Apex Hides the Hurt

by Colson Whitehead

  “What kind of consulting?”

  “I’m a nomenclature consultant. I name things like new cars and toothbrushes and stuff like that so that they sound catchy. You have some kind of insurance policy to reassure people or make them less depressed so they can accept the world. Well you need a reassuring name that will make them believe in the insurance policy. Or you have a new breath freshener. Now who would want to buy a brand of breath freshener called Halitotion? No one would buy that. So I think up good names for things.”

  “Wow,” Dolly said.

  “You’re here about the town’s new name,” Jack said. “Heard about that.”

  He nodded. Jack wore khaki pants and a blood-red sweater. White collar erupted out of the V-neck. How did they skew, the demographic of two sitting next to him? He wrote the script: Jack had responsibilities, he was climbing the ladder, but was trying to hang on to some notion of the youth rake. On Saturdays he put on his old college sweatshirt and hunkered over the papers he had to get through by Monday a.m., as if putting on sweats could take the sting out of working on the weekend. There were stains from his glory days, from poker marathons and touch football. The detergent was never what it was cracked up to be and Jack was grateful for that, because those stains were reservoirs of hope, and cherished as such, accounting for all those lost years.

  Dolly was also decked out in the national khakis, accented by a seaweed-green blouse. A small string of pearls cupped her neck, and when her husband said something that diminished her, she ran a finger across the pearls to reaffirm their presence. Perhaps she did this to remind her of his affection, perhaps the necklace was an asset she might pawn one day as part of her exit strategy. According to the script, she had a full-time job, nine to five, but outside the nine to five there were hormonal hours, and she cocked her ear to their little ticking. Thus her earnest talk about bedrooms, and how far away the kids’ rooms should be and the system of who would get out of bed to soothe on what days of the week. Jack drank scotch, Dolly nursed a vodka tonic. He had no idea what a Help Tour was at that point, but he liked the name.

  “Winthrop sounds nice,” Jack said. “Sounds distinguished. I mean look around this bar, the history. But I think Lucky is up to something with his idea. I mean this is the twenty-first century. Sometimes you got to catch up with what’s going on.” His watch clinked as Jack rested his arm on the bar. It was an expensive watch, and made its way into the script: poking out of the sleeve of his sweater, it told Jack what he was working for, and what he had achieved.

  “It is a homey little place, though,” Dolly said. “We came a day early to look at property,” she informed him, grinning away.

  “I’m not saying it’s not a nice place to raise kids, honey. I’ll tell you, brother, where we are now, the housing stock has gone through the roof. We go out to see a place from the newspaper—”

  “—or our realtor drives us out there—”

  “—and what you’re getting for the price is a damn bungalow. There are these retirees who try to get ten—”

  “—twenty—”

  “—times what they bought their houses for thirty years ago. Move to Florida with that money. But for a couple like us—”

  “—bedroom for each of our kids and a guest room at least—”

  “—it doesn’t make any sense.”

  Muttonchops offered his back to them, obviously eavesdropping despite the occasional cover gesture, smearing a cloth across a glass, turning labels on bottles face out. He wondered what he would have made of their little back-and-forth if he hadn’t been looking into their faces, cataloging every twitch. Their tag-team wrestling match with the domestic world. It was in the little gestures that he found the true meaning of what they were saying, in what their hands darted toward, in how their eyebrows and lips tilted, dipped, and scurried about their faces. It was there he saw the honesty.

  In the old days, these were his Great Unwashed, the clueless saps who came to his names and connotations seeking safe shores and fresh starts. Try This, it will spackle those dings and dents in your self. Try New and Improved That, it will help keep your mind off the decay. But he didn’t feel that warm old happy feeling of condescension in the bar that day. He hadn’t felt it for a long time. All he felt now was envy. These people had expectations. Of the world, of the future, it didn’t matter—expectation was such an innovative concept to him that he couldn’t help but be a bit moved by what they were saying. Whatever that was.

  “And the schools.”

