Nocturnal Emissions (28 page)

Three months later—nine months since that first exciting presentation for the Gosston plant—Bobby Vook arrived for a return visit. Again, we were to be bussed to the same hotel, the same convention hall, for another buffet and more pens and magnets. Whatever Bobby Vook had to tell us, though, was probably just more of what we’d been following in our email bulletins and lesser meetings with our supervisors—that is, process facilitators. Nepenthe had been fined nineteen million, which, as vast a sum as it was, had actually been negotiated down from a larger amount. Nepenthe was appealing the fine, but their chances of avoiding it looked slim. The good news, the bulletins told us, was that no criminal charges would be leveled at Bobby Vook directly, and he would continue in his role as the head of this nation’s operations while he considered “other exciting opportunities the company was offering him overseas.”

Also, we expected Vook to formally introduce a new company philos-ophy, a radical new direction, that the bulletins and our bosses had already begun preparing us for. This was something called Lean, which involved a whole new approach to streamlining every process, from manufacturing our products to shipping them to the customer. Lean also encompassed a streamlining of our workforce, from the sales and administration offices right down to the machine operators. A retirement package would be offered to anyone who left voluntarily, after which the remaining number of cuts would be determined and implemented. These cuts would take place in every Nepenthe plant, but in Gosston’s case it meant we needed to lose four hundred people, voluntarily or not, half of whom would be let go in six months and the other half six months later.

We filed to our seats. The hall lights dimmed, and the stage lights beamed dazzling rays with some orange and green spotlights thrown into the mix. The announcer gushed, “Ladies and gents…it’s the man of the hour, the man with the plan, the myth and the legend—Mr. Bobby Vook!”

Vook pranced out onto the stage, into the most dazzling of the stage lights.

He dazzled in and of himself. He wore an orange spandex jumpsuit, which did not compliment the paunch that his sweaters had always concealed, and on its chest was the logo for Nepenthe Pharmaceuticals—like a superhero’s signa-ture emblem. He wore rubber goggles with orange lenses, and little green lights circling those lenses. His head had been shaved bald, and waxed to a plastic gleam.

“Hel-lo, Gosston!” he shouted. “I believe you may be familiar with me.

The name is Bobby Vook…” A huge grin, dazzlingly white in the stage lights.

“…
wait
for it…” he teased. His eyes, even behind the orange lenses, were agleam.

“…and I ain’t no goddamn motherfucking CROOK!”

There were no insects in Gosston’s Nepenthe Pharmaceuticals plant. We followed very aseptic procedures. You had to change from your street clothes, even change into factory shoes, upon your arrival. You wore a hair cover and a lab coat over your uniform, even outside the sterile cores where vials were filled and other critical procedures took place. We used plastic instead of wooden shipping pallets, lest insects nest in the latter. We had special lights spaced in the halls that lured and zapped flying insects, though these never seemed to make it through the various automatically locked doors and airlocks anyway. I’m sure the hotel wasn’t quite as stringent as we were in regard to insects, but I was reasonably sure there were no crickets to be found in its rooms, its restaurant, or the hall that served as its convention center. If there
had been
any crickets in that hotel, however, I’m sure we would have heard them chirping now. Because the room was dead silent. Not a single pair of hands had come together. There was not so much as a cough or a clearing of the throat. I’ve noticed in the past that if someone makes a sniffing sound in a quiet room, soon other people will need to sniff, too…a compulsion, as if they’ll starve for air if they don’t. There was not even a single sniff, however, as Bobby Vook stood there before us, all shiny orange in his bath of spot lights, little green lights twinkling around the lenses that now looked like big gaping skull sockets in his head. His grin a skull’s, now, too.

“
Ohh
-kay,” he said at last, and chuckled nervously. In an uncertain tone, he went right into his presentation, turning his face from us to pace up and down the stage as he spoke. His voice sounded strained, either from embarrassment or from trying to hold in the paunch he had to be suddenly all too aware of.

He talked about the fine. He talked about Lean, and the sad necessity of job cuts, but the bright future that Nepenthe still offered for those who remained. It was all about the customer, after all, he told us…making sure they got the best product they could in the fastest possible way.

There was no applause at the end of his presentation, either. When the announcer called out, “Let’s hear it for Bobby Vook, ladies and gentlemen,”

the most you heard was a few people clicking the buttons on their new pens, their faces set in hard lines as they contemplated their longevity with Nepenthe Pharmaceuticals. Vook waved back at us without actually looking at us as he jogged—no,
bolted
—off the stage.

Three months later—a year since Bobby Vook’s first meeting to address the pricing issue—I was sitting in the cafeteria trying to eat while assailed by the propaganda spouting from the oversized mounted TV screens spaced about the great room, when I heard my coworker Albert say, “Hey, look, it’s Vook.” He pointed toward the nearest screen.

There, we saw a photo of Bobby Vook taken when he still wore his sandy hair in a bland conservative cut, and small steel-framed spectacles. Words scrolled below the pleasantly smiling portrait, which read: “It is with great sadness that we report the passing away of our friend of many years, Bobby Vook.

Last night, Bobby took his own life at home, where his body was discovered by his wife, Tilly. He is also survived by his sons Tommy and Billy. We will keep you up to date on funeral details, but in the meantime, all the Nepenthe Pharmaceuticals facilities across the globe unite to share our grief…”

“What the Vook?” Albert exclaimed.

