Speech Impediment: III of III

According to my copy of the retreat’s schedule, I’ll be in ‘Conference Room #D’. I resolve to briefly investigate.

The conference rooms are in a detached building accessible by a crumbling aggregate sidewalk. The structure is rustic: a façade of large tan and orange stones and splintery timber framing. The foyer is dark but for the light filtered through the tinted glass door. A vacuum keeps watch in a corner. One of those ubiquitous black signs with white letters behind glass says “Room B - ENG, Inc.” and nothing more. Ed Miller is not a headliner. 

D’s door is unlocked and drags against the berber carpet in its path. This is my stage. An amphitheater it is not. Their air is morgue cold. I fiddle with the thermostat and the furnace squeaks on. The west wall features generously sized-windows with vertical blinds, some of which rustle gently with the ventilation. Several stained drop ceiling tiles bulge with ancient water damage. Max capacity looks to be 40. Chairs with diverse colors from varied eras stand behind long rectangular tables. What looks to be a slide projector rests atop of a wheeled cart wedged along the southwest wall. Just what I need. I unplug the projector and put it on the ground beside. I wheel it in front of the music stand that promises to be my modest podium. Bearings gotten, I depart up the path and through the hotel's side doors.

I take 152’s key from my pocket and unlock the deadbolt. The early morning sun pools in a scalloped puddle under the drapes. The room has not changed since the first time I opened the door. Nothing moved, not even the air. The continuity irks me. At home, objects are out of place. There is clutter. On the road, it’s frozen and sterile. 

I unsuccessfully try to kill at least one of my remaining hours with a nap. The bed creaks with my presence. I lie on my back and intertwine my hands on my chest. Breath whistles through my nostrils. Glowing coals are in my stomach. The room is dim enough to sleep but not quiet enough. 150 has either cranked the Price Is Right or the walls are made of reinforced parchment. The enthusiastic invitation to join the players in the first row is clear as day. I roll over to my left side. Rental car keys poke my thigh, so I extract them and toss them on the floor. I avoid thinking whenever it occurs to me I am doing so. My thoughts are phrases rather than paragraphs or pages. The jingles and applause disrupt their haphazard beginnings. Stimulants for breakfast may have something to do with it. 

I give in to my unrest. The remote on the night stand has six total buttons. I thumb just two: on and up. I surf unimpressed. Of the thirteen viewable channels, three are dedicated to weather. Five are televisual noise in an array of colors, some with rolling black or green bars. At this time of day, the rest are shows with boisterous audiences and paternity tests. I feel worse for my attempt at distraction. A commercial for denture adhesive sends me over the edge of discontent. I rise to brave the shower in hopes of refreshment. 

The fan moans its welcome. I disrobe gripping the sink for balance. A dismaying paunch hangs slackly when I bend to release my legs from my pants. I catch it in the mirror, drooping and puckered around the navel. Sucking in does not work. It only creates unattractive dimples, valleys around a receded mountain. Some days it looks worse than others. I’m not certain whether my physique is changing or my frame of mind. Some days I hate myself for what I’m becoming against my will. Other days, there’s much less resistance. It is what it is.

My skin is translucent like taffy wrappers. The purple-blue veins and feathery capillaries meander starkly beneath. The only opacities are the moles. Age spots. I discover more daily. Where do they come from? Even your body hair thins and the remnants go gray. My legs are bald and my quads balding. Not a muscle on my frame is hard any more. At best, the active ones can become the consistency of a stress ball when flexed. 

I must sit to remove my socks. My toenails have started to flatten and become brittle. Despite obsessive trimming, they are prone to snag my socks and make me shudder. If only we weren’t embodied.

My ring goes onto the sink’s rim with a clank. There is a pale band around my finger like the midsection on a nightcrawler. I massage it. 

I bring the opened bar of soap with me. I pull back the curtain and position myself at a safe distance from the filthy drain. The pipe protruding out of the wall and the showerhead are the same diameter. With a three quarters turn of the knob, water sprays in a crescent moon. Calcium crusts over the rest of the tiny openings. 

After a second's delay, the water could cook a lobster. I let swaths of flesh turn beet red. My strongest desire all day is to be swaddled without end in this warmth. My unwatered parts are jealous in their chilly exposure.

The showerhead terminates around my sternum, making me crouch to wash and rinse my hair. My knees nearly knock at the strain. The lustrous shampoo in my palm smells faintly fruity. It lathers well. While I wait for the recommended two minutes, I clean the rest of me. Globs of suds slither down my calves. The young man refuses to leave the back of my mind. The line between stoicism and resignation is faint.

