Apex Hides the Hurt Read online

  “But what was it called?”

  “Oh. They called it Freedom.”

  Freedom, Freedom, Freedom. It made his brain hurt. Must have been a bitch to travel all that way only to realize that they forgot to pack the subtlety.

  . . . . . . . .

  Apex was manufactured by Ogilvy and Myrtle. They got their start in 1896 as commercial suppliers of sterile gauzes and medicinal plasters. From what he could tell, theirs was a small but sturdy outfit with solid distribution in the south, catering mostly to hospitals. He imagined Ogilvy and Myrtle Sterile Bandages being applied to the hip wounds of the day. Got kicked in the head by a horse, fell off a stagecoach, you knew where to go.

  Things picked up during World War One, when they put in a successful bid for a military contract. An assured client base of patriotic casualties enabled them to enter the age of mass production. Blood in their business was down-payment money and lines of credit. A couple of years later, once Johnson & Johnson unleashed the noble Band-Aid, O and M joined the adhesive-bandage revolution with gusto.

  Any way you looked at it, Ogilvy and Myrtle’s Sterile Bandages were shoddy pieces of work. It must have been those military contracts, he speculated—government money will lull the best of souls into short-shrifting, he’d seen it happen. Whatever the reason, poor craftsmanship was the star the company ship steered by, and they tacked expertly. Number one, he observed, the rectangle of folded cotton absorbed nothing, and immediately after application brown blotches soaked through. Might as well walk around with a spouting artery if that’s going to happen. And the not-Band-Aids had a temperament. The moment he put one on, it was overcome with an unbearable self-loathing and the edges rolled up on themselves, too shy for this world. Whereupon it was only a few seconds before the gummy sides were clotted with dirt and they were even more abject. In showers, they went AWOL first thing, abetted by the particularly water-soluble adhesive, leaping from skin for the safety of the drain. Afterward when you should have been drying, you had to root around amid the hair and suds down there to prevent clogging. Water or no water, they self-destructed after twelve hours regardless, so that when you reached into your pocket for your wallet, the bandage clung to the rim of the pocket and tore off, the pocket pulled the scab off, and you bled on your clothes and dollars. A person couldn’t win with those things.

  In the fifties, they relaunched their brand as Dr. Chickie’s Adhesive Strips, hoping that a homey image might rustle up a little market share. These were the days before the advent of nomenclature firms, the Dark Ages. To people like him, the amateur namers of yore were like medieval doctors who never saw a patient unless armed with a bucket of leeches. Perhaps in its historical context, removed from modern cynicism, Dr. Chickie might have been a figure of apparent trust and authority, staring back at the wounded from the front of the tin box. He wore a white smock, lascivious grin bulging behind a white mask, and he peered through deep goggles that would not have been out of place on a World War Two flying ace. To his eyes, Dr. Chickie came off like a pediatrician who kept a box of special pictures in his desk drawer, the kind you had to send away to Amsterdam to get developed.

  Dr. Chickie prescribed no special remedy for the unpopularity of O and M’s adhesive strips. The good doctor ministered to the same handful of loyal patients for years, doddering on until the overhaul that cued him onto the stage. When he got the assignment, the only mental association he had with Dr. Chickie was deranged relatives. When he went to visit his deranged relatives they always had rusting tins of Dr. Chickie in their medicine cabinets. O and M had stopped packaging their strips in metal tins only a few years earlier, as if the plastic and cardboard revolutions had never happened. Market research bore out his impressions. The only people who used the product lived in small hamlets where everybody believed Truman was still the president; on visiting their homesteads the mailman shoved in pitches for land deals in Florida and sweepstakes guarantees and little else. Mummies that they were, they didn’t need Dr. Chickie’s Adhesive Strips anyway. What was there to sop? What they needed were brooms, to sweep up the dust that fell out of the nicks in their bodies. These people were not the kind you tried to seduce through advertisements in tony magazines. Only the rise of managed health care kept the company in the black. The military, HMOs: O and M had a facility for finding those in need of bargains bought in bulk. Nonetheless, they wanted a leg up in the domestic field.

