He keeps his mouth shut.
He stares at the mountains, still listening to Maya, but also trying to imagine their insane and explosive rise from the earth. In his mind it happens in minutes, or seconds, like a Hollywood CGI special effect, sharp peaks piercing the crust of an unsuspecting planet replete with snowcaps, mythological legends, and harrowing tales of alpine tragedies.
He listens, falling in love and falling to pieces at the same time. He knows it. Knows that in all likelihood the falling-in-love part will not be reciprocated. Shouldn’t be, really, because who can blame her?
And also knowing, no, feeling more than he’s ever felt anything that the falling-to-pieces scenario, that is an absolute. A sure thing. A matter not simply of if, but of when.
And how completely.
In small part this rush of feeling and purpose and fatalism is happening and will happen because of Maya’s proposed agenda. Because of the way she is laying it out. Simply. Rationally. Selflessly.
But mostly it’s happening because of who she is.
And that is someone who is infinitely better than he will ever be.
He listens and forces himself to keep his mouth shut to the extent that every time he senses the urge to blurt out words that have the potential to make him appear less than serious, or frivolous, or shallow, or crazy, he devotes some of his substantial continuous partial attention skills to things like the Hollywood-style rise of the Himalaya mountains or the hundreds of priceless playlists that he’s lost, perhaps through the same hole in the bottom of the lake sought by the diviner.
He listens because he loves her now, he’s sure of that. Not that he’s going to tell her or anything, because that would totally blow it, but yeah, these past five, six, seven minutes have clinched it.
He loves her.
Which is all the more reason to keep his mouth shut, because the last thing he needs is to get himself double-face-smacked again.
Or is it?
Because to get a Buddhist so frustrated that she smacks you in the face a third time in one beautiful, brutal, absurd, and lie-changing day must mean that, at least to a degree, she digs you.
Right?
~ * ~
What Henry finds so impressive about Maya’s plan isn’t that she wants to initiate a coup or violently overthrow the government or break so much as a parking law. She doesn’t want to close the borders to development, undermine centuries of cultural traditions, or even write a sharply worded letter back to the home office.
What she wants to do is give a few hundred people access to clean water.
~ * ~
Here, in succinctly reasoned, Princetonian, MBA-style bullet points is how:
• Make the call center operational enough to flatter and impress Pat and Audrey and corporate; this includes working with—no, supervising Mahesh to help train the operators to at least look like they know what they’re doing in time for Pat and Audrey’s visit.
• Convince them that beyond the good PR buzz potential of the call center, they have an opportunity to generate much more globally newsworthy publicity with an ambitious yet viable and scalable plan to bring fresh water to people in villages such as this. This would be done with the affordable, life-saving LifeStraw (which Henry first learned about from Madden), a product whose mission is consistent with the broader Happy Mountain Springs ethos. This could be enhanced by entering a partnership with a not-for-profit organization such as UNICEF (Tap Project) or Charity: Water.
• Exploit the Happy Mountain Springs project as a shining example of how corporate goals, cultural ideals, and environmental sustainability can work hand in hand in the new Galado, and convince the palace to create a Ministry of Corporate and Cultural Sustainability.
When she is finished, Maya puts a hand on Henry’s thigh and looks him in the eye. “You know the only reason I thought of this, the only reason they may even consider this, is because of you, Henry.”
Does Henry agree with the goals of Maya’s agenda? Absolutely. Does he think they have a chance in hell of achieving any of them? Absolutely not. Will he share his opinions with her? Of course not. He loves her.
He places his hand over hers and says, “It can’t hurt to try.”
~ * ~
They depart from the village and head for the call center shortly after lunch. This time Henry is behind the wheel. After directing him onto the only paved road in the region, Maya curls up in the passenger’s seat, pulls her black wool sweater up snug about her neck, and sleeps. He passes yak-drawn carts on the side of the road. Young men on smoke-spewing two-stroke scooters. Billboards for South Korean computers and cell phones, on stilts deep within rice paddies. Prayer flags alongside billboards covered with desecrated images of the prince, Galadonian graffiti spray-painted in yellow over the young despot’s smiling, airbrushed face.
Far ahead smog hovers above the capital city like atomic fallout.
He doesn’t think much of the first red-robed person he passes sitting cross-legged at the side of the road until he passes a second, a mile later. A half-mile later there is a third, like the others male, cross-legged, neither smiling nor frowning but staring straight ahead as he zips past at seventy-five miles an hour. After passing three more men, he finally sees a woman in the same position as the others. Henry waves, but she doesn’t respond and probably didn’t see him to begin with. As he gets closer to the capital, the red squatters, now close to an even mix of male and female, appear with more regularity and in increasingly larger groups. Ten. Twenty. Now groups of a hundred, shoulder to shoulder in something akin to prayer along the roadside.
