Ad Nomad

by Eric Jay Sonnenschein

  He had been sure Karen was against him but now she deprived him of this certainty. She seemed less an adversary than an observer speculating on outcomes. Dane did not understand how a person could appreciate him and want him gone at the same time. In Karen’s view, Dane’s UNIHEALTH experience followed a predictable arc. Yet he walked away from her, confused and dissatisfied.

  24. NO GOOD BYES

  In his final weeks at UNIHEALTH there were two major events. Dr. Mooney sent an email:

  It is with mixed feelings that I must announce my retirement. I will still consult and come to the office on occasion. I love the people at UNIHEALTH (of course platonically, ladies…no sexual harassment intended!) and I will miss you all.

  Everyone was sad to learn Dr. Mooney’s news since it was widely believed his retirement would be so gradual as to be imperceptible. For a few days Dr. Mooney disappeared. This prompted little concern since he had other clients. Then, one morning in the men’s room, Zach Trench told Dane that the venerable Dr. Mooney had been found unconscious in a stall with his pants around his ankles and his hand gripping his penis. He had suffered a stroke.

  The UNIHEALTH managers protected their icons. They never disclosed the details of Dr. Mooney’s illness to the largely female staff, who adored Dr. Mooney like a lovable uncle. It would have besmirched his image and put every male employee under a cloud of perversion.

  Dane recalled the last time he saw Dr. Mooney. It was the day he tendered his resignation. Dr. Mooney stopped by his cubicle to tell him that testosterone converted to estrogen in certain mice, a phenomenon which baffled macho scientists. This apparently useless information made little impact on Dane, caught up as he was in his new freedom. Yet, in retrospect, he pondered whether Dr. Mooney’s story of the hormone-switching mice was a parable with a profound life message. If so, what could it be? That virility was impermanent? That hormones could not be trusted?

  When Dr. Mooney heard Dane was leaving, he handed him his card.

  “Maybe you can use me in your new agency,” he said.

  Dane found it strange that Dr. Mooney solicited business at the point of retiring. Retirement might not have been his idea. Perhaps he masturbated in the men’s room to lift his spirits.

  In retrospect, Dane wondered if Dr. Mooney’s report on transhormone mice was a cry for help. “Of course, how could I be so obtuse?” Dane chastised himself for his insensitivity until he recalled a more damning detail. When they first met, Dr. Mooney told Dane he was taking a free supply of STRIDALL, due in part to Dane’s superb direct mail. Could STRIDALL, whose mode of action was unknown, have triggered the stroke?

  Dane researched the side effects of STRIDALL in the prescribing information. There it was under “Adverse Events:” a 5% occurrence of cerebral ischemia.”

  “I made him sick!” Dane told Becky that evening. “If only my writing weren’t so persuasive.”

  “Your writing didn’t give the man a stroke. He’s seventy years old. You don’t know what he ate or his genetic makeup,” Becky said. “For all you know he ate steak and cheeseburgers every night.”

  “He did eat a lot of Danishes,” Dane reflected before he was buffeted by another wave of guilt. “No, it’s not that easy. Don’t you see? I almost killed a man with my writing! A good man.”

  “It was a free sample. Maybe he didn’t take it correctly. Maybe he stopped taking it. You don’t know.”

  This suggestion stopped Dane’s hysterical self-incrimination long enough for him to think. Dr. Mooney had only a month’s supply of STRIDALL. By now he would have surely run out, well before his stroke occurred. If he was still taking STRIDALL then he and his doctor, not Dane, were to blame.

  It rained on the day after Dane heard about Dr. Mooney’s stroke. He brought a chocolate mousse cake to UNIHEALTH in his honor. All morning, Dane stopped by the kitchen to see how the cake was doing. After an hour, only a quarter of the cake had been eaten. Dane was demoralized. Even his generosity failed. Later he passed the kitchen and noted that only a quarter of the mousse cake remained. Dane was gratified. He might have failed as a writer at UNIHEALTH but his desserts were a success.

  25. LAST WRONGS

  Dane had only a few days left when another tragedy befell the UNIHEALTH family. Toby Bowles, a promising junior account executive, was found dead on her kitchen floor.

