Nocturnal Emissions

by Jeffrey Thomas

  This scene of lifelessness began to fade away, as another image began to fade in. That image appeared to be a gigantic eye, filling the screen behind the grinning dancer. I started to recoil. I started to voice an inarticulate cry. Before the transition could become complete, however, and the colossal eye come into focus, Hee pointed my remote again and returned me to the station I had been tuned to before her arrival. “That reminds me,” she said, rising to her pretty bare feet and brushing off the seat of her tight little shorts. “Time for my med. My stupid mother finally got some for me—no thanks to you. You got something I can drink?”

  From a pocket of her shorts she produced a little green pill with an eye imprinted on it, which she held up for me to see. Insanolin. I saw heaps, mountains, landslides of these lime green pills every day at Nepenthe Pharmaceuticals, my place of work.

  #8: Vook

  Bobby Vook was a top executive of the Nepenthe Pharmaceuticals company, though I could never remember his precise designation (I can barely keep track of the titles of the people directly above me, lately exotically renamed

  “process facilitators,” “coaches” and the like instead of supervisors and team leaders). Nepenthe has facilities in numerous countries, and its headquarters is overseas, but I guess Vook was in charge of operations here in this country.

  Whatever the case, for us Bobby Vook was the most visible of the Nepenthe top brass, their vocal instrument.

  A year ago, all three shifts from my plant, and everyone from our nearby sister Research and Development facility, were bussed to a hotel with a large convention hall. In addition to sacrificing a day of production, the company treated us to a lunch buffet and gave us all sorts of little gifts like pens and fridge magnets with the company logo, just to reassure us that—despite rumors that Nepenthe was suffering losses—the company still had plenty of cash to squander.

  Bobby Vook was to give a presentation, to reassure us all about two things. One was those scary rumors of Nepenthe being in decline, largely due to the fact that several of the drugs we had developed some years back were soon to lose their exclusive patents, so that any rival company would be free to replicate their formulas. No doubt Vook would try to bolster our spirits with talk of new formulas that were in the “pipeline,” to replace the ones that were expiring. The other concern was allegations that Nepenthe—through the specific ministrations of Bobby Vook, it was claimed—had compromised its ethics in this country, by fraudulently inflating what is called the Average Wholesale Price of their drug products. Since this price represented the reimbursements Nepenthe received for drugs prescribed to the elderly and poor, as covered by our country’s Infirmaid program, Vook’s accusers claimed he was cheating taxpayers out of millions.

  All I knew was that we thought his name was odd. At work it had taken on any number of meanings, none of them good. If a machine was malfunctioning, my coworker Albert might exclaim, “What the Vook?” Or my coworker Tom might jokingly curse me, “Vook you!” This was quite widespread. How could you even judge a person’s country of origin from such a name? It seemed more like the name one might give to a product; maybe not one of our drugs, but a laundry soap or soft drink.

  We filed into the rows of seats for the presentation, taking note of the stage with its elaborate theatrical lighting, a large screen serving as its backdrop. Upon this screen was projected a slide show of propaganda: the grinning faces of children whose lives had been touched by our fine concoctions and elixirs, researchers in lab coats who apparently worked with similar childish grins stamped on their faces all day long, such images interspersed with inspirational, alliterative slogans like PRIDE IN OUR PRODUCTS, CARE FOR

  OUR CUSTOMERS, DARE TO DIVERSIFY. This last sentiment pertained to Nepenthe’s commitment to diversity in its workforce. From what I could see, that translated into Nepenthe paying new workers the starting pay of eleven an hour in this country, five an hour in another country, three an hour in an even more remote and impoverished country, and so on. Now that’s what I call diversity.

  Below DARE TO DIVERSIFY these lines came sliding onto the screen:

  “From our many places of origin, we bring unique skills that combine to make us greater than the sum of our parts.” Which, implemented in the plant I worked at, I guess meant that someone from a country on the other side of the globe could teach us all a better way to slice the cellophane off a module of glass vials and load them onto a conveyor belt for filling. Maybe a different twist of the box cutter knife, indigenous to some distant land? A foreign but better method of peeling off that wrapping of cellophane?

