Man of the World by Robert Gibson

23: a job

The pebbly shore of Dranl’s North Beach was not a bad place in which to kill time before an interview. The waves, tumbling and lapping safely out of range of Midax’s carefully polished shoes, braced his lungs with ocean tang: a few minutes’ pep for his spirit while he awaited the chime of two from the clock tower. He would, when that hour struck, cross the shore road, to enter the Port Authority Building.
  In another sense, though, the beach was an unfortunate place. The shimmering vista of the Zard Ocean – sunlight on water to infinity – shouted at him in derision of what he was about to do.
  Hey there, pusillanimous Midax Rale! So you’ve finally decided to turn your back on greatness, eh? Crawl, then, into your secure little hole!
  Worse still, in the roped-off area a little way down the beach, could be seen the part-built launch-centre for the Monto deRoffa quincentenary celebrations to be held in five years’ time. The authorities were deep in plans to recreate the epoch-making voyage, which from this very point, all those centuries ago, had begun with the Rinka setting sail on its quest to cross the Zard, to round the Cape of Gales, to circumnavigate the Dark Continent of Sycronn and discover the sea-route to the Orient. Billboards advertised what the reconstructed ship was going to look like. Tall displays, erected side by side, formed a wall-sized map with the route marked, and sign-sized letters honoured the heroic deRoffa’s name: the captain who had made history at the age of thirty-five. The man who had unleashed a tempest of cultural, scientific and economic forces. The man who had shaped the modern world. So said the billboards, and they probably did not exaggerate, thought Midax. At any rate it was a sad message for the thirty-five-year-old non-achiever Midax Rale, wandering along this same beach with a record of mediocrity about to culminate in this afternoon’s effort to land a job as paper-pusher for the Dranl Port Authority.
  The clock-tower chimed. Twice. So, get on with it.
  For a dull, final moment Midax stared out over the Zard Ocean. Some ember of defiance within him made him answer back to the taunt of infinity:
  It is you, O marvellous universe, who have kept me down all these years. It is your greatness, O world and sky, which killed my desire to choose a limiting career, during these years which count the most, the years when I was young and should have sprung upon the ladder of employment and social position. Years in which you unfortunately left no room in my mind for that workaday ladder; for its rungs which are necessarily narrow and small. You left me no capacity to compromise, no taste to make a humdrum start on anything. But now at last I am turning my back on you. I am facing the smallness. I have to. The smallness is what is real. Inescapably real. The realists are right. The careers-room staff were right and I should have listened to them.
  The clock-chimes died away. Midax turned, plodded up the steps to the entrance of the Port Authority and reported to reception.
  “I have an interview with Mr Rersh Wadd.”
  He was told to go up in a lift. He emerged onto a floor which seemed wholly taken up by one enormous antique conference room. It was miserably dim, with a gloomy jungle of potted plants.
  On one of the leathery divans, in front of shelves of old commercial books, lounged a dour, chunky man in a brown suit. He had the deep tan of those who can afford long foreign holidays. On a couple of other chairs sat two equally unsmiling women. Introductions were made and Midax was asked to sit down. One of the women told him, irrefutably, “Your name is Midax Rale and you are here to apply for the post of administrative assistant,” whereupon Midax nodded gravely.
  The other woman asked him about the places he had previously worked. Suppressing a yawn, Midax, who had already filled in an application form giving a long list of the temporary jobs he had had during the seventeen years since he had left school, again listed these posts. Plus the stints at various colleges which punctuated them. Plus the correspondence courses which he had also undertaken in such topics as archaeology, palaeontology, history, foreign literature…
  The woman polished her glasses for a few frowning moments. Then she asked him why he had done these things.
  Yes, he had heard aright. She had asked him why he had studied interesting things.
  Midax wondered what to say. Being alive, one naturally wished to occupy one’s mind, so surely the answer was obvious – he studied interesting things in order to satisfy his curiosity. But surely these people must already know that – which suggested that maybe the question meant more: maybe they really were interested in the details: maybe they were inviting him, in civilized fashion, to have a bit of real conversation, to help take his mind off the almost unbearable prospect of narrowing his life into a steady admin job.
