by Travis Klempan
The salesman’s knees finally buckled. His head angled toward the—The name of the long angular thing escaped him. Concrete curb, cement block, the divider at the end of the parking spot. What was the difference between concrete and cement anyway? This idle inquiry might not be his ultimate thought, but could be the penultimate, or antepenultimate. How could he remember those words but not the name of the blunt object his head traveled to meet? He’d never been one for math on the fly, but it seemed to take an awfully long time for him to fall. He held out hope for an injury severe enough to force an end to this weekend, but an injury mild enough to let him say goodbye to his girlfriend.
Ex-girlfriend, he reminded himself. Using up another thought this close to the end felt wasteful. He tried to think of something big, profound, but all that struck him before his head struck the curb-thing was how she was right. He’d spent more money for this weekend than he’d spent on his last car.
No, not a weekend – a life-changing opportunity.
The opportunity to come to this office park and get yelled at, hosed down, challenged, pushed, waterboarded by veterans of…Iran? Maybe Afghanistan. The one he would have joined, he’d once told his buddy, the one who did join, except it wasn’t like this was World War III or anything. For that, for sure he’d have enlisted. Their fee as spent as his sense of balance, thrown away, at best, on the hope that someone manlier than he could have shaped his shapeless form and middling identity into something approaching tough, cool, enviable…
Alpha.
Another thought devoured on his accelerating collapse toward the ground, this time on that singular word encompassing so much of what he’d hoped to become. Alpha. His body wasn’t yet at 45 degrees relative to the parking lot where he and a dozen other middle managers, customer service representatives, and cryptocurrency entrepreneurs had spent most of the last 48 hours. Had his knees not buckled, this golf equipment salesman would have spent 24 more. He wondered if the instructors would cancel the remainder of the weekend.
He committed himself to thinking as quickly and broadly as he could in his time remaining. The instructors (Mentors, he chided himself, using up a thought within a memory) had denied the attendees sleep, withheld snacks, and permitted them water only at the top of each hour. The price of Alpha Water had been factored into the registration fee, and whoever made it to the end of the weekend got to keep the branded bottles. Despite these hardships–or perhaps because of them–the salesman had kept enough self-preservation to sneak a few sips from the fire hose directed his way. When the Mentor had turned the hose to his compatriots (called Hopefuls on the slick website he had found after late-night soul-searching) the salesman licked rusty flakes from his lips and found it tasted the same as the Alpha Water.
Hopeful. Another word without meaning in this time and place. The Mentors called the Hopefuls far worse things and the Hopefuls thanked them for the insults. The deprivation, the belittling, every minute of the weekend was designed, the website had said, to fix them, improve them, evolve them.
Would they halt the evolution, he wondered again, call an ambulance? He hoped they let the bearded Mentor with the white cross on a red background on his black shirt come to his aid. The Mentor they called Doc had carried an oversized backpack the entire weekend but said nothing since the men had stepped out of their Teslas and late model Mercedes.
Mercedeses?
The Mentors had scowled the entire time, using every curse and then some to point out exactly how frail and fragile and epically worthless these Hopefuls had been. Once they’d forked over the cash and agreed to abase themselves in the pursuit of excellence, though, the Hopefuls had started the long ugly climb up the Ladder of Discipline toward Dignity. It was all right there on the website, and the Mentors had echoed the sentiment, loudly and often.
Is it abase or debase? Another thought squandered.
The salesman’s body remained oddly stiff as he accelerated. His entire musculature—such as it was, encased in years of apathy and padded with snack food—described an arc through the sere desert air toward the curb. Mentor Jones had taken a particular interest in the salesman’s un-manliness, declaring it his personal mission to square the salesman away. Mentor Jones suggested various ways of using golf clubs to stiffen the Hopeful’s spine, none of them medically feasible but each more gruesome than the last. Now, more brittle than a pitching wedge, the salesman recalled the last time a touring professional had visited his store. The pro had bragged without boasting about the ways he could use a golf club, and the salesman wanted that confidence for himself. He had paid to come here, to be bent and battered, shaped for greater things. He wanted to get out of the rough that his life had become. He wanted to be a professional. An Alpha.
How often does a real professional find himself in the rough, though?
Passing 45 degrees, the man grasped not for help but for the different terms for angles greater than and less than what his body now showed relative to the asphalt. He wasn’t uneducated, but for the life of him he could only remember obtuse. Mentor Jones had used that word on more than one occasion to describe more than one member of the fire team to which the golf equipment salesman had been assigned. Jones was constantly disappointed by what he saw. The big man found joy, he’d divulged, only in the chances to use the words he learned through discipline, self-improvement, and the daily puzzle he played on his phone. Whenever the Hopefuls were mired in another one of his endless mindless tasks, Jones dispensed a word. Sandbag carries from one end of the parking lot to the other: epidermal. Four-way interlocking pushups until their arms gave out: alternative. Low crawling through the decorative shrubbery next to the insurance office: paradox. Mentor Jones revealed that obtuse had been Friday’s word and contrary was today’s. The salesman realized he might not ever learn tomorrow’s word. He felt cheated without that answer.
