by Evan Dara
Half an hour later, Marcus is working his slice of apple pie. Uses the tip of his pointing finger to pull up fragments of crust. At first, Marcus had forgotten about his dessert. He had been, after all, full. But when he did remember, the pie and its plate were waiting for him, in a corner of his main living-room table.
He consumes the sweet heartily. Somewhat startled, pleasantly surprised, he is again a little hungry. He’s glad he had taken the wide slice. And the apples are very good, he tells himself. Very, very good.
—
That evening’s re-constitutional is exciting, promising. Marcus has decided to start hunting for an image – a Symbol for the G center that will also, to the degree possible, sum the essence of gratitude itself. Something to put on the center’s stationery, on the website, as a standing 3-D sign on the buildings lawn – everywhere. Not a logo. An emblem.
He walks the tangy air free-associating. Turns are unremarked. Blocks pass while he remains motionless. Volition – decision – is gone. A burgundy lily holding morning’s water. A river flowing over a dawn horizon. A human shadow looking into a receding sequence of concentric windows, whose farthest window frames the shadow enfleshed, looking back through eager eyes.
On some sidestreet, somewhere, Marcus stops. He suddenly feels no need to put one foot after the other, to go anywhere. Embraced by sweet, unsounding night, an arch of stillness grows around him, going tactile, cloth-warm, dense. Marcus’ heart starts to roil, and he feels himself swell to the world’s grand presences, the all that’s luminous and numinous, both distant and near. In this ordinary, pragmatic streetplan, the homes and trees, black with night, stand there receiving him, and he them. But him, he, those dogged, horrid pronouns – they hardly exist any more. He is no more than an amphora, a tide pool of gratitude. A weigh station for beneficence. Marcus wants, and seeks, to cultivate this feeling as deeply as possible, to know it, to become it, at a cellular – a mitochondrial – level.
Marcus weeps from gratitude.
—
He rips through his morning exercises, pumping sizzle into his body like the sun pours lambent orange into his windows. His marketing session inspires his hour of basic research, which fuels the online grant-writing tutorial he discovered the week before. In the a.m., habitually, he permits himself one break for coffee and one for a five-minute snack, plus two quick trips to the front door and its oxygen. Today he doesn’t even think about carrying the snack, and one of the door-openings, over to tomorrow.
After lunch, he starts to compose the mission statement. He had read about such statements in a management forum on the web, and it made immediate sense. Who you are, what you’ll be doing, what you stand for, why you’re necessary – make a précis, written in catnip. No more than four hundred words, bold and forthright. Marcus opens a new file.
It will be easy. He only need type out what’s constantly writing itself inside his heart, what he lives every instant of immanent day. He takes a sip of coffee, starts to tap. His fingers scrabble as he notates his findings, barely keeping up with his own silent dictation.
But soon he stops. Faced with the floodtide of words, he surrenders, and puts his hands on his lap. He has been kidding himself, he sees. Blind to the truth. This thing is so big – so broad and various, so important – that he can not meet its requirements. Developing his center, designing it, outreach, administration – each is a world requiring inordinate effort and ongoing, intricate construction.
It staggers him: he has found something that is vaster, objectively, even than his subjective experience of it. And its realization will require even more than the mega-energy it has given him. He will need an assistant. Maybe several.
He closes the mission-statement file, saves it away. Better to work on conceptual material just now, things only he can do. It’ll be a more productive use of his time.
His world is moving forward.
—
For the next few days he feels as if he’s mountain climbing: every time he thinks he’s reached the peak, the next crest comes into view. He stacks up pages of expository material, plans further for conferences and colloquia, adds two rooms to the archive. Sleep and meals get shorter, the time between disappears altogether. He formulates how he’ll go about finding an assistant: he’ll hang modest signs around town. Why modest? He doesn’t want to give even a hint of the applicants’ good fortune, the magic castle they’ll be entering. He’s already sketched out the signs’ language, and wants to proceed. But: no masking tape. He’ll have to wait for Fairley’s, tomorrow.
