Corporate America

Corporate America

For Victoria

You have the nerve to dress up a turd and call it a caramel.

—Céline

One

Amidst the mob of protestors, I was about as inconspicuous as a pedophile on a playground, a bouquet of Tootsie Pops trembling in his fist.

The Japanese-American teenager was first to spot me.  He retreated when he saw me approach in my estate-sale suit, a menacing navy blue number, replete with thick chalk stripe, notched collar, and double vent in back.  His gigantic sign, unwieldy and taller than him, cast shame on the Prock Chocolate Corporation’s continued use of the brand name Kamikaze Karamels.

Dude, you have no idea how much I’m behind you, I replied honestly, tucking my sunglasses into the jacket’s interior pocket, on whose flap was stitched: Made exclusively for Gordon Getty by Madam Li.

I pressed through the mob blocking the revolving door entrance, fastening an imaginary cup to my groin. 

‘It’s better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating... It’s better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating...’ I kept mumbling to myself.

The protestor, his fear of confrontation abated, re-seized the moral authority he had relinquished like so much lunch money and demanded to know my name, which I refused to furnish, and the purpose of my visit, which I refused to disclose.  

Fine, the boy hissed.  Like a gun-fighter retrieving a Colt from his holster on the quick draw, he produced his iPhone, practically spinning it around his index finger, and snapped my photo.  Then I’ll just post your picture on our website instead! 

You gotta do what you gotta do, I replied with a shrug, though I was radiating shame. 

I was next intercepted by this unreconstructed hippie woman with pewter hair.  She fluttered up to me, her maroon cape flapping in the breeze like a spinnaker.  Please, she beseeched, promise to give this to Cyril Prock.  She pressed a flyer in my hand, something downloaded off a website: gloomy images of third-world youths with wet eyes on a cocoa plantation somewhere in the tropics. 

As I nudged towards the entrance, I tried to read the copy, but was blinded by the glare ricocheting off the Prock Chocolate Corporation’s intergalactic world headquarters.  Aluminum panels covered the façade from the ground level up to the twelfth floor, creating the illusion the entire building was wrapped in foil.  The unwrapped thirteenth and fourteenth floors, where I would soon learn the senior management team was installed, were constructed of shiny brown granite and looked positively good enough to eat. 

I pushed the revolving door.  The lobby was as cold and damp and empty as the soul of a Wharton MBA.

The security guard at the front desk located my name on a ledger.  He made me surrender my driver’s license and pose for a photograph, which was fashioned into a badge, then escorted me through a narrow corridor.  The glossy black elevator doors—the color of hot fudge—separated.  After he authorized the floor, I ascended, alone, to the ninth floor, where I was greeted by a chunky H.R. representative who, upon confirming that the facial image of the interview candidate on her clipboard matched mine, escorted me to an empty conference room. 

Inside the conference room, it was freezing.  She offered me my choice: bottled water, freshly squeezed orange juice, or fair-trade cappuccino.  I ordered a coffee even though I wanted the OJ.  Sipping a cappuccino out of a dainty white porcelain cup, in my suit and tie, would doubtless boost my gravitas.  The H.R. woman waddled out, past a gold-tinted two-way glass mirror that ran the length of the east wall.  This conference room was like one of those basement interrogation rooms in the former East Bloc, where acne-scarred thugs extracted forced confessions from political opponents.  This was a trick and a trap: the H.R. woman would never return with my fair-trade cap.  Instead, I would hear three deadbolts click and a rusty steel door would swing open, followed by the arrival of a little man in a trench coat with a waxed moustache who would start slapping me with his black leather driving gloves until he got the answers he wanted. 

This was not the career I visualized when at age twelve I read, on my own time, during summer vacation, an annotated copy of Crime and Punishment.

The wait was interminable. 

As I sat there in silence, swishing sideways in the wheeled office chair, I secretly hoped I’d bomb. I was a man of letters, after all—or at least had been.  I had no business working for multinational corporations that despoiled the environment and put profits before people.  

This wouldn’t be a lifetime gig—just a few months until I got back on my feet.  I began chanting that mantra again: "It’s better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating..."

I sifted through the stack of industry trade magazines on the ten-foot-long conference table: Confectioners’ Corner, The Treats Tribune, Candy & Snack Today.  My God, who writes this crap?

