We should be as water, which is lower than all things yet stronger than even the rocks.

He Dog, Oglala Lakota warrior

We were so young and we knew everything. We were so foolish. It became us to adorn ourselves with what we did not know. We dressed and played the part and found we had changed into something perverse, a thing bent and untrue. Why had honest speech eluded us, and when had we ceased to be? For to see us now in a glass was not to see us at all, but to see a thing false. Yet there was a twilit longing, a distant craving to return. But how? After how many years gone down, how to find even a thread of good in the soiled fabric of days. No heart, no laughter, nothing but a dim memory of something that once was good. And now so very tired. Tired of it all but captive none to less, held irrevocable in the unman image and conceit of it, unable to find any meaning in the slow dissolve of life we had formed with our own hands. The once shiny object now tarnished with many deceits, an anxious hunger eating us slowly and we falling further into oblivion and darkness.

***

Steven smiled. He could feel the disease within, the gnawing pleasure and delicate twisting of life as the older man sat before him. Steven was watching for the older man to show alarm or fear or perhaps plead for mercy, that would be nice. To beg, Steven would have liked to see that, to see the man grovel a little. But no. The older man simply looked around the tiny conference room. Looked at the HR guy Steven had asked to be involved, looked at the thin manila folder on the table, looked at the picture on the wall of some nameless European street, but did not look at Steven. The older man seemingly not surprised. It was disappointing to Steven, unsatisfying really. He had hoped to elicit some kind of discomfort and pain. The older man had always been so self-assured and confident, so adept in the face of the mounting stresses of the projects. Steven wanted to knock him off his game. At least once Steven wanted to see the guy wince or struggle. But there was no struggle in the man, he was disarmingly at rest.

You know what this is all about.

The HR guy had spoken. The old man listened.

Steven has concluded that you are not performing the necessary tasks assigned to you. You are not meeting the minimum requirements to justify continuing your relationship with the company.

The HR guy continued with a brief litany of nonperformance.

Do you have anything to say?

The older man had listened and now quietly spoke.

These things are untrue. The teams appreciate my leadership. My work is available to all on the corporate site, all reporting, all progress, all the things you say I am not providing, all there for anyone to see. But you have already decided what you are doing today.

The older man was silent once again.

This is what had always bothered Steven, the man seemed unfazed by anything. Almost untroubled. Some would have said the guy was naïve or simple-minded, maybe meek or something. So pathetic, it was galling. To Steven the guy was servile and wimpish, and not a leader at all. There was real pleasure in controlling others, of having the reins of power and the ability to twist reality as you saw fit. Clearly the older man appreciated none of it. No, the older man had never shown a desire for power. Astonishingly the old guy had disseminated any power he might have held to others. Clearly not a power-broker. And it was true the people liked him. If anything, this gave Steven pause and real concern. The man might eventually upstage him undoing Steven’s careful assent to power. In some quiet way the older man just did his work, encouraged others, and moved the projects along at a steady pace. The man’s work was solid. There were no actual issues there. It had taken some invention and a few lies to have him removed. And here they sat, the three of them. In a very few minutes Steven’s problem would be resolved.  

Steven knew life was nothing more than a fabrication. All pretense and bluff. Man was beast, and Steven’s own life a careless collage pasted to the stiff pages of his days with no regard for beauty or an honest thought. There were none. Over the years he had come to see that all was pretend and show. There was no enduring thing to be held or cherished, nothing sacred, but only what one could take for oneself, what one could control to consume upon one’s lust in some harried race to outdo others, to subjugate and make your mark, for taking was its own reward. That was reality. There was satisfaction in stepping on others. It was intoxicating, crushing them in pursuit of his goals. Steven had found this to be true. And yet there was a niggling doubt. His satisfaction never fully realized, not really.

After the meeting during which the older man had surrendered his company id and company credit card, Steven had walked with him to his desk, watched the old guy put his personal items into a cardboard box, and escorted him to the door. There had been no words. Steven had watched as the older man walked out across the black pavement of the parking lot and a memory passed through his mind.

It was summer and he was a young boy.

His grandfather had visited their home and was leaving now, walking out to his car parked at the curb. Steven was watching him through the screen door, his tall thin frame slightly bent from his long years. A sweet old gentleman who would get down low on his knees to listen as Steven shared his many dreams. He would smile and tell Steven that dreams come true.

His grandfather would die that night. It was Steven’s final memory of him and he did not yet know it.

The sweet old gentleman had been good to Steven but had vanished suddenly from his young life, receded into lost thought and time’s dissolve. So many dreams had died that night or so it seemed, for life had become a frenzy of getting and clinging, and not like his grandfather at all. Not a generosity of spirit but a venal craving forever unsatisfied. A carelessness as if one was cut from the moorings of the one thing true and honest, left to drift, always invidious of the happiness others had, lost to any joy in this world.

Steven watched now as the older man put the cardboard box in his car, climb into his vehicle and drive slowly away. He wondered if the old guy had grandkids, and was he as kind to them as he had been here with his teams? Would the older man die tonight and leave a trail of sadness as his own grandfather had done?

Who cares, he thought.

But he regretted the thought immediately, turning in haste from the windows overlooking the parking lot. Life was comprised of taking, that was obvious. He tried to feed it but it was never enough, the want always there to taunt him, a twisting canker to have more. He could not still it. Yet…

Dreams come true.

His grandfather’s voice echoed in his mind. The image of the old gentleman on his knees listening intently to Steven’s many childhood fantasies. A sweetness and a hope Steven did not know anymore but wanted desperately. Yet to quiet his obscene cravings now was not something he could imagine. There was a time when he was much younger, a time when he would dream and where everything was possible. Not this corruption and seething dark voracity, but a healing ache and a good dreaming. It was a lost image now come back to call to him, to bring him to himself for he was lost in a house of mirrors, false images, and unreality. He wanted once again to be a child and giggle with joy, to come to full blossom in the light of day.

But it was not possible. The events of the day, of his life really, were as a dry stick, a dead branch withered and left to rot in the dog heat of days. He had been a taker and that was all, an empty tomb of echoes and regret. Hollow inside except for this brief passing memory of his wonderful grandfather, of his kindness to Steven and his infinite smile. There seemed a kind of redemption in the faraway reminiscence, but all was too far away.

And the older man today, what of him? He had that same sweetness about him. The same caring resonance and tenderness. Qualities Steven had grown to detest as a weakness, but just now in the solemnity of his memories, treasured more than life itself. Steven was a broken and shriveled man, spent empty under the weight of his own misshapen soul. There was no one to turn to, no one to succor him in his malaise. He walked away from the windows feeling completely alone for he was.

It had always been his purpose to dominate. He was unable to subdue his own deceits. He had willingly crushed others in his selfishness yet destroyed his own soul. And now all lay pointless and dark, without any hope. To know the joy once again… But it was so far away and remote and the darkness overtaking him once again. Could he stop the evil?

He could not go back in time. He could not erase the picture in his mind of the older man walking out to his car with his cardboard box.

What had he done?

***

We were so young and we knew everything. We were so foolish. We consumed our gods for they were us, and we did not know the time of our own unmaking.

END

Image by Jaseem Aslam.