The Three Fates of Henrik Nordmark: A Novel (8 page)

He sucked in again and this time he inhaled the smoke deep into his lungs. It was sickeningly sweet, not enjoyable at all, and the worst part was, he didn’t feel any different. Henrik polished off a full two thirds of the joint before he just couldn’t take it anymore. He tossed the remains down a drain and stood beside the Dumpster waiting for the pot to take effect. One minute passed and then another. Henrik didn’t feel different at all. The more time that went by, the more it appeared he was entirely immune to the effects of marijuana. Henrik instantly regretted the addiction he’d chosen and was busy making plans to try either irresponsible gambling or perhaps an incremental dependence on peach schnapps when he took a single step forward.

Henrik’s foot felt as light as a feather. He took a second step and then a third. His legs, those short, stout tree trunks that had always affected his ability to play sports, suddenly filled with pins and needles. Henrik walked around, tentatively at first and then with confidence, his feet gathering momentum with each consecutive step. Henrik was truly amazed at this thing called walking. He imagined his ancestors from millennia ago, having crawled on all fours for centuries, finally discovering this mode of two-legged transportation and what a liberating feeling it must have been. Henrik felt as though he were walking on water. He glided along the surface like a back-alley Jesus while all manner of slippery eels and automaton fish swam underneath the concrete.

Had an outsider happened to walk by and spot Henrik at this exact moment, they would have seen the most peculiar sight — a bald, middle-aged security guard with a look of unrestrained glee on his face, skipping around the alleyway, swinging his arms and stopping every few seconds to look down and imagine what kind of aquatic vertebrate lived beneath his feet.

Henrik stopped abruptly to gaze up at the tall buildings. “Gravity,” he said. “Gravity doesn’t seem to be doing its job.” Why were all these buildings standing tall in the city when gravity was so powerful it could pull meteors out of the sky? Shouldn’t it have torn these skyscrapers down long ago? Concrete and pillars, glass windows, men in ties and women wearing pantsuits — all these things lived in the offices above and here dwelling on the land was Henrik Nordmark with his water balloon–shaped pot belly and ambitions to become unique. For the life of him, he couldn’t imagine why things weren’t constantly falling out of the sky.

He checked his watch. The face looked huge, like someone had strapped a wall clock to his wrist. It was time to head back.

Henrik took his post by the door and stood like a statue watching people go by. Even as he marveled at the strange sizes of their heads — some round, others bumpy, some that seemed to be missing chins and still others that had foreheads like battering rams — he regretted that he had yet to feel the pot take effect.

Henrik was lamenting the loss of seventeen dollars to ineffective marijuana when suddenly the world slowed down to a standstill. Like molasses, the businessmen and couriers moved as though they were striving to climb steep hills. Henrik wanted to help them, to run over and push them in the small of the back.
You can make it to the elevator! Keep trying! All is not lost!
But Henrik couldn’t move. He froze in place, his mind occupied by whether or not he really had to pee. He was counting how many times he’d used the lavatory today when a police officer entered through the front doors. This cop walked at a different pace than everyone else. His stride was fast and hard, a hare leaving tortoises in his wake. He extended his hand to Henrik.

“I’m Constable Sullivan.”

Henrik stared at this man’s formidable moustache.

“Security Guard Henrik Nordmark,” he replied.

“We got a call from one of the merchants on the third floor. The smell of marijuana smoke entered through their windows. Usually we wouldn’t investigate something like this but the mayor introduced a new Say No To Drugs campaign just last week and my sergeant’s been on my ass.”

Henrik’s heart skipped a beat. He tried to swallow but the saliva got lodged in his throat.

“How may I help?” he said.

The constable took off his hat and held it in his hands. “Have there been any teenagers hanging around the building? Do any street people sleep out back?”

Henrik could barely catch his breath. A single bead of sweat originated from somewhere atop his vast scalp and careened down his forehead. It was the first drop in a torrential downpour.

“No sir,” he said. “No unruly teenagers or hobos.”

The officer placed his hand on Henrik’s shoulder and took him aside. “Are you all right?” he said. “Your face is all red and you’re sweating pretty bad. You look like you’re about to have a panic attack.”