From the middle of the stack I plucked a glossy magazine called Smoke & Mirrors, some sort of P.R. industry rag.  I flipped through its pages, hastily, as though it were a copy of Playboy and my parents might charge in unannounced at any minute.  I scanned an article about workers’ rights at garment sweatshops in Lesotho, not so much out of interest in the topic—even though social justice was a prevailing theme in my work—but because the author’s photo (a smokestack blonde from the Apparel Retailers’ Coalition) caught my eye. 

I jumped in my chair when a cheerful middle-aged man walked in and slapped a blank legal pad on the burled walnut conference table.  He extended a meaty hand and introduced himself as Ron Buernekehl.  He was in his fifties, in a tan polo shirt with the Zolt logo on the breast, purple lightning bolts shooting in every direction.  Sprouting from somewhere behind the lobe of his right ear were blades of thinning brown-gray hair, combed over the crown of his head. 

Last week we ran some focus groups in here.  This little Hindu gal from down in Menlo Park was sitting right where you are.  Gave us a terrific idea.  Saved our rear ends, if you want to know the truth.  She was telling us how her grandmother drizzles milk chocolate spiced with cardamom over Indian bread, ‘nam,’ I think it’s called.  He looped an index finger into the belt loop at each hip and yanked his trousers upward.  Our R&D guys played around with the recipe, adding more chocolate, less spice.  We switched out shortbread for the nam.  Hits the shelves in two weeks.  You’ll learn that when Cyril tells you he wants new product on the shelf in a month you get it done.  Hard part’s the name.  How do you like ‘Bombay Blaster’?

A series of metallic taps sounded on the two-way glass.  Whoever was behind it must have been wearing brass knuckles. 

Ron Buernekehl leaped up and exited the room.  When he returned he sat down and said, If you don’t mind, I’d like to ask you to sign this NDA—just to be sure you don’t tell our secrets to the competition.  He chuckled as an unsteady hand guided a rogue strand of comb-over behind his right earlobe. 

I thought about the name while you were away. I signed the non-disclosure agreement.  It looks like you’ve already got the Japanese-American community mad at you with your Kamikaze Karamels.  Do you worry Bombay may offend Indian nationalists?  And blaster has militaristic connotations—which may not go over too well given that right-wing Hindus and militant Muslims are always shooting each other up over there. 

He folded his arms across his chest and rolled his seat away from the table.  Got a better suggestion? He swiveled from side to side.

How about ‘Mumbai Meltaway’?

Hmmm.  Not bad.  He rolled in and scribbled on his notepad.   

I’m not crazy about Indian food myself.  Too many flavors, he said.  Joni and I went to some Indian place in Burlingame a year or so back and I spent the next two days on the pot.

An affirming nod was all I could muster.

Another rap on the glass summoned him.  This time Ron Buernekehl was gone for almost ten minutes.  Finally, he returned.  A woman was with him.  Involuntarily, my comportment changed, as in high school, when we had a substitute teacher in Geometry class.  The second she walked in, we knew instantly whether we were authorized to lean back in our desks at a forty-five degree angle and ignore her or snap bolt upright.  I stiffened by back and smoothed out the fabric on my thighs.

She was attractive, I guess.  Just a few years older than me.  Thirty, maybe thirty-one.  Her hair—dyed gold as the Pharaohs’ tombs—was of that indeterminable middle length that can’t make up its mind if it wants to be short and stylish or long and sultry.  She had a killer body, though, sheathed in a brown pantsuit.  Clearly a workout fiend.  But I’m a skin fanatic, and she had big pores. 

She presented her card and introduced herself as Judith Koob, Vice President of Strategic Communications and Global Affairs.  Her handshake crushed my palm.  There’s another release we’ll have to insist you sign, she said, patting down the crown of her hairsprayed head.  All of our candidate interviews are being videotaped for quality assurance and training purposes.  We’ll need your consent.  She slid the form across the table.  I looked up at the microphones suspended from the ceiling, then over at the glass panel, and wondered how many of her henchmen were back there, enveloped in a cloud of cigarette smoke, drinking cold black coffee as the eight-millimeter projector grinded.

Tell us about why you’d like to work for the Prock Chocolate Corporation, she said, taking over the interview.  Her voice was mechanized and tyrannically perky, like one of those automated operators you get when you call VISA to find out if your credit card will work. 

I sipped my cappuccino as I formulated my response, hoping the overhead microphones weren’t picking up the sound of my grumbling stomach.  How was I to tell them that writing website copy, marketing free online games to children, and making up names for candy bars stolen from other cultures represented the nadir of my professional aspirations?  So I answered her question with a question, which, in retrospect, must have been the first time I practiced the black art of spin.

