The Last Stoic (11 page)

A giant, black as a new moon, emerged from a billowing
curtain of fog.
 
A round visored helmet obscured his face.  Leather greaves protected his shins.
Metal scales glittered along the length of his right forearm and a large oblong
shield covered his left.  Muscle undulated from his neck, shoulders, arms and
chest.  He clenched the hilt of a bright sword in his gourd-sized fist and
pounded it against the shield.

At the opposite end of the arena,
from another mass of curling smoke, stepped a second colossus.  His skin was
pale and his eyes clear.  Ropy yellow hair coiled at his shoulders.  He wore
large plates of metal along his right arm and right shoulder.
 In
one hand he gripped heavy, oiled netting.  In the other he raised a long
harpoon. 

They paced towards one another
slowly, probing and evaluating.  Only twenty yards separated them.  The teuton
hoisted his harpoon.  His eyes narrowed and he launched.  As the missile
spiraled through the air it morphed from wood and iron into brown leather.  It
became a football.  Mid-flight it disappeared in an explosion of fireworks.

“The gladiators!  The coliseum! 
Glory for one!  Crushing defeat for the other!  Stay tuned!  Superbowl XXXIX up
next!”

“Kick-ass!”

“They’re gonna get destroyed.”

“Nah.  I’ve got a thousand on the
Titans by 3.”

“The commercials are supposed to
be good this year.”

There were about twenty others in
the room with Mark, mostly men, watching the game on the sixty inch plasma
television filling the wall.  Mark arrived an hour earlier and had already
downed two neon-coloured martinis, layered according to the colours of the
teams contesting the Superbowl.  The martinis washed down the slim pink pills
Gus had given him.  His extremities were tingling.  His appetite was sharpened.

Mark slid forward on the buttery,
lambskin couch in which he lounged.  From the various platters arrayed along
the top of a long cherry wood coffee table he loaded up a plate with chicken
wings, oysters, rainbow-coloured nachos, three healthy dollops of salsa,
guacamole and queso, and a half-dozen enormous marinated shrimp.  As the plush
confines of the sofa re-embraced him he marveled at the surrounding affluence. 
Gus was a relatively young man, vice-president of the regional firm for only a
few short years.  Mark wondered if he might attain a fraction of these riches
in his time with the company.  He fantasized about returning home a tycoon.

Everything in the house was
conspicuously larger, wider, louder, crisper, plusher, more vibrant, more
lavish than anything Mark had ever seen.  But there was a freshness.  An
untarnished gleam.  It was as though earlier that morning, Gus had an army of
movers and decorators storm the house and outfit it from top to bottom.  He imagined if he looked carefully at the frame of the television or the speaker cabinets he’d find
one or two stray Styrofoam packing peanuts.  Mark would learn later that Gus
himself was a guest.  This was the senator’s house.  Gus had befriended his
young wife. 

The game continued.  A general
din of cheers and jeers filled the room.  Mark didn’t know the score and didn’t
really care.  A giddy disregard had taken hold of him.   

The boss’ wife, Emily, swept into
the entertainment room like a warm gust, the sort of suffocating blanket of air
that precedes a tropical thunderstorm.  A yellow, patterned sun dress enveloped
itself around the smooth slope of her broad shoulders, the luxurious arc of her
breasts.  A pair of sandals bound the perfect arch of her feet and slim,
leather straps snaked up the flesh of her rounded calf.  She held a
Titan-coloured martini in the slender fingers of her right hand.  Emily was
oblivious to his staring.  She breezed out of the room as easily as she’d
arrived.

Mark was surprised to feel hungry
again.  He levered himself off the couch, following Emily, in search of another
drink. 

“Mark!  How the fuck
are
you?”

Gus leaned in close to Mark with
his chest thrust out.  He was grinning broadly but his greeting sounded more
like a challenge.

“Great,” Mark said after he had recovered
from his surprise.  “You have an amazing house.”

“I call it home.  Where’s your
drink?”