  Ah, but now we were seated, the slide show stopped, and from somewhere in the wings an amplified voice announced, “Ladies and gentlemen…Bobby Vook!”

  There was the barest heartbeat in which we hesitated, before applauding loudly if not enthusiastically. I think we were all a little surprised, and even embarrassed, that this man should be introduced like a celebrity—a talk show host. But here he came striding out onto the stage now, Nepenthe’s very own celebrity, our very own infamous-of-late Bobby Vook. He was an unremarkable fellow: middle-aged, blandly good looking, with sandy hair and spectacles. He didn’t have that steely-eyed, hard-mouthed look of so many executives. He looked like he might even be pleasant to talk to. Before today I had never seen him in person, just in telecasts—either live or recorded—on the big TV screens in our cafeteria. (During our frequent meetings, but also, these cafeteria TVs ran Nepenthe programming nonstop to “entertain and educate”

  us while we ate, their booming sound drowning out our efforts at conversation and relaxation.) From those telecasts I knew that Vook eschewed expensive, sharp-lined business suits, instead favored sweaters over his shirt and tie. It was a human touch; this was what he was comfortable with, and it was no doubt calculated to make others comfortable with him. The down-to-earth, accessible, “Every Joe” Bobby Vook. Joe Vook, as it were.

  He wore a sweater, as usual, but this one a little more showy than what I had seen on the cafeteria screens. This sweater had wide vertical bands of alternating green and orange—the colors of the Nepenthe Pharmaceuticals logo, which now loomed on the screen behind him.

  Finished clipping a microphone to the collar of his sweater, this bland-looking executive looked up and out at us and said, “Ladies and gentleman…I’m Bobby Vook—and I ain’t no crook.”

  We were stunned. There was a moment of hesitation, as there had been before we applauded for him. And then, a sudden crash of laughter. We all laughed spontaneously, as one. The laughter rolled up and over the man on the stage like a wave. It was amazing to us, delightfully unanticipated, that this man whose name had become a joke to us would make a joke of his own name as well. It almost made him one of us. This irreverence, this self depredation, this head-on confrontation of the charges against him, in combination had a funny, profound effect on us. It was just wholly unexpected. We were used to tedious platitudes, lazy and insincere catchphrases, the trendy use of the word

  “robust” in every speech at every meeting (“robust line of products,” “robust growth,” “robust workforce,” etc.), the same propaganda that droned ceaselessly from the cafeteria TVs. Not this…this odd flash of humanity. Of fun.

  This quirky bit of originality. This guy Vook was suddenly more challenging to pin down than just in terms of the nationality of his name.

  Vook went on from there to defend himself, and Nepenthe, against those allegations of pricing fraud in regard to “critically important, life-sustaining medicine.” There would be “multi-district litigation,” Vook informed us, but he and Nepenthe’s foreign owners maintained that their pricing was fair and in court they would challenge the government’s “AWP reimbursement models,” hoping to win “a favorable civil resolution after a full investigation and negotiations with the multiple government agencies” involved.

  Whatever dry and typical terminology he threw at us now as he paced the stage, gazing out at us earnestly through his littl
e round specs, it didn’t matter.

  He had already won us over. These cheated taxpayers were with him in his struggle. How dare the government try to bring down our man Vook? The vocal instrument of the place that put food (and drugs) in our mouths, and the standup comedian who could make fun of himself just as readily as we made fun of him?

  When Bobby Vook wrapped up his speech that afternoon, we all burst into applause—and this time, without any hesitation. I remember seeing, even at a distance, the appreciative smile on Vook’s face. He had gotten more than he had expected that day, too. Our mutual surprise and gratification bonded us.

  Suddenly, we Nepenthe workers had hope again. We had needed something to reinvigorate us. Yes, the talk of new drugs in the pipeline had reassured us somewhat…but what had really stirred us was knowing that we were being led by a unique guy like Bobby Vook.