Do you know the poet Langston Hughes?

Ron wiped the lenses of his gray plastic frames with the sleeve of his polo shirt.  Not me, he answered, though he seemed genuinely keen to find out. 

Judith Koob remained silent.

Langston Hughes wrote a poem called ‘Ennui,’ I said, which goes like this: ‘It’s such a bore being always poor.’ 

A wry smile washed over Ron’s face. We had a Hughes here back when I started, headed Sales in Region Six, or what we used to call Region Six back then, before we carved the country up into twenty regions.  It’s Region Eleven now.  Charlie Hughes.  Played football at Cal.

I don’t think they’re related, Ron, Judith said without looking up as she stabbed the keyboard of a menacing black slab of technology cradled in the palm of her hand.  The size of a two-inch-thick Kansas City strip steak, the VORTEX 4.0 had among its hundreds of applications everything from telephone, internet search engine and e-mail to, presumably, polygraph machine, radon mitigation system, nuclear dirty bomb, kidney dialysis machine, car-battery charger, and rectal thermometer.  It beeped, buzzed, chimed, blinked, vibrated, or chirped nonstop for the duration of our meeting. 

Judith Koob looked up at me.  We’re looking for people who want more from a career at Prock than simply money, she said.  We’re looking for people committed to helping us implement our mission.  She traced a coral-painted fingernail over her lip.  Would you happen to know what that is? 

To deliver superior confectionary products and shareholder returns to improve wellbeing. 

She smiled at Ron.  I like a candidate who does his homework. 

Ron, now surfing his own VORTEX 4.0, didn’t look up, but nodded in agreement.  Then, anxious to re-assert control over the interview, he asked, What qualifies you for a position in the P.R. department at Prock, Francis?

I’m in the storytelling business, and I will help you tell your story—clearly, compellingly, and persuasively.  I skipped the part about telling their story as fast as I could, for as much money as I could get my hands on, before the publication of my stunning début novel and imminent escape from Corporate America.

Ron lit up and said, We have a great story to tell our consumers.  We use the finest gourmet ingredients, hand-selected by quality-control specialists on four continents —

Ron’s right, Judith said, hijacking the conversation again as Ron’s face morphed into a badly disguised scowl.  We do indeed have a great quality story to tell.  But we also have other stakeholders we need help telling our story to: employees, the press, Capitol Hill, stockholders, activist groups.  She went on to explain how these stakeholders either impeded the company’s efforts to fulfill its mission, or had outright grievances against the company.  Regulators at the FDA, health-groups demanding Prock pay a fat tax on their products to offset the social costs of obesity, human rights groups opposed to its labor practices, activists concerned about the company’s marketing practices to children, shareholders demanding the company not use genetically-modified ingredients in its products—all of them were creating headaches for the executives at Prock.

I looked at her curiously.  Before that morning it was unfathomable to me that the Prock Chocolate Corporation—manufacturer of the beloved 7th Heaven bar of my youth—could have so many enemies.  Judith Koob said it had nothing to do with the fact that they made chocolate and everything to do with the fact that they were number one hundred and eighty-nine in the Fortune 500.  Any activist on a political, social, or economic crusade was always looking for ways to hitch their issue to the Prock wagon; it brought attention to their cause, she said. And big companies like hers were of course a most attractive target for wily plaintiffs’ lawyers determined to empty the deep pockets of a corporation.  There’s a certain degree of conflict that comes with this job.  Is that something you’d be comfortable with? Judith asked.

As a storyteller, I’m in the conflict business.

That’s great, she chirped, then asked to see my writing samples.

I removed from my backpack the bound copy of The Enigma of Dilemma—all twelve hundred pages of it— and plopped it on the conference table with an impressive thud.  "It’s a roman à these, if you’re familiar with the term.  Loosely translated from the French, it means ‘a novel of ideas.’ It’s a story that incubated in my head after I toured the death-camps and gulags of Poland, Romania, the Balkans, Russia, and the Czech Republic as an undergraduate.  I was initially obsessed with the victims’ stories—reading the Holocaust literature, accounts of life in Solzhenitsyn’s gulag, the Soviet show trials.  Then I became fascinated with the perpetrators.  I wanted to explore what kind of political, cultural, and social infrastructure spawns monsters like Hitler, Goebbels, and Stalin." 

Ron, unburdened by ideas, shot me a guy’s-guy smile. "Joni gets me one of those Chicken Soup for the Soul audiobooks every Christmas. We go down to Mexico for the week between Christmas and New Year’s and I sit on the chair by the pool and listen while I pop a couple Coronas."