I rinse off and resign to the relatively arctic exterior environs. Mist spins and curls, inhaled by the exhaust fan. Steam shrouds the upper half of the mirror. I dry off as quickly as possible. My loins look pilled like a plucked turkey. I vigorously towel my hair. At least I have hair. I am here and able. It is good to be alive. 

I riffle through my shaving kit to find my trimmer. I clip the longer whiskers of my mustache. It’s modeled off of Walt Disney’s. A lot of my persona is. He was the consummate father figure, the icon of benign paternalism. The comb passes easily through my hair and falls in a well-trained ducktail. The scalp beneath is pink and vulnerable.

With cleaning complete, I lay the remaining towels on the bed and collapse again. The set in 150 is muted or off. Here I am again in the familiarly unfamiliar. The pillow crumples like a diaper. The ceiling looks acned. My mind searches for a pattern and finds a grin, sinister for its lack of eyes and meaty chin. The image dissolves. 

I think about calling Debbie. It’s the same time in Wichita. She should be awake and moving. I should let her know I’ve arrived safely. But I have nothing new to say, so I don’t bother. What is there to share? She would not want to hear from me anyway. She would stammer through minimal responses while reading the paper. There’s only peace between us—the limpid, disengaged peace of strangers.

I notice the pain in my thoracic spine. It feels like I've been stabbed with a lit sparkler. My back protests regardless of my position. The doctors say it’s the nature of things. So it seems.

I clear my mental debris. It’s time to compose. I visualize adults in a bright lit #D, shifting in their chairs and staring blankly. Some mouths gape open. One person will take notes like there’ll be a test. Another will spend the duration with a finger in or about his nose. I try to concentrate on the task at hand, on what I’m going to say. I cycle through bits. I extract my notebook from my satchel. 

The sconce will not light up. I trace down the conduit to find the plug dangling. Once connected to the nearby outlet, the lamp illuminates as it should.

I peel it open and read over entries at random. 

“There’s an ‘I’ in the middle of every choice.” [Spell ‘CHOICE’ on a pad/board, underlining the ‘I’.]  “There’s an ‘I’ in the middle of life, too.” [Spell ‘LIFE’ on a pad/board, underlining the ‘I’.] But just who is this ‘I’ though?  It’s you of course. The ‘I’ is all of us in this room. I don’t claim to know all about him or her, but I know a little bit. The self-helpers talk about how each of us is unique and different, but I want us to see how similar we are. We’ve never met before, but I can say at least one thing about each of you. We’re all here in this room because we have a job to do. You have a job to do. Now, there’s a lot more to who you are, but that part is undeniable. What does that mean? Let’s go farther than the obvious. [Look around.] I know I can say this: your job is where you are at least 24% of any given week. Take sleep out, and it’s 42% of your waking life. That’s your station. That’s a significant part of you as a whole and try as we might, we can’t really get rid of it. I’ve met a lot of people who like to compartmentalize their life and minimize the place of their jobs. That can be fatal, though. If you lop of 42% of yourself, how much are you left with? [Pause] Everything from the navel down.”


“[Write ‘Money’] Money is a fickle motivator. People are excited by the prospect of it, but eventually the inspirational reality of it in your pocket always peters out. The stuff you can get with it or the times you can buy with it let you down. [Cross out ‘Money’] Principles, though, they endure. [Write and underline ‘Principles’] That’s a secret I should let you in on because you aren’t going to hear it from on the news. You aren’t going to learn it from that desire in you to check out what your neighbor has, but it’s the truth. So, let’s talk about principles. You don’t need to have a great job to believe it deserves to be done well. You don’t need to be thanked in order to earn praise because everyone knows what they’re doing and knows whether they’ve done enough, well enough. It’s part of what it is to be an ‘I’.”

“I heard it in a song that life’s not so bad that it can’t get any worse. I like that. That’s the truth. Have you ever thought about life that way? [Pause] Let’s try it together. What could get worse in your lives? Think about it. [Pause] I’ll go first. [Raise your left hand.] My wife of 30 years could leave me. That’d make it a whole lot worse. What about you all? [Take answers.] Good. Now, that we have that answered, I have another question. Why don’t we live with a little more conscious gratitude for what we have?”

I lick my index finger and turn the page.

