I. "A Sense of Insufferable Gloom"

Part Six

Mark LeVine blinked the water out of his eyes. It was raining. He didn’t remember when it had started. It might have been raining when he left the union offices. He hadn’t been paying attention. People on the sidewalk hurried around him, their jackets closed tightly to keep out the dropping temperature and stinging, cold rain. But Mark himself stepped idly along the slippery concrete. It was time to go home yet he wasn’t walking that way. Mark wasn’t walking to anywhere specific. For the time being, he just felt like walking.

Mark had almost jumped out of his skin at the contact of thick, olive-colored fingers on his shoulder. The receptionist hadn’t batted an eye. She never flinched or took her focus off of Mark. It was like the man that was suddenly standing behind him was a ghost only Mark was aware of.

The man spoke as Mark turned swiftly to face him, drawing his shoulder away like the man’s touch was acid burning through his jacket and shirt. “Is there a problem here?” He was shorter than Mark and much older. His slightly squared head was topped with a thin, evenly combed layer of silver hair. He wore a plain black suit and tie that made the white of his shirt stand out like sunlit snow. His faded-blue eyes were disarming and locked solidly on Mark’s. “What’s going,” he asked, his voice not direct at any one person.

The receptionist answered before Mark. “This man stormed up here a few minutes ago.”

“Stormed,” Mark shouted over her. “How could I storm? I’ve been sitting here waiting for over an hour!”

“-He refuses to fill out his paperwork! He doesn’t know where he’s supposed to be! And, he’s trying to cause a scene! He’s blaming us for some vandalism!”

“Because UNION was spray-painted all over my shop!”

The man held out his hands with such suddenness it caught the attention of both of them. “Okay, okay. Let’s just settle down a moment.” He didn’t yell. His raised voice was only loud enough to be heard over them. When the echo of their bickering had begun to fade into the recesses of the office suite, the man spoke again. “May I see his forms, please?”

The receptionist stood up for the first time since Mark had been there. The official looking man took the papers from her outstretched hand. “Thank you, Ms. Kory,” he said.

“You’re welcome, Mr. Bloom,” the receptionist, Ms. Kory, said pleasantly to the man who was obviously her boss, or at least one of them.

Mark watched them, mostly Ms. Kory. He eyed her hatefully, wondering how such a spiteful woman could exist. He almost didn’t notice Mr. Bloom walking past him until he heard the older man politely call his name. Mark turned around, missing the narrow-eyed glare from Ms. Kory’s tightly scrunched face.

“Let’s talk this way, Mr. LeVine,” Mr. Bloom said, gesturing over his left shoulder with a sideways nod.

What could have been seconds or minutes later, Mark wasn’t sure which, Mr. Bloom was opening a door into a small conference room. He had been led around a series of corners and down an uncertain number of hallways. Mark felt uncomfortably turned around. Still, he followed the silver-haired Mr. Bloom a few steps further into the conference room. The man had been talking about various random things around the office suite he, at least, found interesting. Mark had only been half listening, trying more to pay attention to his surroundings than find a fascination in labor statistics, color schemes, and the history of a wall. Somehow, Mark realized, he had failed on both counts.

The conference room was a basic, oblong, rectangular space illuminated by a panel of tall windows reaching from the linoleum floor to the soft-tiled ceiling. Most of the floor space in the isolated room was taken up by a long, wide table Mark guessed was about ten or twelve feet long. A dozen black, leather chairs surrounded the polished, wooden edges of the table. Mr. Bloom gestured to one of them as he walked to one end of the table, becoming silhouetted by the late afternoon light pouring in between the narrow slats of the thick blinds draped down the length of each window. “Have a seat, Mr. LeVine,” he said pleasantly.

Mark bit the inside of his lip and straightened his back. “No, thank you.”

Mr. Bloom pursed his lips slightly. “Oh,” he said. He might have been genuinely disappointed. “Well, suit yourself. But, I’m going to sit down.”

Mark watched the older man sit down at the end of the table. For reasons Mark could not explain, he found himself pulling out the closest leather chair and seating himself in it. He sighed, disappointed with himself.

“So, Mark...” Mr. Bloom looked down the table to the young man. “May I call you Mark?” He didn’t really wait for Mark to answer either way. “Mark-”

“I don’t want to join a union!” Mark blinked suddenly. He couldn’t believe he had said that out loud and so boldly. He took a quick breath, drawing the small surge of strength he felt at the surprised look on Mr. Bloom’s face. “That not why I’m here. I came here for answers. My business was smashed and I want to know why...I want to know by whom. I didn’t come here for membership. Just answers.”

