The Genealogies: Chapter Four, Part Three

Daily bread

Marcelo worked for Gumble Communications. It occupied a suite of offices on the 16th floor of what was called a class B office building in downtown Los Angeles real estate patois, just on the border of the Financial District. It wasn’t the prettiest building, a black glass box built sometime in the sixties, just as Los Angeles was beginning to acquire a skyline taller than that of a small Midwestern city. The building didn’t have the amenities that the newer skyscrapers possessed, like a concierge, a food court, a dry cleaner. It did have valet parking, but even run-down norteño clubs in Pico-Union had valets. Valets were ubiquitous, like purple jacaranda buds in the spring; one parked beneath a flowering tree, and, upon returning, found one’s car covered in a blanket of them, violet and sticky. It wasn’t a depressing building--in the clinical definition of depression-- but it didn’t fill him with longing to start the workday, although when he was honest with himself, he admitted that nothing would make him long to start the workday. He could quite happily spend his time lolling about the house in his pajamas. Even though he still recalled the perils of his last bout of unemployment, he preferred that eschatological uncertainty to his present situation; when one is supremely unhappy in one’s lot, indolence seems to be preferable to the daily indignity of earning a living from that which one loathes.

The company was the brainchild of brothers, Kenneth and Lucas Gumble. Kenneth was the CEO and chief salesman. Lucas handled the technical side of the business. They had both started out working for AT&T, and then slowly circled down, working for smaller and smaller companies, until they decided that if they were going to work for a small company, it would be their own. They had made it a going concern for ten years, growing it slowly, enough to support a small staff but never quite taking off as they had hoped. But they had no choice now. There was nothing else to be done. It made enough of a profit to make it worth the work, and, really, they had nothing else to do. They enjoyed what they did, but in a sense they were trapped, forced to devote their time and money to it, knowing it would probably never quite succeed to their expectations, even if they never admitted it to themselves. At their ages, what else would they do? Hope to again work for a conglomerate? Who would hire them? And their business, despite its survival, was, in many senses, a failure. The business had become a job for them; they were not business owners, but employees like Marcelo, merely better-paid. Of course, if they thought as much, they would never admit it; they were the sort of men who did not readily admit to forces beyond their control. They were the sort who had been raised to believe that the choices they made largely dictated their lives, and had lived accordingly. Nothing was beyond what a little hard work could accomplish. The next deal, yes, that one, the one that was taking shape, next week or next month, yes, that one would start things off, would launch them, would make the business more than just a flow of daily sludge. That one, yes, that one would set them onto those fabled heights.

Marcelo dreaded Tuesdays the most—the day for the weekly staff meeting. There was nothing he enjoyed less than sitting in a conference room and wasting two hours of his time. He much preferred to waste time at his desk. He hated making progress reports on projects, defenses of actions, suggestions for achieving urgent tasks. Work was arduous enough. Talking about it seemed a bit of an added torture.

Marcelo walked into the office at eight o’clock, as usual. He shared his office with the chief technician and his assistant. Together they comprised three-quarters of the salaried staff. Fortunately, it would be an hour before the assistant—and three hours before the chief—arrived. He treasured this hour to himself. Lucas Gumble was the earliest of the brothers to arrive, and he didn’t get in for another hour or so as well. This was time Marcelo used to do not much of anything. He booted up his computer. He checked his email first, happy when his inbox came up empty, as that meant that he had nothing urgent to which to attend. He opened up his browser and perused the morning’s headlines, or went to the New York Times’ website. He found his favorite radio station on the web and brought up their live stream, enjoying a bit of music before other people arrived and forced him to turn it down. He avoided doing anything that could be construed as work, and he considered that to be one of the advantages of the job he had. For an hour every day he didn’t have to pretend to be busy, didn’t have to slog through collating reports, changing rates, adding or amending accounts, pulling last-minute projects out of the fire. He could just be, and be paid for it. He enjoyed it very much. It was work as it should be, at least for him: easy and leisurely.

He was finding it more and more difficult to disguise his distaste for work. He found it harder to keep a straight face as more projects were piled upon him, harder to hide his disgust when given a new assignment. He had reached the end of a tether that had never been very long.