“When I was a child, one of my teachers called me simple. Hard to believe, right? Me, simple? Anyway, at the time I didn’t know what it meant, so I asked my mother. And what did she say? [Look around.] Well, nothing to me. She reached for the phone and called the principal directly. That principal got an earful and I still didn’t learn what it meant. Looking back on it, it’s funny to me. Simple-minded is taken as an insult, but it should be taken as a compliment. Simple is good… It’s that simple. The most successful people in the world have been simple-minded. Do you think that’s a coincidence? I’m here to tell you it’s not. The singularity of their purpose is what keeps them from wasting time in the wrong direction. Remember this from school? [Draw a line between two points and then a wiggly line between two points. Put an ‘x’ through the wiggly.] The shortest distance between two points is a straight line. The simplest routes don't have detours. Think about it. We don’t put wide-angle lenses on horses, we put on blinders. People are afraid of limitations, but we shouldn’t be. Friends, we are limited, aren’t we? Who here feels unlimited?” [Pause for affect.] “Nobody?” [Pause for affect.] “Good. I didn’t think so. We are limited everywhere—in our homes or apartments, in our relationships, and in our jobs, too. We need to admit it. We need to see it because limitation can be good. Focus is a type of limitation. You know that.”

I mutter sections aloud. I strike through the last sentence. I am concerned about flow, about sounding genuine. People can tell whether you’re convinced of the truth of what you say from the first words out of your mouth. To avoid suspicion I perform with a casual air, like I’m not there to convince. I am afraid to be charged with hypocrisy. My delivery tends to exonerate me. I get Fours and Fives out of Five on the Believability column of my Feedback Cards.

“What happens when we don’t see something that’s right in front of us? [Pause to take answers.] Very good. We trip over it or we run into it. We get hurt because of our own blind spots. That’s not limited to physical space. Interior space works a lot like the exterior. You can trip yourself up subjectively, too. Did you ever think about that? So, let’s see our limitations and act in light of them. People who harp on the power of choice overstate their case. Have you ever noticed that? [Pause] They never mention how little choice there is in some weighty parts of life. I’m not going to do that to you. I’m not here to sell books. Because there’s a whole lot out there that’s not your doing and isn’t your choice, but there’s some that is. What’s your part? What job do you have to do and how is that limited? We need to get the right scope, here. [Pause to take answers.]”

“You’ve heard of the power of positive thinking, but what you don’t hear so much about is theplace of positive thinking. You can’t be positive everywhere or about everything. That’ll get you in trouble, the sort of trouble that makes a person need pills before long. Anybody who has ever worked with electricity can verify if positivity is applied where it doesn’t belong, you’ll blow a fuse at best or start a fire at worst. I don’t want that for you or anyone, so I go around the country teaching people basic safety. You need to protect yourself against faulty ways of thinking as much—if not more—than you do against faulty wiring. Whoever told you, or even implied, that life is all about happiness was either wrong or trying to sell you something. Not me. I say it like it is. There’s sadness and struggling in this world and always will be. You can’t stop it, but you can manage it. Have any of you being skiing? A show of hands. [Pause] Well, if you’ve been skiing, you know there’s a right way to fall. The same goes for football. There’s a right way to take a hit. It doesn’t stop with sports and recreation. There are ways to manage the blows that come from living.”

“[Pour water into the big cup, halfway up.] Folks like to ask: is the cup half-full or half empty? They think it tells a lot about the person answering and I suppose it does. So, let’s see. By a show of hands, which is it?” [Raise the big cup high, eucharistically.]  “Half-full?” [Pause.] “Half-empty?” [Pause] “Well, I say it’s a false dichotomy. You see, there are so many other options. Full and empty doesn’t tell the whole story.” [Pour the water from the big cup into the small cup. Allow spillage.]  “The answer is clear now. Do you see it? The controversy’s gone. My cup overfloweth! Ladies and gentlemen, full and empty has less to do with the water and more to do with your cup. [Pause] Friends, what I’m trying to tell you here is simple. You don’t even need me to say it. You already know it. You knew it before you sat down in this room. You’ve known it since you were a child, but you’ve probably forgotten. Expectations make your reality. If you make your cup fit what you carry, you’ll be happy. I promise you that. Because in the end it’s not about the size of the cup, what it’s made of, or the color. It’s about how well it fits what it holds.”

I grab a pen from the front pocket and add to the last entry.

“Maybe your job isn’t glamorous. Maybe you spend most of your days resetting people’s passwords and unjamming printers. Sounds bad, doesn’t it? Boring? [Pause.] Let me tell you though, there’s a need for that. There’s nobility to that. Maybe a new password will allow your coworker to write that report that changes the course of your company or maybe it lets him check his personal email. Maybe that functional printer lets a person print off that document just in the nick of time to beat her deadline or maybe it lets her print 20% Off coupons at Macy’s. The outcome is irrelevant. You probably wouldn’t know it anyways. What matters is that you have a set of tasks. They are your duties. Yours. Whether you like them or not, you signed up for it—freely—and now you are bound by them.”