I’ve heard about those books, I said, searching for something—anything—positive to say about his genre preferences.  Clever title.

Judith Koob scanned the manuscript, listlessly turning each page as though browsing through a stranger’s photo album.  She closed the cover of my manuscript.  Why don’t you tell me about your business experience?

I hadn’t before that morning imagined that I could feel insecure about not having a skill set I had so ruthlessly avoided acquiring.  I awkwardly explained that I had most previously served as assistant manager, weekend days, at Red Lobster.

Oh, she said, not very enthusiastically, as she attached my resume to the manuscript cover with a paperclip. 

Ron, taking a cue from his boss, adopted a shocked tone.  But you’ve taken some business courses?  Basic accounting?  Statistics?  Finance?

Not one, I said, perhaps a little too proudly.

He shook his head disapprovingly.  We need someone who can do earnings releases, communicate financials, that kind of stuff.

I get money, I lied. All I got was that I had none.

Ron’s tone grew weary.  I just don’t know how we can use book-writers and French-speakers, he said, awaiting validation from Judith.

In addition to French, I’m fluent in several Slavic languages: Czech, Polish, Russian.

I’d had a gift for languages since I was a kid.  It started with flawless imitations of the parishioners we used to chat with at coffee and doughnuts after mass at St. Gabriel’s—recent immigrants from Mexico, the Philippines, and various former Soviet satellite states. 

Ron could relate, he said.  Back in the dinosaur times, when I was at pledge at UC-Santa Cruz, I used to be able to say the whole Greek alphabet.  Alpha, beta, gamma, delta, zeta, iota, something, something.  Can’t say I ever used it again.  

Judith exhaled audibly.  Do you have a letter to the editor, maybe a brochure you wrote, something like that?

Just this novel, produced while I was enrolled in one of the most prestigious creative writing programs in the country. 

Ron looked at Judith.  It wasn’t a nod she gave him.  It was more like a blink, and somehow he divined its meaning.  Well, we’ll be sure to have a look at it. He stood up.  Then he thanked me for coming in and invited me to grab a handful of Turbo Turtles from the crystal bowl in the middle of the conference table.

What about the job? 

He slid both hands into his Dockers—his involuntary response to conflict, I would soon discover—and jangled coins.  Well, we’re just not sure your skills are the right fit for us.  I’m thinking we might maybe need somebody who has more business experience.  He extended a hand.  But it’s been sure nice talking to you.

I glared hard at them both. The only thing worse than not getting this job I despised would be returning to the one at which I excelled, at Red Lobster, where I would doubtless encounter my former classmates on parents’ weekend.  I swallowed hard and said, I can do this job.  My aim was to project certainty, but my voice cracked; I sounded twelve.

The writing we do here is corporate writing, son, Ron said in a fatherly tone.  Press releases have to be short.  Cyril won’t read a document longer than one-and-a-half pages, and it looks like your writing style is wordy.

This guy had to be joking.  I authored a novel examining consciousness and doom and the castration of the human spirit under the totalitarian regimes of the Nazis and Soviets, and this dreary middle manager, dressed in a little brief authority, most ignorant of what he’s most assured, to quote Primo Levi, was telling me I wasn’t qualified to write about Lotta Licks Chocolate Chewies?

Look, I said, clinching my fist into a ball, I crank out ten thousand words a day.  I could write you twenty press releases a day if you’ll just give me a chance.

Judith Koob studied the exchange silently.

Ron said, I’m sure you’re a very talented writer, but—

Quiet! commanded Judith Koob as she consulted her VORTEX 4.0.  She grabbed everything in front of her—including the two hundred eight-five-dollar copy of my manuscript—spun the chair around, and catapulted herself into the air.  We’ve got a crisis.  Zone Three. 

Ron collected his legal pad and VORTEX 4.0 and scrambled to catch up to his boss as she sprinted down the corridor.

Menacing noises—phones ringing, doors slamming—were audible from behind the glass. 

I sat alone in the room, my eyes fixed on the microphone dangling from the ceiling.  Was the interview over?  Was I supposed to wait?  Talk to someone else? 

With my index finger I scooped up a dollop of foam from my coffee cup and smeared it across my tongue.  It was cold and bitter.  I glanced at my reflection in the gold-tinted two-way glass, and cursed myself for having been stupid enough to believe my teachers when they said that utter originality was the most prized—and elusive—aspect of great art.