His idyll soon ended, and the real day began. Thomas and Estelle appeared around the corner. Thomas was the assistant technician, Estelle the office manager and general get-things-done girl. Estelle poked her head in the door and greeted Marcelo before going into the office next door where she and the Gumbles had their desks. Estelle was a short, winsome blonde, and Thomas hulked over everyone. Of course, their personalities were completely opposite of their appearance. Estelle had a temper and shortness that she controlled with difficulty, even though underneath it all she had a somewhat compassionate heart, or at least acted as if she did. Thomas was possessed of an almost preternaturally placid demeanor, accepting the day’s buffets calmly, a rock shrugging off roiling waves. He was almost imperturbable, able to take with a calm equanimity that with which the owners loaded him; to some degree, that annoyed Marcelo. Marcelo mimicked Thomas’ outward calm to incursions in the day; however, beneath the façade, he stirred with vexation, and yearned to let out a howl. A stoic upbringing, however, prevented him from doing so. It was one of the many constraints Marcelo placed on himself.

Soon after, Lucas showed up. Like his brother, he was in his mid-fifties. They were separated in birth by a year, Lucas being the elder brother. His hair had gone prematurely white, like Steve Martin’s, and much like the actor he put forth a cosmopolitan air. From looking at him one would be hard-pressed to guess the straitened circumstances in which he was raised. Lucas and Kenneth’s father floated in and out of their lives, doing a variety of jobs—short order cook, janitor, gas station attendant, nothing that required much education, of which he had none. From what Marcelo gathered, their father also wasn’t impressed much with providing an education for his sons, thinking it a luxury that people such as themselves could ill afford. If it had been up to him, the boys would have been working and out of school by 15 or 16. That was enough learning to start making money in some form of employment, however tenuous.

Fortunately for them, their mother was of a different sort. She, too, had very little education, but that lack made her prize it all the more. Their father was always the “Old Man,” said in a derisive, dismissive tone. But they always referred to their mother as “Mother,” reverentially. She, like their father, did all sorts of jobs to keep the family afloat. However, she insisted that they become something else than they were, and transform whatever meager inheritance she could supply into something concrete and respectable. Both Mother and the Old Man, however, instilled a certain mercenary ethos in their sons. The only difference was that their mother expected them to better their station in life; their father’s view was more immediate, unconcerned with what lasted, as nothing lasted much beyond the day.

What Marcelo detested the most about his job was the utter tedium of it. He had realized long ago that they didn’t actually need him there full time. Most days he could quite easily accomplish all his tasks by noon or one o’clock, assuming he worked at a steady clip and didn’t dally unnecessarily. This left the afternoon free to work on any special projects that might come his way. Unfortunately, those were few. So he had great slabs of time in which he did almost nothing, or nothing productive. He would chat online with friends, catch up on the major newspapers, visit the occasional porn site when no-one was looking. If Lucas or Kenneth walked into his office he would quickly bring up his billing program and pretend to be searching for some little teasing trace of data. They must know how little we actually do, he often thought. He often thought about making the brothers an offer, to work on retainer for a guaranteed number of hours every week, just so that he could use the time he wasted at his desk for other, more enjoyable activities, although he didn’t know what they would be. Thomas and Horace, the chief technician, would look at Marcelo when he was in a particular state, his head buried in his hands at the sheer inanity of his day, and laugh. “You get paid to do nothing,” they’d say. And while Marcelo did appreciate that aspect of his job, there came a point when he simply ran out of things with which to occupy his time. Of course, he never asked for extra work.

On a particular Tuesday, Horace walked in an hour early.

Marcelo, doing an exaggerated double take, said, “You’re early.”

“One of these Tuesdays you won’t do that,” Horace said.

“I don’t do it every Tuesday.”

“Yes you do,” Thomas said. “Every Tuesday.” He laughed. “But you deserve it, man. You’re one late motherfucker.”

Horace winced. “Language.”

Thomas’s body shook as he laughed more. “Yeah yeah. You’re worse than that when you’re wiring shit.”

“And the fact that it annoys you makes doing it worthwhile.” Marcelo smiled, the smile overtaking his face, feral, with all his crooked teeth showing frighteningly, suffusing it to the point of exaggeration.