“I was just on my way to find
one.”

“Come on this way, I’ll set you
up.  Anything catch your eye?”

“You run with an attractive
crowd,” Mark replied, thinking of Paul’s wife.

“Maybe we can hook you up
tonight.”

“Ok.”

“We’re glad you’re here,” Gus
said, handing him another martini freshly made by the bartender.

“Thanks.”

“Not just tonight.  But we’re
glad you’re with the firm.  We think you’ll become a key part of the team.  We
want you to think of us as family.”

“Thanks, I appreciate it.”

Gus handed Mark another pill. 

“I’ve got to go get me some of
that
,”
he said.  Before Mark had lowered his drink Gus was gone, trailing a slim woman
in tight-fitting shorts and a halter top.  Mark studied the pill in his hand. 
He felt euphoric.  He probably didn’t need it.  What the hell, he thought,
what’s good for Gus…

He stumbled down the hallway
looking for the lavatory, giggling, poking his head in to the recreation room,
guest rooms, the weight room, and the sauna.  When he finally found it, he
didn’t bother to knock. 

“Jesus Christ!”

The woman was fully naked, lying
on a towel, stretched along the length of the black marble countertop.  A bald
man, rotund and naked from the waist, hunched over her, his face obscured by
her thighs.  Mark thrust the door open and it clattered against the wall.  The
woman sat up to look over her shoulder.  The man between her legs stood and
turned.  A short, silver straw waggled from one of his nostrils. 

“Occupied!” cried the man as he
ripped the straw from his nose and fumbled for his glasses.  He turned back to
the woman.  “I told you to lock it!”

The woman slid from the counter
and attempted to cover herself.  A drift of white powder snowed down from below
her belly button and dusted the floor and toilet bowl.

“Fuck!  You stupid whore!  Do you
know how much this shit cost?!” 

She shrugged dumbly.  The man
fell to his knees and began to rescue the cocaine.  As Mark closed the door he
saw the man, head in the toilet, vacuuming the walls of the bowl. 

He felt like he had entered an
alternate reality.  Who are these people?  Were the company parties like this
when grandfather was at the firm?  Mark found another lavatory and returned to
the entertainment room, gathering a bottle of beer along the way.  He found his
original place on the lambskin couch, heaped up another plate of hors
d’oeuvres, and laughed until he was wiping tears from his eyes. 

The Superbowl had entered the
fourth quarter and the Titans were up by nine.  It was almost over.  Mark
noticed he was now alone.  He heard a cheer rise up from a distant part of the
house.  And another.  And another.  Faint, but unmistakable.  Mark imagined that in this remote room there must be a gigantic, high-definition screen showing the
game, with duodeca-phonic sound and arena-quality amplifier stacks.  Or maybe
the game was playing in a custom-built IMAX theatre.  He stood up and pointed
himself in the direction of the cheering, careening down the hallways, bouncing
from room to room, turning back when the noise quieted. 

Finally he came to a doorway. 
Inside, people stood shoulder to shoulder, laughing and clapping.  Mark scanned
the dim room.  There was no screen.  There was no television and no high-tech
sound system.  It was the games room, with a number of vintage pinball
machines, arcade games, a shuffle board, antique fairground contraptions like a
fortune telling machine, and a mechanical wild turkey shooting game.  In the
middle of the room, on a large, very expensive looking snooker table, a man and
a woman engaged in vigorous intercourse. 

The woman lay spread-eagled on a
duvet covering half of the table.  She wore only a pair of sandals and a Titans
replica jersey wrenched up toward her neck.  Her face was flushed.  Her hair
was tousled and damp with sweat.  Her partner grunted between her legs, his
trousers at his knees, and the full, hirsute moon of his straining buttocks
rising and falling like the round end of a pump jack.