The next morning, Wednesday, the tape, a thick black roll, is in the drop-box, but Marcus is deep into curriculum planning and refuses to stanch the flow. By Thursday afternoon, though, he finds – makes – a moment for the requisite steps. Around 4 p.m., he grabs coffee, sits down at his workdesk, settles in by exhaling once – then lands, definitively, by taking another breath and drawing out his second exhalation. He relaxes his hands. On his computer, he sets up a portrait 8½ x 11.
The first line, of course:
Assistant Sought
He leaves a space, continues:
For new, exciting, info-based local venture
No go. Clangy; oversell. He wipes the line, types again:
For info-based local venture
Better. But predictable, though. Too first-choice. Insufïiciently indicative. Better to tip a card. It comes quickly:
For Wisdom-based local venture
There it is. He knew it wouldn’t be tough. He adds a request for a CV, then, farther south, puts his telephone and e-mail, anonymously. Pleased, he takes a breath and sets in to compose the page a bit more elegantly.
But another thought comes. The review process will be easier, more efficient, with some prior selection. He adds, halfway down the screen:
Prefer candidates to have a deep engagement
with Renaissance Humanism
Maybe not. But he must deal with local realities: how to keep the shims away? Marcus thinks for a moment, soon understands:
Full-time position (I.e., not after hours)
Marcus finishes composing the page.
—
The next mornings exercises are massively invigorating. But Marcus’ expanding strength presents a consideration: he again doesn’t feel the push-ups, and he’s now doing a solid forty. Sure, he can continue to add – he started with twenty-five – but that would cut further into G time. The full sequence already takes over an hour and ten, and this subtracted from the moments just after he rises – a period of super-high creativity. Something to think about.
Once in his chair, he makes exceptional progress this Friday, mostly in researching setting up the center’s publishing arm. And lunch, taken late, is restorative and fine. He decides to apply this belly to a few additional hours of deskwork, then prints sixty copies of his ad, proofread one last time. Then, after an indulgence of coffee, he reaches for his coat.
Outside it’s chilly. In the breezy afternoon wane, Marcus totes his foldered sheets and his full roll of masking tape. He moves through the residential areas just north and east of downtown: this will provide the most effective shim-to-non ratio. Battling the wind, he sticks pages onto lampposts and the lower parts of trees, occasionally inside bus shelters, and is pleased to find the tape works on all surfaces. One slash on top, one on bottom, think no more about it. Happily, it is not snowing.
Emptying his sheaf takes just over an hour and a half. Gratified, contented, even proud, Marcus puts his forearm through the tape core and heads home.
—
He can not deny it: there’s extra piquant in Marcus’ thoughts of that night’s re-constitutional. He won’t trace his steps, but he won’t dodge them, either. Of course he isn’t going out just to see the signs he had hung. But, yes, he is looking forward to what the walk will bring. Hey: always room for a little primary narcissism.
By 9:15 p.m., block by block, then step by step, he is moving more slowly. By 9:45, streetcorners,
approached, birth a quaver beneath his sternum. He doesn’t remember the city’s every pole and trunk. But he is sure he has been this way. No signs. Not a single posting remains from, what, four hours earlier.
The efficacy of City Hall astonishes him. They must have shims to burn. Amazing operation.
Now and then, in a random glancing at a randomly-passed lamppost, he makes out tape traces where they should – might – be. But it’s dark, and he’s tired, and, he knows, suggestible. The third viewed set of phantom stripes becomes a good cue for him to head home.
Next day, between sips of breakfast coffee, he agrees that he’ll put up more signs. But he’ll turn this second pass to his advantage. To obtain clarity, trackability, he’ll print the new signs on paper of a different color. If he ever has to go out again, he’ll be able see which signs stay up, and later determine which locales generate the most applicants. A winning idea. Later that morning, he asks Fairley’s for a hundred sheets of magenta bond. He will have them first thing Monday.