The scrolling words were cut off by a strobe flash of static. For a few moments, through watery, wavering distortions, I saw a figure dancing…twirling…grinning into the camera. Though I couldn’t hear the words he was singing, I did see that he wore a crooked black top hat with a lime green ribbon. But then the static returned to swallow that image, and when it cleared, the screen returned to its endless stream of Nepenthe’s very own programming.

We learned more about Vook’s passing in the newspapers, in the days that followed. Vook did indeed die in his home, specifically in his bathroom, where he was found curled on the floor in a pool of his vomit, wearing nothing but his steel-rimmed specs and the black sweater upon which glowed, in orange and green fibers, the logo of Nepenthe Pharmaceuticals. He had died from an over-dose of the sleep aid LethargEase, one of our company’s numerous products.

I wasn’t one of those to have his job cut, as it turned out, though coworkers dropped away around me like war buddies gunned down by a remote, dispassionate enemy. Over my lunch in the cafeteria the day I learned of Bobby Vook’s suicide, I became rather philosophical. It occurred to me that Bobby Vook
was
one of us, after all—at least in one respect. He had not only helped to implement the Lean process that was to cut so many workers from Nepenthe Pharmaceuticals, but he had cut himself from those ranks, as well.

#9: Waltered States

After several evenings of sitting on the carpet to watch TV together, this time Hee suggested we both sit in the recliner instead. We were pressed into it so snugly that she was practically in my lap. I was afraid that she would take note of my subsequent state of tumidity, but if she did she didn’t call attention to it.

She watched TV with a zealot’s devotion. Changing the channel with my remote, she suddenly exclaimed, “
Oh, oh,
I’ve been wanting to watch this documentary about Rake and Widget!” She set the remote down on a smooth brown thigh (oh lucky, lucky remote) and clapped her hands like a child half her age (she had told me she was eighteen, which was a relief—her personality, if not her former occupation, had led me to think she was a year or two younger).

“Who are Rake and Widget?”

“A music group. This is one of the new channels I’ve been watching ever since the night we lost power for a while.”

Without admitting to having been the cause of that incident, I asked,

“Where do you think these channels are coming from?”

“Other dimensions,” she said easily. “I sure wish Rake and Widget were in this dimension—I love them. Shh, now.” She pressed a finger to my lips, and I had an impulse to take it wholly into my mouth but she drew it away first.

The documentary began by following a musical performer of this other dimension named Walter Egan, as a limousine delivered him at some TV or movie studio, a handheld camera shadowing him all the way. This Walter Egan had an attractive head of fluffy, snowy hair and looked unpretentiously casual in his dark glasses, black t-shirt and jeans. Inside the studio, on a small sound-stage around which were gathered cameras and clusters of lights, a flurry of smiling, more self-consciously attired individuals greeted the musician enthusiastically. Chief among these grinning hand-shakers was a slender youngish man who introduced himself to Egan as Teddy Winsome, his tan set off by his expensive light-colored shirt and slacks.

“Walter,” Teddy Winsome gushed, pumping Egan’s hand, “I can’t tell you how exciting it is that you could make it today to watch Rake and Widget shoot this video.”

“Well, it was fun to be flown in here for this,” said Egan. “I’m flattered these guys wanted to cover my song.”

“Oh, they love
Tunnel O’ Love
. It’s such a cool song, Walter; it has to be the raunchiest song I’ve ever heard. I think that’s why the boys thought it would be fun to do it. It was very important to them that you get to see the shoot. God, we’re all such fans of your work, here!” He waved an arm to encompass the large, scattered crew of technicians, camera operators, makeup artists, publicity people and the like. Winsome went on, “I’ve been meaning to check out some of your newer work, like
Walternative
—what a great title that is! But
Magnet and Steel
from ‘78—oh wow, Walter, who doesn’t love that song? Such a classic. I had such a crush on Stevie Nicks when I was a teenager—and who didn’t, huh? I suggested to Rake and Widget they try to get her to do backing vocals for their cover of
Tunnel O’Love
, like she did for you, but ah…” his smile flickered and he shrugged “…they have their own vision, you know. They’re the artists, not me, right?” Winsome gave a nervous-sounding little laugh. He had an anxious sort of energy, like a dog waiting to be swatted again with his master’s rolled up newspaper.

I noticed, and it seemed to me that Egan noticed too, that there were some dark red stains on the front legs of Winsome’s slacks below the knees, as if he might have spilled some food on himself or maybe knelt down in something wet, but Winsome didn’t appear to notice the stains himself.

“So, ah, are you the director, Teddy?” Egan asked.

“Director? Oh no,” Winsome chuckled, darting a look over his shoulder, perhaps startled by the sound of the crew behind him as they rearranged the position of a set of lights. “Rake and Widget direct themselves. I’m their liaison here.”

“Liaison?”

“Their agent, more simply.”

Egan nodded, glancing over at the large greenscreen backdrop the cameras and lights were trained on. The performers would be photographed against this field of lime green, and another background or series of backgrounds later added behind them using the process called chroma key.

Looking back to Winsome, the singer said, “You know, sorry to say I’d never heard of these guys before.”

Winsome blinked at Egan several times, his smile uncertain, as if he thought the songwriter might be kidding him. He wagged his head. “
Rake andWidget
, Walter. They’re huge right now.” He waved a scolding finger at Egan and joked, “You know, it’s not the seventies anymore, Walter.”

Egan smiled politely and said, “Well Teddy, I’m sorry, but I follow all kinds of music, and I just never heard of these guys until the request to cover my song. And I still haven’t had the chance to hear anything by them. What kind of style do they have, anyway?”