  “School system going to pot. Do you know in some classes they have kids who don’t speak a word—”

  “—of English—”

  “—the English language. Mangling it. Now, I heard how Lucky just gave a heap of money to the little elementary school here. So you can see what he’s trying to attract.”

  “Right,” he said.

  “When I first heard about this conference last year, I thought, that’s the middle of nowhere. But look, XMB has moved down here and I went to college with their CEO and he sings the praises. Listening to the guy, fuck. Barbecuing. Never flipped a burger in his life and he’s barbecuing. Just barbecuing. Added 30 percent to his workforce and at a fraction of what it would have cost back west. Hell, I’d be barbecuing too, hours I put in.”

  She shook her head. “He’s always at the office.”

  “Working those hours. XMB and Ambiex last year, but this year there’s a whole new bunch coming down to check this place out. You gotta think, if it’s not us, it’s gonna be someone else and the plum spots’ll run out. From a fiscal point of view it makes sense if you can get around the thing of picking up stakes.” He slapped his palm on the table and startled everyone. “If they want to change the name of the town to bring things up to date I say let ’em. I think Lucky’s proposal is a great idea. Bottom-line-wise.”

  “Did you come up with the new name?” Dolly asked.

  “Not me, the company I used to work for. And it’s not the new name yet—it’s only a proposal. There’s been a little controversy in town over whether or not it’s appropriate. I’m here to arbitrate, you might say.”

  “I think it fits. Winthrop—that’s a bit old school, don’t you think? Three martini lunches and cholesterol and all that?”

  “I think it’s quaint.”

  “Her father owns a bank. This is his kind of place. You should have seen our wedding.”

  “Oh Jack.”

  “The ice swan alone.”

  “Jack.”

  “Okay, okay. Well I think your company does good work. I think New Prospera is a great name.”

  He raised his mug to New Prospera. That’s one vote for you.

  . . . . . . . .

  When he accepted the assignment, the clients gave him a packet on the competition. Sometimes it was important to know what you were up against. Sometimes it didn’t matter at all. At any rate, when asked about how he came up with the name Apex, which was often, he always kicked things off with a brief preface drawn from the information he received that fateful day.

  In the promotion materials for the Johnson & Johnson Company he got the lowdown on the creation of Band-Aids. The year was 1920. The place, New Brunswick, NJ. Earle and Josephine Dickson were newlyweds. He was a cotton buyer for Johnson & Johnson, she was a housewife. He worked for the country’s number-one medical supply company. She cut herself. Repeatedly. Every day it seemed. She was clumsy. She had household accidents. Through the modern lens, he told his audience (a comely young lady at a bar, poised sophisticates at a dinner party, a dentist), he interpreted the young lady’s constant accidents as sublimated rebellion against the strict gender roles of her time. He’d attended a liberal-arts college. Perhaps she wanted to be a World War One flying ace, or a mechanic. He didn’t know. All we have are Band-Aids, he said.

  Every day Earle would come back from work to confront his wife’s wounds, cotton wadding and adhesive tape in hand. He pictured her through the screen door, offering her latest dome
stic tragedy for his inspection when Earle came back from the office, red-eyed, anxious, what the heck, let’s throw in a trembling lip. After a while, Earle decided to take himself out of the equation. He placed gauze at regular intervals onto a roll of tape, and then rolled the tape back up again. That way, whenever Josephine had one of her little cries for help, she could help herself, and if she happened to slice herself while cutting off a patch of tape, well what could be more convenient. Earle of course mentioned this innovation to his colleagues, and the rest was history and brand-name recognition, was Band-Aids, competing brands of adhesive bandages, was Apex, his toe.

  . . . . . . . .

  New Prospera. If he lifted the whelp by the heel he’d find the birthmark of the Fleet clan. Albert Fleet’s shtick consisted of resurrecting old nomenclature motifs just before they were about to come back into vogue. Old hound dog sniffing, he had a nose for incipient revival. The good ones always came back, the steadfast prefixes, the sturdy kickers. When you counted them out, Pro- and -ant would stumble back to the top, bruised and lacerated but still standing, this month’s trendy morphemes and phonemes lying at their feet in piles. Everything came around again. Languages were only so big.