  Toby had become a UNIHEALTH legend, not merely for her unsurpassed work ethic but for her extraordinary effort to lose weight. In the course of one miraculous year, Toby worked her way up at UNIHEALTH from office assistant to traffic manager to junior account executive and down from 300 lbs to a svelte 150. In the process, Toby was involved in a romance that made all UNIHEALTH employees feel warm and hopeful. She fell in love with Vibert, the mailroom manager, and they were engaged to be married.

  Dane knew the story of Toby and Vibert from hearsay, but he never witnessed their mutual fondness bud under fluorescent lights during late night projects and blossom into passion at the company Christmas party. There, at the Parsippany Hilton, Toby and Vibert crashed a wedding reception in the hotel’s other banquet hall and helped themselves to that party’s superior refreshments. When their trespass was discovered and they were pursued by security guards, they dashed across the lobby and bolted from the hotel, carefully holding their heaping platters before them, laughing and exulting in their mischief.

  Tragically, this was the last carefree moment the lovers shared.

  Soon after this caper of gourmandizing affection, Toby made a life-changing choice. She underwent a lap band procedure because she wanted to lose weight “to be pretty for Vibert.” She called the lap band, a “wedding band inside” that bonded her forever to her man. Four months later, her mother found her on the kitchen floor of the Bayonne home they shared. Toby had a thoracic aneurism and died without regaining consciousness.

  All UNIHEALTH employees convened in the atrium the day after Toby died. It was Dane’s penultimate day and the sky was a shroud covering the atrium skylight. Many colleagues came forward to recall how much Toby grew as a person in the short time they knew her, how she accepted responsibilities and met every challenge.

  “She was always the last to leave,” Sylvia Befunkewicz said. “And you know if I say so it must be true.”

  Others recounted that Toby was just hitting her stride and her love of Vibert was the final piece in her personal puzzle. Van trips to Toby’s wake were planned.

  Dane had no clear interest in attending Toby’s wake. He never met the deceased. He had no chance to chat with her, to banter, to share pithy insights and personal dreams. Anyway, Dane was leaving the next day and aimed for an inconspicuous departure.

  What incited Dane to crash the wake of a stranger? Even as he separated from UNIHEALTH, Dane needed to belong. Not knowing Toby did not prevent him from mourning her. Rather, it intensified his sense of loss. Toby was all that Dane was not—devoted to her job and agency. Toby’s entire life transpired at UNIHEALTH. Dane, by contrast, held on at UNIHEALTH for two months and left when it became unbearable. In Toby, Dane saw his tragic potential and experienced vicariously the belonging he missed. She was the UNIHEALTH employee in everyone. By paying his respects to her, Dane honored all pharma workers with no way out and mitigated his guilt for leaving the agency in a car rather than a box.

  Dane drove to the Jersey City funeral home so he could come and go as he pleased and take a private tour into his past. Years before, Dane had taught at the state university in Jersey City. He had once admired the old Gothic houses of clapboard and dark red brick, with their steep slate roofs, turrets and dormer windows, and imagined he could live in their obscure splendor. Now in the late afternoon rain, the gorgeous elements looked like undigested architecture, remote and miserable, foreshadowing the grim event to which he was an uninvited guest.

  The mortuary had a black, brick façade. Its awning was suspended over the sidewalk, a jet shroud held aloft by gold posts. “Sitwell and Sons Funeral Home” was inscribed in
gold Gothic letters with a ghoulish dignity. Dane entered with others in diffident respect. He confronted three concurrent mysteries—death, the deceased and his motive for coming. Would he be vilified as an emotional vulture gorging on the sorrow of grieving kin and colleagues?

  As Dane trudged into the viewing room, he pretended this was only a community gathering. He ignored the sullen drapes, woodpaneled walls and floral aerosol. The open casket rested on a raised bier before a hearth, drawing visitors to the void. Dane wondered if the fireplace was a homey touch or multitasked as a minicrematorium. Dane had been to one viewing in his life. As the UNIHEALTH contingent filed past the open casket, Dane followed the other mourners and lowered his eyes.

  Suddenly, Toby lay under his down-turned eyes, her wide, stiff body in a blue dress filling space but seemingly weightless on black velvet. Toby’s freckled face was faithful to the enlarged photograph in the atrium but Dane was meeting her for the first time. Meeting her?

