Story: The Program… Julie Andrijeski

Isn’t it a lovely day?

theprogram 

 

 

 

The Program

Julie Andrijeski

 

 

The guy couldn’t possibly be hitting on me.

 

I was barely standing. The paper coffee cup in my hand was uncomfortably hot, but I didn’t stop clenching it. I watched the man stare. His grayish-long hair hung in ragged, uneven curtains around a narrow, canine-like face. He didn’t look old. His eyes had that red-rimmed look that came of too much coffee with sugar and maybe a bag of mostly chemical cheese-flavored snacks in front of hotel pay-per-view instead of plates filled with anything roughly resembling food. His suit looked like he’d slept in it, curled up in a plastic seat at the airport terminal, or maybe a bus station, but one of the nicer ones.

 

Still, something compelled my feet to move. They brought me closer to the corner where he stood. A second later, I attained the near-physical periphery of the invisible circle of avoidance that he emanated by the livid intensity of his presence; it kept off every other conference attendee and even hotel housekeeping, which didn’t dare touch his uniform stack of plastic drink cups or tiny plates dotted with bites of carbohydrate snacks and half-eaten chunks of previously frozen fruit. Bent plastic spoons littered the gold carpet by his feet. I reached the edge of this circle, then stopped, clutching my own complimentary conference name-brand coffee, conscious suddenly of the stupidity of the name badge I wore, the complete inanity of the chipper purple writing of my name, the way it hung with falsetto cheeriness from the tired lapel of my beige suit.

 

I used to laugh at the color beige. I scoffed at it. Now I had become its bitch.

 

Even having come so far, my cowardice reared back into ugly existence. I hid in the panacea of polite emptiness. “Hi. I’m from the blah blah blah…” I recited my title and company as if it were a death sentence. I no longer had to think to speak; that necessity had died years ago. It was like breathing; I had to think to stop.

 

The man’s eye twitched. His lips quivered, a effort-laden attempt to smile that I had to fight not to cut short. A part of me wanted to clap my hand over his mouth, tell him, “Shhh.”

 

He must have seen something in my eyes. I saw his shoulders relax, a half-frenetic tick that shook dandruff off his lapel. Then he spoke, and his words stunned me briefly.

 

“So what do you think of The Program?” he said.

 

I glanced back over my shoulder, at nothing at all. I may have wondered briefly if he was talking to someone else, to people who weren’t there. Then I realized he wasn’t. I felt something in me sag. My lips opened and closed – up, down – like breath, or maybe really boring sex.

 

“It’s okay,” I said. I grew even more conscious of the name tag, and now also of the flat, automaton quality of my voice, the fact that my shoes were just the right height to make my suit look a little more formal without being high enough to call attention to my sexuality. I wanted to grab the front of his shirt, scream at him, beat his hollow chest with my fists.

 

“It’s fine,” I continued, hating my voice more and more. “I can use some of this stuff at work…”

 

His hard, dark eyes fixed on mine.

 

I smiled at him, conscious of how utterly little personality I exuded. He leaned closer, his voice soft, almost sensual, if a little frightened.

 

“Have you noticed?” he said. “Have you?”

 

I glanced behind me once more, this time afraid one of my colleagues might be nearby, that they might have noticed what I was doing. My boss looked at me sometimes, head cocked, her eyes askance, puzzled, as if I were a business project that didn’t quite add up, didn’t quite follow the right number of process steps. My eyes focused. No one I knew stood nearby. A woman in a tan suit laughed with pink lip-sticked lips, almost skin-colored but enough there that no one could accuse her of wearing no makeup at all. The doctor or salesman or pharmacy rep or CEO she laughed with or at smiled, rocking on his heels. His eyes focused on her chest, although it was wrapped in the usual faux-silk covering. No one would call her a whore.

 

“No,” I said, my voice faint.

 

“Look at their eyes. Look at them!”

 

“Why?”

 

“Gone.”

 

“Gone?”

 

“Well. Leaving.”

 

“Leaving?” I glanced back, hating the hope I could hear in my voice. “Leaving, you said?”

 

“Yes.” His dark eyes evaded mine. “Leaving. Every time they say it, any of it…they leave.”

 

“Say what?”