Horace was a short, stocky, solid brick of a man. He was a bit older than Marcelo, in his late 30’s. He kept his hair in a Marine buzzcut, and tended to wear tight t-shirts that showed off his honed arms and the bicep-long tattoo of a bald eagle and fluttering American flag. He was too much of a patriot for Marcelo’s tastes. He was too much of a conservative as well. It was an odd combination to him, seeing as Horace was also as gay as they came, and not closeted, but fully out, his boyfriend occasionally making an appearance at the office to take him to lunch, always at his side when the workmates got together for social outings. Marcelo had to reassess some of his stereotypes. His good humor and occasional flashes of concern worked to keep him from tipping over into Republican caricature for Marcelo, and thus an object of dismissive scorn. Marcelo was glad that he didn’t find Horace completely distasteful. Work would have been truly unbearable with an antipathetic office-mate.

Horace, scowling like a leopard coming across a strange scent, “Lucas in yet?”

“Of course,” Marcelo replied.

“On time, as usual. Almost caught Marc looking at Shaved Lesbian Fisting.” Thomas laughed at his own joke.

“He’ll be happy that you’re in early.”

“I don’t really give a rat-ass-fuck what makes him happy.”

“See?! You’re worse than I am.” Thomas continued his almost ceaseless laughter.

“I really don’t understand your hatred of him.”

“I don’t hate him. He just annoys the piss out of me.”

“That’s another dollar in the potty-mouth jar!”

Horace ignored Thomas. “And these meetings. Why do we need meetings? Do we ever accomplish anything?”

“They are somewhat useless.”

“Hey, it’s an hour we’re not working. I can deal with that.”

Horace sniffed. “You’re not the one they ask questions of, Tommy. As a matter of fact, I don’t really know why you’re brought into them.”

“Maybe so as not to make him feel left out. You know how the brothers are about making sure we all feel included.”

Horace snorted. “Yeah, when they’re ready to dump on us with work.”

Horace finally sunk into his chair, powering up his computer.

Thomas turned back to face his computer monitor, but continued to giggle. Looking at Thomas, one would be forgiven for thinking that he would have been unable to giggle: his hulking, tall frame argued against it. But Thomas giggled, girlishly, in a high pitch, and his body shook with it.

“What’s so fucking funny?” Horace had little patience for Thomas and his fits.

“You tell him, Marc.”

Marcelo’s face was impassive, more out of not knowing what Thomas was talking about than out of any attempt to hide something.

“Go ahead. Tell him what you want to be now.”

Marcelo sniffed.

“You have a new one? Quick, tell me before the lord of the manor comes in here.”

Marcelo leaned back in his chair, hooking his hands behind his head.

“Orthodontist.”

Thomas guffawed. Horace chuckled lightly as well, shaking his head.

“Orthodontist. That’s a good one.” Horace scratched his chin. “What does an orthodontist do, anyway?”

“Deals with deformities of the teeth and corrects them.”

“What?”

“He puts on braces.”

“Oh.” Horace looked up. “That doesn’t sound like easy work.”

One time, when the workday had been particularly hectic and frustrating, Marcelo had announced his decision to seek a career that with the minimum of effort would provide a maximum level of financial comfort. Of course, he’d had no idea what that career would be, and when pressed by Horace and Thomas, he’d blurted out “Garbageman.”

“Garbageman?”

“Yes,” he began slowly. “Garbageman. I mean, being a garbageman now isn’t like it was when we were growing up. Well, me and Horace, anyway. You’re probably too young to remember, Tommy. But look at a garbageman’s job now. Most of the time you don’t ever even have to get out of the truck. You just pull up alongside the garbage container on the sidewalk, and a mechanical arm comes down and picks it up and upends it into the truck.” Marcelo began warming up to his subject. “Maybe, if there’s a car blocking it, you have to get down and roll it clear so that the arm can get it. But that’s it. That’s the most work you have to do. I remember growing up in New York, and watching the garbage trucks on trash day. Some poor-ass schmuck—or two, I can’t quite remember—rode on the back of the truck—the fucking back, where all the garbage went—and would have to get off in front of every collection point, hauling the cans off of the curb and turning them over into the back of the truck, emptying them. And these fuckers weren’t on wheels like they are now. These were the old tin cans, and filled with loose garbage or ripped bags. They were fucking disgusting. Big fat black flies just hovered over the cans, especially in the summer, and they’d have to fight through that swarm. God, no, that kind of garbageman I wouldn’t want to be. That was work. But now? Heh. You don’t get your hands dirty, and you get union benefits. You get to drive around all day, and at the end of it pull up to a landfill, flip a switch, and empty your truck. That’s probably the worst part, having to deal with the smell. But that fades. I could hack it.”