Whether or not this whole exercise was worth it was not a question worth answering. For $18,000 and 75 hours, the website promised an excruciating challenge with nothing but benefits after the Recognition Ceremony. The Hopefuls would get Thoughts from Thought Leaders with names like Guru and Godfather. Monthly conference calls would let Hopefuls glean additional bits of wisdom long after the fire hoses turned off. After a year, they could sign up for more. Mentors hinted at bonds among men—Men—but the salesman had yet to connect with his fellow Hopefuls. Only two of their names still stuck in his head (and that was before the concrete curb racing up to meet him finished them off), but maybe the bonds came in the last 24 hours.
The ones he would miss.
The website said that simply by admitting they needed help and committing their resources the Hopefuls had already achieved something that other, lesser men—men—would never glimpse or dream of. The golf salesman would likely never have attained the level of the Mentors – certainly not Jones or Doc, bald and bearded men whose tattooed arms and demeanors hinted at pasts of glory, futures of potential success, their miserable todays sucked up by having to trudge alongside the pathetic Hopefuls – but at least he would crack his forehead on the trapezoidal curb having tested himself, however briefly.
Trapezoidal. How could he remember that word but not the angle that wasn’t obtuse?
His vision narrowed, darkening at the edges and clarifying toward the center. He remembered the last time he’d felt anything positive, truly positive, like Love, even if for himself. The salesman had spent his year-end bonus on a trip for two to Hawaii. He hadn’t known that this meant the Big Island, not the one with Waikiki, but at the time the mix-up mattered little to him and not at all to her. For a week they hiked through jungles and swam in rivers, surfed and fallen off their boards, spoiled themselves and thought of neither past nor future. The last full day before coming back to real life and Arizona, he booked a nighttime dive with manta rays. Until that moment when the sun had set and the creatures appeared, he’d thought of rays as small things. Lights from the divers kneeling on the seabed mingled with lights from snorkelers at the surface.
Cathedral, he’d thought at the time, remembering now as his body paralleled the asphalt.
The manta rays were enormous, frighteningly so, but were only interested in the plankton attracted by the human lights. The fish didn’t swim through the warm ocean – they flew, not as jets or planes or some clunky human contraption, but as graceful, majestic beings. One errant giant soared up and over the salesman, looped around, and knocked the human’s scuba mask off. In a moment of clarity, he had remembered the procedure to replace the mask on his face and clear the water. Watching the creatures with eyes touched by seawater felt like a whole new experience.
Finished with the feat, the rays departed and the divemaster encouraged the tourists to extinguish their lights. The salesman saw pure blackness and felt, in that moment, happy. He had reached for her hand, warm and ready for him. Even through the wetsuit he could feel the grains of sand beneath his knees—
Don’t lock your knees, Mentor Jones had repeated, probably no fewer than (less than?) a hundred times. When the Hopefuls stood in rows, Don’t lock your knees. As they linked arms, Don’t lock your knees. Any idle moment between exertions and evolutions, Don’t lock your knees. The Mentors had pointed out their flaws both collective and individual, but still they cautioned the Hopefuls. The salesman hadn’t locked his knees, not until a moment before, allowing himself the mercy of idleness, inattentiveness in how he commanded his body. If he couldn’t command himself, though, how could he command a wife, a family, a job, the—
—sound of bone meeting concrete was described in detail by Hopefuls and Mentors near enough to hear. They likened the sensation to that of a large gym sock filled with wet sand being swung against a brick wall. This wasn’t too far from the truth but was too graphic to include in the medical writeup and police report.
Mentors and Hopefuls farther away were still engaged in the acts of tearing and being torn down in the hopes of building them back up. If the men could be built into Men, strong enough to leave the office park parking lot with their heads held just high enough to tune in for monthly meetings with the Guru, then the Mentors would have accomplished their mission. Mentor Jones was closest to the golf salesman, but likewise occupied with a task that kept him from breaking the Hopeful’s final fall.
No one was at fault – not Jones, not the other Mentors, not the Hopefuls assigned as the golf salesman’s fire team. Certainly the Guru wasn’t at fault. He never attended the sessions, not since he had hired the Mentors to yell on his behalf. He’d also hired lawyers to write waivers stronger than any man, men, or Men present, bearded or not. Even the salesman couldn’t be blamed for what was, in the end, an accident.
A few of the responding officers were former military. They jawed with the veteran Mentors, compared war stories and sneered at Hopefuls still standing in sweaty, sloppy rows. The Scottsdale Police sergeant in charge of the scene winked at Mentor Jones before taking it upon himself to bark at the Hopefuls to clean up their ranks, dress-right-dress, and the cops laughed as the Mentors took charge. Maybe they wanted to use the time remaining to shape the men a little more, mold them into something that would keep the hooks set in flesh. Bonuses, after all, didn’t earn themselves. The Guru had said that.
The golf equipment salesman’s story would circulate in the break rooms of a police department and the nurse’s station at a hospital for a day, maybe less, before being overtaken by something more novel and less cliche. Now, though, he was free to leave the program, for the program never worked for men like that, or at all.
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Travis Klempan is the author of Have Snakes, Need Birds and Hills Hide Mountains. He is a Navy veteran who lives in Colorado.
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