The Boardroom

A short story about professional anxiety. And going crazy.

“You got this, Stu.”

Stu is not sure. Young at forty, not quite six feet, Mason Stuart is many things, but confident is not one of them. He sweats fat drops, big enough to qualify for nationhood. In his mind lurks the constant fear that the worst will happen, just as it always does. It’s a loser mindset, a problem sans solution, forevermore.

Nicky’s got his back. Nicky always does. Same age, slightly shorter. Skin so dark he can blend in with the twilight, a hide-and-seek savant when they were boys. Now they are here in the boardroom, grown but not quite men, still straddling the edge of two worlds.

Across the table stands the sonofabitch. A demon from Stu’s past, tall and svelte. Look at that smile, those iridescent teeth reflecting fluorescent light. Stu feels like he needs sunglasses, mostly to hide the murder in his eyes.

Jayden Cruz. His high school nemesis. Cruz got into Harvard Law. Stu had to settle for Suffolk. We all know why Jayden, C-student-on-a-good-day Cruz, almost approaching mid-wittery when he wasn’t baked out of his fucking mind, got into Harvard. Every accomplishment he’s had, and there have been many, requires an asterisk to tell the full story.

Stu, on the other hand, had to fight for every inch. He had no sugar daddy, no benevolent oligarch offering a leg up. Despised, Stu became determined. Determination built resilience and resentment in equal measure. Stu is glad Cruz sees it. The cocksucker’s smile falters just a little.

Violent fantasies of blue war paint, solstice sunlight bathing Stu in glory. Bloody teeth bared at the breast of oncoming doom. You feel alive bathing in the icy river that forms the border between being and unbeing. Or so he’s read.

Something shifts, a change of vibration. The air has teeth, nipping Stu’s skin. His palm tingles moments before the door opens, a phantom pain aching where the hilt of a sword should be. A collective breath is taken. In walks the hiring manager.

The ritual is about to begin.

The hiring manager steps in front of the projector, PowerPoint slides projected on his chest. Stu is so nervous he can’t remember the guy’s name despite a million emails sent back and forth. A billion. The letter C is emblazoned across his forehead with its hairline receding like the tide at Mont St. Michel. C for Cruz. C for C-student. C for Can’t believe this fucking job duel is against Jayden Cruz.

“Gentlemen, welcome to Dunbar Coyle,” the hiring manager says. Larry. His name is Larry. He speaks with the cadence of a man who knows what he says is not important but desperately wants it to be so. “Today is Tuesday, August the third. It is about twelve-fifteen, in other words, time to begin. Today you will be battling for the position of partner. I’ve read your presentations, very good, the both of you, and now is your time to shine. Convince our panel that your approach is the best. And you know.”

Here he pauses, eying Cruz and then Stu with a deep, portentous gaze. His face is as inscrutable as the Pythia awaiting hallucinogenic fumes, but the words are clear: they both know the wages of failure.

Larry gestures to the three individuals who followed him into the boardroom. How did Stu not notice them? He feels Nicky grasp his shoulder, hears the unspoken reassurances in that touch.

The panel, partners all, are women. Two youngish ladies or color, probably a few dozen eggs frozen and tucked away between them, smartly dressed in notice-me-but-don’t-notice-me business attire that looks to cost more than Stu’s monthly rent. With them, a pinch-faced old white crone, token Caucasian, hair pulled back in a severe bun, scalp straining to keep every strand in place. Stu doesn’t stand a chance but he must press on. The consequences of defeat are too horrible to contemplate. Mason Stuart—why have you never been promoted? The question has dogged him like a miasma his entire career. But he’s made it this far. Against all odds he is here.

Again, the war drums beat. Again, he is striding the battlefield, head adorned with the pelt of a wolf he slew and skinned when he turned thirteen. Across the plains foreign invaders, tall and dark, spears and shields serried in perfect formation. The dawning sun kisses the spearheads in an intimate gesture of anticipation.