  It was quite a situation.

  Really, what else were they going to do?

  They came to him and he saved them.

  . . . . . . . .

  No, Albie’s wife hadn’t taken everything in the divorce. She had left him his inappropriate emotional reactions to small things. Before they got back into the Bentley, Albie noticed the crushed toy in the driveway and murmured, “It’s a damn shame,” shaking his head as if rendering verdict on the entirety of cruel nature. A frankfurter made him smile, a broken toy sullen. He hoped that Albie’s melancholy might put an end to conversation for a time, but Winthrop Lane had other plans. It must be unfortunate to be so unsettled at the sight of your name. Particularly when your name was everywhere.

  “This is the first road they put in,” Albie told him, “so that they could get supplies back and forth. Keep following it and you’ll hit the factory. Before that it was just woods. Maybe there were some Indians or something, but they didn’t have a road.” Albie winced. “Probably want to change the name of the road, too. It’s like they want to erase it all.”

  “I don’t do roads.”

  “It’s simple tradition. You know what it means to be a Quincy man—we’re all brothers. It doesn’t matter where you come from, once you walk into those ivy halls, you’re in the brotherhood. Women, too, now that they let women in. They got a right. I tell you, I go back to visit and I can’t help but say, Golly, look at how it’s changed! You got all kinds of people, from all over the world. Handicap access, so they can wheel up there, it’s great. But even in my day, there was that spirit. A community of like-minded people. Had a black fella lived in my dorm. There were only five or six, but you have to understand the times. Good fella, quiet. Milton, I think that was his name. Lived downstairs. Liked to swim, if I remember correctly.”

  “Wow.” He had found, in his life, that it was always a good policy to flee when white people felt compelled to inform you about their black friend, or black acquaintance, or black person they saw on the street that morning. There were many reasons to flee, but in this case the pertinent one was that the reference was intended to signal growing camaraderie. He recognized landmarks on the road, and realized that they were almost at the hotel.

  “Quincy days—they were good times, right? They mean something.” His eyes sparkled. “There is a bond. It’s the same thing here, that’s what I’m telling you—look! There’s old Gil and his little rug rats. Hey Gil! What was I—okay, okay, Winthrop means something. Goode’s people, sure, they’re the ones first settled here, sure. Can’t dispute that even if I wanted to, it’s a historical fact. But it was nothing ’til my great-great-granddad opened up the factory here. Just a bunch of trees until there was a Winthrop name to say: This is here. It’s tradition. Guys like you and me, we understand that.”

  At the curb outside the hotel, a white shuttle bus disgorged passengers. Recruits fresh from the airport, dressed in the uniform of their kind, primary-color polo shirts and khakis. Albie pulled up and grimaced. “Will you get a load of that,” he muttered. “Marching in like a bunch of ducks. Ain’t that a kick in the pants—only time this place makes any money is when Lucky has one of his things going on.”

  He slid out of the passenger seat and said to Albie, “Can’t stop progress,” without thinking. It was a catchall phrase of his, something to put out there when he felt too indifferent to come up with a more engaged response. He instantly regretted his mistake. He looked back into the car. There sat Albie, pooled in the front seat: privilege gone soft in its own juices.

  “No, you c
an’t stop progress, can you?” Albie sighed. Did his eyes glisten, or was it a trick of the light? “Listen,” Albie said, “I know you have responsibilities. You got your job. But you’re here to be objective, right? You can see what they’re trying to do, can’t you? They’re trying to take away something that means something.”

  They left it at that.

  He found himself walking automatically to the hotel bar and stopped. He considered the situation, and then permitted his subconscious to have its way. He had only been away for a few hours, but there was no reason his afternoon could not be categorized as a hard day’s work.

  The joint was packed. He shuffled through. You could have called it Happy Hour, had Muttonchops not been glowering behind the bar. The bartender poured him a beer as soon as he sat down on the single empty barstool. He pictured the shuttle buses, one by one, as they navigated the twisty roads from the big city, full of Lucky’s recruits, buckled up and secure. The visitors dispersed once they hit the elevator, but only briefly. They washed their faces and flossed and then they made their way down here.