He’d spent the following days expanding on his vision of work on a garbage truck, the ease with which one could spend a day, traveling the county’s streets, picking up other people’s garbage at a mechanical remove, performing a socially useful function, even if it was in an ultimately environmentally suspect fashion. He had no desire to move up in his new chosen profession, to become a supervisor, or, heaven forbid, own his own waste management firm, not only because of the possible mob connections such ownership might entail, but because, well, that was work; if there was anything he had learned from the brothers Gumble it was that keeping a business afloat, let alone profitable, was difficult, arduous work, fraught with stress and uncertainty in the best of times, and that was the sort of paradigm from which he was trying to escape. A waste-disposal schlemiel would be heaven: punch the clock, take a brown-bag lunch, not think too much about you were doing, if you thought about it at all. It was a job that bore no responsibility to anyone, that made no demands, that afforded the leisure to think when the mind wasn’t immediately occupied by the mechanics of driving or loading refuse. It had been a joke, but Marcelo, slowly, began to see true benefits to it. Why not? Why not do something as honest and unassuming as garbage collection? It certainly couldn’t be any worse than the panic conditions that prevailed in telecommunications. And having a blue-collar job gave a man a certain rough quality that particular women loved—a quality even more desired when it was revealed that beneath the scratchy veneer was someone who read Borges and Pynchon for pleasure and could hold his own in conversation with your Yalie father. It always, at last, came down to sex.

He had kept up the pretense of seriously looking for work in the refuse trade for a week or two, until he almost had Horace and Thomas, and himself, convinced. But doubts had begun to creep in. Would it really be any better in garbage collection? Weren’t all jobs the same, stretches of almost interminable time in which one sold oneself into virtual serfdom for a sometimes not-too-comfortable wage? And if this was true, why change, why take the risk of falling into something worse, something out of which one couldn’t easily extricate oneself? Indecision—almost as if he had to make a decision—lapped at his mind, like the faint wind-borne waves of a pond, barely noticed but insistent. And then, there was the social connotation of the job itself. Garbageman. Marcelo came from a blue-collar family, son of a tradesman and a laborer—or a tradesman and a tradeswoman, as Mamá’s labor certainly required a great degree of skill. But the fact that both his parents, at one point or another, owned their own businesses, however modest and labor-intensive they were, instilled in Marcelo a disdain for manual labor. He was better than that. Mamá and Papá always wanted their children to be more than they had been. Carlos and Marcelo and Lexie were brought up to strive so that they wouldn’t have to cut other people’s hair or sew their clothes or work 8 hours in a factory. Their children would be professional. And how would it look, now, after all that education, all those loans, if he would turn out to be a garbageman? What would the family say? How could he live it down? It would make for an interesting conversation at the next high school reunion.

Horace and Thomas, while not exactly crestfallen, were a bit let down as Marcelo gradually stopped entertaining them by spinning out his future as a garbage man. But something else usually transpired to get him going, and get him thinking about other career avenues. Every week or two or three he would come up with a new one—podiatrist, chef de cuisine, cultural attaché, each a bit more fantastical than the next. The only requirement for making it to Marcelo’s list was that it be as far removed from data manipulation as possible, and that it amused him for whatever obscure reason. Horace and Thomas need not divine the reason, as it was occluded to Marcelo most of the time as well. Their amusement by his flights was merely gravy, something to keep the office atmosphere light, which was hard enough to manage in a small space occupied by three men. The other quality all his choices of careers shared, glaringly, was their low likelihood of being attainable. Marcelo felt comfortable in this fantasy world of fabulous, socially respectable, somewhat glamorous work. It got him through the tougher days, the days when the term “going postal” could have applied to him easily. And he could then linger in his job, and not seriously look for something else to do, something better, a better fit, as he had no idea what else he could do. In his quieter moments he felt trapped; he pushed those thoughts down with visions of future success, attained in some as yet amorphously imagined manner.

