by Rae Agatha
“Anna, what time is it?”
Anna looked at her watch, “It’s 6 p.m.”
The two moons were lighting their way.
DAN
Dan Salinger couldn’t recall when was the last time he felt happy. Happy in the deep, philosophical sense, not glad, not positive; not in a sense of having a good time with friends in a pub and watching Premier League while drinking beer. Happy in a sense of feeling fulfilled, satisfied, calm, self-confident. He was spending yet another hour of his life in a traffic jam as he was coming back home from the City after almost nine hours of office work for Mayflower and Sons, an insurance company he had been slogging away for almost ten years. Dan was thirty-six and he was wholeheartedly convinced the corporation work was sucking the life from his veins, that it was eating him alive.
He remembered well how he used to like the job, how exciting it was to finally have a steady income, but now, after a decade he basically hated it. He felt bored with it, finding it absolutely pointless.
Dan was an insurance agent, someone who was “there for you”, as the Mayflower and Sons’ cheesy slogan would say. The problem, was that it was actually a well-paying job, he had to admit it, it was the only reason why he was still doing it in the first place. It was full of endless routine, so uncreative, so mechanical and, basically, so dumbed down that he sometimes felt he wanted to cry when he entered his office.
One tiny entertainment, a diversion of sorts that he had at work was the bi-monthly meeting when the agents, him included, would gather around the table in the conference room, sometimes three times when necessary to discuss the more serious cases of accidents, injuries, deaths, thefts, arsons, flood, and failed crops. The meetings were quite disparaging, because everyone knew they were gathering to make sure the compensations were the lowest possible and have their fingers on the pulse of how far they could go in rejecting an indecent amount of insurance payouts were concerned.
Dan remembered the very first of such meetings he participated in, almost seven years ago. He and other agents were discussing a case of a man who was cheating on his wife and had a heart attack while banging some young girl in a night club’s rest room. The man died and they were debating to figure out if the widow deserved the life insurance policy money or not. On the one hand, honest to God, she needed money; no job, a mortgage, two small children, the husband was the sole breadwinner in the family.
On the other, the autopsy showed the guy was under the influence of drugs while he was in the club, he hadn’t been using protection during sex with an unknown partner and the insurance company’s investigation proved he’d engaged in this particular way of life every chance he could. Which included the time during which he had bought their insurance, a fact he forgot to mention during his physical and when they signed the deal with him.
As the result, the board determined the man was deliberately risking his life and health, and decided not to pay the widow the full insurance. After some mathematical calculations, it turned out she only got 7% of the policy, which basically meant she would have nothing to live on. It was Dan’s first meeting. The first lesson in the nasty school of life. Once the initial shock was gone, he only remembered thinking he was glad he was not the one delegated to pass the news to the woman. He thought he wouldn’t have had the courage to look her straight in the eyes.
After a while he got used to the meetings, just like everyone else, and he even welcomed them as it would mean doing something different, having a little bit of fun in the office. Someone watching them from a distance might have thought they were all a bunch of cruel bastards, people with no hearts, seeking the lowest form of entertainment, that none of them cared. To tell the truth, for them, especially during those meetings, people were no longer humans, they were more sets of digits, mathematical patterns, results of many different factors.
Dan was sitting in his car, looking ahead at the traffic jam. There was a major road construction ahead, it was quite possible he would have to spend a lot of time there. Some years ago, he’d probably get angry, furious, like Michael Douglas in Falling Down. How many times had he imagined himself becoming deranged, walking out of his car, and just let out some steam on anyone that would be near enough for him to reach. But that was years ago. But, on May 6th 2005, he was too downcast and apathetic to even project such a situation in his brain.
Dan opened the window, feeling he was sick and tired of air condition’s dry air, and felt the wind blowing through his hair and turned the radio on. It was news time, and once again, just like every hour, they said that on the 6th of July, the host city of the 2012 Olympics would be announced, that the date was official. London was one of the strongest candidates, as a multi-cultural conglomeration, a metropolis open for everyone and a city capable of organizing the most splendorous Games imaginable. London was bidding against New York City, Rio de Janeiro, Moscow, Paris and some other cities Dan couldn’t recall – he wasn’t following the news too attentively, not lately anyway. He turned the radio off and closed his eyes. He could hear the sound of road work ahead of him. He began to think about when he fucked his life up.
I
Back in the rather light-hearted years of his twenties, Dan knew two things; that he had to get a job and that he loved Meg more than anything else in the world.
There were many of them, the brats all hanging together, the secondary school friends. All of them had a rather modest background, they were all from the working class, and mothers’ were housewives or working mothers, fathers working physically demanding jobs. His background had always been a problem for him. Obviously he never stood out from his friends as they all lived similar life; parents driving fifteen-year old cars, modest brick houses with tiny backyards or old apartments that were in the need of renovation, public schools, two channels on TV, and second-hand clothes. It was when he was about seventeen years old that he began realizing that perhaps his future, his adult life, did not have to look like that, that maybe he had the power to change something.
