Vocation

Doug had been solo at the desk for two hours before he got his first call.

Rrrrrriiiiinnnnng…

Doug: Student Support. ‘S Doug. I can help…

Karl Po: Hello.

(Doug hears an Asian man in that “hello”, and the call’s from the Cornell exchange. Doug sees potential.)

Doug: (After a lengthy pause) Hello. You called the student support hotline. Are you having trouble.

Karl Po: (After another, longer pause) I’m having trouble.

D: OK amigo, I can help you there.

K. P: Thanks. I mean, thanks for taking…The time, I mean. Um. Thanks.

D: No worries dude, now just take me through this whole dance contest. Bring me right up to speed.

(Karl Po was only a few minutes into his story when Doug put aside all doubt. A live one. Right there at 11:34 on a rainy Tuesday.)

***

An hour and a half later, Doug was finishing up with Karl Po.:

Jeez Karl it doesn’t sound to me like you have much of a choice. I mean, your wife and your own brother, not to mention his 17 year-old kid! And the kid’s girlfriend. we must never forget she fucked your brother’s kid , and your brother’s kid’s girlfriend at the same time. And at different times. Horrible. Then there’s the humiliating fall from grace at your job, not to mention in your neighborhood. Your agonizing Rheumatitis, severe nasal allergy pain, and weeping sore condition. Throw that in with the 25 pounds that you can’t lose despite fasting, exercise, dark magic, and the use of “supplements”. I gotta tell ’ya man: I’m just not seeing that there’s much here that makes your life worth, well, anything.

Doug let the word linger before taking up again. Technically, the list of troubles was the last part of the protocol, but Doug was detail-oriented. It was his custom to run down a series of confirmations in closing, just to make sure he and the subject were same-paged regarding sequence and timing. He was steering the train of conversation in just that direction, when suddenly the whole fucking thing jumped the tracks. After yet another nine months-pregnant pause, Po intoned:

It’s so strange. This isn’t quite the way I expected this to go.

Doug was appalled at his own carelessness almost as much as with the tremendous balls of Karl Po. Po - he realized now - was never planning to show up tomorrow. Not on time, not anytime. He decided he’d need to change a few things about the approach. Nothing extreme, he promised himself, jotting some quick notes in the tiny book that he used to record his ideas as he birthed them. Even though he knew KP wasn’t all in, and might never be, Doug decided to play out the string, if nothing else but to stay in practice for the next real opportunity:

Well, Mr. Po…Karl…you know I like to think we’re here to help, no matter what our assessment and interpretation of the word becomes after speaking with a particular caller. If what we hear dictates one course of action over another, then aren’t we obligated to express that opinion? If not then what are we doing here anyway?

***

K: (After another twenty-eight minutes of taffy-pulling, followed by forty five seconds of silence) I’ll be breaking everybody’s heart. My mother…

D: (shuffling papers around his desk) Well, Karl, I think we’re done here. I have other callers, you seem determined, maybe revisit this at the later date?

K: You sound almost disappointed

D: It’s nothing. Don’t worry about me.

K: So you are disappointed. I knew it. I should have you arrested. I fucking call for help because I think I’m thinking about killing myself and here you are fucking encouraging me! You fucking asshole! Evil, devious motherfucker! ASSHOLE!

D: Well now Mr. Po I don’t see where that kind of language…

K: FUCK YOU! (click)

***

Afterwards Doug replayed the events in his mind. Over and over he combed the footage, like a football coach studying game-film, leaning in, looking for advantage, searching for gaps in the defense. Was it his delivery? Po had seemed comfortable speaking with him…The pitch itself? Doug’d been using it for five years and six months without issue. Was he, himself offensive in some way? He was wearing Polo khakis and a powder blue button down. Not the most imaginative threads but not overtly objectionable. His armpits and breath were heavenly. His entire being - in fact - a veritable olfactory feast. Everything seemed in order, but something was very, obviously, wrong. Doug felt defeated. Leaning as far back as they Aeron would take him, he launched a melancholy ghost of himself through one of the thousand holes in the drop-ceiling. He imagined himself a microscopic thing, Even smaller: A thing that would appear microscopic when compared to things that were actually microscopic to begin with. The sad little piece of Doug tumbled up into the ceiling holes, went bouncing through unseen cracks in support beams, and finally moved into open air, airborne for the gusting thermals.