  There were plenty of meetings to follow in the months to come, both here and abroad, as this pricing issue played out in court, and concerning our patent and pipeline matters as well. Vook didn’t appear again in person in our area for quite a time, but he frequently appeared on our cafeteria TV screens, both at breaks and during telecast meetings. The first big telecast, following the meeting where we from the Gosston plant had seen him live, came about three months after that event. I remember we were all rapt, uncharacteristically quiet, as the telecast began. Normally we hated these ever-babbling mounted TVs, but this time we all watched with keen interest.

  Then a voice off screen announced, “Ladies and gentlemen…it’s Booooobby Vook!”

  Vook came jogging onto the stage, onto the screen, amid energetic applause from both the audience before him and the viewers here in Gosston.

  He had the same bland face and haircut, the same little specs, and again his sweater bore the colors of the Nepenthe logo—alternating vertical bands of orange and green—but whereas before the colors had been pastel, now the orange was fluorescent and the green was lime green. Vook already had his microphone clipped to his collar, and as soon as he hit the center of the stage he called out, grinning, “Hey, let me tell you something. I’m Bobby Vook—and I ain’t no goddamn crook!”

  We roared. Absolutely roared. Some people even shot up from their chairs and slapped their hands together fit to fracture the bones within. We had waited to see if it was just a fluke that first time…but now we knew it for certain: this guy was one of us! No politician, however committed to the little people, could have aroused a greater sense of connectivity with his con-stituents at that moment.

  Vook pointed into the camera and said, “Love you, Gosston!”

  We roared again, even more thunderously. After the meeting, some of us had hoarse voices all afternoon. Vook hadn’t forgotten that warm reception we had given him three months earlier. We didn’t feel like mere worker ants anymore; we felt proud of ourselves, of our work, and the products we produced.

  The latter two things, perhaps for the first time in our working careers.

  Vook went on to discuss the latest developments in the litigation issue, and Nepenthe’s continuing plans to contest it. There was reiteration and elaboration regarding our future products, currently awaiting completion of clinical testing and government approval. But all of this felt like the afterglow of a tremendous orgasm. We sat there with dumb smiles on our faces, as if over-medicated with the drugs we produced.

  At the conclusion of the telecast, Vook gave a bow, a wave, and jogged away off the stage again. The announcer shouted, “Ladies and gentlemen, let’s give a big hand for Bobby Vook!”

  And Vook trotted back onto the stage, for a repeat of his bow and wave.

  Three months later, and another telecast. We’d followed the doings of Bobby Vook in company email bulletins (and in the newspapers), but it wasn’t the same as seeing the man in his element: public speaking. He had always been an effective speaker, but the pressures brought upon him by this pricing fraud issue had forged a new man out of him, kicked him into a whole new course of evolution. Oh, he had already worked his way up to the topmost branches of Nepenthe’s many-armed tree, but this was something else. He had evolved this time not in rank, but in our perception of him; in his persona. And we eagerly awaited to see how this mutative process would continue.

  In the next telecast, we saw, and liked what we saw. After the giddy announcer had cried, “Ladies and gentlemen…get ready for Booooobby Vook!” the man came jogging out onto the stage, and we gathered in the Gosston plant’s cafeteria shared an excited grin like a bunch of kids anticipating a magic show. Vook’s sweater was black this time, but on the front of it was the Nepenthe Pharmaceuticals logo, woven into the fabric in illuminated green and orange filaments that must have been tied into a battery pack he wore on his belt. He had adopted a younger haircut, spiky and gelled, and his new eyeglasses had thick frames of green plastic. The lenses were tinted orange.

  “Hey, you know what?” he cried. “I’m Bobby Vook—and I ain’t no fucking crook!”

  Upon which followed the loudest, longest response yet. We all bolted to our feet instantly, and cheered. Vook could apparently see us, live, as we saw him, because he looked into the camera and made quieting gestures with his arms, and said, “People…thank you…thanks…hey, calm down there, Gosston, huh?”

  When at last the furor had died down, and the audience in front of him and we in Gosston had reclaimed our seats, Vook brought us up to date on the fraud scandal. A huge fine against Nepenthe was being proposed, in the millions, but Vook reassured us that Nepenthe was still in negotiations, still hoped to convince the government agencies concerned that the AWP for Nepenthe’s products had to be reevaluated and readjusted.