I tap the pen to my lip. I continue. “It’s okay to be bound. It’s nothing to be afraid of. That’s what freedom is supposed to lead to. You have freedom, you use it, and you abide by how you used it. Life is a series of obligations. Did you ever think about that? [Pause.] Of course you’re free to abandon what you bound yourself with, but that makes us weak. It makes us liars, contract-breachers. It makes us untrustworthy. It’s disintegrating. Don’t you want integrity? Then do your job as well as you intended to way back when you were interviewed for the position or accepted the promotion.”

I close my notebook and attempt summoning my enthusiasm. It will not come. Dread comes in its place. 10:12. I am in a bind. I want to be away from here, but not down that sidewalk. 22 years in, I have seen more sad faces at close range than I care to. With under an hour to go, I don't like what I do any more than them. You can’t like what’s born out of problems. I wouldn’t have a job if people did so often have problems with their own. The issue is bigger than me. Work ruins so many of us, and still for most of us it's all we have. Most days, I feel like the only lives I've changed are my family's and my own and not for the better. So much of what I say just bounces off the walls. I can’t tell if it’s my fault or theirs. Debbie says it’s both but that doesn’t help. I am tired of all of this. I am falling apart. 

But the show must go on. There is no choice. I call the front desk to request an iron. Ten minutes later, there’s a knock at the door. An abandoned iron wrapped by its cord waits at my feet. A note taped to it instructs me to return it to the front counter as soon as possible.

I fashion an ironing board out of a towel and the dresser top. The iron hisses over my collar. No starch could be found. A fresh press will do fine. It’s important to look sharp but not managerial. I hold the shirt up and approve. I put it on, leaving the top button open. I tuck my shirt into my pleated khakis and wrap a belt through the loops. Cordovan penny loafers complete the ensemble. In the still-thick air of the bathroom, I look myself over. After my palm tames a wild hair, I am presentable.

I untwist the twist tie on the white plastic sleeve and eat a series of saltines. The crackers go from crisp to mushy in a single bite. I tongue the roof of my mouth to scrape off the doughy residue. I grab a glass from my satchel and fill it at the sink. I swallow. It must be hard to filter the river out of river water. I dry the glass out with a hand towel, place it back in my satchel, and put the satchel over my shoulder.

For the last time, I head for #D. The hallways are deserted. Everyone must be waiting already.

I am greeted by a middle manager inside the foyer. She must recognize me from the promotional material. Her teeth are impeccable and her dress is best described as ‘smart’. Our banter is cordial but forgettable. I confirm my readiness. I give her my card and tell her to tell her friends. She reassures me her teammates are super excited to hear me. I smile and nod. She asks if I want an introduction and I decline. She says she’ll be sitting off to the side if I need anything else. I thank her but explain mine is a low-tech affair that does not warrant assistance.

Unnoticed, I survey the room. Everyone is slumping and denimed. The rows are segregated by gender. My hungry friend is two rows back, leaning on the chair’s back legs. A fortysomething man sits atop one of the tables, wagging his legs leisurely. He seems to be the locus of the room’s energy. His flannel clashes a bit with his hornrimmed glasses. The rest look winded from the 9:30a Team Building Scavenger Hunt. The men are thick and sweating although it can only be 60° at most outside.

Pre-performance symptoms are exceptionally acute now. The sloshing of circulating blood muffles my hearing. My hands shake, visibly I worry. The knot in my gut is Gordian. I inquire after a water fountain. The manager directs an eager-looking woman to fetch me a bottle. She returns with two. I offer one to the manager, who obliges. After three gulps, I feel more myself. Two deep breathes reset me completely.

I cross the threshold. The anemic furnace struggles to create room temperature. While the audience is seated and chatting, I fuss with the set ritualistically. I grab two glass cups, one larger than the other, from my satchel. I put them on the projector cart, center stage. I want them to see me put these two cups down. The show has already begun. I want half them to lean over to the other half and ask, “What’re those cups about do you think?” Part of my gratis bottle of water goes into filling the larger of the two glasses halfway up. I turn to address the audience. Not many are looking back at me. I put my hands in my pockets and clear my throat. I inhale, close my eyes, exhale, and open my eyes.

“Good morning everyone.”