Man of the World by Robert Gibson

22: the wide world

For the unfortunate few who have given most of their love or placed most of their reliance somewhere in school, or who know that the material in the careers room is not for them, the end of their schooldays means exile into cold, draughty solitude.
  So it was, in emotional terms, for Midax Rale. But not only for him. It was likewise true of one other man, a very tall sour young man who, some years later, was stalking up the road to a re-union at Ganeshan Secondary.
  But this man was no Midax-type, no cloudy dreamer. On the contrary, he knew exactly what to do about the cold feeling of post-school exile.
  Play life’s game – and accept the coldness.
  Even the trees lining the avenue had grown and changed, and the very sunlight of late afternoon appeared altered from how it used to shine, now a pale dribble through time-bent boughs onto the asphalt drive. No use trying to recapture the life of yesterday.
  Nevertheless the tall man plodded on. Not for love of what could never be brought back, but through a business-like care for his destiny, he wanted to find some serviceable relics of his dead-and-gone schooldays, and wring what answers he could from them.
  At first he had no luck. A small crowd of parents and ex-pupils gave him negative replies as he circulated amongst them.
  “Lantti Trewiw? Sorry, don’t know what became of him…” “Davlr Braze? Sorry, don’t remember anything about him…”
  Continuing, the tall man began to be recognized. Several had seen his picture in the news.
  “Hey, you see who that is?” “Who, that beanpole? Can’t say he rings any bells.” “Don’t you follow politics at all?” “Well, if he’s a politician, he seems a soft-treading one.”
  Indeed the tall man was not out to make friends of everyone in sight, not this evening at any rate. He was simply concerned to blend in with the (to him) rather sad atmosphere, while trying (and largely failing) to get news of the schoolmates he had known.
  “Maybe you remember Jolld Tontrar?” he asked.
  “No, sorry,” replied a woman who looked almost middle-aged. She thought some more, for she wanted to be helpful. Then her face lit up. “Ah, wait! He became a lawyer and married Tarlpa Hemm, I think.”
  “Ah.”
  “But you’ve missed him by a year. He turned up at last year’s do – the one and only time I’ve seen him here. Now I think he’s moved away somewhere, he and Tarlpa… or maybe I’m thinking of someone else…”
  “And Lantti Trewiw?”
  “He’s not here either. So, you knew Jolld? So did I, I now remember. He and I were in the same year, but –” and now the woman sounded surprised – “we weren’t in your year, were we? I remember you now, Waretik! You were in the year before us.”
  “True,” admitted the tall man, oddly pleased that she remembered him out of her own life, rather than from seeing his picture in the papers. “I did actually turn up at last year’s reunion, where I tried to track down my classmates, and mostly failed. This time I’m on the trail of the people in the year after mine. While at school I did get to know quite a few of them – Davlr, Jolld, Tarlpa, Lantti… and then there was that dreamboat Midax Rale; what about him?”
  “Oh, he came a few times, then gave up. Maybe he lost interest after Pjerl Lhared moved away to do her accountancy training. And when she married Lantti, maybe he heard about that too, and lost heart… such a drip about her, Midax was. But he’s still living somewhere nearby; I see him sometimes, in the shopping centre or the library occasionally. We hardly exchange a word, though. Mooning Midax was never a chum of mine. He always gave the impression of being hurt because one wasn’t giving him something; goodness knows what.”
  “And Stid Orpen? Sennwa Axan?”
  “Sennwa moved to the west coast… Stid went into the Civil Service…”
  “Interesting…” and the conversation went on, flash-lighting shreds of the diaspora from the classroom into the world.
  Due to that divergent spill, re-unions would get harder to arrange with every passing year. In the minds of achievers, curiosity about one’s old classmates is not a strong enough emotion to overcome pressure of work and the inconveniences of time and distance. Easier not to bother. Those who do attend re-unions are, increasingly, the lesser achievers, people who have remained local, and even these tend to lose heart after a while.