—
The signs go up late on Tuesday afternoon, after a productive morning studying service marks. He allots thirty percent of the second-generation signage for areas where he posted before, the remainder for strips along the lakefront and up King Street, a residential-commercial borderland on the city’s other side. Covering so much territory takes longer – he’s out for better than two hours – but Marcus is sure it’s justified. Top-tier fishing companies use drift nets.
By a Wednesday afternoon walkaround – not a re-constitutional, just a mid-day break – most, virtually all, of the signs are, he sees, gone. One he spots on the opaque back of a bus bench on Lake Street, holding solid. Another, on the brick-and-soot side wall of what had been Randall’s Pets, turns out to be a municipal electricity meter, wrecked and taped. On his way home, still in sun, Marcus thinks he sees several more. So, progress. Encouraging progress.
That evening, he decides to skip his re-constitutional. It’ll be the first night-circle he’s missed in x weeks. He would like to step out, but he understands that it’s wiser to stay put, to receive phone calls from applicants. He’ll remove the impediment of the answering machine, so brusque and impersonal. He’ll also be able to make up for the hours he spent tramping about that afternoon: he has several strong, really intriguing ideas for the G Center’s lecture series.
He makes himself, as reward for his discipline, a richer dinner, adding chestnuts and dried apples to the mix. Later, while working, he pours himself a cup of Peruvian Decaf Fair Trade, a relic from before and a glisten in the night. But he knocks off early, near ten fifteen. He’s still humming with inspiration, but he’s been visited by a thought and he wants to jump on it. He folds away his research notes, closes the internet, opens the file with his classic, iconic, Street sign. The change – to the first line, locus of biggest impact – executes nicely. The font is already set:
Executive Assistant Sought
It’s good. It’s really good. Executive. Add one word, and what a diff. He is wildly glad to have thought of it.
—
Thursday morning, while Marcus is investigating joint ventures and extramurals, a compound word pings into his mind. Craigslist. He continues with his internet searching, but the word, beluga-like, keeps surfacing, jutting up and commanding light. Yet despite this active distraction, Marcus finds a cornucopia of potential collaborators. By late morning, he has the names of more than a dozen groups, from Augusta, Maine, to – delightfully – Augusta, Georgia, in fields ranging from positive psychology to soft marketing. He looks forward to contacting all of them.
Craigslist is put to rest before lunch. It doesn’t carry employment ads in A-burg. Doesn’t function here at all. Of course. Why would it? Good to know.
That afternoon, Marcus sets out with his third batch of signs, this time in lime. And he decides to just go ahead and put them up in town – it is, simply, the most efficient thing to do. Knowing all about the shims, he thinks, is adequate defense against them. He is glad to have gotten to this point of understanding. Of acceptance.
Up to his jaw in his parka, he walks from his block, crosses South Winooski Street, crosses Pearl. There, at the very beginning of the mall, at the height of its effects, he stops. Had he not allowed himself to process this, to see? Here, in A-burg, the future has come home. Dead stores, rows of them, stare unbreathing from behind pressing, scrambling, huffing people, big-clad against the chill and wind, eyes both indrawn and afire. Service vehicles smear all-but-unsullied gutters, service folk tend discard bins only holding planted bits of cosmetic waste. Cars round corners then round them again, seventy seconds later. Steams and sounds and abrupt, shattering glints. Inconceivable activity – and nothing, absolutely nothing, being accomplished. Nothing moving forward.
Marcus nods, bunches his mouth, forces himself to approach a once neoclassical, now just forlorn, ashlar wall between two dust-encrusted shop windows. He waits for one, then another woman to pass, then unsheathes a sign and slaps it up with two swipes of tape. He gives it a quick confirming look, takes a few steps up the block, repeats the pulling and pressing against the back of a derelict newsstand. His next notice goes on the side of a pristine, concrete, azalea-topped plant-box. Around him, all directions, people stream.
He continues at this, fastening signs, doing his work, remaining discreet. He branches onto sidestreets, climbs up stoops, attention staying with paper and tape. He sticks a sheet upon a birch, planted for shade but now without leaves. When he has only about twenty pages left, he decides, why not, to expand his practice. To vary his terrain. He will try, maybe it will do some good, conspicuousness. Well, a bit. Why not?
