The Apocalypse Club (4 page)

I’m not sure why he hasn’t cancelled his policy and gone elsewhere. Firmamental seems to be doing everything they possibly can to get rid of him, but he stubbornly refuses to go. The farm has been in his family for four-and-a-half generations (if you count the great-uncle who briefly ran things before he fell into a pen of Australian razorbacks that were being specially engineered for some sort of military application and was eaten alive in under five minutes). Firmamental has insured the farm since the beginning. Firmamental bills itself proudly as a company that was originally started by a small collective of farmers. It’s a key platform of their marketing strategy and it’s remarkably close to the truth, provided you make the teeny-weeny substitution of “Swiss and London banking conglomerates” for the word “farmers.”

I used to dread Herbert’s phone calls, but lately they’ve become the highlight of my day.

“Dammit, Simms, what the heck are y’all smokin’ over there?” He starts all conversations this way. It goes without saying that we are familiar enough with each other by now that we communicate exclusively on last-name basis.

“Hello Mister Sternhauser. How are the pigs?”

“Godawful stink, Simms. Dunno why’n hell I got inna this business. Damn things’re in heat an’ humpin’ so much it’s like late-night cable two-four an’ seven out there.”

The hayseed accent is a put-on, incidentally. After the first few phone calls, I did some research and found out that Herbert is or was a board-certified oncologist who studied at Johns Hopkins. I asked him about this a while ago and he told me he got tired of watching ninety percent of his patients drop dead and wanted a change. It was a toss-up: go to dental school or take over the family business. He went with the latter because he preferred pigs to the thought of sticking his fingers in people’s mouths all day. We have not spoken of it since.

“I trust that everything is satisfactory with your Firmamental insurance experience?” I am instructed to ask this during every single phone call by my supervisor, about whom more later.

“No Simms, I sure in the hell
ain’t
totally hummered by the grand Firmamental experience,” he says. “What is this great festival a shit y’all got here on line 221?”

I flip open a copy of his policy wording, which, not coincidentally in the least, I happen to have sitting next to the phone on my desk. “Hmmm. Let’s see. I’m guessing that you’re referring to the addition of FCO9666 as a mandatory coverage.”

“That’s the one, Einstein. Ya get a lot of consequential loss due to livestock bein’ possessed, do ya?”

“I believe our underwriters –”

“I can’t even pronounce this last one.
Evil spirits, supernatural entities or
…what in hell is that?”

“Djinn.”

“Djinn? Fuck’s a djinn? Why doncha spell it G-I-N like normal folks?”

“It’s not the drink. According to the National Farm Underwriting Manual, it refers to an Arabic or Islamic creature made of smokeless and scorching fire.”

“Well, pardon me, Mohammed, but I ain’t never seen no smokeless and scorching fire characters paradin’ about my pens in a hijab lately. Get a lot of those, do ya?”

“As you know, Mister Sternhauser, our actuaries are amongst the most forward-thinking in the industry.”

“As you know, Mister Simms, you’re chargin’ me two hunnerd an’ tweny-eight bucks fer this load of ectoplasmic horseshit.”

“Yes, you’re absolutely right. I do apologize for that, Mister Sternhauser. The charge for that endorsement is not supposed to apply midterm. You’re not supposed to be charged for that one until your next renewal. I’ll fix that and have new documentation out to you right away.”

A sigh. One of these days, the man is going to break. “Christ on a cricket pitch. How many defects is that now, Simms?”

“Counting this one? Sixty-two thousand nine hundred and fifty-eight.”

“Shit, son. I think you’d have an easier time of it trackin’ the things that work instead of t’other way round.”

“Well, there are always a few bumps when you introduce a new system.” This is another thing I have been instructed to say. I have been instructed to say this in a light, jovial manner. These phone calls are often recorded and replayed for coaching and/or training purposes to assist me in reaching just the right level of light jovialness. It can be difficult, even for a trained and highly attuned ear, to detect even two parts per million of sarcasm in such a statement.

Which brings me to my supervisor.

