The Three Fates of Henrik Nordmark: A Novel (5 page)

seven

Henrik marched toward the employment office, quite determined for such an early hour in the day. He stopped outside the building and gazed up at the big blue letters emblazoned above the doors.
Employment Office
. The words themselves were daunting. Henrik had narrowed his quest for distinction to one of two options when he awoke that morning: Try to find a new job or try to find a girlfriend. The mere thought of the latter stirred in Henrik’s chest such a fretful swell that he thought he might burst a blood vessel and had to sit down for a couple of minutes to calm down.

He resolved instead to find an exciting profession, the type of job that by definition would make him unique.

In twenty years, Henrik had never considered leaving his security guard post. There were so many benefits to his current work. True, he was required to stand most of the day and it was demoralizing to have so many people pass by as though he were a wooden statue in a cigar store window. But the job was straightforward with few demands for physical exertion and he wasn’t required to produce quantifiable results in order to keep his employer happy. Henrik also found he was rarely called upon to quell disturbances.

When he first took the post as a young man, Henrik anticipated the day might arrive when he would be called upon to act courageously — to throw his body in the way of a bullet or fend off a trespasser with his billy club. In truth, he never planned on jumping in front of a gun or taking out his nightstick. But from the moment he put on the uniform, he anticipated that others would respect him as someone who might act with valor in the course of duty.

Nothing could have been further from the truth. Henrik was routinely ignored. From the attractive women in their business suits, the most he could hope for was a dismissive head nod, and even that seemed to be a colossal chore requiring such superhuman effort that he couldn’t hope for more than three head nods a week. Henrik’s duties were so mundane that within an hour of working his post that very first day, he found himself sleepwalking through his job, much in the way he’d sleepwalked through life.

“Not anymore,” he said.

Henrik entered the employment office. The place was teeming with people, men and women, young and old, some with children, others wedged two to a seat in the small green chairs, all waiting for their names to be called. The room had the air of a refugee camp in which people hunker down for days at a time because they have nowhere else to go. Henrik almost expected a live chicken to pop out of someone’s handbag and run frantically around the floor as famished, unemployed jobseekers chased after it. He walked up to the front desk where a lady was reading the newspaper.

“I would like to find a new job,” he said.

She snapped her bubblegum. “Please take a number, sir. You’ll have to wait three hours before we issue you an employment insurance check.”

“But I don’t want a check. I want to find a job that makes me unique.”

A tiny sparkle formed in the corner of the lady’s eye.

“Wow, we don’t usually get one of you in here,” she said. She stood up and rummaged excitedly through a stack of papers on her desk. The lady found the page she was looking for, attached it to a clipboard and handed it to Henrik. “Please fill this out.” She glanced around the room. “You might have trouble finding a seat.”

“I’ll sit on the bench out front,” he said.

“Excellent. I’ll call you soon.”

Henrik sat in front of the employment office and dutifully filled out the entire sheet. He listed his name and age, the number of years he’d been working in his current occupation, and in the box next to the question, “What is your dream job?” Henrik wrote “florist” — the first profession he could think of that was equal parts innocuous and difficult to mock. He turned the page over to find a list of occupations with instructions to circle those that interested him the most.

Henrik had circled a few when an incident broke out in the lot next door. Two men were having a disagreement over a parking space. As the argument raged on, it became clear the driver of a red Honda Civic had parked in a spot that was actually a walkway. The other man was the building manager, livid that people kept parking in this non-regulation spot.

“Listen,” the car owner said. “I’ll just move my vehicle and get out of your way.”

The building manager stepped in front of the driver’s side door. “We’ve called the tow truck company and we’re towing this vehicle.”

“There’s not even a tow truck in sight,” the car owner said. “You can’t honestly expect me to wait around until the tow truck shows up.”

“That’s exactly what I expect you to do. You parked in a walkway and now people can’t get through.”

The car owner, a man wearing a Dunkin’ Donuts uniform, ran his hands through his hair in frustration. “What’s more important?” he said. “Moving this car so people can walk by or punishing me for parking here?”

Faced with the irrefutable logic of this argument, the stubborn building manager crossed his arms and stood in front of the driver’s side door.

Quickly, in a sudden unexpected move, the car owner scurried around the vehicle and jammed his keys into the lock on the passenger side. As he turned the key, the building manager grabbed him and a small skirmish broke out in which the two men struggled against the car door. In the end, the Dunkin’ Donuts employee escaped into the confines of his car and managed to lock the door before driving away. The only damage done was a budding bruise on the building manager’s jaw and a long, angular scrape across the Honda Civic’s car bra.

Henrik watched the incident take place with surreal wonder, as though it were a scene from a movie and not real life. During the skirmish, he wondered whether there wasn’t some sort of implicit societal obligation for him to enter the fray and defuse the situation. And if he was thus duty-bound, and the situation were to get completely out of hand, which side would he choose?

The lady from the employment office opened the door and took the clipboard from Henrik. “Mr. Nordmark, one of our employment specialists will see you now.”

Henrik was ushered into a tiny office at the end of a long corridor. He glanced around the room. The bookshelves contained no books at all but rather stacks of multi-colored file folders lined up next to boxes wrapped in brown paper. Henrik sat down in front of an empty desk and was joined shortly by a man wearing a brown suit and a green tie. The man took his seat at the desk and immediately started doing paperwork. Henrik looked him up and down. His eyes darted around the cluttered office and then focused straight on the man’s tie.