 

“Those things. You know.” My jaw fell slack. I could fall back on the usual excuse; I could tell myself he was crazy, or that I was, for listening to him. I could believe he was, with the duller parts of my mind. DSM classification 22.560-b – crazy as a woodhouse snake, or maybe a blind porcupine with a bladder problem. But something lived in the cracks nestled inside his lack of words. I glanced up when a small group of conference attendees walked by, chatting about the lecture we’d heard on the importance of maximizing your forward momentum in order to attain excellence in execution.

 

“Which was me,” the man said smugly.

 

I tried to fit that into my last thought. It wouldn’t.

 

“You?” I said, stupidly.

 

“Once, yes. It was me. Oh boy. Was it.”

 

“Really?”

 

“Yes.” He sniffed. “Of course.”

 

I wondered briefly if we were in the same conversation. Still, most of it tracked, which made me wonder again whether I was wearing gum behind her ear, or just a Bluetooth. I listened to a group of women as they passed.

 

“…I can see it now. I’m one of those ‘Death-spreaders,’ just like he how he said,” one said, her voice bright, like confessional television bright, holding an evangelical awe of colored squares and numbered lines with thick arrows, which the conference brochures supplied in plenty, too many, enough to bring a half-stifled hallelujah if the lemonade were ever spiked with enough of those complimentary after-lunch mints. Saccharin ran down the back of my gums, that sick taste like when you did blow in a bathroom stall at four am (not that I would know that, personally, I mean, I am a professional, okay so there was that time in grad school but really, I hadn’t done enough to know much…okay so I’d read books, steampunk stuff, those too cool for school kind of books that reminded all of us of a fictitious or even slightly-truthful past when we passed out at raves or visited ex-boyfriends in jail or had sex with a stripper named Candy and her gun-toting, coke snorting boyfriend and actually liked the stripper more…like that was real rebellion, or drugs were preparing us for anything other than what I was doing right now, with all these people in beige…). The woman was still talking.

 

“…I’m going to ask Steve tomorrow about implementing the Six Steps to Light so we can create a Clean Breathing Space around our task force on financial planning…”

 

I vomited a little in my mouth.

 

Her companions nodded. I could see another woman tagging along like one of those weiner dogs that had long ceased to remotely resemble its wolf-like descendants, mentally taking notes, thinking she should have been the one to say that, to think of some practical expression to execute the Path to Everlasting Light and Glory, unless that was the bible so it didn’t really belong here, even if the workshop founder did lead them in at least one prayer at the start of all this?

 

Note to self, check religious affiliation.

 

I wondered why the man had found me with his eyes, why he’d stared at me, as if I were the only one visible to him in the crowd. I wondered if any of the rest could see what he saw, if they could see me at all anymore, or only looked at me as a flat surface of glass, seeking themselves, craning around me as an annoying distraction. If so, they did not seek a self to showcase, but one that lacked flaws. They sought the perfection of safety, a personage that was safe, normal. They wanted to be extraordinary within dullness, not realizing that their dullness would bury the extraordinary like a cloud of flies on the bloated corpse of a baby calf whom its mother has abandoned.

 

I watched them pass. Not one looked into our no-touch, no-see corner…a corner likely populated at every conference but easy to walk by unless one was blinking and quaffing name brand coffee from ad-strewn paper cups at just the right moment in the mid-morning conference break, one bleary eye squinted on the floral prints and glass chandeliers above the hotel ballroom seating chart, head tilted at just the right angle…

 

“He started off with a personal anecdote, didn’t he?”

 

I turned my head. The man’s voice was smug.

 

“Didn’t he?”

 

I stared up at the podium, worried suddenly about the eggs I’d eaten off the morning buffet. Had they really been as orange as the heat lamps made them appear? I stared at the man, feeling lost suddenly, vulnerable, almost childlike…a deer in a tunnel of white light, wondering vaguely if it could jump or if it would only find itself impaled on the cow-catcher jutting out from its nose, not quite committed to running, or even closing its eyes…

 

“…Well, I’m obviously a 4BA7,” a suited man boasted as he passed, slurping at a cup identical to hers and puffing out his chest. His voice boomed louder, hoping to gain additional listeners. “I have a tendency to be really structured about planning. And that story he told about the manager who always asks those questions? That was me.” He gave a self-depreciating laugh. “That was soooo me! Don’t you think, Laura?”

