Big Winner

On March the Third, a Wednesday, amid the frenetic clickings and sotto voce titterings of the office floor, beneath the drop ceiling and its whack-a-mole of panels displaced or teetering, encased between chipped drywall and plywood dividers, and the far tighter boundaries of his own spiralling mind, Nick Cerny tried to remember why. Why he should pick up the phone and dial the next number. Why he should scroll down the list on his computer screen. Why he should even drag his gaze up from the gray emptiness of his desk to the static vacancy of that informational array. Why he took this job to begin with. But he knew why, and it was as simple as the cogito: a body needs money like a mind needs… stimulus.

But here Nick was, ensconced in the gilded tower of its antithesis. A monument to monotony. Telemarketing. A job so trivial, so importunate, so automatic, it has been supplanted by the machine for all but these chary few. For no one could gaze into the banal horrors of this dialing chamber with eyes un-askance.

He worked for pay, proof in situ of Franklin’s famous time-finance equivalence principle. It was not good pay, but he was, as the saying goes, in no position to be a chooser. Work = money = food = rent = shelter. Stuck on those ignoble tiers of Maslow’s brutal hierarchy.

As a student his favorite courses had been in philosophy, that crufty purposeless enterprise that promised no wealth and little clarity, trying to find the light in Sisyhpus’s eternal grunt.

If only he’d finished school. A frequent, derisive taunt which his uncooperative consciousness drew oft into ever-widening awareness. All that debt for nothing. He had been close of course, but registrarial logistics cinched down like a vice, like the searing walls of Poe’s Pendulum, mercilessly closing in, pushing him nearer, always nearer, to that monstrous Pit, and then… the fall.

No backstop, no savings, no marketable skills, deep in the red, he’d turned to telephony. Indeed the basest of all human pursuits. The term “soul crushing” too generously presumes the preexistence of said soul, for this industry is staffed by doddering husks, intoning their vocal crapola into the unrelenting ferocity of the general population. The bête noire of telephone's pre-digital epoch, telemarketing—or the “scoundrel’s succor” as Nick had dubbed it—survives only as a distended mass of agitation and disdain. No one is a friend, only a new stone on the great heap of ire and remorse. The job is a constant battering from the great breadth of human negativity. Hang ups, screamers, slammers, criers, chatters, crack downs, and—the worst of all (for the commonintant crushing guilt)—legitimate saps; all seep through the lines in electronic clarity.

The rule was to never deviate from the script. Never. Don’t take “no” for an answer, but Nick had heard much worse.

“You are a fucking piece of human shit, go get smashed up in a car wreck, and die slowly from internal bleeding.”

“That is very specific sir. I’m sure such a discerning character as yourself wouldn’t want to miss cashing in on the grand…” Click.

The best were masters of manipulation, natural tendencies like shame and self-awareness shoved deep down inside to rot like so many hopes and dreams.

The script was simple enough: “Congratulations big winner! You have been randomly selected to receive the ultimate jackpot of $20,000. To accept your grand prize…”

Once the rare sale was made, some shoddy product would be sent forth on the pretense that its purchase would confirm the transmission of the promised reward, a remittance that was far from forthcoming. Nick was agonized each time. There was no winning. He was a victim of both consistent vitriol and the scourge of self-flagellating guilt upon rare success.

A little black notebook sat on Nick’s desk, it was the only personal adornment he maintained besides a coffee cup bearing the words “What a day.” The notebook contained his philosophical ponderings, the remnant gasps of abstract thought he retained from the treasured electives that he’d managed to pack into the scheduling gaps of his abortive, stifling attempt at a business degree. He picked up the notebook and started to scrawl fiercely.

“Time and tide wait for no man, the dithering hours sliding by. Cast in the great swirling pall of human grayness, darkness, destitution.”

He was no poet, but sometimes poetry is all that will do. He went on.

“At least Sisyphus had a mountain, the heather, the stone, free from the constant grind of human vice, the tortured loathing of the soliciting caller.”

Nick leaned back in his chair and let forth a loud, heaving sigh.

Mark, the floor manager, shot up a quick glance from transfixion upon his Maxim magazine, a publication which Nick had been surprised to see remained in print. Fortunately for Nick, the wandering eyes promptly returned to the prurience of those pages.

But Nick’s vexation had reached an inflection point. As if in show of his determined willfulness, Nick hopped up from his seat and made for the door.

Outside, he darted across crumbling pavement to his vehicle, a rusted Camry from the bronze age, held together by gum and paper clips.

Despite the day’s chill, he opened the windows so he could feel the rush of wind, riding the waves of frustration.

Soon, he arrived at his destination, a liquor store on the corner of Haussmann, and parked behind the building.

The store was dimly lit and musty. Nick nodded absently at the clerk who was scrolling through his phone, then skidded down a narrow aisle to search for a familiar boon. Old bottles peeked out, coated with thick patinas of dust, between more popular brands. He ran his hand across bottles, feeling their neglect.