  So he began to answer. He started to describe how one big subject led to another – how all big things were related; for instance, history and archaeology and palaeontology by vistas of time, and foreign literature because it was like exploring new worlds…
  The big-suited chunky man removed his glasses. He did not polish them; instead he stared at them as though he had heard something so astonishingly daft that he did not know what to do. In a pained, dumbfounded tone he intervened:
  “But, Mr Rale, what about money?”
  It was Midax’s turn to be dumbfounded. After a long arrested moment his soul was, however, illuminated by the sublime simplicity of the fellow’s remark, and he almost allowed himself to grin. What, indeed, about money?
  “Er – yes, exactly,” he nodded. “That’s in fact why I am now applying for a permanent post now, Mr Wadd.”
  The suited chest heaved. With a heroic effort at forbearance, the chunky man sighed and then, apparently putting the lid on his opinion of this nincompoop, he proceeded to ask some more questions. Finally he said, “Yes, well, we shall let you know.”
  Midax had no doubt what that phrase meant. He got up to leave, in the natural assumption that he had seen the last of the place.
  A couple of weeks later he got a big surprise: a letter telling him that he had been “accepted for a three-month trial period”. Well, well. Perhaps it was Mr Wadd’s policy to allot a quota of admissions to the mentally handicapped…
  As it turned out, Midax fitted in well. Smallness suited him, in a strange sort of way, at this particular point in his life. His yearnings for great and far things, his contemplative inner vistas which had denied him the blinkers of a go-getter, also allowed him (oddly enough) to find contentment while administratively employed. It was a kind of game, a harmless activity like hoeing a bed of earth or pruning the buddleia – that’s how he saw the task of getting the office system to run like clockwork. And he turned out to be good at it. He viewed the microcosm of papers and drawers and filing cabinets, the little universe of documentation, as a sufficient challenge to be of mild interest. It allowed him to make his share of difference – put in his contribution to the running of things. Besides, as soon as (due to his arrangements) it was more or less running itself, he could call much of his time his own. It then became possible to squeeze his own studies into office hours - by means of shorthand notes which no one else could read.
  Of course the whole thing was bound to pall after a while. But it was a secure huddling-place which paid the bills and allowed him leisure in the evenings and week-ends – leisure to dream his dreams. What more could he expect from life, things being what they were, since not everyone could hope to be a deRoffa? High adventure was for the few, the very few.
  Yet because he was in good physical condition, and not yet old, he could still entertain theoretical hopes. Some kind of breakthrough, some triumph whereby he might capture and rescue his slow-fading daydreams of real fulfilment. This effort of hope – though shrunk and wizened by now to little more than forlorn self-deception – remained a practical necessity; he had to have it on his side, to tip the scales of morale against the more dangerous night-dreams… the heartbreakers, the nostalgic returns, the deceitfully inviting dreams which fooled him into believing that Time had been rolled back and that he was still at school with the warmth of Pjerl close by and bright hopes before him. Or even more fantastically, he would dream that he had somehow been allowed to stay on at school year after year while Time rolled on, nobody objecting or thinking it odd…. all this to trick him into believing that the lost days were not lost. Until he awoke, that is. That was the wrecking moment.
  Self-recrimination yelled: how could you let her go, you lunatic? How did you manage to be so stupid? How did you manage to drop out of touch with her without even knowing the importance of what you were doing?
  Yes, that was the biggest question – himself. How had he managed to lose the radiance from his life.
  Fortunately, in these desolate awakenings, he also sometimes heard the echo of a more distant mental voice, the faintest of all: You did well to escape… do not put too much credence in the perfection of the dream.
  Be that as it may, the waking world did not present him with any effective rival to the memory of Pjerl. No other woman stood a chance. A stalemate ensued. Dreams ruled the night while a stable equilibrium of ordinary, bearable things ruled the day.
  Once, at the office, taking part in a conversation with some of the typists on the subject of pay, he was questioned by a “temp” who was about half his age, with a schoolgirl figure and pigtail, who fearlessly asked him how much he earned.