The enemies chant. Stu knows the fate awaiting their conquests, heard rumors of captives trampled to death in a shallow pit by the women as the pipers play keening war songs. But he is no Pygmy, no bush-dweller destined for eternal humiliation, mangled body unmourned food for vultures and crows. He is a free man. His axe is sharp, the steel tested and true. The heart beating in his chest is the same heart of his ancestors, ready to strike when the horn blows. Nicky always tells Stu he spends too much time on the Internet.

“You know how it works,” Larry says with a very Larry smile. “To the victor, the spoils. Mr. Cruz, you’re up first.” Because of course he is.

The ritual begins.

Cruz, C-for-cunt, struts to the podium, placid and in control. He grips the clicker casually, a lead singer grabbing the microphone, the crowd ready to be moved. The partners are rapt, smiles poorly hidden. Overhead, Stu sees flaming arrows raining down on his comrades, wicker shields bursting in blooms that burn but never consume. 

“It’s like this,” Cruz starts, easy smile on his handsome face. “You all need to get with the times. Client retention is important.” Click. The band starts their opening number behind him. “Clients retain firms who reflect them, you understand? That reflect society.”

The picture behind him is a pie chart titled “Dunbar Coyle.” The biggest slice is labeled with a damning indictment: 73 percent white. Cruz’s finger accuses the thick slice of unspeakably self-evident atrocity. “Over here, this is the problem.” The finger moves, changing character as it indicates the smaller slice. “This is the part that should be growing. As you can see, it remains stubbornly stuck. What you need, you understand, is a partner who can reach not only the clients represented by this piece of the pie that, out in the real world, is growing,” and not this piece”—the finger moves back to the larger slice—“that is shrinking.”

The smirk again. A red cloud covers Stu’s vision. He can sense the war hammer in sweaty palms, feel the haft shudder with orgasmic joy as the business end smashes Cruz’s skull to pulp.

The presentation goes on, but Stu hears only white noise, the static of a dog listening to his masters’ conversation while waiting for crumbs from their table. What if this time they don’t fall?

Honor. Virtue. All lies. Nicky tells Stu all the time he focuses too much on who to blame. “Easy out,” is Nicky’s phrase of choice. “Be a victor, not a victim.” Nicky means well, but it’s easy for him to say. He made partner at his firm. Funny, that.

“. . . outreach.” The word comes in through the static. Outreach. A mystical incantation. The world is run by magic, power that can be flexed only by those born into the priestly class. Cruz is a Brahmin, so does that make Stu a Vaisya? A Sudras? Something worse?

“To conclude,” says Cruz, “I have a proven record at Willingham Brownstein of attracting both new attorneys and new clients who represent the best of what the country has to offer. My work speaks for itself to the tune of twenty-five million, and with the resources of Dunbar Coyle, there’s no telling how far past this number we can reach. That’s the impact I make wherever I go. Thank you.”

There is no applause; that would be too déclassé for these august ladies of good breeding. But Stu can sense the potential energy vibrating in their hands. Cruz sits down on his side of the room and can’t help but look over, face noble like a chieftain back from conquest. A direct challenge: “Top that.”

It’s all in Stu’s head but it’s real and it hurts. Stu cannot “top that.” He is fundamentally incapable. A victim, born in the wrong body at the wrong time. He curses his patrimony, his inheritance, his genetics. Why should he honor his mother and father, born into a world where they still mattered yet bequeathing a world where their progeny did not? Nothing made sense.

But nothing is over until the light of life is extinguished. Stu knows the new rules and he will play the game accordingly. Nicky thinks Stu had sent over the presentation they’d worked on together, boring stuff about quantifiable accomplishments and hard work and discipline, obdurate adherence to the highest standards of legal representation, all that stuff that didn’t matter anymore. No, Stu had made the decision to grapple the Fates by their necks, bend them over, and show them how to get well and truly fucked. Sorry Nicky, he thinks, but I sent over the other one, the one you called a “total fucking embarrassment,” end quote. Playing it safe gets a man nowhere. It’s time to move and the Tiber is waiting.