Henrik could barely pay attention to the man’s words, so chaotic was the swell in his brain. He kept replaying a television commercial in his head from twenty years ago in which a man held an egg to depict the regular human brain and then cracked the egg into a frying pan to show what your brain looks like on drugs. Months after that commercial aired, a poster in the supermarket took the metaphor a step further by showing your brain on drugs with a side of bacon. After having only a fuzzy recollection of this poster for the past decade, Henrik suddenly thought it was the funniest thing he’d ever seen. He stifled a giggle. Henrik tried his best to hold in the rest but he laughed out loud in spite of himself.

The constable was still staring at him. Henrik needed an excuse. Not just any excuse, but a really good one that would both explain and mystify.

“I ate some bad roast beef this morning,” he said.

“You have to take care of yourself, buddy,” the cop said. “Get some fresh air and exercise.” He tapped Henrik on the shoulder and walked out the front doors.

Henrik returned to his post and stood there for the rest of the day. At some point — he really wasn’t sure when it happened — the marijuana wore off and only then did he realize how high he’d been. The remaining hours of his day were a torture session revolving around staring at the clock and counting the seconds as they passed. The minute hand labored as it clicked and Henrik felt the day would never end. When it finally did, he headed home with a strange compulsion to listen to the Beatles’
Sgt. Pepper
and eat a plate of bacon. Neither was immediately available so Henrik listened to what he thought was a Ringo Starr solo track on the radio and ate some green ham that had been sitting in his refrigerator for a month. The song turned out to be an unmelodic Elvis Costello
B
-side and the ham was convincingly inedible.

He passed out on the couch that evening, his head aching and his stomach in knots.

Henrik awoke with a start in the middle of the night. He stood up and walked in a zombie-like state to the bathroom where he found a sample-sized packet of expired Anacin in a drawer by the sink. Henrik popped the two little white pills in his mouth, shot them down with a glass of water and brushed his teeth by the open window. He looked up into the sky and took in the stars. They were bright tonight. Even the city lights couldn’t obscure them. Had his eyes not been so tired, he could have stared up at the stars for hours. Henrik glanced at the clock on the wall. His shift at work started in six hours. He shut his blinds, the night sky disappeared and Henrik went to bed.

Across the city at that very moment, a young man was sitting on his windowsill, staring up at the same stars. He couldn’t sleep, he was so excited. “I’m rich,” he said to himself. “My life is going to change.”

That young man’s life was indeed about to change.

But not, as he would learn, for the better.

eleven

The next morning, Roland headed to the office dressed in a T-shirt and a pair of casual Banana Republic pants. There was no way he was going to wear a suit on his last day at work. Besides, it was casual Friday and most of his clients would be wearing jeans. He walked up to his desk and sat down.

Mason’s seat in the cubicle next to him was still conspicuously absent. Roland imagined Mason sitting on the company vice president’s jet surrounded by gorgeous flight attendants, a cognac in one hand and a cigar in the other. Just days ago this image would have haunted him like no other. He would have been plagued by night sweats and bitter to the very core. But karma had risen and fallen like the tides and he barely gave Mason’s empty chair a second look.

Taped to Roland’s monitor was a note he’d left to remind himself to visit his grandmother. “All in good time,” Roland said. He tossed the note into the recycling and started composing a resignation email addressed to the entire company:

Dear Heartless Bastards,

I won the lottery. I’m rich as fuck and I hope you all rot in hell . . .

He’d barely finished typing the first sentence when his phone rang. It was Kara, his girlfriend of several months. Kara was a nice woman, fairly pretty and quite capable of making small talk in any social situation. She would have been perfect for Roland if not for the fact that her occupation gave him the out-and-out willies. Kara worked in the city morgue as a mortician’s assistant and her chief responsibility was to prep the deceased for autopsies. Just the thought of her stripping down dead bodies made Roland shudder. If that wasn’t evidence enough that he should find a new girlfriend, there was a single incident that had been nagging in the back of his mind. A month ago Kara made a comment and waved her hand in front of her nose after Roland stunk up her bathroom. She’d had friends over and everyone started laughing at him as Kara loudly talked about the smell and how no one could enter the bathroom for the next hour. Roland knew his resentment was unreasonable — absurd, even — but he’d never quite been able to forgive her for the fuss she made.

“Hello?”

“Hi Roland, it’s Kara.”

“I know. I saw your name on the call display.”

“Oh. Well, I just wanted to see if we were still on for dinner at Joalina’s tonight.”

“You see,” Roland said, “the thing is that I won the lottery yesterday.”

“Oh my God, Roland. That’s fantastic!”

“Yes, it is.”

“Everyone’s going to be so excited. We can celebrate tonight.”

