SALES ARE DOWN

By Ben Greenman

from forthcoming collection, as yet untitled

"High Tide, High Time" was the slogan Jack had settled on, after toying with a series of others ("Shore Thing," "Seaweed Solutions," and the rather generic "Just Add Health!"), and he even went so far as to type an email to Stanley with "Got It!" in the subject line and, in the body, a long paragraph explaining the winding but rewarding path that had guided him to the door of what he now believed was the only intelligent destination for the campaign. "We must stress the origins of the product," he wrote. "Isn't that what your father always told us?" He paused and remembered Stanley's father, Theodore, a six-foot-two Brahmin with mostly gray hair cut by a streak of black. "The past inheres," Theodore had said, and then he had pointed at Jack and said, "Stress the origins of the product." Jack could not remember the first time that Theodore had said it, but he did know that at some point he had started to count the occurrences in his mind, and he remembered where he was the hundredth time he had heard it. In fact, Jack remembered that Stanley had been there, too, hearing time number one hundred with his own two ears. Stanley had been young then, just a kid, maybe eleven, maybe ten, he had been in the office on one of the company's Family Fridays, playing a game he liked to call "Mr. Mayor," a game he had invented with his father that had started when he (Stanley) had removed a magazine from his (Theodore's) desk and noticed that he (Stanley) exactly resembled the mayor of Brampton, Ontario, down to the angle of their eyebrows. "We must preserve our floral gardens," Stanley said, waving his eleven-year old hands. "We must fix up our factories!" Then he took questions. At the time Jack had been thirty-two, skating toward his first divorce, convinced that his heedless forward progress would be brought under control by his second marriage, which he was certain would happen as soon as he came to terms with Mariela and convinced Dot that he was free. Dot was Theodore's assistant back then. She and Jack had been seeing each other on the sly for a year or so. She was roughly midway in age between Jack and Stanley. But Jack had been wrong. He had been wronger than wrong. Dot had not married him even when Mariela stood down. "Oh, you can't?" he said when she told him. And then he expectorated his greatest fear. "Theodore?" he asked. She nodded, and his blood ran cold, but then she was laughing. "It's not Theodore," she said. "Don't be daffy. He's a great boss and a great man but for the love of all that's holy, Jack, he's three times my age." She had, she went on to explain, decided that she was attracted to all beings, though women more than men, and that she planned to live in what she called a "multi-faceted amorous community," by which, she said, she meant a share-house where everyone occupied whatever bed beckoned. Twenty years had passed. Dot was still in the house, still beautiful, still mostly with women. Jack had a bent back and a bruised sense of nearly everything. Stanley had never been elected mayor of anything. The great man was in the ground.