The front door tinkled so quietly he almost failed to hear it. A man walked in, hooded and scrawny, swimming in the massive hoodie that was wrapped around him. He seemed to shudder as Nick looked back at him, his pallid face a nest of patchy scruff, turning away from the glance like a hand pulled from flame. There was a weird tension, the tiny note of sourness that hints of the poison in the wine.

It came so suddenly Nick almost didn’t realize what was happening. There was some strange delay, like watching a movie of yourself on the security camera TV, tucked in the corner. Maybe he was watching himself, eyes floating like tennis balls before the vortex of pixels, dancing in the gray dampness of a luminous untethered sea. When he finally regained awareness, the room was full of the violent bursts of desperate shouting.

“Give me the fucking money! Put the money in the fucking bag!”

The hooded, pale-face man was holding his arm out menacingly, his hand clasped around cool metal. The handgun was pointed into the clerk’s face and danced only an inch away. They were trembling—the clerk, but also the gunman. The surges of fear knew no limitation. The air sparked with fear and desperation, creeping toward the high-octane vapors diffusing above the gas, the room primed for ignition.

Nick stood motionless across the room, watching the proceedings with an odd level of detachment. As if only just becoming aware of him, pale face turned on Nick and raised the weapon. It was pointed directly into Nick’s chest, just above the heart.

“Don’t you fucking move.”

Kind of an armed-robber platitude. This is what came to Nick’s mind as a deadly weapon had its business end, all the intentionality of the chemically propelled metal, all that potential energy, directed right at his chest.

It was then that Nick realized he might die. The thought didn’t come as a shock, but had more the flavor of an old friend, someone polite and patient, always lingering in the background of every photograph, but not saying much. He wondered what it might be like to die. The immediate sense, close to the chest, was something like relief. Freedom from the grind, the tension, the constant scrabbling. But it wasn’t just relief. There was also the agony of the piercing scrape of metal and flesh, the abyss. The fear of the dreams in that long sleep, the deepness of its totality, its uncertainty. His life didn’t flash before his eyes, but something did. A life he didn’t have, a life where things were possible, where he moved about the world, did things, helped people. A life where he wasn’t surrounded by the dreariness of the office, the drabness of the city. This wasn’t a life he had lived, but it was one that he might.

The gunman turned his attention, and the gun, back to the clerk. Nick crinked his neck.

The clerk moved quickly, shoveling mountains of cash into the black trash bag. Nick was stunned by the sheer quantities of cash. Why would this store have so much cash on hand? Maybe they didn’t trust banks. Maybe it was a front. The latter seemed more likely, but Nick preferred the first.

Just as the mountain of cash was being sealed up into the depths of plastic blackness, a new shrillness began. A flash of red and then blue, red and then blue. A police siren squawked its frightening howl from right in front.

This seemed to Nick an unlikely occurrence. Did the police just happen to spot this as they drove by? He didn’t have much time to consider it. Just then, Nick felt that he was struck by something. He felt the hot shock of pain surge across his forehead and he fell to his knees. He heard shuffling and shouting and then heard no more.

So many questions. Nick was asked question after question after question until his head nearly split open. Sitting in the back of the ambulance with a large gauze bandage taped to his face, he answered as best as he could, his voice a hollow creak after long usage (telemarketing is not kind to the larynx). But they kept asking the same things over and over.

Finally, after so many questions he felt like Alex Trebec, they let him go. Against the insistence of the EMTs, he declined an ambulance ride to the hospital (he couldn’t afford it). Besides, his head didn’t feel too bad. In fact, something about the strange adrenal shock of the entire experience felt pretty wonderful. It was like the endorphins of running, without all the boring exercise.

When he got back to his car, he saw that he’d left the windows open. He drove all the way home without even closing them, just feeling the flappy breeze of the cool afternoon, trying not to think. When he finally pulled up to his building, he leaned back in his seat and took a long breath.

Then, he noticed something in the back seat. A plastic shimmer in the last of the day’s sunlight. He reached back and pulled the stuffed trash bag into the front. It was brimming with cash. It felt like a leaf bag in autumn. The haphazard scramble of bills made it impossible to estimate the amount. But Nick was assiduous.

Up in his apartment, he counted it carefully. Twice. $20,000. Exactly.

He wondered what the odds are of such a precise number, decided there was probably some information he didn’t know. Pale face must have known something. Some surreptitious goings-on at the store. Nick wasn’t too curious. There wasn’t much to connect him to all this. The less he knew the better.

He figured pale face must have tossed the bag on the run; not wanting to be weighed down for the chase, he sacrificed wealth for freedom. Nick thought that was a fair trade. Good move, pale face.

He laid out the cash on the table before him, and gazed in wide wonder.

What do I do now? He thought.

He pulled out the little black notebook and began to write.