One Brother Shy

by Terry Fallis

  “But it’s been nearly ten years, a whole decade,” Matt said.

  “For you, it’s a long time ago,” I tried to explain. “For me, it’s always right there. Always.”

  “But I know the real Alex MacAskill. I’ve met him and seen him in action. He’s in there somewhere,” Matt said, leaning across the table and tapping my temple.

  “We just have to bring him out.” “We have a term for that,” I explained. “My therapist calls it ‘going inside-out.’ You know, taking the inside-my-head voice and letting it loose on the outside world.”

  “Right, inside-out,” he said. “By the way, what were the names of those two assholes who visited this tragedy on my twin brother?”

  “Why?”

  “I just want to know their names in case I ever bump into one of them, with my car.”

  “Jackson Trent and Cam Forster.”

  “Do you know where they are now?” Matt asked.

  “I think Cam actually went to law school, but I could be wrong. And I heard Jackson worked for a long time as a groundskeeper at the Royal Ottawa Golf Club. But that was quite a while ago. I have no idea where they are now. Frankly, I don’t care.”

  “I wonder if they have any idea what they’ve done,” Matt said.

  Then he stood up, came around the table, and gave me a hug. He pulled back a bit so he could look me in the eye at close range while his hands still gripped my upper arms.

  “What a horrific ordeal. Thank you for telling me. I know that wasn’t easy. I cannot imagine what it’s been like for you all these years – and if anyone can imagine it, I should be able to,” he said. “So I think I’m starting to get it now. I think I can at least begin to understand.”

  You’re about to drop a “but” on me, aren’t you?

  “But let me just make two observations,” Matt continued.

  Careful.

  “Firstly, you are obviously a very strong person. That’s even clearer to me, now. From personal experience, I’ve come to believe that resilience is something we really only discover when confronting adversity. You, my brother, are blessed with a shitload of resilience. And secondly, last time I checked, 2005 was ten long years ago. You told our father it’s been six years since someone even recognized you as ARCHangel. And remember, in the ten years since the video was posted, I cannot recall a single soul ever asking me about Gabriel, ever, and I do cut quite a striking resemblance to the star in that video. Not once has it happened. So it makes me wonder if you might be too close to the situation to examine it dispassionately. And that maybe you’re still fighting a battle that actually ended quite a few years ago. At least it’s food for thought.”

  I know. I know. I’m trying.

  “I know” was all I could muster.

  “Those two bastards probably have no idea what they’ve done,” Matt said.

  Two spotlights finally doused, then the third. Good. House lights up. Not good.

  CHAPTER 13

  With no familial mysteries left to solve, Matt could finally focus on getting ready for his big pitch to a high-flying American venture capitalist. And I figured I’d better help him as much as I could. After all, I felt responsible for pulling him off his top business priority that week. On the other hand, I did think Matt’s reasons for ignoring his day job were quite compelling. As in, “Gee, I’m sorry I’ve been away from the office a bit lately, but I’ve just reunited not only with the identical twin brother I never knew I had, but also with my birth father who I haven’t seen since I was one day old. But I’m back now. Any messages?”

  Neither of us mentioned our father, though his silent presence shared our minds alongside the more pressing task ahead. I wondered when we’d see him again. We had so much lost time to recover.

  “This is not your standard, run-of-the-mill VC pitch,” Matt said as he swivelled a full 360 degrees in his desk chair.

  We were alone in his office as he rotated. CTO Isabella Prochillo, and Matt’s CFO, whose name I can never seem to remember, Michael something-or-other, had just left after working with us for an hour and a half on the presentation.

  “You keep saying that,” I replied. “Even though I have no idea what a standard VC pitch looks like, why is this one so different?”

  “Stephanie Mosel is, well, she’s…mercurial. She’s famous for backing winners. She’s made an astonishing amount of money on some amazing outlier start-ups. But she’s…er…different. She doesn’t just immerse herself in the spreadsheets. She’s a bigger thinker than that. Unlike most investors, she judges opportunities on a broader range of factors, some of them not particularly business-focused. You never really know what’s going to catch her eye and push a deal past the finish line.”

  “So you’ve met her before?” I asked.

  “No. Never. She doesn’t hang out with the other angel/VC crowd on the playground. And she doesn’t mingle much at the big meet-ups and conferences. You don’t reach out to her. She finds you.”

  “How did you land an audience with her?” I asked.

  “As I said, she found us. She called, said she’d been watching us for quite a while and heard we were ready for a new investment round. So she invited me to present to her.”

  “Who else is going?” I asked. “Isabella and Michael what’s-his-name?”

  “No. Remember, she’s mercurial. We’ve got only one opportunity. She lays down the rules for the pitch, and we follow them, or it’s a very short meeting,” Matt explained. “I’ll be the only one presenting and she’ll be the only one listening. No slides. No support. No sound and light show. Just spoken words. That’s how she does it. One on one. Principal to principal, with a platform demo only at the end.”

  “Why set it up that way?”