  At first, though not at all offended, he was reluctant to answer lest she feel envious of his higher salary. Fool that he was! He rapidly learned – when he at length did tell her what his salary was – that her idea about what to expect from society was much more up to date than his. “Yes,” she responded to his information, “I reckon we can say you’re underpaid.” Amused, Midax reflected that in some ways his dreams were correct and he was still at school – in a lifelong Civics class at any rate. He had much to learn about expectations. He should be asking for more, apparently.
  Yet he felt sufficiently well off – especially when turning the pages of newspapers and magazines. The political articles transported him onto the grandstand of history where he could witness the current dramatic moves towards world unification – current talks between the elected Monarchs of Vevtis and Larmonn, on either side of the Zard Ocean, bringing World Government closer to reality. The meteoric rise of the statesman Waretik Thanth, who had (amazingly) been at Midax’s own school – he had even spoken to him once or twice. Likewise the articles by scientists and historians pampered his curiosity, as if they were reports by an army of skilled hirelings busily researching to keep him from boredom. In fact this was his wealth: his perpetual immunity from boredom. A privilege no money could buy.
  Without boredom to drive him to act, he allowed the days, weeks, months, years to go by. His deeply underlying discontent was not sufficient to stampede him out of his comfortable grazing-lands. He did his job well: reliably he kept the records of which ships were in port, which had paid their harbour dues; which had not, or were contravening the port’s regulations in some other particular, and what stage the various legal proceedings against them had reached. Also he maintained an information service for his superiors, so that at the drop of a hat he could provide them with statistical summaries or instant response to inquiries about any individual case.
  He moved his desk so that in his office on the third floor he could sit and look out over Dranl Bay, seeing much of the port and enjoying the sense of being involved, no matter how humbly, in a great pulsing artery of the world economy. Here was the festival of human existence acted out under the sunny sky, for the benefit of that obscure spectator, Midax Rale.
  His boss, Mr Wadd, soon became pleased with Midax’s performance in the job. Nothing remained of the contemptuous manner which in the interview had resulted in that deathless utterance, “But, Mr Rale, what about money?” Wadd still believed Midax was wasting his talents, but he was wasting them on the Port Authority, wasting them on Mr Wadd’s department, so that was all right.
  It was a rather sad case all the same – thought Wadd in his fairer moments.
  “Look,” he said one day, holding out a leaflet, “why don’t you go on this management course, Midax?”
  Midax took the leaflet gingerly.
  Wadd encouraged, “I’m sure you could get through it easily…”
  “Trouble is,” Midax said, laying the leaflet aside, “I don’t have time for any extra studies at the moment.”
  “Why? What’s on?”
  “I’m on a geology course and two history courses…”
  “You always are,” said Mr Wadd wryly. “You ought to think more about getting your bread and butter.”
  “I eat plenty of bread and butter, I assure you.” He picked up and waved the leaflet and added, “But thanks for this information. I admit it wants looking at.”
  “It wants more than looking at. It wants doing. Else you’ll get stale in this office,” Wadd declared. “I don’t want to lose you, but for your sake you need to look for something better.”
  “Ah, but you know yourself, Rersh” (they were on first-name terms by now) “ – you wouldn’t give up your volunteer work on the Rinka, would you?”
  For he knew how keen his boss was on naval matters. How proud the man had been, when selected to play a part in the deRoffa quincentenary celebrations which were getting quite close now. Rersh Wadd, navigator! And what was more, historic navigator: appointed one of the crew on board the replica of deRoffa’s flagship.
  “When you put it that way,” conceded Wadd, “I have to agree with you. All I’m saying is, why not have both worlds? Keep your spare-time interests but get a better job, where you’ll earn more – which in turn will help you to pursue your own interests more ambitiously, maybe. I’m speaking against my own advantage here – I’d be very sorry to lose you and to have to train someone else to do your job. But you deserve promotion and you’ve reached a dead end here.”
  Midax shook his head dubiously. “I don’t think I could do the sort of thing you do – keep down a hassle-job and prepare to navigate the Rinka. People are different.”
  “Yes, you couldn’t do it unless you trained. Well, it’s your life.” Wadd’s tone relaxed; Midax guessed that the man understood him a bit more – finally understood that the Midax Rales of this world just didn’t have the Wadd type of ambition.