When red-robed squatters line both sides of the road, he considers waking Maya but decides not to unless the squatters do something dangerous or threatening. As if sensing the change outside the truck window, she awakens, but she shows no sign of being surprised or concerned by the demonstration.
“AAD,” she says by way of explanation. “The Alliance Against Dictatorship. They are protesting the prince’s policies. I forgot that today was the day.”
“Are they legal?”
“Barely. So far the protests have been nonviolent. They wear red and line the roadside to the capital. Last week they gathered outside the airport, and there were clashes with the military. But from what I hear the military is split, like the rest of the nation, over which side to take.”
“What does the prince make of this?”
“Oh, I imagine he is insane with rage. Citizens wearing red in the capital have been beaten and thrown in jail if they fight back. Several months ago the opposition color was yellow, but when HM wore yellow for a speech, the opposition realized that was a royal color on Mondays and Wednesdays, so for a while there was much confusion about what to wear if you wanted to express your disgust with the government and simply not get killed.”
Henry slows the car after noticing flashing lights up ahead. It’s a military checkpoint. A half-dozen armed soldiers stand in front of two dark green personnel carriers blocking the road. Henry looks down at his untucked shirt, a white Brooks Brothers with a thin red stripe.
“Calm down,” Maya tells him as the truck eases to a stop. “We’re fine.”
A soldier approaches Henry’s side and raps on the window. Before Henry can speak, Maya leans across the seat and begins to converse in Galadonian with the soldier. Henry sits back, crosses his bare forearms across his potentially incriminating red-striped shirt, and stares ahead. On the side of the road three soldiers are thrashing the legs of a young man in a red robe with riot sticks. Maya sits back in her seat and rummages through her valise for a document. She hands it to the soldier, who looks at it but doesn’t seem to read it. He smiles, steps back, and waves them on.
“I told you we’d be fine.”
He touches the lump on his head that he got from his night out with Madden. “Never doubted you.”
As they ease through the tight space between the two military vehicles, Maya nods at the soldiers. There are no red-robe
d protesters on the other side. “Too close to the city for the prince’s comfort,” Maya explains. “He had the military shut it down out here, but according to the guard back there, it’s getting increasingly difficult. Too many demonstrators at too many locations. And according to some others I’d rather not mention, it may all change if the prince loses the faith of the military.”
“How would that happen?”
“If the monks get involved and HM asks the military to crack down on them. It’s one thing to ask a soldier to cane an intellectual, but a monk? Many soldiers depend on them for spiritual atonement. Giving food and assistance to them helps bring you to a better place.”
“Look, I don’t want to seem any more callous and offensive than I’ve already been, but why would any company want to do business here? Didn’t someone, some corporate type, do a little preliminary research into the situation before diving in with an investment?”
Maya inhales deeply and rolls her eyes. “From what I’ve seen, I doubt it. But in their defense, they’re not alone. The prince has been doing this dance with multinationals for a while, and the protests, they are nothing new. They’ve been getting bigger and bigger, but because up until now he’s been able to control the flow of information, to an outsider it probably seems like more of the same.”
Less than a mile from the checkpoint, two miles from the city limit, Maya instructs Henry to turn off the highway and head back toward USAVille.
“Shouldn’t we head to the call center?”
She shakes her head. “It’s late. Better to rest up one more night, give our plan a good think, and dive in with them tomorrow.”
After a few moments on the new, unpaved, and significantly rougher road, Henry says, “What do you think? Do you think what we just saw is more of the same?”
“I do,” she answers. “But who knows how long that will last.”
~ * ~
In his driveway he puts the truck into park but doesn’t shut it off. Before he can ask, Maya says, “I really have to get going, Henry. I have a lot to do tonight.”
~ * ~
Endorsed (or at Least, to the Best
of Our Knowledge, Not Yet
Officially Condemned) by the Gods
Shug is in the driveway at eight the next morning. After several miles of silence en route to work, he asks Henry if he is feeling better.
“I am, Shug. And you?”
The older man smiles. “I am well. And, if I may, your employees are excited about your return.”
Inside the call center Mahesh has the team gathered around a television. As Henry gets closer, he sees that they’re not re-viewing Pat and Audrey’s corporate creation video or a customer service lesson but watching a bootleg DVD of the American situation comedy 30 Rock. On the table alongside the TV are two half-empty boxes of Dunkin’ Munchkins. After an onscreen punch line is delivered and no one in the group laughs at the appropriate time, Mahesh shakes his head, pushes Pause, and with a blue marker on a white board begins to diagram the joke for them.
It takes Henry two pronounced clearings of the throat before Mahesh finally acknowledges him. He motions with his forefinger for Mahesh to come to him. Mahesh responds by holding up his forefinger. Just a sec. Henry shakes his head and mouths the word Now. Reluctantly, the young man walks away from the TV screen and stops beside Henry.