Larry fails to hide his glee. The conclusion was foregone. “Thank you, Mr. Cruz. Mr. Stuart, you’re up.

The sweat stops running from Stu’s neck down into his ass crack. Peace descends and his vision clears. He sees every dead follicle in Larry’s triumphant forehead. He strides to the podium as Larry fiddles with the laptop to bring up Stu’s presentation: “Staying True in Trying Times.”

“Oh no,” Nicky says.

Oh yes.

The cover page shows a bronze-age army engaging in a mission of conquest, muscular men painted in faded hues, sunlight gleaming off helmets not yet covered in gore scattering their enemies before them like sheep. One fighter’s sword bears down on a victim, a breath away from crashing into his skull. Every time Stu looked at it, he became that warrior, thews straining as he sent men to their graves. If Stu squinted, the future victim in the image looked a lot like Larry. “You’ve heard a lot about client retention in terms of demographics,” Stu opened, “but what about satisfaction? What about results?”

He speaks with practiced ease, the voice of one who shares blood with Cicero and Pericles; Themistocles and Arthur, Duke of Wellington; Alexander and Charlemagne. Cruz cannot lay claim to such lofty patrimony. Impossible. 

“In chasing an urban audience,”—Stu doesn’t stop for the laugh line—“you will chase away what’s made Dunbar Coyle so great, which is winning. Which is victory. Which is money in your clients’ pockets. Which is the knowledge that they received the best possible legal representation no matter what that looks like on the surface.”

He hears gasps now, the two young ladies of color and the pallid harridan struggling to breathe like they’re in a depressurized cabin orbiting Mars. Which they are. God of war, baby. God of war.

When you find the enemy’s soft spot, you keep pushing. The blood of Lenin courses through Stu’s veins as well. “We’re all in this together. This is what we’re told, and this is what we believe. It is what I believe, and what I know Dunbar Coyle believes.” He goes to the next slide, showing the real story at Willingham Brownstein. “What you’re not seeing is that my opponent’s numbers stopped here, at the six-month mark. If you go further . . . wow, what a drop off. Would you look at that? Red line does not go up.

“So this demographics-based approach isn’t working. Under my opponent’s watch, Willingham Brownstein has been providing subpar legal representation.” The next slide shows reviews posted on popular websites. “This doesn’t look good, but these are the wages of hiring based on criteria other than competence. Willingham Brownstein won’t be your competition much longer if attorney Cruz stays there, which is incentive enough for you to hire me instead. But regardless, a change in approach is needed for Dunbar Coyle to stay on top in this changing legal landscape. In the absence of competent legal representation, what if you make your core competency competency?”

You could hear hair grow in the silence, the deep quiet that preceded the bowel-shaking bass of an electromagnetic pulse. “Anathema,” croaks the old partner, “anathema!”

“Guards!” shouts one of the smartly-dressed younger partners, waving her hand as though anyone on the other side of the closed door could see it, rattling the expensive jewelry around her wrist.

“Oh damn, Stu,” Nicky says. He pulls Stu back. “Cut it out, man. Just cooperate.”

Stu can’t stop smiling. There is a satisfying “Oh, shit” look on Cruz’s face as he surveys Stu’s slides. Old boy got lazy, thought his chromatic disposition meant he had this in the bag. Figured Stu would be too afraid to fight back. Joke’s on you, Cruz. This untouchable’s got teeth.

Now the other young partner is on the ground, head held in hands and literally shaking. “Words are violence words are violence,” she chants, rocking like a metronome as Larry rushes to the old lady, now writhing on the ground as though poisoned. You’d swear Stu had entered their church on Easter Sunday and taken a dump on the altar.