Mr. Bloom blinked slowly, thoughtfully. His lips were drawn tightly together, the lines of his soft face suddenly appearing more defined. He didn’t say anything, not for a long moment. He didn’t seem to be waiting for Mark to say anything more. Mark wasn’t sure what more he needed to say. If he had begun to put his thoughts together, they were broken by the sudden sound of a door handle turning loudly and a door swiftly being opened and then closed.

Mark turned in his chair enough to peer over the back of the supple, black leather. A man much younger than Mr. Bloom walked casually past Mark, his eyes fixed on the silhouetted figure of Mr. Bloom perched observantly with his back as straight as an evergreen tree in the chair at the end of the table. Mark felt strangely uneasy about the way the man had seemed to ignore him. Suddenly, like never before in his life, Mark felt lower than any other human being.

He watched the tall man with a slender, muscled frame walk with even, calculated steps toward the end of the table. Mark noticed the paper-stuffed folder he placed on the table in front of Mr. Bloom before walking around the older man’s chair to take a seat on the opposite side of the table from Mark. His eyes were a dull blue Mark could barely make out in the grim shadows hovering against the opaque bands of pale sunlight stretching through the room. His sandy blonde hair was like the world’s perfect wheat field, each stalk trimmed short and even. The skin on his thick hands looked smooth and well manicured. The silver of his watch gleamed for a moment as he sat down. If it hadn’t been for the dull, golden hue of his hair and the softly tanned complexion of his face and neck, Mark would have lost sight of him in the black leather chair.

He wore a black suit and black, silk shirt. Mark suddenly wondered if the man smelled like money. His tie was the oddest part of him, the pattern consisting of narrow stripes purple and red in color. When he looked at Mark, Mark inhaled sharply, maybe too loudly. Mark looked away quickly, spotting Mr. Bloom flipping through the contents of the folder.

Mr. Bloom took a deep breath, laying his hands on either side of the open folder and the documents spread over each flap. “Mark,” he said with a clarity that reminded Mark of his grandfather. It was the way that even when he was wrong, his grandfather could have little doubt he, himself, was absolutely right. It was his grandfather that had tried to exile him from the family. Mark never cared much for his mother’s father.

“Mark, you know that this is simply a misunderstanding. It is a misunderstanding ...a forgivable ignorance that is, unfortunately, leading to unnecessary hostilities.”

“No one wants a war, Mark,” said the man seated across the table. “What happened was unfortunate.”

“Yes,” added Mr. Bloom. “I completely agree. As much as we would like to, we simply can’t control what all of our membership-even the truly advantageous and dedicated members-do all of the time.”

Mark realized, horrorstricken, what this was. It was a close to something like an apology that he was going to receive. But it wasn’t even really that. It was a bold face admittance. It was the truth about so many things said with the smile of a wold as he talks a sheep into letting him through the door.

“Even the best parents can’t control their children all of the time,” Mr. Bloom continued.

“Something you’ll have to learn if you still want a child of your own,” said the blonde-haired man.

Mark’s eyes shot from Mr. Bloom to the blonde-haired man to the open folder on the table in a matter of heartbeats. He recognized his name on several forms. He saw Zach’s name as well. Those were their records. His gaze lifted with awe-fired fear to the two men watching him.

“You can’t adopt without joining a union,” the blonde-haired man said as soon as his eyes met Mark’s.

Just then, the door behind Mark opened again. Two men walked in, one after the other. The door closed loudly behind them. Their footsteps seemed to clamor loudly off the walls around the table. Mark was watching them. He wondered if they were being deliberate in their actions, each one taking a separate route to the opposite side of the room. They placed themselves in the long-backed chairs beside the blonde-haired man.

“You’re under no pressure to join a specific charter,” said Mr. Bloom.

“Your field of employment allows you several key opportunities,” said one of the two men that had just entered the conference room. They were slightly older than the blonde-haired man. The one on Mark’s left had brown hair, the one to Mark’s right had salt and pepper colored hair. Their eyes were similar in color, so were their slightly sunken cheek bones and narrow, pale noses. Mark wondered if they brothers, or cousins. He didn’t have too much of a chance to ponder.

“As a gay man myself, I’d be happy to counsel you on some of the options that, itself, provides,” Mr. Bloom said.