Dan got interested in economics. He had always been good at mathematics, he started renting books about economy and marketing, he understood the mechanisms, and he knew that all he needed was the guiding hand of a teacher, a professor, somebody to help him expand his knowledge. He saw himself as a manager, as a CEO or a CFO, he saw himself having his own company sometime in the future.
He had such good grades at school that he had pretty big chances to go to a good college, an achievement unprecedented in his family, however, Dan was told he was expected to go to work after graduating, his parents needed him to support them and his disabled sister, so when he was nineteen years old, he started working at a gas station, promising himself that one day he would have the degree that would allow him to move up the social ladder, at least a bit. It wasn’t until years later that he would think his parents made him pay for their own lack of any higher ambitions.
That perhaps if his father was interested in having a career in the radio manufacturing company instead of putting the transmitters together on the conveyor belt all his life, that maybe if his mother gone back to work after giving birth to him and his sister, just like many other mothers were perfectly capable of doing, then who knew? Their life situation might have been different and Dan might have been allowed to pursue his dreams and wouldn’t have had the weight of providing for his family put on his shoulders. Besides, with the degree, his being a broker, or a manager, or even having his own company, would have supported his family on a much larger scale. All they’d had to do was give him some time, he was sure things would have turned out differently, life would have turned out better for them all.
Dan liked the gas station job, he liked the people he worked with, and, apart from the shift work which were difficult to get used to, he enjoyed spending time there. When he was on the night shift, he would usually bring books with him to read or study; during the day shifts he had no time for that, there were too many clients coming in.
Dan was work
ing at a gas station almost two years when he met Meg. She was his age, also twenty-one, and came to work at the station after losing her job in a small company. She’d been secretary there, responsible for arranging the manager’s meetings, making phone calls and coffee. After some months, it seemed that her boss was thinking of broadening the scope of her responsibilities and he put his plan in motion. First, he complimented her looks and later on he made more pointed open remarks concerning business trips he would have love to take her on with him sans actual business. Finally, he would accidently touch her in the office a few times, and Meg decided it was high time she changed her job. Unfortunately, her former boss, was so hurt by her decision he made some phone calls to his friends and she was unable to find any other office work in the area. So she ended up getting a job with a temp agency that landed her as a temporary worker at the station. Dan and Meg would often have shifts together and after a couple of months, he had to admit, taking that job might have turned out to be one of the better decisions he had made.
They would talk a lot, share cigarette breaks, and discuss things. They had similar expectations, to get out, to look for something better, bigger, more interesting, more challenging. The station was only a pause, something to allow them to plan the next steps.
One night, the manager of the station, Greg Jackson, spotted him reading the book on the basics of the economy. He asked Dan if that was what he was interested in, Dan confirmed it and the manager came to him about three days later with a leaflet. He said he had found it in his mailbox some days ago and thought that Dan might be interested in it. It was a company in Liverpool, called EDUCATIO, offering correspondence courses in different fields, including economics. All Dan had to do was to sign up, pay the tuition every month and he would receive notes, list of books to read and lesson plans for one month ahead. After completing a one-year-long course, he would take an exam, also sent to him via mail, then receive a paper confirmation if he passed and a diploma that he was certified as an economy expert of a lower degree. It wasn’t much, it wasn’t a college degree, but it could have been something to help him move forward.
Dan couldn’t believe the opportunity that just appeared right before his eyes. He looked through the leaflet and decided to give the company a call. Its owner (and manager in one) explained all the rules to him and how much he needed to pay - it turned out Dan was able to buy the course. It meant he would need to postpone his plans of moving out of the house, it wouldn’t be possible for him to pay the rent and tuition simultaneously. As much as he wanted, needed to live on his own, he thought that the opportunity was too tempting to waste it, and thought that one more year at his parents’ house wouldn’t hurt him, especially if it meant getting a diploma allowing him to change his life. The owner of EDUCATIO and Dan made a deal that the company would send him a contract within a week. Just as it was settled, the contract, already signed by the company’s manager, appeared in his mailbox exactly four days after the conversation.
Dan read it carefully, it stated that for the money he would pay them, he would receive lesson plans and notes necessary for him to carry out the educational plan for a given month as well as a list of books he might find interesting as far as given topics were concerned, which he could obtain from a library in order to learn something more, to deepen his knowledge. After a year, provided he would be interested in taking an exam, he would pay money for the opportunity and receive the test,which he would then send back to EDUCATIO and, provided the result was positive, he would receive a diploma allowing him to look for a job as a lower manager in companies, and giving him a necessary credentials to look for a bank loan for his own company.