Mark briefly sobered.  He’d never
before seen a naked woman, nor a naked man for that matter, let alone a pair of
them together, copulating, on a billiards table.  Exhaling jaggedly, he averted
his eyes and they alighted on Paul Cornelius, his boss, standing near the
fortune-telling machine.  Paul talked and gestured to a tall man wearing jeans
and a golf shirt.  Before Mark could turn and duck out, Paul noticed him and
waved him over.  Mark hesitated.  He noticed that Paul wasn’t distracted by the
exhibition at all.  It could have been just another football game.

“The application will be
completely dynamic,” Paul was saying as Mark approached. 

“Uh-huh.”

“Employees, customers,
administrators, developers,…”

“Uh-huh.”

“…everyone will login through the
same completely customizable portal…”

“Yeah.”

“… and create, update and
maintain content through the graphical interface, without any more code being
written.”

“Uh-huh.”

“You see what I’m saying?”

“That’s awesome.”

“It’s the ultimate content
management system.”

“By the sounds of it.” 

“No-one, not Microsoft, not
Yahoo, not even Google for fuck’s sake, has anything like that.”

“You’re right there.”

“It’s going to be ten years ahead
of its time.”

The man in the golf shirt nodded,
replying with just enough enthusiasm to mollify.  His eyes darted from Paul, to
the snooker table, and back rapidly, almost imperceptibly.  Paul was talking
business. 

“Yup, it’s remarkable Paul, I
just wonder if you guys can pull it off.”

“Oh, we can pull it off, the
project is well underway.  The technology’s no problem.”

“Right.”

“We just need to make sure we
have the funding to keep the talent.”

“Right.” 

At the word ‘funding’, the man
directed his full attention to the snooker table.

“Here’s one of our rock stars
right here,” Paul continued. 

“Stu, this is Mark, our latest
recruit.  From Canada, actually.  He’s one of our database specialists.  A
fucking wiz.”

The man shook Mark’s offered hand
without taking his eyes off the table.

“This is Stu Townshend, CEO of
SmartSource and principle of the Gabriel Group of corporate angel investors.”

“Pleased to meet you.”

“I was just telling Stu about our
portal project.  Can you tell him about the recursive XML content engine piece
you guys are prototyping?”

Stu Townshend looked completely
uninterested in recursive XML content engines.  Mark looked over toward the
snooker table and back to Paul, apologetically.  Paul grinned.

“He’s really having a go, isn’t
he?”

“Who are they?”

“That’s Mrs. Ornstein.  Her
husband bet against the Titans.  She was the stakes.”

“He’s just the first of the
syndicate,” Mr. Townshend added, laughing, “there are two others waiting their
turns.”

“That’s unacceptable!”

Paul was shouting. 

“Fucking unacceptable!”

“We don’t want to go down that
road!” he continued, “we don’t need to re-invent the wheel, do we?”

Mark stared, puzzled.  Mr.
Townshend peered over him toward the pair copulating.

“Failure is not an option.  How
long do you think it will take?”

Paul grew quiet.  He looked
blankly at the wall behind Mr. Townshend.  His face contorted as if he was in pain. 
Catching sight of Mark he cupped his left hand over his lapel and leaned in.

“Sorry, I’ve got to take this,”
he whispered, his right hand pointing to an ear-piece buried in this right
ear. 

Mark took advantage of the
interruption.  He nodded to the two diverted men and departed.  In the hallway,
Mark took a second to collect himself.  Away from the noise and activity of the
games room, the flow of adrenaline slowed, and the fog of intoxication
returned.  He chuckled giddily to himself as a warm feeling of indifference
spidered through his body, re-numbing his limbs.  For a moment, he considered
slipping away, returning to the sanctuary of his apartment, before the evening
took another, stranger turn and he lost control, before something regrettable happened,
something that might jeopardize his standing in the company or, even more
importantly, his dignity, that precious commodity that he’d newly won and that
he felt he should jealously protect.  He began to look for the exit.

Gus clapped him on the shoulder. 
The pupils of his eyes were dilated, his eyelids were unblinking, and he was
grinning madly.