“What’s going on, Mahesh?”
“Training. Immersion in the culture.”
“Watching a pirated sitcom?”
Mahesh taps his temple with the same just-a-sec forefinger. “Not just any sitcom. Two-time Golden Globe winner. Out-of-the-box thinking, bro.”
“Where’d you get the doughnuts?”
“Had them overnighted. Verisimilitude.”
“Tell you what,” Henry says. “If they want to eat doughnuts and watch sitcoms, they can do it on their own time. Extra credit. With you. But right now we have to teach them basic phone protocol. Get them to buy into the fundamental mission of the company that’s paying them. Paying us. You down with that, bro?”
Mahesh lowers his head, nods. “I am.”
~ * ~
Ten minutes later, Mahesh, who today is wearing a blue-and-gold Los Angeles Lakers hat and a seemingly ironic T-shirt that says Worldwide Economic Downturn: Team Leader, deviates from practicing the call scenarios and launches into a long story about how he was almost cast as an extra in Mumbai during the filming of Slum-dog Millionaire.
“You know what the director, Mister Danny Boyle, said to me?” he asks the group, and they shake their heads in unison. “He said I would be perfect but I looked too American. Can you imagine that?”
Henry can’t. When the story is complete, even though he hadn’t planned it, he steps in front of the group and says, “Thank you, Mahesh. Have a seat, please, while I go over a few things. If I speak too fast, raise your hand, and Mahesh and Maya can help translate. But you know, soon callers are going to be talking fast too. In English. Without subtitles. And I hate to say it, but Happy Mountain Springs can’t afford to have people working these phones who cannot hold a basic conversation in English. If you need extra help, practice at home with a friend or coworker. If you can’t keep up, then I can’t use you until you are able to. You may find this harsh, but I find it harsh that people who I was assured were, if not fluent, at least conversant in English expect a paycheck from me even though they are not.”
Mahesh raises his hand and begins to speak before he’s acknowledged. “But—”
“Not now, Mahesh.”
Mahesh stands. “But—”
“Not. Now. Mahesh!” He smacks his right hand on a work-table, knocking a stack of documents to the floor. For the first time in a professional environment he has raised his voice. And it has an effect. Mahesh sits. The others sit up straight. The response surprises him to the point where he momentarily loses his train of thought.
In the back of the room, Maya subtly nods her head. Go on.
“Now, to put it bluntly, we are fairly well screwed. We are a call center”—he picks up an untethered placebo telephone—”without working telephones!” For punctuation, he drops the phone and laughs, enthusiastically enough that the others decide not to join him. Next he picks up two empty sixteen-ounce bottles of Happy Mountain Springs water and holds them out toward the group. In the front row, two women lean back, like people in the front row of a bloody boxing match. “If that’s not bizarre enough,” he continues, “we’re pimping on behalf of a water company in the middle of a region that has no access to water and where plastic bottles are outlawed!” He throws the empty bottles over his shoulder and then, more delicately, says, “This must be . . . horrible for many of you. But I didn’t create this situation. All that I can do, and all that we can do, is to try to make it work, right? If we do, our lives may get incrementally better. And if we don’t, in this economy, they will shut us down in a heartbeat. Any questions so far?”
An older woman in the back row raises her hand. Henry points at her. “Yes, in the back?”
She rises, straightens her blouse, and asks, “What does pimping mean?”
After the others stop laughing, Henry picks up one of the laser-printed decks of stock calling scenarios they’d been practicing and tears it in half. “In the morning,” he says, “we will have new, better, simpler ones.” And because no one else has a question, he decides to proceed by having each person stand up, say a little bit about him- or herself, and then answer a few simple questions as honestly as possible. Without fear of retribution.
A sampling:
Tell me three positive things about Happy Mountain Springs bottled water: It is bottled fresh from a clear mountain stream; it does not contain arsenic or other carcinogens; it increases sexual stamina.
What kinds of things do others who do not work with us tell you about Happy Mountain Springs water? It will deplete your sexual stamina; it is a false front for a chemical weapons operation created by the prince; it will make you barren; it will make
you insane; it actually does not contain water; it is laced with heroin; it will corrupt my dreams; it will dilute my karma; it caused tumors in laboratory mice; it will turn me into a woman who makes sex with other women.
Do you think it’s true that the gods do not approve of water sold in bottles? Yes (unanimously).
Do you really believe that Happy Mountain Springs is owned and operated by evil spirits? Yes; not really; not necessarily owned and operated by but most likely guided by them.
If you were president of Happy Mountain Springs, what new policies would you institute and what old ones would you change? I would eliminate the bottles; remove the narcotics; give us working telephones; give the water away for free.
Holy Water Page 21