The Call Center

I

Even at 6:00 AM it was so hot and dry that one could see a wafting haziness above the road — the air had a barren sort of texture, and even the birds seemed to sing languidly from their perches. The sky was a dull blue, a blue that was half-asleep but presaged a deeper cerulean later in the day. It was a Monday and James Lancaster arrived at work around this time, stepping out of his BMW in a pair of gaudy bronze sandals and plaid shorts and an equally gaudy floral shirt, casually unbuttoned. He felt vaguely dreary, as if he himself had materialized out of that dull blue sky as a manifestation of its dullness; he’d had a severe headache the last few days in the morning, and he’d had one again this morning, and Advil seemed to only blunt the sharpness of the pain.

James lived in Summerlin on the outskirts of Las Vegas, where he occupied a mid-range one-room condo on the top floor. In the dead heat of summer, James, along with most people in Summerlin and Las Vegas locals generally, avoided the outdoors as much as possible and basked in the air conditioned climate of his condo, his car, his office, airplanes (as his work required), restaurants, bars, and the like. Days in August seemed to stretch on endlessly, punctuated only by the occasional light desert breeze that meandered through the palm trees outside the office and caused their leaves to sway slightly, and by the desert birds — mostly pigeons and doves — that crooned in the morning and seemed to quiet down after about 11:00 AM. The air was dry and just breathing in produced a bitter taste in one’s mouth.

James’ personal office was located adjacent to the larger office space that housed his sales department, a stuffy, characterless group of folks. His company sold at-home fitness equipment through marketing contracts, a concept that had seemed appealing and profitable years ago but was now tiresome to James, who didn’t use the equipment — in fact, he regarded the equipment he sold with disdain and he quietly scorned the people who bought his products, likely in part because he himself was out of shape from long years of sedentarism and alcohol, and he held his own physique in equal disdain, if not a private sense of inexorability.

His desk was a mess of sports memorabilia and miscellaneous paperwork and packaged foods, and an unopened letter from some stakeholder sat atop a box of cheap crackers — it had been sitting there since last Tuesday — and James noticed this but chose to ignore it for the moment. James prepared some coffee and lethargically perused his latest sales reports in solitude. At 7:00 AM his sales director, Stefan, peering in through his door’s window, knocked politely. Stefan was a man whom James genuinely enjoyed the company of — he was simple, spoke intelligently, carried himself with an easy confidence, and was a man of morals, although James did not think that Stefan was particularly good at sales training or even hiring good reps, believing most of the reps in the office to be more or less incompetent, lazy, or both, and certainly there seemed to be a general lack of enthusiasm in the office that irritated James.

James waved Stefan in, and Stefan sat across from him. They discussed sales numbers from the last week (they were down), monthly numbers, system changes, which reps were underperforming, and other banalities, with Stefan speaking in his characteristically slow, thoughtful military dialect, having served as a Navy technician for twelve years. James declared, as he always did when the numbers were down, that the company was far off its targets and that he would get out on the floor one of these days and show these reps how to really sell.

“These guys don’t know how to push our products,” James insisted, dropping his coffee cup in the trash in emphasis — he had drunk most of it, and the rest was cold. “They don’t have any assertiveness. It’s not their fault, they just don’t have it. They think they can win a sale if they present everything well enough, which they sometimes do, but they don’t understand that no one does anything in this world without someone else telling them what to do. You need to take a sale. And the more products we offer and the more partners we bring on, the less they sell.”

“It’s true, isn’t it,” said Stefan, “that most people, salespeople even, never learn how to tell themselves what to do, so you can’t expect them to have the natural capability to tell other people what to do.”

“That’s true,” replied James.

“My commander used to say most people live like leaves falling from a tree — their path is not definite, it’s defined by the wind, the conditions, and they’re hit by rain and dirt on the way down, and they feel sick, and unworthy of anything better. If you lead a horse to water and it doesn’t drink, it’s not because it isn’t thirsty, but because it doesn’t feel worthy of the water.” Stefan paused, then added, as if to feign optimism: “I have some new talent starting today, though…some look promising.”

James was skeptical, and was becoming bored of Stefan, and had work to do. “I’ll believe it when I see it,” he said.

“Anything else?” asked Stefan.

“Yes. Can you grab some Advil for me? There’s a bottle in the break room cabinets. I’m dying from this headache.”