 

A woman in a pink suit that looked beige giggled.

 

The dog-faced man was closer to me now, or perhaps I to him. He clutched my forearm suddenly, with talon-like fingers, breathing in shallow, excited breaths, making the hairs stand up like obedient little soldiers.

 

“See,” he breathed. “There’s always a system. They tell you who you are. Flatter you. You’re someone. You’re a 4AB7-Q! That’s what you are…” He fought to breathe, as if gripped in an intense passion. His teeth seemed to lengthen, filling his mouth, sharp and stained with coffee. He had the worst coffee breath I’d ever smelled, enough to give me nightmares of those creepy yellow creatures in the foot fungus commercials, but I didn’t move away, couldn’t. Instead I took a sip of coffee myself, conscious of the look of vapid, polite interested disinterest plastered on my face. I took a half-step deeper into his circle, a tiny, suppressed rebellion, a Molotov cocktail made in an emptied container of complimentary bottled water that had once sat in an ice-filled plastic bin and tasted worse than anything that came from the tap, except maybe in Albuquerque.

 

“What do they want?” I ventured.

 

“What does everyone want?” he said. “They want to eat your brains.” He made a slurping noise, holding his hands about head-width apart, as if drinking a mai-tai in a pineapple shell.

 

“My brains?” I stared. “Like a zombie thing.”

 

He paused on the question. “No,” he said finally. “But that’s an interesting hypothesis.”

 

“So what then?” I said. “What kind of-”

 

“You’re asking the wrong questions.” He leaned nearer to me, licking his thin lips like a dog smelling meat. “I’m getting closer,” he said. “I’ll bring one back for you, next time.” He pressed a finger meaningfully against his nose. “You know. I know. I can tell. I’ve been to hundreds of these things…and you know.” He nodded emphatically. “Yes. You know. You might not know until later…but you do. I can smell it.”

 

I felt flattered, but also a little sick.

 

A polite tone issued from the PA system over the room. I blinked, staring at the notice board on the easel near the door to the Evergreen ballroom, wondering vaguely if they still had any of those little packages of salt-free peanuts.

 

“The Six Standards of Impactful Leadership for Winners?” I read doubtfully.

 

“No,” he said, as if reading my thoughts. “All of them.”

 

“All of them?” My eyes widened, cracking through a coat of carefully applied make-up (just a touch so that no one would think I was a lesbian, but not so much that I would look all that inviting or available).

 

God, why hadn’t someone just run me over?

 

“All of them?” I repeated.

 

The implications hit me slowly.

 

“All of them,” he said. His eyes held a predatory gleam. “I’ve got things. Souvenirs.”

 

“Like, keychains?” I said. “Free pens?”

 

He didn’t bother to answer that.

 

“But there are so many-” I began. My mind began to open, churning in recycled nausea.

 

“I missed one in Wichita,” he said, apologetic.

 

“All of them?” I stressed the word, sure I had misunderstood. My mind tried to calculate, boggled, and shut down before it might have warmed into something more gravy-like. “Are you like…Santa Claus?”

“Watch the ones who tell you it’s not a program,” he said, leaning by my ear. His voice was soft, crafty. “Watch those who tell you they are trying to do something complex simpler, or something simpler in the right order…watch the ones who say they can see through the excesses of the rest, who promise to make your workplace meaningful, like you can teach a hog to enjoy being led into the gun tents…” His voice dropped so low I had to lean into his thin lips.

 

“Those ones are closer,” he murmured. “They’re closer to where they keep the brains…you’ll see.”

 

While I was still standing there, gaping blankly as the attendees slowly regained their seats, the man disappeared. When I looked down next, all I held was a free pen.

 

I took a sip of coffee, then wandered back to my seat.

 

—

 

Julie has been writing since she was about seven, when most of her characters tended to be angry dogs with magical powers due to the overabundance of Jack London and Lewis Carol in her personal library. Since then, she has worked as a waitress, a teacher, a professional cow-milker and a business consultant for healthcare companies. She is currently working on her first graphic novel, “Rook,” and a few screenplays, along with the occasional short story. For recreation, she likes crashing self-help conventions and attempting to train her cantankerous pet rabbit to fetch small shiny objects. She also likes horses and long walks on the beach, as well as the occasional sprawl on the couch.