Preamble

A man started to wander his neighborhood at dusk. It was a dusk that stops people out running errands, leaving work, living otherwise unremarkably, just for a second with its comfortable temperatures and striking but unpretentious colors. It was the kind of dusk that momentarily evokes intrinsic memories of contentedness. The man breathed in the scents suspended in the humidity as he walked frantically but without purpose. He strayed from his neighborhood. His mind raced, but he thought of very little. He enjoyed no moment of pause or peace in the gift of a lovely evening.

This man was, by and large, as men are and have always been. He had led a life without any distinguishing privilege, trauma, handicap, or endowment. He had known love, struggle, heartache, kinship, work, rest, and recreation. Circumstance and inclination had very much dictated his path, punctuated by intermittent responsibilities and reactions. He found himself now as he had found himself often, led by unrest and without a plan. He continued at his hectic pace onto a main highway, accompanied now by the rush of traffic and the garbage littering his walk of grass beside the asphalt. He was disconnected from the sounds and smells, retained nothing, just walked.

As the highway wound into the city, the sidewalks widened, filling with people smoking cigarettes, waiting for buses, leaving happy hour, arriving to dinner. The man moved through them adeptly, until another man stepped in front of him, and they collided. The collision was more like a bird flying into a window than two sedans meeting head on, as the other man was unlike this one in that he had known distinguishing privilege and endowment. He stood taller and broader than most, and his physical presence was bolstered by the confidence that came with often being the strongest in the room. He was commanding and deliberate, and when an average man rushed disjointedly into him, he didn’t react immediately.

The smaller man was already wound up and reactive. He had barely made contact with this juxtaposing being before he spit a venomous “fuck you” and took an uncommitted and sloppy swing. The larger man absorbed the second impact even more effortlessly than the first. He had a politician’s response; a face that allowed no indication of emotion and the verbiage to match. He had the capacity to, in a volatile moment, process even the smallest details available. While one man seemed to only know the adrenaline pounding in his ears, this man could slow the clock down and weigh his options. He waited until the man’s demeanor observably shifted from combative to simply frustrated, and then he extended an invitation.

“Walk with me,” he said encouragingly as he guided his assailant with a gentle hand on his shoulder. He steered them left down a street with a block-wide hotel that ended at a lake. Their reflection glided along the immaculate hotel windows, the smaller man looking even more slight and shrunken as he submitted to the larger’s direction.

“I’ve no interest in what it is you’re taking out on me. That’s not my business. Wife trouble? Shit, husband trouble? Tough boss? Not my business. But I have a few spare minutes, it just so happens, to walk with you to a place that may have help, and you’re going in when we get there. Because you, my friend, just attacked me. The least you can do is spare a few minutes yourself to appease me.”

The man said nothing. His mind continued to race with fleeting thoughts devoid of substance just as it had before this man had altered his destination-less course. He moved without purpose through more smells and sights. Chinese food, garbage cans, stale puddles, perfume, horns beeping, couples kissing, he retained nothing. The larger man turned them left again down a narrow alley between red brick rowhouses and a firehouse. One block down they turned right, and the larger man stopped.

“Go ahead in. There’s something in there for you. You’ll remember the moment you tried to knock me out as the moment your life changed for good.”

The man looked at the limestone church. It was small, had six steps up to the door, a little stained glass window preserving a tragic moment in biblical history along one side, and not much else. He made no move.

“I could call the cops and have you taken in. But they won’t help you. I want to help you. Go.”

And he acquiesced, leaving the stranger with another, more defeated, “fuck you” which was met with an unbothered, even jovial, chuckle. The man had been in a church before. He had been to a church wedding in his childhood, a few funerals throughout his life, a mass with a girlfriend. He found an empty pew and sat. A service was beginning. He felt very aware of himself for the first time that day, socially awkward and at risk of being exposed as an interloper. He recognized that it was an irrational fear, yet the fear persisted that someone would start quizzing him on this church, all churches, all religious texts ever written, and proper high holy day etiquette. He was sweating. He was fidgeting.

The congregation began to sing, and he again felt conspicuous as he struggled to rise, sit, kneel, and amen in unison with the others. Everyone grabbed the books in front of them, so he did the same, desperately trying to appear practiced as he chose a page to open to. The book naturally fell open, to his surprise, because a block had been cut out of the middle to conceal a smaller book. He felt a sharp increase in his anxiety as he wondered if his imaginary audience could see his vandalized bible.

The man wanted to know what the little black notebook in the bible concealed. He nonchalantly tipped it into his lap and shifted his weight just enough to let it fall between his legs. He then sat quietly through the rest of the service, retained nothing, and was the first out the door. He resumed his earlier frantic gait, again aimless. Once he felt like he had put enough distance between the church and the notebook in his pocket, he sat down on a bench by a lake.

He opened the little black book. It was suede and only just larger than the palm of his hand. The first page had scrolled across it at a slight slant ‘love what you do, and you’ll never work a day in your life’. The second page read only ‘money can buy happiness’. Slightly agitated at the anticlimactic content, the man flipped to the next page and read ‘growing up doesn’t have to mean growing old’. The fourth page was the last page with any writing on it at all. It said ‘$20,000 sign on bonus. Signature required below. Legally binding.’.

It was dark now, and the lake was a black mirror returning the halo of light pollution to its architects. The busy-by-day paths were empty except for bugs and trash. The man had lost interest in the notebook and mentally acknowledged, with frustration, how far he had gotten from home and how little energy he had to walk back. The disquiet that fueled him earlier had subsided. He scanned the horizon. He saw headlights over a bridge, ripples on the water, grass on the dirt, a pen in the grass, and he picked the pen up and signed. “Yeah, I could use $20,000 right now. That’s a cab and a pizza”, he smiled to himself. He scribbled across the page, and as he crossed a T he felt the page’s edge cut a shallow slice into his knuckle. The bamboo paper blotted the lone drop of blood up almost before it left the cut.

“Welcome to the team, my friend. I know you’re gonna love it.” The larger man exuded his same air of levity from earlier and a genuine smile, broad and toothy. He approached the other man who was still sitting on the bench, offput by the abrupt reappearance of this character. In one fluid motion the larger man took the notebook from his company and replaced it with a sizeable envelope filled with hundred dollar bills.

“Sign on bonus. But that’s nothing. The world is your oyster now, and the pearls don’t run out. Take it though, it’ll get you started.”

“Who are you?”

“I’m your friend. I’ll show you how to live forever and enjoy every second of it. You’ll know wisdom and wealth. I’ll ask you to do a few favors here and there, but mostly your job is to find people like you and help them like I helped you. Think of me as the Mary Kay lady. Someone got me on board, I got 10 more on board, you get 10 more on board, we all get pink Cadillacs from corporate and bored housewives to spend time with. Don’t think too much about it right now, you’re gonna be a natural. Just make no mistake, there’s no running from your new position. Best to embrace it. You don’t want to be summoned by the boss, my friend, trust me. It’s a lot more fun where we are here.”