The man put his paperwork aside. “Now, how can I help you today?”

“I want to find a job that makes me unique.”

“What’s your previous occupation?”

“Security guard,” Henrik said.

“Well that’s not very unique at all. There are thousands of security guards out there.”

“That’s my point exactly. I need a job that, by definition, makes me unique.”

The man in the green tie picked up the clipboard with the list of occupations. He scanned the sheet for the ones Henrik circled. “Let me see here. Aerospace Engineer, Professional Bodybuilder, Lactation Consultant. Do you have any expertise in these areas? Any aerospace training?”

“No, sir. I don’t.”

“Any weightlifting or bodybuilding skills?”

Henrik covered his pot belly with his arms. “No.”

“What about this last one — Lactation Consultant? Do you have a specific proficiency in this area?”

“Actually,” Henrik said, “I wasn’t a hundred percent sure what that one was.”

“It’s when you help new mothers learn to breastfeed their babies.”

Henrik grimaced. “No. I don’t care how unique it makes me. I don’t want to do that.”

The man in the green tie leaned forward in his chair. He glanced from side to side and then looked Henrik straight in the eye. “Mr. Nordmark, do you know how you really make money in this world?”

“How?”

“You get other people to work for you.”

“Do you mean by hiring employees and providing some kind of goods or service? Because that seems like a great deal of work.”

The man in the green tie walked around to Henrik’s side of the desk. He dragged an old dust-covered ottoman toward the center of the room and sat down with one leg over the other.

“The trick, you see, is that you don’t need to provide any goods or services. You don’t need an office and you don’t need to pay any of your employees.”

Henrik’s ears perked.

“What you need to do is find entrepreneurs. Well, not full-fledged entrepreneurs, but people with an entrepreneurial spirit who lack direction. And you give them direction. You help them to go out and realize their capitalist dreams while you sit back with your feet up, drinking piña coladas and lounging by the pool all day, all the while collecting ten percent of their earnings just for helping them get started.”

“But wouldn’t these entrepreneurs want to do the same thing?” Henrik said. “Wouldn’t they want to find people to work for them so that they could put their feet up and drink expensive cocktails?”

“That’s the beauty of the whole plan. The entrepreneurs you find will go out and find ten more people and then those people will find ten people and so on.”

“But at the end of the day, wouldn’t someone have to do some kind of work to bring in money?”

“Of course. But it won’t be you.”

Henrik furrowed his brow. “You’re talking about a pyramid scheme. I don’t want to be involved in a pyramid structure of any kind.”

“That’s not true,” the man in the green tie said. “You don’t want to be at the bottom of the pyramid. But I bet you’d love to be at the top. Everybody wants to be at the top of a pyramid made of money.”

“I really don’t think it’s for me.”

Henrik started to leave. The man in the green tie placed his hand on Henrik’s shoulder. “Mr. Nordmark, you don’t really want to be a florist, do you?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Now, I wasn’t going to tell you about this because I’ve been keeping it a secret. But I like you. You seem like a trustworthy person. My idea is for a new type of service which up until this point has never been attempted before. This is still in the conceptual stage,” the man said, “but my business will be called the Truth Company.”

“What will you sell?” Henrik said.

“We’ll sell the truth.”

“But isn’t the truth free?”

“No, it isn’t,” the man’s hands grew animated as he spoke. “Most companies routinely lie. They lie to stockholders. They lie to consumers and employees. They deceive and swindle and finagle as a daily part of their operations. The Truth Company will be different, Mr. Nordmark. We’ll sell the truth.

“Say for instance you work in an office where you’re generally happy. The people are nice and the work is inane, but bearable. Everything is fine except for one thing that drives you crazy. For example, one of your coworkers chats constantly on the phone about her upcoming wedding. Or another coworker might have really offensive body odor. What do you do about this? How do you tell them the truth?”

“It would be socially awkward to say something.”

“Yes! Exactly,” the man’s voice swelled. “That’s why the Truth Company will do it for you. You pay the Truth Company to tell the person that nobody cares that all the good places are booked or what color their centerpieces will be. To tell them to take a bath and wear deodorant, for Christ’s sake. Now this can happen in several ways. For a nominal cost, the Truth Company will send an anonymous note to the person explaining their offense in detail and listing the negative consequences their insensitivity has incurred on those around them. For an additional cost, in the case of body odor — which incidentally, I suspect will be the company’s top moneymaker — we’ll include a bar of soap and a stick of deodorant. Now, I’m just thinking off the top of my head here, but perhaps a secondary stream of revenue can come from cross-promotion with one of the national deodorant stick companies.”

Henrik was intrigued, although he was not ready to subscribe to this man’s newsletter just yet. “Go on.”

“In the case a client believes an anonymous note won’t send a strong enough message, for an additional fee the Truth Company will send out a field operative to confront the offender and tell them what they’ve done straight to their face.” The man in the brown suit and green tie leaned back on the ottoman. “In fact, I’m looking for field operatives right now. You have an opportunity here, Mr. Nordmark, to get in at the ground floor. Now, I can’t pay you at first. But I’m a generous man. When the Truth Company grows into a worldwide entity, I won’t soon forgot those who where loyal to me at the start. So, would this be something you might be interested in?”

“You want me to approach strangers and tell them they emit a foul stench from their armpits?”

“Your duties will be far more wide-ranging,” he said. “But yes, that would be part of your job.”

“What if someone punched me in the face?”

The man paused a beat.

“Then I’ll buy you a Coke.”