He’s on Bank Street at that moment, and so goes to number 170, former home of Anderburg Records. It had been a leading local vinyl shop, with some CDs, mostly used. Over the years, Marcus had spent hours in its two aisles, riffling and gabbing. Now the site is dark, gunked, still-aired, sad, an unfathomable cavern not only of memory. Inside, bins and fixtures lie tumbled atop paper-scattered flooring. Tape ghosts haunt the verso of the front glass. Marcus quickly affixes his lettered rectangle, matte green.
He takes a step back. It’s the first time he’s put up in the center of a shop window, his foray into framing and context. But he’s a little off. The sign dips a bit to the right.
Someone walks up. The person stops, looks, shifts his weight, sets in to read Marcus’ sign. Marcus takes another step away, making room. The reader is a thirty-ish man, brown shoulder-length hair, thin denim coat over a woolen sweater with a surf-like, swirling collar.
The man stands in place, eyes on sign, for better than fifteen seconds. But he does not pull out a pencil or a BlackBerry.
That yours?, the man then says, still looking at the posted sheet.
Marcus tightens his view of the reader’s back. Mm, he says.
The man shifts his weight. Should say something about salary, he says. You know, like boilerplate like attractive salary. Or like salary commensurate with experience.
Hm, Marcus says. Could be.
Best of luck, the man says. He turns, angles Marcus a small smile, nods his head.
Marcus looks at the man. His denim coat, the swirling woolen collar. His snug black jeans.
I ask you something?, Marcus says.
The man nods. ’Sup?, he says.
You ever read Rousseau?, Marcus says.
The man scrunches one eye. Hunh?, he says.
The Reveries …?
The man keeps looking. Jerks his head.
You even know who Pascal is?, Marcus says.
The man takes a step back. He gives an open smile. What you—?, he says.
Marcus turns away. He walks past the man and goes to his upheld sign. Unsticks the right side of the tape, tries to make the thing hang correctly.
Hey, the man says. What was that?
He waits for an answer. Marcus continues his work.
Oh, man, the man says, and starts to walk away. Go back to your
room.
Marcus is now holding the sign’s two upper corners. He looks to the shop window’s top and sides, sticks the page up again. Then he takes two steps back. Still not perfect, he thinks; now the left hangs lower. But, better. And he used the same piece of tape – ecological, good. Marcus scrapes his hands together, starts down the block.
Over the next twenty-or-so minutes, he puts up the rest of his announcements, spread quasi-evenly through downtown.
That evening, after supper, Marcus offers himself an early – 7 p.m. – re-constitutional. It’s different, but advancing the stroll is an inspired idea. Phone calls will likely arrive later, to avoid disturbing anyone during the dinner hour; people are thoughtful that way.
Outside, the night is dry; the cold snips at his nose and eyes. But the leg-stretch is invigorating, tonic. He walks up and down his block once, then a second time: delicious. Then he goes home. He has important things to do.
—
It’s glorious back inside, warm, light-suffused, suggestive of baked goods. Accompanied by a new cup of Peruvian Fair Trade, Marcus takes Maxwell’s 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership down from his shelves. He’s had the book for months, and now, he knows, he’s ready for it. Which means, he smiles, he no longer needs to read it. Still, it may help him teach other Gratitudinarians.
Marcus lands on his chair and, as a resuit of its little sideward swivel, notices something. He stands and goes to his house’s side window, sees a hat-sized stain on the wall below it. It’s a clumpy, raggedy bit of damp, storm-cloud brown, buckling and chipping the plaster and paint under the sill. Marcus squats and palps the thing with the back of his index finger, as Baker plays a mezzo-soprano from the ’40s. Oozy and textured, the stain moves wall-ward under Marcus’ pressure, then refluffs back. But it doesn’t look too serious, Marcus thinks. He can’t see how it would threaten anything structural.