“Huh,” Mark questioned, his brain catching up with what was quickly being said. “Why-”

“You’re a business leader with a unique perspective,” said the man with salt and pepper hair. “We look for that. It’s good for diversity. You could, maybe, make a good leader. Maybe anywhere you like.”

“It’s important to have diverse leaders, especially when and where there might be none.”

Their words and voices were beginning to flow together. Mark was having trouble keeping up with who was saying what. “No,” he said meekly. “I...I don’t want to be a leader anywhere.”

As he was speaking, the door behind him opened once more. The sound of high heels tapping with precision under a steady, intimidating gait muted his words even more. Mark looked at her as she walked around the table to his right. She was an older woman, well past her forties. She wore a close-knit purple blouse with an obscene red pendant near the v-cut neck line that extended a few inches below her collar bone. Her black skirt stretched down to her calves was almost as tight as the skin on her face. She sat down next to the man with salt and pepper hair, quickly acknowledging Mark’s last statement.

“It is truly disheartening to hear such a thing,” she said intensely. Mark couldn’t help but think of his high school principle.

“I don’t want to join a union...any of them,” Mark said, looking at the faces surrounding him, watching him.

“Aren’t you being selfish,” the woman said.

“You’re not thinking of others, your neighbors and friends,” said the younger of the two brothers.

“Don’t you realize how unfair you’re being?”

“Is it right to horde resources, Mark,” asked Mr. Bloom. “Think about that. Think about the country and how fragile it is.”

“Everyone has a part to play. Are you going to play yours fairly, Mark,” asked the woman.

“How can anyone know if you are taking only your fair share? What will society think? What will your friends say?”

Suddenly, the blonde haired man leaned over the edge of the table. “Have you thought about your partner, Mark?

“Or, your employees, Mark,” asked the older brother. “Have you thought about them?”

“What about your business in general? It is such an unstable and difficult time we live in, Mark,” the woman said. “Don’t you want to protect your business?”

The younger brother spoke up again. “Don’t you want to protect what’s yours?”

“Wait, wait! Please,” Mark protested, his voice rising above the rattling, attacking din of their voices. “You can’t just sit there and do that. I’m not an idiot you can just talk down to. I have...I have my questions too,” he said, stamping the polished tabletop with his finger tip.

“Who are you people? Why are you treating me like a...a petulant child who doesn’t understand the rules of the classroom?” Mark sat up in his chair. “Well, I don’t care about your rules. I don’t want to be a part of your classroom. I don’t want to be in a union!

“I’m a baker. All my life I’ve wanted to make cookies and be my own boss. I will never be in a union. Or, be some kind of managerial figurehead. I have the freedom to work as long and as hard as I choose. I have the spirit of ingenuity unfettered and I will not submit to change that. I don’t have to wait on my turn or a boss to let me go toward something great or hold me down and keep me in my place.

“So what do you want? My soul? My ethics and my values? Why do you have to tear us down? Do you want to hurt us or our store? Fine! Go ahead! Kick down the doors! Throw rocks through our windows! We’ll fix them! We will do it. Us...ourselves, without your bureaus or your bosses. Do you want to burn it to the ground? Go ahead! We’ll build it again!”

Mark was suddenly on his feet. He was propelled by an anger raging beyond his control, a fear he could feel like a nameless, black weight on his soul and deep in his heart, and a sense of pride he had only felt in the shop of his dreams, standing beside the love of his life.

“So what the hell do you want?!” He was pounding his fist into the table now. “Who the hell are you people?!”

The conference room became deathly silent. Mark’s voice quickly faded between the vacuum of space between the bands of light and shadow stretching from the windows. Mr. Bloom was the first person to speak. He held his hands flatly together in front of his face, though he wasn’t praying. “America is a...delicate place, Mark. It’s sort of like...a wheel. One bad spoke and the whole wheel of America can just come apart.”

The woman across the table spoke next. The tone in her words was beyond impersonal. She could not hide the threat laced within the context of her nouns, pronouns, and prepositions. “America is delicate, indeed. More than that, it is sensitive. The American people are sensitive. They depend on people like us, people who help establish the system that protects them. You can’t just go around disrupting the system.”

Mark shook his head in disgust. “‘People like us’? People like you are part of the problem. Have you looked out those windows?” He pointed past Mr. Bloom to the panels of glass and blinds. “Have you? You aren’t protecting anything. You’re destroyers, all of you.

“Me? And people like me? We run good businesses, honest businesses with decent prices because we don’t have armies of faceless workers promised and then anchored to unfunded and unrealistic liabilities. There are no shadowy puppeteers with one hand pulling the strings and the other taking their share. What we do and what we produce are not natural resources. We have to work for them. And you can’t take them.”