  The bad news was, one of the drugs in the pipeline had been rejected by the Food and Drug Regulation Board, after the years of research and development that went into any given product. Well, Vook said, that was the way it worked out sometimes, for every pharmaceutical manufacturer. “Back to the drawing board, huh?” he shrugged. “But hey, we still have other stuff further back in the pipeline, right? We’ve had our successes in the past, and we’ll have them again, my friends!”

  Three months later—nine months since that first exciting presentation for the Gosston plant—Bobby Vook arrived for a return visit. Again, we were to be bussed to the same hotel, the same convention hall, for another buffet and more pens and magnets. Whatever Bobby Vook had to tell us, though, was probably just more of what we’d been following in our email bulletins and lesser meetings with our supervisors—that is, process facilitators. Nepenthe had been fined nineteen million, which, as vast a sum as it was, had actually been negotiated down from a larger amount. Nepenthe was appealing the fine, but their chances of avoiding it looked slim. The good news, the bulletins told us, was that no criminal charges would be leveled at Bobby Vook directly, and he would continue in his role as the head of this nation’s operations while he considered “other exciting opportunities the company was offering him overseas.”

  Also, we expected Vook to formally introduce a new company philos-ophy, a radical new direction, that the bulletins and our bosses had already begun preparing us for. This was something called Lean, which involved a whole new approach to streamlining every process, from manufacturing our products to shipping them to the customer. Lean also encompassed a streamlining of our workforce, from the sales and administration offices right down to the machine operators. A retirement package would be offered to anyone who left voluntarily, after which the remaining number of cuts would be determined and implemented. These cuts would take place in every Nepenthe plant, but in Gosston’s case it meant we needed to lose four hundred people, voluntarily or not, half of whom would be let go in six months and the other half six months later.

  We filed to our seats. The hall lights dimmed, and the stage lights beamed dazzling rays with some orange and green spotlights thrown into the mix. The announcer gushed, “Ladies and gents…it’s the man of the hour, the man with the plan, the myth and the legend�
�Mr. Bobby Vook!”

  Vook pranced out onto the stage, into the most dazzling of the stage lights.

  He dazzled in and of himself. He wore an orange spandex jumpsuit, which did not compliment the paunch that his sweaters had always concealed, and on its chest was the logo for Nepenthe Pharmaceuticals—like a superhero’s signa-ture emblem. He wore rubber goggles with orange lenses, and little green lights circling those lenses. His head had been shaved bald, and waxed to a plastic gleam.

  “Hel-lo, Gosston!” he shouted. “I believe you may be familiar with me.

  The name is Bobby Vook…” A huge grin, dazzlingly white in the stage lights.

  “… wait for it…” he teased. His eyes, even behind the orange lenses, were agleam.

  “…and I ain’t no goddamn motherfucking CROOK!”

  There were no insects in Gosston’s Nepenthe Pharmaceuticals plant. We followed very aseptic procedures. You had to change from your street clothes, even change into factory shoes, upon your arrival. You wore a hair cover and a lab coat over your uniform, even outside the sterile cores where vials were filled and other critical procedures took place. We used plastic instead of wooden shipping pallets, lest insects nest in the latter. We had special lights spaced in the halls that lured and zapped flying insects, though these never seemed to make it through the various automatically locked doors and airlocks anyway. I’m sure the hotel wasn’t quite as stringent as we were in regard to insects, but I was reasonably sure there were no crickets to be found in its rooms, its restaurant, or the hall that served as its convention center. If there had been any crickets in that hotel, however, I’m sure we would have heard them chirping now. Because the room was dead silent. Not a single pair of hands had come together. There was not so much as a cough or a clearing of the throat. I’ve noticed in the past that if someone makes a sniffing sound in a quiet room, soon other people will need to sniff, too…a compulsion, as if they’ll starve for air if they don’t. There was not even a single sniff, however, as Bobby Vook stood there before us, all shiny orange in his bath of spot lights, little green lights twinkling around the lenses that now looked like big gaping skull sockets in his head. His grin a skull’s, now, too.