***

Christian Choo was going to be late. He was nineteen years old., uprooting from Japan for an ivy-laced engineering ride, but failing all but one of his courses in this, his third full semester of school. Christian had married just a few months before coming to Cornell, after fathering a child with a high school girlfriend. The girl - Tiya was her name - had since been put on Psychiatric lockdown on the advice of the family doctor. The child was being raised by her family while she “healed”. The prospect of returning home to Tokyo with an academic dismissal form to present to an unemployable wife who might be bi-polar, became the trigger-event to a phone conversation with Doug.

He woke up late, almost 4:00, and considering all that had happened, he thought that was about right. Excessive sleep, tardiness, and general sloth had been his constant companions for almost two years. That they would conspire to thwart his punctuality regarding the last appointment he’d ever make wasn’t especially surprising. Still, he felt he should hustle. If the guy left, and he decided to go ahead anyway, then he’d be leaving an un-kept promise, which - he felt - was probably frowned upon in any kind of decent afterlife. He was puzzling over this, still wrapped in sheets and horizontal on the bed, when his cell phone started up, bouncing and vibrating on the bedside fake wood table. Nine rings went buy. No movement / complete silence from the bed. He was reaching for the thing again to see who it was when it blew up again. This time, the man was close enough to see the caller ID. Just one letter, capitalized and final: “D”

Hello! (he sounded more upbeat than he’d intended, and made a mental note to tone it down for the rest of the conversation.) Oh hey. Yep. Yeah. Yeah not bad, not as rested as I’d like but, I guess I don’t have to worry about that much longer. OK. Yeah, I spoke with her again last night and it’s like I told you. There might even be more than one. Yeah, totally. Just like you said. Right, no the kid is probably not mine, and then you weigh that in with the VD she gave both me and the kid. Oh yeah, he’s been since like, age 10. No. No exaggerating. It’s sealed. He’s a disaster. Already I know he does coke like every night. I think he actually was arrested with coke. Oh now I’m getting worked up and I really didn’t want that today. Yeah. Right make it 4:00, the top of Six-Mile like I showed you. OK. And listen man, I know his is probably the last time for us before I, um, before…

(loooooong pause)

…Anyway I just wanted to thank you for all your help and support. Without you, I might have never realized the truth. God knows how many years of agony and misery you’ve saved me. I had a little token of my appreciation sent down today. Use it in good health my friend, and when you use it, think of me. OK. Goodbye.

***

Tokyo could be a cold place in the fall. Mai Choo figured that most people didn’t know that, most Americans anyway. She watched them daily, trundling by the hundreds past her info desk at the Tokyo Airport. They’d take a look outside at the snow and the weather, realizing with inevitable certainty that whatever light linen, single-layer, small pocket-animal laden ensemble they’d selected for travel day wasn’t going to make the nut. They’d move off then, searching anywhere and everywhere for English-language signs, or symbols that might indicate warm garments for sale. Mai Choo could never afford to watch for long, her duties as interim chief were too demanding. But everyday she’d give the warmer clothing phenomenon a few minutes, usually during her daily, early am multitasking session while reading the papers, having breakfast, and streamlining her day’s appointments in a tiny leather-bound notebook.

She’d been just getting around to this daily observance when there came a knock at her office door. An underling opened the door a crack and stuck his head in the space between. He said:

Mrs. Choo. A package. Next day air from Cornell.