Dan read everything three times to make sure it was clear for him and signed the paper. He sent it along with the first check and about a week later he got a large envelope containing the lessons for the first month and a detailed description of what he was supposed to learn, read and remember.
In the first few months since Meg started working with Dan, they began dating. It was their first serious relationship and everything was going great, soon they were both head over heels in love with each other. Their families liked them, their friends liked them, their boss didn’t mind them working together, and things were looking up.
At the same time, his good friend, Peter, told Dan that he was the luckiest guy on the planet having a girl like Meg by his side.
The crisis began when Dan was finishing his correspondence course. During the past eleven months he had learnt a lot, read a lot, he felt that, at least from the theoretical point of view, he was ready to be seriously taken into the consideration to work as a manager. He contacted EDUCATIO and told the owner he was interested in taking the end-of-the-year exam and that he was writing the last check for a bigger amount of money; the materials and the exam papers fee. The owner told him that everything was fine, that Dan had made a good decision and that he would send the exam with the very last package.
When it came, Dan found a fifteen-pages long test, which included open and closed questions from the whole year. He told Meg he would be taking the exam on Saturday, their day off on that particular weekend. Meg asked him if he didn’t feel tempted to cheat, after all, it was a matter of having the diploma or not, a rather big deal, and he was given a week to send the papers back, so he might have gone to the library, or use his own notes, or ask someone for help, there were basically dozens of options he could have helped himself while writing the exam. Dan honestly said he wouldn’t feel good if he acted that way, that it was a matter of concluding, of finishing, the course and he wanted to see how much he had actually learnt. He wanted to wrap thing up in an honest way.
Saturday came and Dan locked himself up in his room, opened the test and spent the next four hours answering the questions. It was pretty difficult, quite thorough, but as he promised himself, he did not seek any help, he was relying only on his hard and systematic work, on the knowledge he gained during that past year. He checked everything twice, and put the test into the envelope and sent it. When he did not receive any reply within two weeks, he called EDUCATIO’s office. The secretary said the manager wasn’t available that he was on a leave. Dan asked when he would be coming back, and she replied she wasn’t sure, but asked him to call upcoming week. Dan got a bit upset, after all he was waiting for the test’s results and, hopefully, the diploma he was working on (and paying for) during the past twelve months, but agreed on calling later.
After ten days, he called again, this time the manager himself picked up. Dan asked him about the test results and the owner told him he passed with flying colors, that it was one of the best results they had had in the company’s history. Dan was overjoyed and asked when to expect his diploma to arrive. The manager promised him that he would have it within a week.
Dan and Meg went camping for a weekend to celebrate his results and spent two nights by the lake thinking about how their lives were going to change now. They speculated on the job opportunities that were now ahead of him, they were talking about the house they were going to buy, about places they would visit during summer holidays. Dan thought it was a good opportunity to propose to Meg, but decided to wait until their lives did actually change.
The diploma never arrived in his mailbox.
II
When ten days had passed and there was still no sign of his certificate, he called the company again, but each time he tried to contact EDUCATIO, the line was constantly busy. Dan started having very bad feelings about all of it and finally, decided to go to Liverpool to speak to the manager face to face.
He wasn’t even sure if he was truly surprised when he discovered there was nothing to indicate the correspondent course company had ever had an office in the building. Dan had had a nasty hunch for a while now, that everything might turn out exactly like this. He asked around, visited some of the shops and offices located in the building, asked each of them about the EDUCATIO. Nobody had heard of it. The closest he came was discovering the post o
ffice that EDUCATIO had the mailbox at. But, he was unable to get information about its owner, such data couldn’t have been given without a reason and certainly not to everyone that asked.
He thought he would inform the police about it, but what would he say, exactly? Whoever he signed the contract with (One copy! There was only one copy of the contract that had the signature of the manager he’d spoken with. Dan had dutifully sent it back with his signature and the first check at the beginning of the course. He never thought to make an extra copy of it, he was literally that gullible. Some fancy Mr. Manager he’d make!) No, he had kept his word, carried out his part of the deal – Dan regularly received the materials to study from, the only glitch was the diploma. Well, the lack of one. But since EDUCATIO never existed, they had no power or authority to print, sign and award any certifications anyway. Besides, their paper wouldn’t matter much anyway, fictional company as it was.
Dan was devastated.
He returned home to his room in his parent’s house and thought that all the money he had spent on the course. Money that he could have used for renting an apartment he could have been sharing with Meg. How naive he was, he literally couldn’t understand that he’d been fooled so easily.
Dan told Meg everything, she hugged him hard and told him that what mattered most was that he had learned so much during the past year and that the knowledge itself was his biggest asset. He knew she was trying to cheer him up, but it didn’t work too well. The bitter taste of being deceived, cheated, the wasting of an entire year and all of the shattered dreams and plans, was omnipresent in his mouth. He felt like a total fool.