II

The sky indeed developed a fuller, richer hue as the day progressed, and a few scanty clouds rose from the horizon, then drifted overhead, then finally disappeared from the view of the office windows, and the birds were silent. The office began to filter out and towards the end of the day Paul, a stakeholder in the company, entered through the front door and asked to see James. Stefan quickly escorted him into James’ office, and James stood enthusiastically to greet Paul, who was a longtime friend of his, and an early financial benefactor of the company. He was an much older man, in his 70s maybe, with wiry hair and a wiry frame, and he tended to appear at the office sporadically two or three times a year; every time James saw him he seemed to have aged a decade since his last appearance, although James didn’t know exactly how old he was. The senior reps recognized his face — he seemed strikingly familiar, in fact — but they recognized him as they would someone from a dream, or someone from their childhood, and all of them had difficulty pegging him chronologically in their lives.

“Paul…I didn’t know you were stopping by today,” said James, shaking Paul’s hand with affected warmth. “Take a seat, take a seat…”

Paul grunted as he sat. Today he wore a blazer with a handkerchief poking out, which, when inspected, was speckled with tiny images of mooses. “I was passing through town.”

“Fantastic,” winced James. His headache had sharpened when he stood up. He rubbed his forehead.

“How is business?”

“It’s good…decent, actually, not great,” said James. “Numbers a little down recently, but that’s business.”

“Well, that’s all well.”

“The reps here need enthusiasm, and resolution. They sound like hospice workers speaking to patients, not salespeople.”

“That’ll come,” said Paul.

“What’s that handkerchief you have, Paul?” piped in Stefan, who had stayed to print a report. “Are those bison?”

“Mooses.” Paul took out the handkerchief, placed it on the table, and scratched his beard thoughtfully. “That’ll come.”

“What’s the story behind it?” enquired Stefan. Paul cleared his throat, gravelly and thick, and replied,

“Oh, I don’t wear it often. But since you asked — you went to college, right, Stefan?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, it's an old artifact from college. When I was a younger man, still in college, I lived in a dormitory with three other students. It was a small dormitory with just one kitchen and one bathroom, and we all would try to wake up as early as possible to use the shower, and every day after classes we would rush to be the first ones in the kitchen to cook our meals. Every year there would be fresh faces, aside from one other fellow who lived with me for all four years, as students filtered in and graduated and filtered out. And in my last year, I came home late one day and found the dormitory had been bolted shut and a note was plastered to the door: ‘There has been an unfortunate medical emergency. Please see the front desk.’

“So I went and saw the front desk, and they didn’t tell me what was going on except they treated me with a strange sort of pity, as if they were afraid to tell me something, and they gave me an empty dormitory to sleep in for the night. I slept in that same room the next night, and then the following day they let me back into my dormitory, still with the same pensive secretiveness, still avoiding my questions. Everything was normal in my dormitory, except for one thing: the tiled floorboards directly outside one of the rooms — the room of the fellow who had lived with me for all those years — had been removed. His door was locked shut. There happened to be a fellow cleaning up the bathroom when I came in — I asked him what happened and, well, he finally gave me the news: ‘Your roommate tried to kill himself with a knife,' he said. 'He survived, I think — they took him to the ER at least. I had to remove the floorboards due to the blood.’

“We all had an eerie feeling about the dormitory after that, at least for the ensuing weeks. I realized that despite living with this fellow for nearly four years, I had hardly known him at all — I knew he was Scandinavian, Finnish I think, but we never spoke, because we both shared the same sort of antisociality. For all I knew he could’ve been at the top of his class, or the bottom, or an athlete, or a scoundrel. And every time I saw the missing floorboards, I was reminded of him, the darkness in his mind that must have been festering for many months, and his room remained locked, always, always locked.

“Well, eventually they replaced the floorboards, and one day a man came in who said he was his father. He was there to empty his son’s room of all his possessions so that someone new could move in. He took two or three boxes out, and I must have been looking at him strangely because as he was leaving with the last box, he turned to me, and seemed to sigh, and said in a heavy accent, ‘Don’t pity me for my son. He was strong. Maybe he had no hope, but he was strong enough to control the outcome of his life. My other son has too much hope and not enough strength.’ Then he left, and as he was leaving this handkerchief must have fallen out of his box because I found it lying in the hallway outside the dormitory.”

Neither James nor Stefan liked the story much, and James kept thinking about his headache, and how his reps were underperforming. Not wanting to appear rude, he hadn’t interrupted Paul, but now he mentioned that it was getting late and he needed to start on his way home. Paul left soon thereafter to catch a redeye. Outside James’ office window, the setting sun lay nestled and hidden behind the crown of a palm tree; strong winds earlier had blown a small branch, overfull with young leaves, clean off of the tree, and the branch now lay in the desert soil underneath, and the young leaves would gradually come to terms with their own desiccation over the next few days.