  Freedom. He whistled. If he’d offered up Freedom in a meeting, he’d have been run out of town, his colleagues in full jibber behind him, waving torches. It was like something from the B-GON days, an artifact of the most pained and witless nomenclature. Roach B-GON, Rat B-GON. Hope B-GON. Freedom was so defiantly unimaginative as to approach a kind of moral weakness.

  He didn’t hear the punch line. Only the laughter. Like everyone else at the bar, he turned to find the source of the racket, and there was Lucky, in the back of the room, in his Indian Vest, surrounded by his weekend guests. Lucky was in raconteur mode, he could tell by the job-well-done smirk on the man’s face. The laughter continued as one man initiated another round of braying; no one wanted to be the first to stop. They were a pretty mixed group, Lucky’s future business partners and incipient flunkies—put a picture of Sterling Winthrop’s laborers next to a picture of Lucky’s multiculti crew and caption the tableau CHANGING TIMES. Jack Cameron, the man he’d met last night, hadn’t been a representative sample. The crowd in the corner could have been an Apex ad, to tell you the truth, so well-hued were they.

  Lucky spotted him at the bar and winked and started over. The Help Tourists stepped aside, each one attempting to catch Lucky’s eye. This was how people reacted when you had the touch. It was how he’d pictured Albie Winthrop on his walks through town, before he’d met the man. Not that diminished thing whose empty kingdom he had just departed. He despised himself his earlier generosity toward Albie. Be a man, for Christ’s sake, he should have told him. Not indulged his weakness.

  “Hello, friend!” Lucky said. “I can tell from your face that you met with our favorite son.”

  “You’re right.”

  “You need a drink, then,” Lucky opined, and invited him to join their table. Without instruction, Muttonchops placed six cans of Brio on a platter, which Lucky carried to the back of the room. Man of the people. He followed. As the two men jostled their way through, the assembled surreptitiously checked him out, trying to gauge his importance, and what was with the limp. Lucky dispensed the cans of Brio and introduced him with a chipper “This is the man who’s going to put our little town on the map—literally!”

  He endured the usual round of questions about the nature of his profession before the subject turned to the new wireless standard. Apparently the new wireless standard was quite precocious. He kept silent. He took notice of his placement in the group. The words cordoned off occurred to him. Although the eight of them were gathered in a perfect circle—broken only now and then by someone leaning over the table to pick up a Brio—he felt exiled, a physical disengagement. This was not mere disinterest made into a palpable thing; Lucky possessed a zone of power. The computer entrepreneur and his Help Tourists were separated from him by invisible barbed wire that maintained a border. There is within, and there is without.

  “It was such a quick ride down from the airport,” observed a young Latino woman. CFO of some fledgling e-commerce outfit. Router of arcane information. Repetitive stress injury candidate, fiddling with the levers on her office chair. She said, “I didn’t realize we were so close.”

  Lucky smiled. “No traffic, you can make it in an hour. Some people even commute from the city. We don’t recommend it, but it’s an option.” He took a sip of Brio. “I know some of you are worried that you’ll miss all that a big city has to offer. It’s a huge fucking thing to move out here, I know that. It’s a big idea, but if you were afraid of big ideas, I wouldn’t have asked you here.”

  He noticed that he was the only one drinking beer. Follow the leader. He wondered exactly what percentage of life came down to good marketing skills. He settled on 90 percent. The other ten was an antacid, to help settle things.

  Lucky said, “Gimme 2.0, my friends, give me 2.0. One thing you’re going to learn this weekend is that I’m always looking for Version 2.0. One of our teams finishes a project—they’ve been busting their asses day and night—they finish it, show it to me, and what do I say? ‘Good job—but what’s Version 2.0?’ Because whatever it is, it’s not good enough. You can always tweak it, there are always ways to make it better. So I say: I love this town, but what’s the next thing? Where’s 2.0? I’ll tell you. You’re 2.0, we’re 2.0, my friend the consultant standing right here, looking like the Sphinx come to town, he’s 2.0.” Lucky squinted at him. “What do you think of that, friend?”