Instantly Mai Choo’s head went into Migraine overdrive. Her son. Her beloved. Her baby. Her miserable, lazy, dishonorable bastard. They’d sent him to America with such high hopes, and reaped only disaster, and misery for the sending. Mai felt a lot of things for her boy, but what she mostly felt was embarrassed. Choo was once an important name in the place where she lived. And the episodes with the boy and his “wife” had changed all that.

Come in, I’ll take it.

***

Mai moved back behind her desk with the show-box sized package, and dismissed the worker-bee. She waited almost ten whole minutes before opening it, another ten minutes staring at it, and then eighteen more minutes fiddling aimlessly with it, before finally sticking it into her laptop and pressing “play”.

The opener was a landscape shot, handheld (on film-class 8mm she noted) as the camera-person walked slowly in what appeared to the bottom of a natural canyon. The camera showed her a small but rapid stream wending, and diving down steep chutes. Then it turned upwards and Mai could just make out high grey rocks reaching up into a white-out sky. She felt vertigo just watching. The rocks were at least 200 feet above the camera.

“The rocks are at least 200 feet above where I’m standing Mrs Choo. We’re at the bottom of an enormous, natural canyon in Ithaca, New York, not so far from where your son attends college at Cornell.”

She’d blanched before at the thought of her stupid, irresponsible son. Now her stomach began roiling and pitching again. The DVD, the high rocks, the unexpected package. All very wrong-feeling.

“My name’s Doug Mrs. Choo…

Mai Choo didn’t hear the rest. She was too busy watching.

***

It really was a nice day. Chris Choo smiled to himself at the irony. Of all people, of all DAYS, to notice and appreciate nice weather. Just another sign, among thousands, that he’d never quite fit in this world. How could he have been so blind? Wasted so very many years? He thanked God - as he did every day, at least a few times - that he’d the good fortune to cross paths with Doug, . He thanked God, yet again, for the ten blue valiums that Doug himself had given him just yesterday morning. He’d buried them all in one go just before the climb, and felt now as if his entire person had been filled to overflowing with cool, soothing clay. The time - he knew - was right.

The last steps of his life stretched before him, taking the form of a insubstantial-looking footbridge about 150 feet long and strung out over a tremendous chasm. He stood, regarding the void in the dull heat of a September morning in upstate New York. The last bridge, the last view, the last steps. The sunlight glinting and sparkling off random reflective particles imbedded in the footbridge. The last sunlight, the last particles, the last steel cross-piece on the last footbridge. He started walking, and each step brought more of what he could only guess was relief.

When he got to what he guessed was the center of the thing, he wasted no time. Classes would end before noon and then somebody would see him, and scream to him, and make him come back over the fence. He couldn’t repay Doug with anything substantial, but he could at least repay him with punctuality. He steeled himself, moving with alacrity, grabbing for support at a green-painted cable, swinging one leg over and then the other. Now both legs cranked straight with hands grasping the cable in reverse behind his back. The last uncomfortable position. The last gaze into a 200 foot void. He looked up, found the 11:00 sun, and let go.

***

She didn’t see where her son actually “jumped”. One minute he stood suspended, holding the cable-fencing behind him and starting down with a blank expression. Then he wasn’t. The angle was close enough that the camera couldn’t catch the entire event without following her son’s descent, and so “Doug” had done just that. Mai watched as Chris fell one hundred and fifty feet, bounced off a great protrusion of evil-looking dark grey bedrock, and exploded into five or six different pieces in a sqishy burst of red, purple, and white. “Doug” had tried to follow these as well but Choo’s remains had become too diffuse to fit in-frame. Eventually he stopped the filming as three of the chunks of Chris Choo bounced and oozed onto the canyon floor. The last thing Mai saw before blank screen, was what looked like a piece of torso leaving a splotchy, snail-trail of gore behind a slow-roll toward the rushes.

***

Doug: Student Support this is Doug, I can help…Mr Po! Nice to hear from you. How’ve you been. Ah sorry to hear that, I…What’s that? Tomorrow? Uh let me check…Tomorrow is just fine sir. I’ll see you then.