  The embalming fluid, masked by powders and pomades, must have shot to his head. As he struggled to connect with Toby’s corpse, Dane was conflicted by two infinite distances—death and the impossibility of knowing a departed stranger.

  He felt like a registered imposter, mistrusted and despised. His throat throbbed against his collar. He could barely swallow or breathe. His soon-to-be-former colleagues whispered their farewells to Toby. Dane overheard someone confide that she never looked better. It seemed irrelevant, even cruel, but they knew her and could be pardoned for saying the wrong things. Dane had no words and nowhere to find them. He agonized over what to say to Toby’s corpse and wondered if her soul could hear. Was small talk permissible? Or should he tell her lifeless body that he was using her death to bond with the living and to experience by proxy the belonging her life epitomized? Would someone overhear his confession and berate him for it? He knew nothing of eschatology but dreaded the impact a false word might have on the departed and on himself.

  “I’m sorry I never met you,” Dane muttered to dead Toby. “I’m sorry you died trying to make somebody happy because now they’re sadder than ever. But you’re lucky because people cared about you. You belonged.”

  Suddenly, dead Toby’s eyes opened. She glared at Dane and said, “Lucky? I’m dead! I didn’t think I could feel worse, but congratulations! You’ve done it. Now get out!”

  Dane lurched backward. After the shock of being denounced by a corpse, mortification set in. Did anyone hear Toby’s outcry? Was he insane? Clearly his stiff-side manner could be improved. Dane glanced furtively at other mourners for a hint that they had witnessed the miraculous rigor mortis. The mourners stared at Dane with disapproval for his pathological immaturity. Bevaqua was impeccably elegiac, as polished here as in the agency boardroom. His bulbous eyes issued Dane a solemn reproach, “Suck it up—with dignity.”

  Although no one acknowledged Dane’s presence, he felt surrounded by appropriate people, trapped by their gravity and his own awkwardness. He could not remain among these strangers but was unable to leave. Then he noticed Vibert seated on a chair, staring at the casket, fingers covering his face. Losing Toby was a vicious blow to the mailroom manager. She would have helped him raise his teenage daughter and they might have started a family together. Now he was condemned to manage the mailroom without the woman he loved. Dane crouched by the bereaving boyfriend and said, “I’m sorry for your loss.”

  Vibert’s eyes were red, despairing but peaceful. “Thank you. I’m sorry, too.”

  Dane patted Vibert’s shoulder and left. Despite himself, he had stumbled on the right thing to say.

  The UNIHEALTH office was nearly vacant when he returned. He erased all traces of himself from his computer and set his papers in right angles on the desk for a neat final impression. His departure went unnoticed.

  Crossing the parking lot for one last time, Dane marveled at the UNIHEALTH building of glass and concrete in the middle of nowhere. Was it true he had worked here for two months?

  Driving in the rain, Dane summarized his UNIHEALTH experience by counting the events between his hire and resignation. It was like looking for patterns in raindrops before the wipers scattered them. His reeling finances had stabilized but his new job in Connecticut would take him even farther from home. He was exhausted and anxious, and still had a dull ache in his groin. Was this how discharged patients felt after a traumatic event?

  AD NOMAD 5

  SUPERVISORY WARNING

  Case 5-A

  ROAD WORRIER & CAKE CRUSADER

  1. THE ROAD TO WINTON

  Dane approached his new job at Mentos Advertising (“Minds Marketing Medicine”) with a stoic calculation: he needed the check more than he hated the trek. Each morning started with certain failure. To arrive at work on time, he needed to cover the 41 miles between New York and Winton in under an hour, but Winton was unreachable in less than 70 minutes.

  The commute wrecked Dane’s faith in maps. Rand McNally drew Route 95 as a wide-bodied anaconda, yet Dane knew it was more annelid than snake—multiple segments stitched into one absorbent traffic organism that sucked hope out of motorists.

  In two dimensions, Route 95 appeared direct, even accommodating, but it was chaos in concrete—mangled and treacherous from wheels and weather. Cruising in one stretch, Dane wallowed in congestion in the next. As exhausts wafted to his windshield, he fumed at the dashboard clock. An inch between Winton and New York in the atlas might as easily have marked the distance between Earth and Mars.