Two

My troubles started at Tor House in Carmel, California, a week prior.

Robinson Jeffers had built the house by hand, apprenticing for most of the 1920s under a stone mason with whom he hauled rocks up from the beach.  The humble writing hut had no gas, heat, electricity, or telephone. 

For an aspiring novelist like me, this was heaven.

We ascended the narrow staircase into Hawk Tower single file, adult school children on a field trip.  I tucked myself into a corner of the bedroom, seated Indian-style on the floor.  Rachel Samitz was perched on the iron day bed with the Navajo quilt, elevated above the rest of us, where she deserved to be, as she was the only one among us with a publishing credit.  Her first book of poems, The Sad Ballerina, was authored when she was a sixth grader.  Her dust jacket photo looked like a juvenile Elizabeth Taylor.  Our instructor occupied the side chair.  The others leaned against the stone walls or squatted during the readings.

Your decision to make the hospital administrator’s business card a symbol of bourgeois hegemony—that image really resonated with me, said my classmate, who wore his shoulder-length hair in a bun, secured by a teal-colored scrunchie.

It means a lot to me that it moved you, Rachel Samitz said as she shook out her mane, which unraveled in stanzas.

There’s almost a musical sensibility to Rachel’s poem, isn’t there? asked the group’s consensus-builder, a widow in her fifties who routinely wore a topaz amulet about her neck.

"I was trying to capture the rhythmic intensity of Rachmaninov’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini." 

Even the way she spoke was lyrical, with perfect cadence and not a trace of self-consciousness.  I was years away from fatherhood.  But after I married, I wanted to live in an old farmhouse in Wyoming with a woman like her—a wife who’d sing Spanish lullabies to my daughter in a candle-lit nursery while raindrops pelted the tin roof.

I hear the third movement, said the guy from LaJolla, who was writing a novel about a deaf lawnmower mechanic.

Actually, it was the second, Rachel corrected, gently, as she removed a strand of white cat hair from the red fleece covering her shoulder.  I suppose our family narratives inform all our work.  My father teaches composition at Berklee and mom sues hospitals on behalf of Public Citizen.

"‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad,’" I said, angling my head in her direction and smiling warmly.  I had on at least a dozen prior occasions unleashed a well-timed quip that caught her off guard, got her to laugh, and authorized me to chat her up. 

The bed squeaked as she turned and faced me.  I’m not sure I understand what you mean by that.

It’s just a favorite quote of mine—from Philip Larkin, if you know your post-war British poets. 

I do. 

Rachel Samitz looked over at the boy with the bun, who shook his head in disgust.  I kept bobbing my head, trying to get her attention, but she refused to make eye contact.

It was just a joke, Rachel.  And a bad one at that.  I’m sorry.  The smile on my face melted away.  I looked at her soberly, pleading forgiveness.

She glared at me but said nothing, her only response the occasional cracking of gum.

When I made the joke, there was no motive or subtext beyond the desperate plea of an infatuated schoolboy to capture a girl’s attention.  So I was as surprised as she was when I said, It just seems like there are bigger themes to tackle in literature than a guy hitting on you at some gelato store on University Avenue.

Her face twisted.  I happen to believe that women’s voices, women’s equality, and our disadvantaged status in the culture are sufficiently big themes to write about.

I do, too.

The boy with the bun in his hair said, You just don’t get it.  He turned to the group.  He just doesn’t get it.

It was silent, except for the oscillating fan, which groaned every time it reversed directions.

That’s not true, I said.  "I do get it.  But it just seems like the character in the poem, the victim of a happy family who grew up in privilege in New Haven, wants so badly—"

Victim? asked Rachel.  "Privilege?" She arranged her hair into a twist at the crown of her skull then stabbed it, the cheap Bic ballpoint substituting for a proper hairpin.

I needed to stop.  But I could feel the collective rage of the group enveloping me.  And as anxious as I was for this exchange to end, I needed foremost to defend my reputation.  "All she has to do is go get a job and get her own business card.  Then she’ll have an equal voice.  This girl wants so badly to know suffering and never has, so she manufactures a slight.  It just didn’t seem ... authentic."

Topaz Amulet looked up at our faculty advisor, her eyes pleading for an intervention.  Our instructor, Lash, pinched the tuft of copper hair beneath his moist lower lip and remained silent as Rachel twisted the top on her Fiji water and interrogated me: "I’m confused.  Are you saying that my work is inauthentic, or that I am inauthentic personally—as a poet and a human being?"