Which all led to his most recent career objective.

“Sure, orthodontia doesn’t seem easy,” Marcelo said. “And getting the training isn’t. I mean, it’s medical school. But remember, my criterion is that it eventually be an easy job. Once you learn what you’re doing, what can be easier than seeing a few patients a day, fitting them with braces, checking their braces, doing consultations, taking x-rays? It’s the same thing every day. Eventually you do it in your sleep. And it’s not like you work every day, or pull an 8 to 5. You’re not on call like a surgeon—I doubt there are many brace emergencies. And you charge through the wazoo for your services. If you just put on one set of braces on one kid a day you have it made. So, yes, orthodontist.”

Horace snorted. “So what medical schools’re you looking at?”

“Oh, I’m doing my research. Don’t you worry.”

“He’s worried that one day you’ll actually go through with something.” Thomas ran a beefy hand across his belly.

“You two underestimate me.” Marcelo shook his head. “There’s more to life than this place. There’s something else out there.”

Horace, grunting, “Maybe for you. You actually have a degree already. But me and Tommy, we’re lifers. We’re telecom schlubbs. We’re just gonna go from company to company, and hope we find one that’ll have a 401K.”

“Hey man, dontcha want to be a writer?”

Marcelo winced inwardly. “Well, yes. I mean, that’s sort of my ultimate goal. If I could snap my fingers and choose anything to do, that’d be it. But, you know, I have to feed myself somehow.”

Thomas laughed. “And that’s why you’re at Casa de Gumble. Just like the rest of us.”

A round head with salt-and-pepper hair popped into the room. “Hullo, lads.”

In unison, “Hullo, Ken.”

“What trouble are we getting ourselves into today?”

“Sadly, none. There aren’t too many opportunities for trouble here. I could change some rates and mischarge a customer or two.”

“Marc, we don’t joke about our customers. Customers are our friends. We wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for our customers.”

“But most of them are fucking idiots.”

“Do you want to deal with customers who know what they’re talking about, Horace? You should be grateful that our customers aren’t the brightest. Once they start getting a clue, then start worrying.”

“Do you need me for the meeting, boss?”

“Of course, Tommy. I wouldn’t dream of having it without you.”

Thomas sighed quietly.

“Well boys, let me check in on Lucas and Estelle, then we can get our little gathering started. Don’t worry—it’ll be a quick one. I have a lunch meeting.”

As Kenneth receded down the hallway Marcelo said under his breath, “And there was much rejoicing.”

“Yay,” Horace and Thomas cheered tonelessly.

Kenneth was a salesman. As such, he was effortlessly ebullient. Lucas was a bit taciturn, and sometimes cutting; but his brother steamrolled you over with good cheer and bright humor. He could sell anything, and often sold a service before he had discussed it with his brother to determine whether or not they could provide it, which invariably wound up annoying Lucas and the rest of the group to no end. Yet Kenneth had kept the company afloat, kept business coming in, kept customers happy, all on a shoestring operation. Marcelo was still unable to determine whether or not Kenneth was perpetually in character, if he was aware of how much of a smarmy, schmoozing salesman he was. He suspected that deep down it was an act; somewhere there resided the true Kenneth, who came out most clearly in his occasional flashes of anger when he or Thomas or Estelle brought up objections to his plans. But the glad-hander almost immediately resurfaced, soothing egos, restoring calm, wooing them to a course they would have to take anyway. Marcelo knew he’d never succeed in business; he didn’t have that kind of blissful duplicity in him. He wasn’t sure that was a positive trait.

Marcelo heard a shuffling of silk approaching, and then Estelle peered into the doorway.

“Ok fellows, they’re ready.”

