The ILTC’s Opening Ceremony was spectacular, if one liked endless speeches. It took place in a small lecture hall with strange acoustics, so that every syllable a speaker uttered seemed to have been bellowed by a god. Thomas sat stiffly as a CEO, a senator, the ILTC’s President, and numerous other luminaries talked about the immeasurable value of the ILTC’s program, and how they wished every participant would do their best.

Finally it ended, and the Young Leaders, after moving to empty classrooms, were placed in small groups to do various exercises, such as determining what Chile should do with its copper resources, although Thomas suspected Chile already had that covered. He breathed easier; now he would get to meet people. He’d never been in such a cosmopolitan atmosphere, and he wanted to learn everything about everyone.

That heady feeling was soon dashed. These leaders, no matter if they were from Madagascar, Germany, or North Dakota, were exactly like the leaders in his high school. They didn’t discuss; they pronounced or commanded. They didn’t ask questions; they battered each other with pointed interrogatives. If another person made a good point, they would say “That’s a good point” grudgingly, then repeat the point using longer and snazzier words so it appeared that it had originated with them all along. Thomas’s gaze bounced from speaker to speaker as everyone talked over each other; he felt like a ping-pong ball during a particularly heated match. Once he tried to say something, but a Frenchman sniffed “Well put” and threw a rarified Continental gloss on his words. He even used a quote from Voltaire for garnish. Thomas clamped his jaw shut, crossed his arms, and sat brooding.

Just a few minutes ago, he’d yearned to escape from the endless speeches. Now he yearned to escape from these young titans, with their bottomless self-assurance and indisputable declarations. He wished he was back home, lying on the beach with his friends and watching the young bikini-clad girls saunter by, or at Oxendine’s Grocery joking with Vernon and the rest of the guys.

The days passed by so slowly that Thomas wondered if God (or a god) had fiddled with the flow of time. He listened to a speech by a supposedly-heroic Canadian activist, but the only thing he seemed to have done was spent some time in a Burmese prison. He listened to another speech by a different senator, one who talked about “the value of bipartisanship, of dealing with my fellow congresspeople across the aisle.” He listened to yet another speech from a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, who informed his audience that the key to storytelling was creating compelling characters.

The only decent experience was the walk along the National Mall. The Washington Monument’s plain majesty reminded him of the Cape Lookout Lighthouse, and the Lincoln Memorial moved him in a way few things had. There was Honest Abe, the hero of his textbooks, looking out from his shrine for all eternity. Hot tears formed, and he wiped them away quickly, lest one of his apparently unaffected peers see them. What would Lincoln think of these callous young strivers marching around his temple? Surely he would be angry and baffled at their arrogance. Thomas wished the exquisitely-carved statue would come alive and humble these fools with a few calmly-delivered yet mountain-shattering words, and then stomp them with his giant shoes.

Then it was off to New York, and another dorm room at some university. Thomas was beyond caring which one.

He knew New York was big, but he didn’t know it was big . On a normal day in Morehead City, there might be a total of ten people on the downtown sidewalks; here, there were ten people within fifteen feet of him. Buildings towered over him, terrifying in their concrete and brick indifference. Newspapers flew down alley and street, like ghosts that decided they’d come out in daytime just to be cheeky. Dirt was everywhere. Drivers honked their horns. Finally their Big Apple Exploration Group entered a pizza joint for lunch, and Thomas felt relieved to be away from the bustle and whirl, until the mustachioed, portly man at the counter demanded he make up his mind what he wanted cuz he was holding up the line. Thomas stammered that one cheese slice and a small drink would do it, then he sped to a corner booth and ate by himself, like a disciplined child sitting in time-out.

There were, of course, more speeches. Thomas sat glassy-eyed and dreamed of sand and ocean and stocking shelves.

Finally it was time for the Closing Ceremony, which was much like the Opening Ceremony, except drenched in ecstasy-sorrow over “our farewells, although I know each of you will cherish these memories forever.” Like everyone else, Thomas received a completion certificate written in stylized English and affixed with the ILTC’s Gold Seal. Then it was over. The same female staffer drove him to the airport, this time with a few others. He didn’t look at her ass, nor did he talk to the Young Leaders next to him in the van. He got on the plane, the plane lifted off and headed south, he stared out the window at the Atlantic Ocean and the coastline, and in no time at all he was back in Raleigh, and his beaming parents were waiting for him.

“How was it?” his mother trilled.

“Yes, how was it, son?” his father demanded.

“It was shitty,” Thomas snapped.

The ride home was tempestuous.

As Thomas stared at Roy, he wondered if he’d looked like that when he’d stepped off the plane: cold, jaded, impotently angry. He expected he had. But he didn’t want to commiserate with Roy. Roy would have to deal with his own wounds, as Thomas had.

“But have you ever thought about going to college? I mean, haven’t you felt that pull ?” These questions would have to be answered, somehow.

“No,” Thomas said, “I haven’t.”

Roy seemed to sense that there was an entire story behind Thomas’s answer, and he waited for Thomas to tell it. When Thomas refused to say anything more, Roy just nodded in an odd sage-like fashion and turned the radio back on.

“Alright then,” he said in a distant voice. “Sorry to get all sorrowful on you.”

“Not a problem.”

“Take care of yourself, Thomas. And tell the others I enjoyed working there — and that I miss them all, sometimes.”