Far away, over the thumping of approaching footsteps, Stu hears a flute skirling over the highlands, notes so pure he can see them, fat and black, floating like petals on the breeze. His kilt moves in time with the wind, the claymore strapped across his back his conductor’s baton. He smells the grass, the air still free as long as men like him have the courage to stand tall against the depredations of an unnatural empire. That they were kinsmen mattered not; they came to pillage and destroy and upend everything Stu held dear. For that, they must pay.

“Stay right there!” Larry yells at Stu, the voice of a court eunuch. “How dare you, how dare—”

Stu’s kick should have sent the man’s head flying through the goalposts at a distance of seventy-five yards. Larry flies back, blood pouring from his nose in an artistic half-circle that hits the back wall with an audible splat.

The ritual is over.

“Fuck, Stu,” says Nicky. He slaps Stu. “Snap out of it, man!”

Nicky is a friend, so Stu does not retaliate. “You’ve always had my back. All I ask you is to trust me on this.”

“The hell?”

“Save yourself,” Stu says. He turns at motion blurring at his periphery. Cruz is running, fist raised. Stu gets down, lowers his shoulder, and catches Cruz in the chest. There is no tragic cardiac arrest. Instead, Cruz ends up across Stu’s shoulder in a fireman’s carry. Stu keeps running, barreling into the two lictors who rush in, their fasces ready to strike. They fall in near-perfect harmony; maybe Stu didn’t get a strike but a Greek Church split isn’t a bad consolation. Words chase Stu as he runs down the hallway of Dunbar Coyle’s top-floor office. He has to keep running because words are violence, words are violence.

That is the trouble, Stu thinks in a moment of clarity, the column-lined hallway returning to drab corporate gray. Once the ability to enact violence had been denied, something had to fill the vacuum, and thus words became a proxy for fists. For swords. For bullets bathed in the entrails of pigs. What Stu had done with his mouth, he realizes not without some small satisfaction, was the equivalent of a mass shooting. His mouth was a canon belching fire into the heart of a shopping mall. It was sickening and glorious, tragic and necessary. He realizes, as he smashes the struggling Cruz into a wall before rushing up the fire stairs, that he feels alive for the first time in decades.   

“Fuckin’ put me down,” Cruz yells, fists pounding Stu’s back.

“You know I’m right. About everything. You know you’re a failure.”

They emerge on the roof. Stu spikes Cruz on the hard concrete. His temple bounces but though dazed he remains conscious. Stu drops one knee hard on Cruz’s chest and grabs his wrists tight. “I want to hear you say it. Say it!”

Cruz says it with tears streaming down his face. If words were violence, then what were tears? Was this how Vercingetorix looked laying his sword at Caesar’s feet?

“I didn’t think you had the guts. I, I didn’t think you had the nerve.”

Stu shakes Cruz. “It was right there, right there! The partners could’ve seen it, saved us the trouble, if they’d bothered to look!”

Great discoveries are said to come like bolts from the blue. Although the sky was blue, the city spread out before them on this most perfect of summer days, there was no jagged blast of inspiration to penetrate Stu’s skull, no divine finger to stir his brain with the intimacy only the Creator could provide. There was only the ice-bath of reality, the unavoidable behemoth everybody pretended not to see.  

They hadn’t bothered to look because they didn’t want it to be true.

The world beckoned Stu, the gift of opportunity. What was he doing here, pursuing things he never liked, becoming everything he hates? Exile freely chosen was the domain of free men. Like Tiberius refusing to bow to the whims of the deified Augustus, still bitter at leaving the love of his life “for the greater good,” Stu would retreat to his Rhodes, to the wilds away from this endless urban sprawl, find a community of like-minded outcasts. Do it all by choice. The time was right to say “Fuck it” and walk away.

Cruz is still talking, still crying, as Stu casts about for something to fight with. A pipe. A plank of wood. Anything would do. “You think I want this? You think this is who I am?”

His belt. Stu undoes the clasp, slips the expensive black leather free of the loops. His slacks sag but stubbornly remain on his hips.