The boys grabbed pads and pens, and tramped down to the conference room. Lucas and Kenneth were there, and Estelle had her laptop at the ready, preparing to take notes for the meeting. Horace and Thomas and Marcelo arranged themselves in their usual places around the table. Marcelo crossed his legs, and immediately began to shake his foot up and down in a nervous tattoo, willing the time to go by faster. Lucas and Kenneth were exchanging reports about their children, ignoring the others for the moment. Marcelo didn’t dread these weekly meetings because he would have to make an accounting of his actions; he did his job competently, if unimaginatively, and wasn’t afraid to lay out progress on his tasks. It was more because these meetings seemed to exist in a space in which time assumed a leaden weight, bearing down on him, so that he became aware of every passing second, and when he would surreptitiously look at his watch, sure that an hour had passed, only fifteen minutes had gone by. He would rather work half-heartedly on his tasks than speak half-heartedly in these meetings. Outside of the conference room time operated within more or less normal parameters, hours passing by in a steady, droning procession. He had designated the time during the meeting as the time of dripping viscid oil. He didn’t share this observation with his workmates, afraid that they wouldn’t know what “viscid” meant, and then he would have to define the word for them, leaving them all at an awkward impasse.

Kenneth began, “Ok, let’s get this all started, shall we?” To Estelle, “Are you ready there, little girl?”

“Oh, you know me, Ken, born ready.”

“Born ready! What do you think of that, Tommy?”

Tommy blushed slightly, chuckling quietly, betraying for another time his badly hidden crush on Estelle.

“Tommy doesn’t want to think about it, it seems. Well, a lot of exciting stuff has happened in the two weeks since we’ve met—very exciting. Some of it some of you know—of course, Luc knows about it all—all of you, really, know bits of it, parts of it. But I’m going to lay it all out for you here today, just so we’re all on the same page and can move ahead.”

Lucas interrupted, “Before Ken gets too far ahead, I just want to stress that before our news can become ‘good’, a lot of hard work will have to be put in by all of you, a lot of long hours, probably. We have a chance for a great boon for our company, but it’s going to involve all of us pulling a little more weight than usual.”

“Luc’s right, quite right. But, I tell ya, it’ll be worth it. We’ve got so much on the plate that it’s mind-boggling. We’ll have it made for the foreseeable future if this happens. Hell, if it happens, we’ll close the offices down for a long weekend and take everyone to Vegas.”

Claps and cheers emanated from the non-shareholders. Estelle wrote the promise of a Vegas trip in her notes in bold and capitalized letters.

“Should I start off with the news first, Luc?”

“I think that would be the best course of action.”

“All right. Well, the news is this: we’ve signed a letter of intent with Phoenix Telecom. You know the gentlemen who were here a couple of times, and who we went to see a couple of weeks ago. They want to buy us for a rather large sum of money, and we’ve agreed to sell to them.”

“Now,” Luc said into the silence, “what this means is that we become a subsidiary. They own controlling interest in us, but they’ll also give us a lot of capital to work with. All the money problems we’ve had vanish. Your jobs are all safe—safer, actually, than they’ve ever been.”

“This is good news, folks. It makes everything we do easier. We can concentrate more on new sales, bringing in new business, instead of just scrambling to keep the business we have here. This is a brand new day for us.”

“But, to make this work, they’re expecting certain things. We’re going to have to start running a much tighter ship than we have in the past. Things will get streamlined and delineated and set out in clear parameters. You’ll all have tasks and functions and will have to adhere to them. I and Ken will run things here, but really, they’re the bosses now, and we’ll all have to answer to them. So, we’ve drawn up a chart with all that we expect out of you.”

Estelle passed out handouts to everyone. They had been done professionally, in glossy covers on heavy paper. Each of their names headed a section, and in that section were set down their primary tasks. Marcelo looked at his, and saw that they had exploded exponentially. He began to get a gnawing in his stomach. This wasn’t what he was expecting. He had been expecting the normal, seriocomic routine of a small business meeting, detailing the minutiae of weekly progress to justify the time they all put into the place, the partners demanding to know who was responsible for this or that, the employees making up answers on the fly. Suddenly, the rules had changed. Suddenly he was faced with the prospect of a much more authoritarian regime, one he wouldn’t be able to finagle or bamboozle as easily, one that expected results and had ways to enforce expectations. Marcelo closed his eyes and opened them, as he did when a child and something untoward occurred, hoping that on opening them everything would prove to be a dream. It never worked.