  “I don’t know for certain, but I suspect she’s not just assessing the big idea, the market potential, and the business plan. She’s also judging the entrepreneur – as a person, I mean. What and how I choose to present is a reflection of how I think and what I believe is important. She’s judging me, and my brain. She wants to kick my tires, not just the company’s.”

  “That actually sounds quite sensible,” I replied. “Except for the part where she never gets to meet the talented people you’ve gathered around you to take this idea from paper to practice. That, too, is an important part of your leadership, isn’t it?”

  “Mercurial. It’s her call.”

  “So let’s hear the pitch again,” I suggested. “The more often you practise it, the better you’ll be able to deliver it without it sounding so rehearsed. That was my preferred acting method. Practise it so many times that it seems spontaneous, as paradoxical as that sounds.”

  “Right.”

  Matt rolled his chair back up to his desk to refer to his notes.

  “Try it standing, and without your notes,” I suggested. “I think you’ll be much more impressive that way, and you can sustain eye contact for the whole show.”

  “Well, I don’t want her to think she’s being stalked.”

  “She won’t. I imagine she’s used to being the centre of attention,” I replied.

  I went and stood next to Matt’s chair. I waited until he stood. Then I sat down.

  “Okay, I’m Stephanie.”

  “I’m not sure I can do the whole thing off the cuff,” Matt said.

  “That’s the point. It’s not off the cuff. You’ve carefully planned the pitch. It has a logical, even at times, dramatic, flow. Now you want to deliver it like it’s emerging fully formed, on the spot, from your steel-trap mind,” I said. “Hey, that didn’t sound half-bad.”

  “Of course, when I stumble, it’s a very short trip from steel trap to claptrap,” he said. “Is this the approach you use in the boardroom?”

  “What are you, nuts?” I replied. “I don’t do boardrooms. I don’t do presentations. I do cubicles. I write code. Good code, great code, beautiful, elegant code. But I don’t present. I’m talking to you right now from my earlier life as a once-avid actor inte
rested in the art of the compelling performance – and by compelling performance, I am not referring to my most famous moment in theatre. That was quite unrehearsed.”

  “Well, I suppose it’s worth a shot,” Matt said.

  He scanned his notes a final time and then handed them to me for safekeeping. He walked in front of his desk and turned to face me.

  “Thanks so much, Stephanie, for giving me some of your valuable time. I know that time is money, and I hope in thirty minutes you’ll agree it was time and money well spent,” he opened. “In short, we have found a way to scale the all-important process of public and stakeholder engagement so that it reaches a much larger audience, yields more meaningful insights, and often breaks down the adversarial dynamic inherent in the search for social licence.”

  Nice opening, bro.

  And away he went.

  Matt, his team, and I had worked hard on what was supposed to be a thirty-minute pitch. There were three major sections. He opened with a story about arrogant executives of a Canadian oil company who clearly didn’t understand the concept of social licence. They mistook regulatory approval granted on a pipeline project as a green light to put shovels in the ground. The spontaneous, immediate, and well-organized backlash from residents, environmentalists, naturalists, First Nations groups, climate change activists, and scientists stopped the company in its tracks, despite their having all the necessary government approvals to proceed. The pipeline has still not been built.

  Matt didn’t miss a beat as he told the story. It was obviously not the first time he’d recounted this tale. It took about six minutes for this opening piece.

  The second section was all about how organizations, institutions, companies, and governments had typically engaged their stakeholders to earn social licence. He covered the waterfront from open houses to public meetings, stakeholder outreach to direct mail, telephone surveys to print advertising, you name it. He then inventoried the problems with these outdated techniques. Chief among them, of course, was the inability to reach, and sustain engagement with, average citizens in numbers large enough to be meaningful. It was easy to connect with passionate stakeholders, but what you heard from them was predictable. But what about the masses? You can’t truly earn social licence without them.

  He flagged a few times, stumbled over his words, but always found his feet. I could see him making mental notes as he navigated this section of the presentation. It took Matt about nine minutes.

  Finally, he went in for the kill with the passionate and potent story of how his Innovatengage digital solution helped earn social licence for a major mass transit system expansion in Manchester. It seemed to me that Matt was at his most compelling when talking about the potential of his digital platform to alter the public consultation landscape, to give private- and public-sector organizations a powerful new way to engage, educate, track, and learn from the audiences most important to them. I was quite moved by the strong feelings he brought to his words. It was clearly not his first rodeo.

  Matt used up the remaining fifteen minutes with this final portion, but it seemed only about ten. It was a strong close.

  I stayed with Matt for a good chunk of what remained in the day, practising and offering advice from the acting side of my experience. My software engineering expertise was not a factor in our preparations. In particular, I think I was able to help almost at the micro, line-by-line, level. I suggested strategic pauses to enhance the impact of certain pay-off phrases. We worked on his energy, inflection, gesturing, pacing, body language, movement, and eye contact. We practised key lines over and over until they were all right there, perfectly cued up in his brain. Occasionally, when he didn’t quite understand a point I was trying to make, I would step in and demonstrate, doing my best impression of Matt, accent and all. By this stage, I felt utterly calm and relaxed with him.