“See, that’s the other thing,” Roland stammered a bit. “I was thinking maybe it’s best, you know, if we stopped seeing one another for a while.”

There was a momentary stunned silence on the other end. “Wait . . . you want to
break up
? Why?” Kara said.

“Well, to be honest with you, I’m going to be really rich. I figured this might be my only chance to date a supermodel or an actress or something. Some girl who might not even talk to me if I wasn’t super rich.”

“You’re telling me you want to trade up?!”

“Well, when you say it like that, it doesn’t sound very good,” Roland said.

“But that’s what you want, isn’t it?”

Roland cleared his throat. “I just thought it would be best to be completely honest with you about my intentions. That way we can still be friends.”

Kara’s voice grew suddenly angry.

“So you’re telling me you would rather date someone who loves you for your money than me?”

“Um . . .”

“You superficial bastard! That’s the shallowest thing I’ve ever heard.”

Roland sighed. “I was hoping you would understand. Life is short. I might never get another chance to have sex with a supermodel.”

“You can go to hell!”

“I’m sorry you feel that way,” Roland said. “Try not to be upset. You know, my grandmother always says — you can’t control the actions of others. You can only control your perspective in this world.”

Kara slammed the phone down.

Roland hung up his phone as well and continued writing his email, all the while humming the tune to Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton’s “Islands in the Stream.” He finished the note, signed it ‘Roland the Rich’ and was about to hit send when his supervisor Chad stopped by his desk.

“Roland, can I speak to you for a moment?”

“One second,” Roland said. He scanned his email one last time, hit send and then turned back to Chad. “I’m all yours.”

They walked down the hall to Chad’s office. Chad shut the door behind them and the two men sat down in chairs facing one another. Chad was a full ten years older than Roland. He was also a good five inches shorter with a slighter build. Two years ago, during the period in which Roland grew his long unmanageable beard, Chad’s curly black hair had started to recede. Chad headed his hairline off at the pass, abandoned his military-style crew cut and shaved his head. With his
$500
Dolce & Gabbana glasses, his lightly starched shirts and his efficient bald head, he looked the part of confident success.

Roland didn’t necessarily dislike Chad. He was an all right guy, Roland supposed. But he was corporate through and through. His blood flowed green with company money. Chad spoke in consulting speak — using phrases like
enabling vertical connectivity
and
re-engineering seamless paradigms
. Three months ago, Roland approached him with a legitimate business problem concerning one of their key clients. Chad hardly listened to Roland’s issue before interrupting him and launching into a long-winded diatribe on how Roland should practice
leveraging synergies
in order to
ramp up a frictionless value chain
. Roland had given him a look of abject hatred, a look that Chad hardly seemed to notice. The past month had been, from Roland’s perspective, tense to say the least.

Chad looked Roland square in the eyes.

“Roland,” he said, “when you come into work in a T-shirt, you send a certain message as to how you represent our company.”

“But it’s casual Friday,” Roland said. In the background, he saw his email pop up on Chad’s computer.

“Yes, it’s casual Friday, but that only means we don’t have to wear suits,” Chad leaned back and let Roland have a good look at his pleated khakis and faded orange golf shirt. “You still have to wear something with a collar.”

Roland lowered his eyes in a descending arc toward his torso where his navy blue T-shirt hugged his body. He looked back at Chad, who was nodding his head in self-acknowledgment of the synergies he was currently leveraging.

Chad continued. “I find it’s best in these situations to look to someone with years of experience under his belt, someone with strong moral fiber, good family values and a keen eye for doing what’s right for the business. I like to take a step back and ask myself — what would Regis do?” Chad gave Roland an expectant look. The room fell so suddenly quiet a pin drop would have sounded like a grenade. “Do we have an understanding?” Chad said.

“No,” Roland said.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean — we don’t have an understanding. I’m not going to come in here on casual Fridays wearing some god-awful golf shirt with a corporate logo on the breast pocket. I look good,” he gestured toward his T-shirt. “You’re the one who looks like an asshole.”

Chad’s relentless nodding came to a grinding halt.

“Excuse me?”

“You heard me,” Roland said. “I won’t comply. So fuck you. Fuck you and the horse you rode in on.”