He listened. Lucas and Kenneth alternated speaking. He caught snippets of their words. Lucas: “If we do this correctly, if we line everything up and thoroughly work everything through, we’ll be a much stronger company, and we can provide things we’ve never been able to before.” Kenneth: “I’ll tell you guys, I’m excited. It’s what we’ve been working for all this time. There’s no more shit, pardon me, no more Mickey Mouse to go through. We can focus on doing the best work we can.” Lucas: “All of you—all of us—will be held to higher standards, but really, I think they’re standards we can meet without too much trouble.” And so on. Marcelo nodded, looked down at his tasks, looked up, nodded again, trying to keep the glaze out of his eyes, trying to look energetic and enthusiastic. But really, all he was was scared. Things that had never been expected of him were now to be routine. Technical attributes of his job that he’d let slide, or had faked, were now going to become paramount. He felt like screaming, shaking Kenneth and Lucas, telling them, “What have you two done? Can’t you be happy with a nice little business, making a decent amount of money? You think you’re lords of capital? Big, bustling businessmen? Wha?”

He held it together, barely.

“This is great, guys. Really. Kudos to you both.”

The brothers smiled, satisfied in themselves.

The meeting wound its way forward, ending after two more or less consequential hours, after tasks were reviewed, goals set, times for further meetings agreed upon. The new owners would be visiting in a month, so there was a lot to do in a short time.

“I know it’s a lot to spring on you guys all of a sudden,” Kenneth said, his eyes bursting with glee. “Do you think you’re up to it?”

Estelle replied, “You know me—I welcome a challenge.”

Horace scribbled madly in his notebook, setting down plans of action, schedules, blocks of hours with specific tasks for them. He nodded and grunted, “Of course.”

Thomas laughed. “You know I’m down for whatever.”

Knowing it wouldn’t be appreciated, Marcelo beat down his reticence. “Like I said, kudos to you both. We’ll make it work.”

“Well, this news calls for a celebration. Don’t make any lunch plans for tomorrow. Estelle, can you make reservations for Café Pinot for—what, 12:30? One?”

They all voted for one o’clock. The meeting broke up, everyone returning to their offices, their comfortable existences suddenly upended.

***

That afternoon, on the bus ride home, Marcelo settled into his seat. The lowering summer sun beat in through the windows, the bus’s air conditioning barely keeping the riders cool. He stared out the window, eschewing his customary reading, just watching cars fall back or pull up on the side of the bus, miles of gray pavement eaten up by the bus’s big black wheels. He wore his sunglasses, in addition to the dark tinted windows, but the sun still shone brightly, burning into him. He felt its warmth penetrate the occluded glass. His neighbor on the seat beside him snored quietly, having fallen asleep almost as soon as she’d sat down, her head lolling slightly to her left. Around him riders chattered on cell phones, or with each other, or read, or sat gazing out the window as well, taking in the weltering migration of cars.

So, the day was eventful. He would remember the day as the day he had been pushed out of his comfort zone, the day-in and day-out drudgery that he said he despised. There was nothing for it now; change was coming. How he reacted to it would be a definition of him. However, Marcelo didn’t like being defined, even by himself. Or rather, he didn’t like the definitions that were thrust upon him unwillingly. He was defined, no matter his preference. He just had no definition for himself. Others had clear definitions of him, categorizations and classifications that allowed them to deal with him, to fit him into their worlds. But as far as he was concerned, he sometimes felt a cipher, or, more accurately, a mirror image of all those around him, reflecting back their own visages, their expectations, their insecurities, their little, niggling neuroses. He was what others made him; he didn’t feel that same power of creation in himself, even for himself. At work he felt he had carved out a space for himself, however distasteful and dull; at least he felt he had chosen it. Now that was overturned. No, there was nothing for it. Change had poured on him like a surprise squall dumping five inches of rain in an hour. His definition had been changed, and he doubted it had never been in his power to prevent it. The bus rose into the sky on a connection between the Harbor and Century freeways. He turned to look northward. Downtown rose up out of the flats, as if the buildings had been set down by some set designer with no sense of perspective, the late afternoon sun burnishing it, making it look so much prettier than it was once you were in the middle of it. It wasn’t like Chicago’s skyline; the buildings seemed swallowed up by the surrounding flats, subsumed by the pull of the rest of the city, turned from a focus to a blip, a periphery, a pretty postcard like the Hollywood sign or the Ferris wheel at Santa Monica. A definition by the rest of the city. He saw it pass and finally fade from view as the bus sank back into the freeway, taking him home.