In order to understand the full existential horror of working for an insurance company, you really do need to meet the man who calls himself Gotoguy @ Firmamental.

If you were to look up the definition for “company man” in the dictionary, you would see an image of his face looking back at you because he paid a sizable amount of money to have the word and his face inserted into the online version of the Oxford English Dictionary as a paid definition. You will also see his face smiling confidently back at you from the definitions of “team player,” “business ninja,” “visionary leader” and “bovine pedophile” (I paid for the last one).

His real name was originally Orenthal Tibbs, but he changed it to Gotoguy @ Firmamental when he was promoted to Acting Supervisor of Policy Fulfillment and Direct Mail Services because he thought it might draw more attention from the big wigs and speed his ascent of the corporate ladder. It’s not an email address (although it is also that). The “@” is his actual middle initial. He has so many professional designations (CIP, FCIP, CRM, CHRP and a CBRA) to go along with his Diploma in Sexual Harassment Prevention that his emails appear to have come from either a highly decorated war veteran or a fraudulent plastic surgeon.

I don’t believe that he has any life outside of the company. He gets in every morning at six
A.M.
and doesn’t leave until nine or ten at night. He joined every committee that would have him and was a member of no fewer than eight company-related recreational sports and leisure teams until an incident six months ago. He had been sneaking into an all-female Zumba and Aquabics class popular with one of the IT directors when he slipped on the tile and tore his anterior cruciate ligament. It was only when they were loading him into the ambulance that they discovered that the perky redhead they had all known as “Daphne” was actually a 38-year-old man who only waxed the lower half of his legs. After that, he was officially advised to refrain from all contact with female employees in a non-work and specifically changing room setting.

Despite that setback, he refused to take any time off, going so far as to schedule that year’s performance evaluation meetings during his ligament surgery. Mercifully, this lasted for only 20 minutes before his doctor decided that he should be anaesthetized, the result of which was that I received a higher-than-expected “Dynamic Achiever” rating in the Team Interoperability category as he was losing consciousness.

I have no idea what he was like before he came to work here. I don’t know that he does, either. The man is so pathologically desperate for promotion that there is no aspect of his identity he is unwilling to erase to get him even a millimetre closer to his goal. I have no doubt that there is no one he wouldn’t betray, blackmail, backstab or even bump off to get what he wants. The previous holder of his job was killed by a hit-and-run driver who was never caught. When I checked the claims records, I noticed that Oren had reported his own car stolen two days prior and got a new one the following week. Coincidence? Sure, why not? In the field of vehicular homicide, I’m sure they happen all the time.

I still call him Oren. I do this in part to bug him and also because I just can’t bring myself to use his new name. I can get away with this because I knew him before he changed his name and I keep “forgetting” to use the new one because the old one is so familiar. I don’t want to talk to Gotoguy @ Firmamental. I would rather pretend I’m talking to whatever tiny particle of Orenthal Tibbs that might still exist within that walking corporate echo chamber.

“Mark!”

Speak of the devil. I hang up the phone and look up to see Oren looking at me over the blue Lucite half-wall that separates my desk from the three others that make up my quad. There used to be 12 other employees in this department. Now it’s just me. Expense reduction was a key pillar of last year’s Presidential Mission. Since it would be uncompetitive to raise premiums to make up for losses due to the growing number of catastrophic storm claims, we were told we would need to find those savings from within. What started out as pruning has turned into something closer to corporate Seppuku.

“Hey Oren. What’s up?”

Something is up. Oren did not address me using one of his daily affirmative nicknames (“Maximizing Mark,” “Problem-Solving Simms”) and he didn’t show that microscopic flicker of annoyance he always shows when I use his old name. In fact, he appears to have no blood flow to his face. The man looks like he just saw his own dead body and realized that he is now just an entity floating in the air above it.

Oren opens his mouth, but all that comes out is a grunt. He coughs several times and leans forward on the partition, holding on to it with white knuckled hands.

“I just got a call. Hudson wants to see you.”