  He said, “Hmm.”

  Lucky slapped him on the back and turned to his audience. “He’s working! He’s taking it all in! That’s the burden of genius! Wouldn’t have it any other way.” Lucky looked at the can in his hand. “God, I love this stuff!”

  Somebody said, “I’ve never had it before, but it’s really good!” and the rest of them agreed heartily.

  He quickly finished off his beer and limped upstairs. When he got back safely to his room, he stepped on the note that had been slipped under the door. It was written in a maniac scrawl, what happened when the right-handed switch it up and use their left. It read, “I have honored your request for PRIVACY but will admit to ownership of a rising anger at your refusal to allow ME entrance. This HEAVY FEELING sits on my chest. WHO do you think you are?”

  He looked around. His mess was as it had been. Nothing had been touched.

  . . . . . . . .

  The number-six adhesive bandage in the country wanted to re-create itself as the number-two adhesive bandage in the country. There was no use trying to overtake Band-Aid, the number-one adhesive bandage. Band-Aid had recognition and fidelity across generations and generations. Generations and generations of accidents and the scars to remind people of what Band-Aids had helped them through. The name was the thing itself, and that was Holy Grail territory. But you could try to catch up with that, become number two, by claiming a certain percentage of future accidents as your own. So men schemed.

  Enter the whiz kid consultant. “Not me,” he always joked when he told the tale, “although I’m flattered, really. I’m referring to the hypothetical bespectacled whiz kid who thought up multicultural adhesive bandages.” Said whiz kid was another of his kind, a lonesome operative doing the same work, believing and disbelieving the same half-assed philosophies. He pictured him strutting down the aisles of drugstores, hands clasped behind his back, surveying the latest advances in adhesive-bandage technology, factotum trailing. The clear strip. The happily colored adhesive strips for children, with their little stars and turtles and crescent moons. The waterproof wonders and the antibiotic-soaked specials. The adhesive bandage had come of age while O and M was still trying to save a few cents on substandard gum formulas. The drugstores had ample shelf space, there was always more room for adhesive-bandage innovation. The antifungal sprays could be displaced to a niche in Aisle 6. This consultant, his opposite number and brother, he wished he knew his name, told his clients that what they needed was a hook.

  And here he tried to re-create the
consultant’s pitch for his listeners. The man walked around the conference room table, provoking the good men in their good suits to reconsider the basic laws of their profession. Band-Aids are flesh-colored, the man said. Most adhesive bandages are flesh-colored. Are advertised as such. And it did not occur to anyone to ask, whose flesh is this? It ain’t mine, and with that the man pulls back one sleeve to reveal his wrist, and the skin there.

  The whiz kid said, You manufacture this thing and call it flesh. It belongs to another race. I have different ideas about what color flesh is, he told them. We come in colors. We come in many colors. And we want to see ourselves when we look down at ourselves, our arms and legs. Around the table the men listened, and soon afterward they got to work. Somebody give this guy a raise.

  At Ogilvy and Myrtle they knew the neighborhoods, some block by block, and they knew the hues of the people who lived there. They knew the cities and the colors of their mayors. They knew the colors of clientele and zip codes and could ship boxes accordingly.

  They devised thirty hues originally, later knocked them down to twenty after research determined a zone of comfort. It didn’t have to be perfect, just not too insulting. What they wanted was not perfect camouflage but something that would not add insult to injury. In the modern style, the gentlemen of Ogilvy and Myrtle learned to worship databases, and linked fingers before altars of data. There was a large population of Norwegian Americans in the Midwest; O and M sent them a certain shipment. And there was a denomination of Mexican Americans in the Southwest; O and M sent them a certain shipment. The cities and hamlets had hues. The shipments were keyed, bands of colors were strategically bundled together. Given their particular business history, O and M possessed long-standing supply networks to poor countries—their cruddy craftsmanship demanded this—and to these poor countries they shipped appropriate boxes to their inevitably brown-skinned populations. The school nurses of integrated elementaries could order special jumbo variety packs, crayon boxes of the melanin spectrum, to serve diversity.