“They make me do this. If I want to get anywhere, I’ve got to do it their way. Put on the mask and dance. I envy you, Stu. I always have.”

Stu doesn’t want to believe it but he does. He believes Cruz and all at once likes the man, twenty-five years of enmity evaporating in a fraternal burst of solidarity. It turns out they have the same opponents after all, that faceless, smothering agglomeration of greed masquerading as deep, deep concern, that wall of crystallized bullshit, that impenetrable bulwark of self-righteousness that brooked no ounce of self-reflection.

“Let’s get out of here,” Cruz says. “You n’ me, start our own firm. Bring your buddy along too.”

Stu tightens the belt in his hand. “You’re staying here.”

Cruz is on his feet now. “Why?”

“You’ve got too much to lose. Too much to gain. You can do too much good.” The first lictor bursts through the door. Stu leaps. The belt lashes the man’s face, knocking the sunglasses from his eyes and leaving a deep welt. Now Stu is crying; through the hum of low-frequency battle-static, he is fighting his brothers. They are all brothers, even Cruz.

“I forgive you,” Stu says, though he’s not sure to whom.

The stakes are high. Somewhere, back at his villa, waits a woman of tear-inducing beauty. Her face is a mask of patient yearning. In her hand a locket, or maybe a signet ring, something he gave her before setting out to battle. A wisp of dark hair blows across her face; she brushes it back with the hand not cradling the sensuous swell of her belly. A playful gust of wind blows up her skirts only for moment, revealing a shapely leg tanned by the sun, dappled with fine hairs Stu loves to caress in the early dawn hours. This woman . . . this woman Stu does not deserve. Because she does not exist. Another pleasure denied him by the crushing weight of bad choices.

The vision fades. There is no fair maiden waiting for her conquering hero. There is only war.

More and more lictors come, but Stu holds his own, fueled only by whispered tales of outsiders lurking in wilderness recently reclaimed from the husks of dead towns left to rot as victims of the new world order.     

“Stu!” Nicky yells. He’s on the rooftop now, trying to interpose himself between Stu and the lictors. Stu almost gives him a good one across the back—boy, wouldn’t that have been ironic symbolism—but it is a lictor who shoves Nicky aside, telling him to get back and don’t move. Behind them all stands the old partner, now in ceremonial crimson, head shaded by the hood of her stola. She raises a bony finger as if to zap Stu with lightning. “Take him alive,” she hisses.

Image created with Bing’s Ai image generator.

Imaginations run wild. Things that could not be, must not be, are, brought to life in spasms of action. Something took over, a mania, an unnamed obsession with the urgency of a slave driver and miles of cotton to pick before sunset. Cruz stands. Returning the favor, he hip-checks Stu out of the way and takes a blow to the stomach. He doubles over, trying to speak, huffing indistinct phrases that finally resolve into “Stop . . . we’ve worked it out!”

Stu stands, debating unleashing more verbal violence on the red witch that appears before him. Magic spells to counter magic spells. He is a ninth-level wizard in a duel with an unfathomably powerful lich, her mouth itching to utter Power Word: Kill.

Then the men with the guns come. Their armor is blinding in the late-afternoon, like suits of light. They aim gold-plated pistols at Stu. He raises his hands and backs away, feet on the edge of Dunbar Coyle’s proud downtown tower. Many stories below, busy people live their lives in thrall to decrepit fossils like this partner who may be Dunbar, may be Coyle, probably neither but replaced both in the first paroxysm of How Things Must Now Be. Dunbar Coyle, the name a relic of past eras, as foreign and remote as an Assyrian king was to Mozart.

Stu knows this building well. He knows that if he times it right, if fortune is with him, he can catch a windowsill, and after that he’d be playing with house money, which was always a good situation to be in. Check the downside and roll the dice. It’s how great men built civilization. Arms out, he takes a step back, waving goodbye to this world and hello to the realm of heroes.

-Alexander