In the six years I had been researching and writing my own novel, I had read more than two dozen books on Nazi and Soviet propaganda and was by then well acquainted with the fallacy of the false alternative, a Goebbels favorite.  I would not be drawn into her unscrupulous debating game. 

"What I’m really saying is I believe that authenticity is at the core of all good writing—and all great writers, for that matter."  I let my voice trail off.  I needed to shut up.

Rachel folded her arms across her chest and looked to Lash, who had an aggrieved look on his face.  I think it’s important we remember the purpose of the workshop environment is to focus on the work, not the writer, he said, rubbing the palm of his hand over the stubble that coated the entire surface of his skull.  Then he pivoted in my direction and said, "And since we are, after all, in Robinson Jeffers’s home, perhaps it is more appropriate to quote him than the uncongenial Mr. Larkin.  ‘The heads of strong old age are beautiful beyond all grace of youth.’  To smiles all around, he continued: So I wouldn’t be too hard on Rachel’s parents.  They did, after all, produce a Stegner.  He removed the fountain pen from the interior of his black leather jacket and waved it at the exit.  Why don’t we finish touring the tower and save the rest of our readings for the main house?"

I hoisted myself off the cold stone floor.  My buttocks were cold and damp.  The boy with the bun entered the alcove, where I was still hiding.  He refused to make eye contact and instead rubbed his thumb against an iron crucifix, stationed in the sill of a high gothic window with thick leaded glass.  Outside, the fog had finally burned off and the late morning light cast a shadow across the lavishly overgrown English garden.

As I was sucking in the ether of a Great Dead Writer’s House on the descent, I regretted my botched attempt at levity.  I was the odd man out in this program, and everybody knew it.  I wanted desperately to become like Rachel Samitz and her comrades, to understand what made uncomfortable mid-century fiberglass chairs and excruciating John Cassavetes movies so supremely cool, but I kept getting it wrong.  These were the people who, with their parents, made annual pilgrimages to the Strawberry Fields memorial in Central Park.  But when I was growing up, every time John Lennon’s Imagine was broadcast over the car radio, my dad would smack his forehead and command me to change the station.  Now there’s a hero for you, Frankie, he’d say.  I’m in Vietnam getting shot at while some millionaire rock star prances around a hotel room naked telling the world getting laid is better than going to war.  And for that bit of wisdom, everybody makes him out to be the Messiah.

As I walked through the house I tried to change the subject in my mind. 

I imagined building a similar home of my own with the royalties from my novel after it became a bestseller.  A tree house in Mendocino, perhaps, with lots of glass and dripping moss.  Or an attic apartment on Kafka’s street in Malá Strana, in Prague, where I could cultivate my depression and catch T.B. 

After visiting Jeffers’s bedroom, where he did his writing, we toured the living room, paneled in dark redwood and fir, then settled in the Great Room, a dining room with a harvest table that seated ten.  Soot-caked rock walls made the room cool and dark, bringing the fragrance of lavender from the garden into relief.  We had a working lunch over herb and tomato sandwiches as Lash read from Jeffers’s Flagons and Apples.  An overlooked masterpiece, he insisted, wrongly.

Despite the occasional friction with classmates—writers, I was discovering, were a ruthlessly competitive, insecure, Schadenfreudian bunch—I was nonetheless honored to be among the most promising literary talent in America: Stanford selected only ten of us Wallace Stegner Fellows a year, five aspiring poets and five aspiring novelists. 

I would read from the finished, professionally bound manuscript, which I collected earlier that morning from FedEx Office.  It cost me two-hundred eight-five dollars: dark gray vinyl cover, with the book’s title rendered in blood red Fraktur, that creepy gothic typeface Hitler’s publisher selected for Mein Kampf.  A vellum flyleaf at both the front and back end of the book.  Heavy white linen paper.  

In the meantime, though, I had to wait my turn.  First was a classmate’s poem about an Inuit woman, followed by another about morning ablutions. 

Finally, I was on.  I rose and leaned against the stone wall, near the fireplace.  "In this, the epilogue from The Enigma of Dilemma, Hans Klump, the son of the protagonist, is touring the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., an experience he finds unsettling—but not for the reasons you might expect."  Lash, installed on the seat of an antique loom in the corner, would normally have nodded his approval were it any other Stegner reading; he had spent months beating cliché out of us.

I began my reading:

Overcome by yet another wave of nausea, Hans staggered into the men’s room.  Fifty-seven and frail, with a brown-spotted pate, he moved like a