The woman shook her head. “Mark, you-”

“I want to leave now!”

The blonde-haired man leaned forward slightly in his chair. “Are you sure Zach feels the same way as you?”

Mark glared through the shadows into the eyes of the blonde-haired man. “I wouldn’t be here if he didn’t.” He looked at the rest of the obscured faces. “We will never give in. Neither one of us.”

Mr. Bloom took a deep breath. “If that’s how you fell, Mark, the door is right there.” He gestured with a subtle nod toward a door on the right-hand side of the room from where Mark was sitting.

Mark hadn’t noticed it before. He didn’t wait for any more prompting, or for any of them to say anything else. The door locked with a loud click behind him and Mark found himself in the lobby outside the office suit. He didn’t keep track of how long it took him to get back outside and onto the sidewalk.

Mark blinked more of the cold, stinging rain out of his eyes. He was standing on a street corner. The green of a traffic light blended strangely with the flashing orange of the DO NOT WALK sign above his head. He felt people pushing past him, trying to cross the street. He had no idea how long he had been standing there. The National Mall stretched from left to right across the noisy avenue. Towering above it in a holy, ivory-white majesty was the Washington Monument. Mark realized he had been staring at it.

He would never know exactly why, nor was there just any one reason, but Mark suddenly had the inescapable urge to touch it. He had not been inside since he was a child. It had been years and years since he felt the smooth stone of its facade under his fingers. He was sure he hadn’t even looked at it since it became closed to the public two years earlier. They never did give a real reason as to why.

The rain seemed heavier, colder as Mark approached the barriers. A few guards patrolled the low-gated perimeter. He thought there might have been more. He wasn’t watching for them. He felt the cold, slick metal under his hands. This could get him into serious trouble. He could be thrown in jail. He could be forced to pay some tremendous and devastating fine. They would make an example out of him. I don’t care, Mark thought. This is supposed to stand for something. It isn’t supposed to be locked behind gates. I have to know. I have to remember.

Mark kept repeating that over and over in his head as propelled himself over the wet barricade. It rattled noisily. He nearly lost his balance, half stumbling as he rushed onto the forbidden hilltop. A guard shouted from somewhere behind him. Then, two more were yelling. He heard them at the barricade, the aluminum ringing under the hiss of the rain and sleet as they scurried after him. Mark turned his bumbling gait into a panicked dash toward the monument. The heavy stones gleamed with a white like angelic snow. He could smell it he was so close. He could feel the bitter wind rushing off its smooth sides. He looked up toward the point of its spire. The obelisk commanded the landscape around it and the sky above it, piercing the sagging clouds.

The guards were nearly on top of him. Mark reached out, his fingers splayed wide, ready to touch the monument. That was all he needed, just to feel it again, just once. He needed it to remind him, to encourage him. They were shouting in his ears. Mark was only a few feet away when one of the guards tackled him. The others were on the scene a heartbeat later. Their hands fought for a grip on his limbs flailing for freedom. They wouldn’t let him get up to walk so Mark crawled. He was less than a foot away when he felt a wet boot connect with his gut, lifting fiercely against his diaphragm for an excruciating instant.

Mark heaved, trying to breathe. He was trying to shout, pleading with the guards who pulled him off the rain-soaked ground with strangling hands on his arms and even his hair. His ears were flooded with demeaning curses slithering off their tongues and past their lips. Yet, still Mark struggled. He reached out again, shoving off one of their hands as pleaded even louder. He just needed to touch the stone once. The wind howled against the writhing mass. Mark managed to gain a few inches of ground. It was just enough. His fingers brushed the cold marble. It was a moment that lasted a heartbeat yet stretched in Mark’s mind for infinity. It was everything he remembered and more. The sensation of the hard, smooth stone against his skin took its time to travel up the length of his arm straining against the pull of the guards.

Mark knew he would never feel the monument dedicated to the first leader of the free world again. He didn’t fight anymore as he was dragged down the shallow slope of the hill. He didn’t resist when the guards shoved him back over the barricade. They spit in his face for the trouble he caused before turning to go back to the easy monotony of their day.

There would be no jail, no fine, no severe public embarrassment. Mark smiled but felt himself sob. In a way, it was like he was granted the gift to feel freedom just one more time. He stared in tearful awe at the monument rising into the clouds and thanked God for that cherished gift. He would never forget it.