The Enthusiasts

11

Somewhere in the middle of an abyss yawning over countless sand dunes and vast stretches of emptiness, harboring very little life to speak of, there was a city centered around the idea of grandeur, spectacle, and material excess. Somewhere inside that city there was a chilly, air-conditioned boardroom with five men in their early to late sixties seated around a large, glossy, black marble slab table encased with a heavy, rounded-edge of dark lacquered mahogany. Each of the five men had received several promotions in his lifetime and had now graduated to a position that was presumably the apex of an organization. The only organization, as far as anyone in this room was concerned. They had each managed to elevate themselves to this high level of social status by way of following the company's values, both stated and unstated. The company valued hard work. Hard work is when you prove through purposeful display and (known to the well-seasoned professional) discrete exaggeration of your actions while politicizing their importance whenever possible in the spirit of showing those above your position that you are willing to sacrifice yourself, your ideas, and your choices for the sake of the set, dictated, and always agreed upon direction of the company which has employed you. That direction, as hardened in the organizational fabric of humanity as any of the observed physical laws of nature, is simply understood and obeyed by all involved at the top and is simply called More. Hard work cannot be accomplished unless someone has witnessed it; anything else is labor, and although seen as critical to the success of the organization, labor is worthless, pathetic, and considered demeaning to the men seated inside the air-conditioned boardroom because it proves that you don't understand the meaning of hard work — which is to get ahead. The company also valued ingenuity. Ingenuity is when you are able to discover a new way of processing information and thereby improve the current system's way of doing things to create more material wealth at a faster pace or at a lower cost. The improvement, of course, will have no value if it is not attributed to you, and every man in the boardroom knew this without thinking about it. It was a big part of who they were. Each of the men seated around the table was proud of what he had accomplished, and each of them was certain that he had worked harder than any other to achieve his position of power within the company. (It appeared that there were some areas of regretted and unnoticed laboring which they each, still, occasionally lamented separately falling victim to after all.) These men were not evil or villainous. The men shared a new sense of perspective after graduating to the highest levels within the company, and they considered themselves a leadership group to be role-modeled after by all in the company with shared good intentions. They were cordial, they joked, and they occasionally praised each other in public and private. After years of rivalry while ascending the corporate ladder together, they shared a connection out of a sense of mutual understanding of the plights and stresses that accompanied only this highest of high level of responsibility. They felt less tension in their bodies lately; they felt they'd finally done what they were supposed to, and that was nice.

But no one would mention why they were where they were, waiting in the cold boardroom, in the hot desert. It wasn't their decision to be there, and the five older men seated around the table had all thought those days were behind them. Taking orders, that is. They each clung to their own false hopes that they had made it to that point where they controlled everything in their lives from now on, and no longer had to answer to anyone. They all told that to their wives and to their mistresses in private after essentially being charged with managing the company that managed everything else worth discussing in the world today. They and everyone else around them could finally "take it easy." But right now, they were growing increasingly agitated and feeling somewhat demeaned, or at least disrespected, while seated inside the quiet boardroom.

Right on cue, a slender, brunette woman in a well-pressed, tailored pantsuit entered the room from a door at the side of the boardroom which featured a company-promoting accolade-covered wall and a state-of-the art media display capable of delivering holographic presentations and over one thousand different customizable light and sound orientations if a point needed to be sold to someone seated in that room. She was familiar to the group of older men, and she circled the long table serving each of them a hot cup of coffee. She smiled at them all, and then asked if they wouldn't mind her sitting down to have a cup of coffee with them while they waited for the presenter to arrive. All of the men, while slightly surprised by the request, politely obliged the young woman and they offered her one of the large, cushioned leather-upholstered seats surrounding the table. Some small talk was shared amongst the group, and the young woman was asked if she had children, and if she'd ever been on a boat, after questioning each other rather boisterously on their weekend plans which involved a motorboat on a nearby company-owned reservoir. The woman answered "no" to the children and "no" to the boat, and she smiled with a light flushing over her cheeks after being asked to join one of the men, if she'd care to, for a boat ride over the coming weekend. At that moment all five men seemed to share a feeling of unexplainable déjà vu. The woman let out a light hint of flirtatious laughter before sipping at her coffee from the white, company-trademark-logo-embossed mug she used nearly every day. Her actions only added more evidence as they watched the mug meet her lips, which left a mild shade of pink lipstick smear over the mug's outer rim before she set it down. This had all happened once before. Each of the men shared but did not communicate this strange sense of intuition, as they were all quietly confused. Instead, they each seemed to mimic the young woman, as they always did, to try and dispel the growing tension and unease they felt around her.