  We punched up several lines and practised various delivery styles until we found the most persuasive yet authentic approach. We spent quite a bit of time on tempo. Matt was a good student. While he had never acted, even in school productions, I suspected he would have had great success on the stage. By the end of the afternoon, I knew his lines as well as he did.

  We returned to the condo, ate pizza on the deck, and then, just to lock it in, we practised some more. He was really nailing it by late in the evening. He’d never before prepared in this way for any kind of a pitch. But by the time we went to bed, I knew he saw the value in it and felt confident. As he said goodnight, he looked drained to me, and I noticed his voice growing hoarse. No surprise.

  By then, we were both exhausted. I Googled Stephanie Mosel and read a bit about her. I don’t even remember falling asleep, but I do remember being roused from my coma in the morning – at least I assumed it was the morning. I rolled onto my back and looked into my own eyes. Two beats later I realized Matt was hovering over me. His eyes were wide and he was waving his hands around a bit. He kept pointing to his mouth and throat. It was nice of him not to make any noise. I wasn’t yet ready for noise. It was then I noticed he was wrapped in a blanket, shivering even while beads of sweat glistened on his forehead.

  “Matt?” I said, still emerging from deep sleep. “Is that you?”

  He offered a facial expression that clearly communicated something sarcastic, like “No, it’s Margaret Thatcher. Who do you think it is?”

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  He then leaned down to my ear, which was a little weird. He whispered so quietly, I almost missed it.

  “Voice. Gone. Completely.”

  The air pushed from his lungs when he whispered was easier to discern than his words.

  He stood up, still shivering. I was awake then. He had dark circles beneath his eyes. His hair was spiky with perspiration. He looked terrible, miserable. He looked sick. Perhaps he was sick. I know. Yes, you’re right, I am a quick study. Always have been.

  “Are you all right? What’s wrong?”

  He leaned down again to my ear where I assume more words were issued, but I could understand none of them.

  “Sorry?” I replied. “Can you say it again, maybe out loud this time?”

  He was midway through a very dramatic eye roll when he turned on his heel and disappeared from my room. I heard him rooting about in the kitchen. Drawers were opened and shut. About thirty seconds later he returned, a small notepad and pen in his hand. He wavered a bit as he approached my bed, even staggered. I moved over in time for him to collapse on the edge of my bed. He was still shivering. For the first time, I noticed him sniffling and snorting – though those two verbs hardly do his performance justice – and running his index finger back and forth beneath his nostrils. I handed him a Kleenex from the box on my nightstand. He nodded and blew his nose. A beach towel might have handled the onslaught, but one Kleenex did not. I handed him the box. He nodded again.

  When he seemed to have his nasal effluvia under control, he piled his overly taxed Kleenexes in a mound on the bed beside him, picked up his pad and pen, and started writing. He dashed off a few lines before thrusting the pad in front of me.

  Woke up at 2:30. Headache, sore throat, congestion, hot flashes then chills, no voice, NO VOICE! NONE, feel like shite, am in deep shite

  “What, you can’t make a sound? Total laryngitis?”

  Matt opened his mouth and tried to say something. His lips were moving. He pushed air across his vocal cords but all I heard was a slight whoosh.

  “Don’t force it,” I suggested, knowing less than nothing about laryngitis. “Try a very gentle whisper.”

  I leaned in close to him.

  “I’m fucked,” Matt said so softly I almost missed it. The hard k sound helped.

  He was holding his iPhone and looking at it periodically. Sweat was pouring down his face. He shucked off the blanket and sat there in a pair of boxer shorts. It was surreal. His body was a precise copy of mine. For some reason, I thought of Dolly the cloned sheep. Matt was shaking his head. He picked up the pad and pen ag
ain and started writing.

  S Mosel is going to phone to confirm. Soon.

  “Can’t you just email her and tell her what’s happening?”

  Matt shook his head with such violence chiropractors in the area surely felt a disturbance in the Force.

  He opened his mouth and I leaned in again.

  “No, no, no. It’s her protocol. I must take the call or we’re done,” he whispered with my ear nearly pressed up against his lips. I know. I’m sure it looked odd. But even then, I barely understood him.

  “When is the call?” I asked.

  Matt shook his head, shivered once, and turned his phone towards me. It said 7:59.

  “She’s not calling at eight, is she?” I asked. “She can’t be calling at eight.”

  Matt nodded, looked at his phone again, then using the fingers of his right hand, started counting down, five, four, three, two, one.

  The digital display clicked over to 8:00 and I held my breath. Nothing. A few seconds passed. Nothing. I began to breathe again when his phone rang with a very loud Led Zeppelin ring tone. I almost knocked the lamp off the nightstand.

  Matt was moving the index finger of his left hand toward the green button showing on the incoming call screen.

  “You can’t answer it!” I shouted. “You’ll sound like a wheezing Hannibal Lecter, only more evil. You’ll botch the deal.”