George Hudson is the president and chief executive officer of the Hudson International Group, the parent company of Firmamental Insurance. He is rumoured to be 122 years old and kept alive by a wide array of biomechanical implants and experimental treatments. He is so reclusive that in my eight years here, I have never even come into contact with another employee who has even seen a
picture
of him.

My first instinct is to assume that the person who brings such news is joking, but Oren is not the joking type. Oren’s idea of funny is limited largely to the outtake reels of corporate training videos in which he has volunteered his services as a background artist. Based on that and the look on his face, I know that this is the real deal, but I still don’t believe it. Why in the hell would the head of the largest insurance company in the country want to see me? It’s not to fire me – Oren could (and would happily) do that all on his own. You don’t get a personal audience with the CEO on your eight-year employment anniversary, which for me doesn’t come up until the end of next month, anyway. Unless I unwittingly pulled some sort of golden ticket out of one of the vending machines or a recently commissioned DNA test has revealed Hudson to be my father, I have no idea why he wants to see me.

But I am about to find out.

A
ccording to the Frobisher Survey of Executive Compensation, the results of which I read at my desk while killing time between phone calls from Mr. Sternhauser last week, George Hudson has made more money by the time his personal butler has brushed his teeth for him on the morning of January 1 than I will make in my entire life.

Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to make so much money that it makes the news. You never see headlines like “Analyst Signs 40-year $2 Million Contract With Firmamental,” and with good reason. Thousands of people do not pay money just to sit and watch me do what I do. In fact, to force anyone to watch would probably be considered a form of torture. If a pro athlete or movie star was being paid that kind of money, we’d wonder what they were doing wrong. Some people get paid more than that just for having their picture taken.

The fact that I am not one of those people becomes elaborately clear to me as soon as I set foot in Hudson’s office.

Despite the fact that we are, as far as I can tell, about three hundred feet below ground, there is bright sunlight streaming through floor-to-ceiling glass windows. The room is round and large enough that I would not be able to throw a tennis ball from one side to the other and actually have it hit the wall. In the middle is a large fireplace that doesn’t appear to vent anywhere. Opposite me is a surprisingly small wooden desk with a couple of chairs in front of it. At a glance, I can also see an area containing what is either exercise or medical equipment (it could be either), a movie theatre with a dozen plush leather seats, a sunken area with either a large hot tub or small swimming pool, and an aquarium containing what appears to be a great white shark in the process of eating a man in green coveralls. The shark has the top half in its mouth and is shaking its head back and forth quite violently, leaving a long ribbon of blood in its wake as it moves from one end of the tank to the other.

“Dammit, looks like Julio fell in again.”

I jump and turn to see that the entire wall behind me is made up of what looks like a gigantic television screen – a screen approximately large enough to play 12 soccer matches simultaneously. On that screen is the face of a man who appears to be in his early fifties. He has beady black eyes that make him look oddly like an angry lobster, and unnaturally tanned skin, although perhaps it’s just because the colour balance on the giant TV is not the best. Is this Hudson? I am so horrified and stunned that I’m not sure what to say.

“Fell in?” I gurgle. The blueberry muffin that I had for breakfast is suddenly not sitting so well.

The man on the screen nods. “Silly bastard’s been depressed ever since the octopus died. Treated the damn thing like a son. Caught it himself, you know. Got some damn infection that only octopuses get. Legs started rotting off and clogging up the filtration valves. Never seen a man in such a state.”

“Legs?”

“Mmmm. Last time they were able to fish him out. Hector only got a nibble. Left hand or foot. One or the other. Shit, I don’t remember. We got a net on him. Got him counselling. New foot or hand or whatever the hell it was. Said he was fine. Guess he wasn’t.”

We watch in silence as the shark manages to separate the top half of the body from the bottom and swallows it in a single gulp. The legs hang in space, spinning slowly counter-clockwise.

“Apologize for the telepresence,” says the giant face. “I’m rarely in the office for long these days. You could say you’ll never find me in just one place.”

He smiles like this is some sort of inside joke I don’t get. Oren nods his head and shovels out a loud chuckle.