  He had effectively killed off New when New Luno hit it big, and at the time everyone warned him that it would look like he was merely chasing a trend, and that sort of thing was beneath him. Anywhere you looked that year, something was New. But success shushes those kind of accusations. If Albert was lugging New back onto the scene, you better brace yourself for a full-blown renaissance. New was new again.

  Prospera, that could have come from anybody on the team. Had that romance-language armature, he was pretty sure it was a Spanish or Italian word for something. What it meant in those languages, that was unimportant, what was important was how it resonated here. The lilting a at the end like a rung up to wealth and affluence, take a step. A glamorous Old World cape draped over the bony shoulders of prosaic prosperity. Couple a cups of joe to clear the head, anybody in the firm could have come up with that one. Everyone a suspect. Prospera left no fingerprints on its gleaming surface.

  New, new, new money, new media, new economy. New order. New Prospera. He reckoned it would look good on maps. Nestled among all those Middletons and Shadyvilles.

  It wasn’t that bad a name, certainly no masterpiece. When—if—he returned to work, his office would be waiting. They still needed him.

  How much did he need them?

  That second night in Winthrop, Old Winthrop, he went to sleep at a decent hour. He drifted off reminiscing about the tools of his trade. He drifted off thinking of kickers. Somewhere in the night he had a nightmare. Rats bubbled out of the sewers, poured out of gutters and abandoned buildings. Making little rat noises. They were everywhere, and he knew that even though they wore the skin of rats, they were in fact phonemes, bits of words with sharp teeth and tails. Latin roots, syllables to be added or subtracted to achieve an effect, kickers in their excellent variety, odd fricatives, and they chased him down. They finally cornered him in an old warehouse and he woke as they started nibbling on his vanished toe, which had reattached itself as if it had never been lost.

  It was early morning. The sun was up somewhere, rebuffed by clouds. Still raining. He went to the bathroom and when he came out he noticed the envelope that had been shoved beneath the door.

  The client had agreed to his conditions.

  He was back to work.

  TWO

  HE LANDED APEX because he was at the top of his game. The bosses would call him into their office to chat, to reassure themselves, to count the lines on his brow as they ran an idea up the flagpole. One day he stifled a burp and his pursed lips put an end to Casual Fridays. The other folks in nomenclature came to him with their problems, they bought him cocktails and he offered obvious solutions to dilemmas. He wasn’t exactly taxing his brain. He didn’t squander names that could have been used for his projects. What he gave them were slacker names. He lent out malingerers.

  He attracted clients through word of mouth. Some clients he passed off on younger, hungrier colleagues and e-mailed apologies. He was all booked up. His generosity increased his estimation in the eyes of the lower ranks and his exclusivity won him still more clients. With the assignments he did take, he was getting faster and faster with his naming. He wasn’t at the point where he could just look at something and know its name, but the answer generally came quickly and he had to sit on the name for a couple of days and pretend to ponder long and hard, or else he’d look superhuman. When he walked down the halls of the office sipping water from a paper cone, hip boots would have been a plus—he waded through a palpable morass of envy. He expected some sort of comeuppance for his efficiency. None came. In fact he was bonused repeatedly. He expected the great scales of justice to waver, for certainly his expertise was upsetting some fundamental balance in the world. There was nary a waver or a twitch. Until Apex.

  His life outside of work, that was going pretty fine, too. He hadn’t met that special someone but he went out a lot, made reservations at approved restaurants. Occasionally he extended a hand across the table to spark a soulful gaze. Friends of his set him up with their sisters. He had a kind of vibe he projected. Wage earning. Self-actualizing. Nice catch. A local magazine picked him as one of the City’s 50 Most Eligible Bachelors. He got some mileage out of that and hit the town with new credibility. This is my face, his manner seemed to say. For the photo shoot they had him sit on a gigantic blue pill, because he had named a popular blue pill, and he wore a fine designer suit that he was not allowed to keep. The writer made a few jokes of the what-the-heck-is-a-nomenclature-consultant-you-might-ask variety. One thing about his job, he had conversation starters for sure.