Roland leaned back in his chair and placed his hands behind his head in great satisfaction. An enormous weight instantly lifted off his shoulders. He was only seconds away from escaping this cubicle prison. All he had to do now was sit back and wait for Chad to fire him. Only Chad couldn’t speak. His brain had slowed to a Neanderthal crawl. All of the courses Chad had been on — the company retreats with their PowerPoint presentations and their index cards and the uniformity of it all — hadn’t prepared him for such brazen insolence. There wasn’t a consulting phrase in his mental dictionary to apply to this problem. Luckily for Chad, he wouldn’t have to say anything. At that exact moment, the company president showed up at Chad’s door. He had two security guards with him and he looked angry. Apparently, he’d read Roland’s email.

Two and a half minutes later, Roland was tossed out into the street and told never to return. The guards manhandled him a little on the way out, but Roland wasn’t upset. In fact, he would have had it no other way. He struggled with the guards, yelled obscenities and cursed out the random pictures of company ambassador Regis Philbin on the walls. When they entered the elevator, Carol from accounting was just exiting. Roland told her she had really nice tits and that he’d always wanted to tell her that. Carol from accounting didn’t seem to know how to take a compliment as she called Roland an asshole. Roland said, “If you want to see an asshole, go to Chad’s office. There’s an asshole for you.”

He was then dragged through the lobby and made to leave not only the building, but the company property itself. On his way out through the lobby, a short bottom-floor security guard who looked vaguely like Alfred Hitchcock bore witness to Roland’s antics and opened the doors for all three of them. Henrik watched in stupefied wonder. Now,
there’s
a man who knows how to make an impression, he thought. He has such passion, such eccentricity, such commitment to his cause. No one will ever forget him. He’ll be defined by this forever.

Henrik’s heart sank to the bottom of his stomach as he watched Roland being dragged out into the street. Not in his wildest dreams could he ever behave that way. Or could he? Roland’s wild taunts and flailing arms stirred within Henrik a sudden revelation.

When the guards from the fifteenth floor returned, Henrik informed them that he was feeling quite ill and asked if one of them would be so kind as to take his spot in the lobby for the rest of the day. The nicer of the two guards volunteered and Henrik left work early. He headed straight to the local shopping mall.

Outside, Roland couldn’t contain his excitement. He felt so alive. For the first time in months — years even — he was excited about life. This money would change everything. It had to. He’d already dumped his girlfriend and quit his job. As well, there was at minimum a
90%
chance that he no longer had any friends left. Every friend Roland had in this world worked at the company from which he’d just been fired and in his resignation email he called many of them out, making obscure references to long-forgotten incidents that Roland had never been able to let go.

In addition to the wicked insinuations he launched upon Mason, Roland charged Bradley from sales with never paying a proper tip in a restaurant, general frugality and altogether cheap behavior. He charged the computer guy Graham with leering at his mother’s breasts, a crime made infinitely worse by her accidental death a mere three months after the incident of Graham’s lustful eye. Roland indicted several others on even more malicious accounts — adultery, intentional cold spreading, silent farting during closed-door meetings and most egregiously, the malicious cock-blocking of Roland’s attempts to seduce Carol’s breasts at last year’s Christmas party.

Roland had forsaken everything — love, employment, friendship. Undaunted, he walked down the street with a skip in his step. He would start over again. There was a new life to be had out there and he had enough money to buy it. He’d already arranged to go speed dating at an affluent restaurant in the downtown district. There he planned to meet a beautiful, alluring woman who would be impressed with his newfound wealth. Yes, the world was his oyster and Roland planned to suck all of the goodness out of it.

Roland’s cell phone rang. He picked it up without looking at the number on the call display.

“Hello?”

“You bastard!”

“Mason, how are you on this fine day?”

“It’s not how I am. It’s where I am.”

Roland stopped at a crosswalk. “And where’s that?”

“Five minutes ago I was sitting in the corporate jet getting ready to take off to the Bahamas. Then the company vice president opens his laptop and checks his email. Next thing I know, he throws me off the plane and now I’m standing on a runway at the airport holding my suitcase and wondering what the hell happened.”

“That’s terrible,” Roland said. “What an unfortunate turn of events.”

“Don’t be a smart-ass,” Mason said. “The vice president said you sent an email to the whole company. What did it say?”

Roland was momentarily distracted by a Spanish beauty with long flowing locks and a swivel in her hips. He stared at her miniskirt and Supergirl top until the light turned green. “In my email, I mentioned that you only got the job because you promised the interviewer you would dress up for him like Cher and sing ‘If I Could Turn Back Time’ with your pants off. I might also have mentioned that your new job title would be Oral Liaison to the Vice President.”