  Other features of his morning routine compounded his agony. Each morning he drove Iris to school six miles south, then reversed direction, returning to his original starting point at 8:10 AM, where traffic merged from three states. This was where his workday began.

  Each leg of the trip had a unique character. When the warped, narrow streets south of his neighborhood were vacant, they were his launching pad. He defied city gravity by making every light, sped across a bridge over a crooked creek called Spuyten Duyvil, accelerated on a ramp and careened around a blind curve under an overpass, before injecting his car into the clogged interstate artery. The gouged and glutted Cross Bronx Expressway—phlegmatic as a subway—then widened to the broad New England Throughway athwart lower Westchester and Connecticut’s Gold Coast.

  After corporate Stamford’s lane closures, miles of sun-beaten straightaway ensued, concluded by a last, agonizing lap on a local Winton road, where black and white squad cars patrolled like fuelinjected orcas. Dane could never appreciate the colonial charm of Winton High School with its white cupola or other architectural gems on the scenic route because his vision was impaired by a tardy man’s remorse.

  2. THE CAKED CRUSADER

  Self-examination was a painful side effect of Dane’s commute. As he struggled with traffic, he reviled himself.

  “Why can’t you find work in your area code?” he asked rhetorically. “It was 36 miles to UNIHEALTH; now it’s 41 miles to Mentos! Ambitious people go the extra mile, but you’re going five extra miles!” he ranted. “That’s commitment you can be committed for…Hey, I like that headline.”

  “I must have committed a crime in another life,” he mused. “Or maybe I was a centipede and this is an improvement.” Gradually Dane’s thinking moved from metaphysical to political. “It’s a conspiracy!” he raved. “But who’s behind it? I bet Goldfarb would know!”

  Even when he maneuvered his 4-cylinder Toyota like a stock car, Dane rarely made it to Mentos before 9:15. He went through the glass doors like an outcast. At Mentos, unlike New York agencies, people worked 9-to-5, but Dane could not benefit from a typical work day.

  As a new employee, his lateness already showed signs of being chronic, which went unmentioned, but not unremarked. His boss, Dick Spilkus, warned that Connecticut people were uptight like New Yorkers, only more genteel.

  Dane was stung by the rebuke. He knew this was no way to start a job, especially not as a supervisor. People reported to him! Was he setting a good example?

 
; However, if nothing else, advertising taught him this: you could not prevent people from judging you but you could influence their judgment. If his tardiness was a given, he must give the people of Mentos something else to talk about. A public relations move was in order. The one he made was from his last job.

  “Let them eat cake!” Dane thought.

  Rain Bread had made Dr. Mooney an icon, so Dane introduced it to Mentos. Since Dane’s image needed urgent care he could not wait for rain; he brought coffee cake every morning from a neighborhood bakery and placed the baked offering on the kitchen counter. John, a retired cousin of the agency owner, who did odd jobs including brewing coffee, showed Dane the plates and utensils. Staff employees moseyed in. “You brought cake?” a colleague exclaimed. “How lovely! Does it have processed sugar? Too bad! I can’t eat it. But it’s so sweet of you!”

  The gift of cake was a crude public relations gesture, yet it communicated multiple messages. It told the Mentos staff that Dane was not a colleague so much as a guest from afar, who had the good manners not to visit empty-handed and thus deserved their consideration. Cakesmanship, as Dane coined his action, also provided an escuse for his lateness. People might think, “He stood in line at a bakery to buy this cake,” thus transforming his truancy to self-sacrifice.

  It did not take long for Dane to idealize his political tactic into a nobler concept. He viewed himself as a missionary, bearing urban sweets to distant burbs—a pompous presumption since it was Connecticut, not some far-flung rain forest. The flaw Dane never saw in his plan was that unprompted generosity might be seen as bizarre rather than righteous.

  Glucose Diplomacy, as Dane labeled his policy, was overall a shrewd preemptive strike at his colleagues’ skepticism. As staid locals, they probably wondered why Dane drove so far for a job. Was he damaged goods? But as long as Dane was sating their collective sweet tooth, they did not insist on an answer.