  His new apartment was great. There was an extra room he didn’t know what to do with so after a year he got a pool table and an aquarium. He bought exotic fish for the aquarium from a specialty store. Occasionally they ate each other. There were all these fins at the bottom of the tank. Conversation starters for sure. From the balcony he could look down upon the city and think he owned it. And perhaps that feeling was in the mix when he came up with Apex. He looked down on everything. It was all so small.

  . . . . . . . .

  Seems like old times, he said to himself, cozying up to the desk after avoiding it for two days. “A History of the Town of Winthrop” opened with a painful crinkle. He would be prepared for his meeting that afternoon. He was a professional.

  He skipped around, and after a few pages of stuff like “that famous quality of generosity that distinguishes the Winthrop family” and “Once again, the Winthrops came to the rescue in a time of need,” he checked the copyright page and confirmed his suspicion. The book had been commissioned by the Winthrop Foundation. He relaxed. He’d always rather enjoyed corporate pamphlets. They did not tax his attention overmuch. You always knew how they were going to end. Winning over the town librarian for sympathetic press wasn’t too much of a task, he figured. A set of leatherbound Shakespeare would do it. He wouldn’t get the inside scoop, but maybe he didn’t need it.

  The Winthrops made their fortune in barbed wire, not too bad a gig at the end of the nineteenth century. Land grants, land grabs, you needed something cheap to keep everything in, and keep everything out. “With the zeal of a true American entrepreneur, Sterling Winthrop found customers among the region’s farmers and homesteaders, who delighted in the inexpensive alternative to costly timber. Even the railroad enlisted the aid of Winthrop’s fine wire to keep its lines free and clear.” Innovative product, niche market, sure, sure. He jazzed his fingers on the desk excitedly. This was something he could understand. Not exactly what he was looking for, however.

  Gertrude Sanders, master of the librarian arts, channeled the pioneer zeitgeist with flair, aplomb aplenty. No equivocating for Gertrude. “Where others saw untamed wilderness,” she enthused, “Sterling saw endless bounty and prime opportunities.” Underdeveloped land, in the modern jive
: a lowly parking lot where high-rises deserved to tower. The river provided a way to move the goods. And the place was empty. Mostly. “After winning over the area’s main inhabitants—a loose band of colored settlers—Winthrop opened up his factory and started producing his famous W-shaped barb, which can still be seen all over the county. Grateful for this fresh start, they passed a law and named the town Winthrop, after the man who had the courage to dream.” Attracting a labor force to the town, building a community, all the usual Town-in-a-Box starter-kit stuff. Had Gertrude ever tired of the Dewey decimal thing, she would have been a shoo-in for a marketing job back East.

  All that hokum. He continued to flip around. If they had created a law to change the name of the town, that meant there must have been a name to change it from. No point going to the trouble of rebranding unless there was something to rebrand. He needed to know what it was. He learned a few things, as his fingers journeyed where silverfish feared to tread. He learned about the strange mosquito plague of 1927, which ended as swiftly and mysteriously as it started, leaving none unwelted. A nearby pond was home to a very rare frog, celebrated and documented in scientific journals. A chilling woodcut confirmed the amphibian’s most celebrated characteristic—an almost human gaze that could only be described as “pleading.” He was about to return to the beginning when a familiar voice kicked in his adrenaline. After a single exposure, he had developed a Pavlovian response.

  “Housekeeping!” She loosed her little fury against the door.

  “I’m okay!”

  “I need to get inside!”

  “I’m okay!” he repeated. He marveled at the ridiculousness of this response, but kept his fingers crossed.

  “You are preventing me from doing my job!” The two black stalks of her legs interrupted the light from beneath the door. It occurred to him that she might have an organic defect in her brain. But then she bellowed, “What are you doing that is so important!” and he decided that her problem probably claimed provenance in both nature and nurture.