  Waretik nevertheless continued to gather anecdotes during the course of the evening. It was second nature to him to accumulate a dossier on as many schoolmates as he could, to build up a life-picture of as many people as possible, especially those who (like himself) had made some use of the careers room. He lined them up in his formidable brain, drawing their profiles, one by one, into cool, sardonic summaries.
  Davlr Braze: This fellow, by the time he left school, must have possessed a vision of how to get on in the world. A vision which seemed to him to combine the administrative with the creative. Controls of processes; phone-calls and memoranda; keeping track of initiatives and of manufactures; the efficiency of movements, the changing of hands, variously lifting, carrying, organizing to make sure that plenty of whatever it was continued to happen – the name for it was business studies, a kind of economic dance which could never seem boring to those who looked at it as Davlr did. Accordingly he plunged into it and soon became the youngest-ever assistant manager in the giant Larmonn Photo Company.
  Jolld Tontrar: He, likewise, was inspired by a web of such scope as to encompass all the doings of life. In his case it was composed of the vast tangle of official do’s and don’t’s, can’s and can’t’s, accumulated by society. It all beckoned him towards the infinite promise of a brass nameplate – the revelation promised in a careers-room leaflet entitled “Your Future as a Lawyer”. Primed with enthusiasm, he set to work. He chose the relevant college, attended the relevant course and came out the other side with his fingers curled triumphantly round the scroll which bore his ticket to success. A scroll soon to be framed and hung on the wall inside his office: Jolld Tontrar, Qualified Attorney, Dranl Law School.
  Tarlpa Hemm: She found her own route to fulfilment by way of those climatic and social factors which impel human beings to wear clothes. Although the human body remained generally constant in shape, designers could compensate for this limitation by endless disguises and distortions of that shape. This activity was called “fashion”. Tarlpa’s one idea became to land a job either as a model or as personal assistant to one of the great fashion designers. Too normal in shape to achieve the first, she managed, as a reward for her single-mindedness, to attain the second objective. Ensconced in this position she was able to take a much firmer line with Jolld Tontrar, who kept phoning her at work. “Look, Jolld, I’m busy! Until five-thirty I don’t exist, right?” – and she would slam the receiver down. Jolld had his uses, but if he got too far out of line there were plenty of other fish in the sea. Life, indeed, was a glittering succession of stimuli, of rolls of cash and streams of colour: new faces at each week-end fling, new swirls on the night-club dance-floor scene. Tarlpa was quite ready to admit that she was not able to consider existence in any other way. For - subtract all the lively stuff and what was left? Slabs of silence; one might as well be dead.
  Lantti Trewiw: He employed the most direct approach of all. In his hunt for perfect bliss he went straight for the substance which must provide it – the fluid organism, the protean prey, the fascinating, amoeboid, tentacle-sprouting quarry called Money.
  Once you had caught and tamed that – it didn’t much matter how – you could command it to turn itself into the key to any lock.
  Thus you could grab the treasures of society. The small price you had to pay for this great reward (Lantti knew) was that you must use up the golden years of your twenties in a focussed manner. You must not digress in dreamy wonderment, not attend useless humane college-courses, not indulge time-consuming yens for learning useless languages, for instance. Lantti had some natural curiosity, but he had to put it under restraint. But so what? It was easy to pay the price, considering the luscious reward! Besides, it’s obvious that you can’t have everything at once. Lantti therefore had the sense to master the details of his uncle’s Agribusiness, a high-tech farming enterprise which allowed its directors to be lounge-lizards rather than tractor-drivers. It was a good bet, and it paid off. By the age of thirty-five Lantti was rich, with a big house and two cars, a beautiful wife and a capacity for trading-in any of these on favourable terms.
  …By the end of the evening Waretik Thanth had listened to a pile of tittle-tattle and had “read between the lines” to glean enough about the small lives of his former friends. Knowledge of any people, no matter how obscure, served his purpose. Now a bigger school awaited him: the world and its pressures; the interactions and merciless exposures of the public arena, in which obscurity and a crushed ego were the penalties of failure, and the sky was the limit to reward.
  Politics would be Waretik’s life.