Prescription for a Superior Existence. Josh Emmons
One of the other candidates for the senior manager promotion might have wanted to hurt my prospects in order to bolster his or her own, but I couldn’t think of any who had both the refined Machiavellian instincts and the technological skill to intercept my email and override my password file protection.
“I don’t know you all as individuals. Sitting beside a vegetarian might be a carnivore. Next to a pacifist, a war-supporter. There may be two men among you who claim nothing in common but an employer, and even that may be a bone of contention. As human beings, however—and more specifically as men—you are in many crucial ways the same. You eat and sleep and wear clothes. You use language to communicate. You feel joy and anger and love. You were born and you are going to die.” He took a sip of water. “From these common traits we can draw certain conclusions: eating reflects a common desire for food, sleep meets a desire for rest, and clothes answer a desire for warmth and propriety.” He paused and I looked for Mr. Raven in the audience. “We could spend a whole day—a whole lifetime, perhaps—talking about your desires and what is done to gratify them, but today we’re interested in one in particular: your desire for sex.”
I asked Max in a low voice if he would give me the Danish, and he said no.
“You might ask what is wrong with sex and point out that no one, with the exception of a few test-tube babies, would be here without it. You might say that it is a fundamental part of us. That would be understandable. At one time I myself would have said the same things, for I too once knew the full force and function of sexual desire, the urge that begins with the sight of a pair of legs or a bawdy joke or a warm object held in one’s lap, and grows until nothing matters but the satisfaction of that urge. And like many of you here today, I believed that I was fine.” Shoale took another sip of water. “But was that true? Are you fine? Your eyes, like mine were, are forever restless in their sockets; you covet your neighbors’ wives and sisters and daughters and mothers; you fidget from the time you wake up until you go to sleep, and even then the fidgeting doesn’t stop. You’re like live wires that can’t be grounded for more than a few hours at a time.” He let this sink in for a moment. “The majority of sexual attraction takes place in the mind, where you are, in a word, distracted. Deeply so. And what are the consequences of this distraction?” A few hands rose timidly in the air. “You contract costly, disfiguring, sometimes even deadly diseases; your marriages break up; your job performance suffers; you hurt others and subsidize prostitution and make false promises. You become dissatisfied with life and lose the respect of your friends, families, and coworkers. You don’t say hello to someone without figuring the odds of getting them into your useworn bed. You spend idle, obsessive hours poring over Internet pornography like prospectors burning with gold fever, and in the end a sad onanist looks out at you from the mirror.” Next to me, Max was breathing heavily. “This is a sickness as debilitating as tuberculosis or emphysema. You are aware of its symptoms, yet you don’t try to get well.”
My thoughts swung between Danforth and Shoale’s speech and my fatigue from not having had any replenishing sleep in three months. With a small cough Max stood up and stalked out to the aisle, ignoring the grunts of men whose knees he banged.
“Is he okay?” I whispered to Dexter, who’d sat on the other side of him.
Dexter shrugged.
Max ran up the aisle and out the door. I thought about going after him but spotted Mr. Raven seven rows down and twelve columns over, staring at me with eyes as dark and cold as two black moons, so I returned my focus to the stage and tried to concentrate on what was being said.
This opening speech made me wonder why our CEO thought the seminar would be helpful. Some of the incidents Shoale had alluded to at Couvade were serious—a vice-president was being sued by his secretary for telling her inappropriate jokes, an accounts manager had downloaded a virus-infected pornography file onto his work computer that immobilized our entire system for two days, a field representative had been arrested for buying a child bride in Indonesia, and of course there was my squad’s own ill-executed trip to Chicago—but such a stridently antisex message seemed farcical and doomed to fail with the men of Couvade, whom I’d seen at bachelor parties and after-work clubs and company retreats to Florida.
The rest of the day’s content, however, was more effective. After Shoale’s talk we watched a documentary about sex crimes and one about the ravages of sexually transmitted diseases that featured disturbing footage of a syphilitic man having his nose surgically removed. Then we had lunch and came back to form small discussion groups and role-play exercises—when alone with someone we found attractive, we were to talk only about work-related subjects, even if that person tried to make things personal—before concluding the day with a lecture from Shoale that took a more positive, empowering tone than his first: “You have the ability to be as great as anyone who ever walked the Earth,” he said. “Gandhi, Buddha, and even Jesus suffered the same temptations and trembled from the same desires that you do. What made them different—what can make you different—is that they heeded the call of their best selves. They made the choice, as you can, to rise above the squalor of desire.”
Several men around me nodded thoughtfully while gathering together their things.
From there I raced back to the office and finished Danforth at four A.M. Then I went home, slept for three hours, and by nine the next morning was seated at my cubicle, where I opened an email from Mr. Raven. I felt a burning sensation in my right wrist and popped two homeopathic pills that went on to have no effect.
“Mr. Raven?” I knocked lightly on his door.
“Come in,” he said, pushing aside his keyboard. Commemorative posters of marathons and charity races covered the wall space not taken up with shelves of corporate histories, mambo primers, and presidential biographies. Through the window I could see latticed scaffolding in front of a former hotel being converted to office space. Mr. Raven patted his gelled gray hair, which lay frozen across his scalp like a winter stream.
“Sit down,” he said, moving things around on his desk—a box of chocolate mints, a pair of Mongolian relaxation balls, a penknife—and fingering a reddish birthmark on his chin. “I assume you know why I want to see you.”
“Is it about Danforth Ltd.?”
Mr. Raven appreciated candor about painful or difficult subjects, as well as when bold action was required. We’d discussed Harry Truman once and, while acknowledging and finding fault with his faults, we’d approvingly measured the strength of his character—its unflinching directness—because of which he could say without hypocrisy that the buck stopped with him. A true leader saw, identified, and accepted mistakes while learning how not to repeat them.
“Please tell me why it was late.”
“I first sent it to you on Tuesday and didn’t know that you hadn’t received it until yesterday morning. I would have done it again right away except that the sensitivity training seminar was about to start.”
“Which your actions largely occasioned.”
“That’s—”
A questioning look settled on Mr. Raven’s face.
I drew my left ankle up onto my right knee and pulled at the pant leg material. “As you know, there were four of us in Chicago. I didn’t see the credit card Juan used and figured it was his personal one, and we’d pay him back later. This isn’t to say I’m blameless—the whole thing reflected bad judgment, including my own—but I’ve already had my wages garnished to make up my quarter of the expense account item, and I formally addressed the Employee Conduct Board last week and volunteered to do community service as well as—”
Mr. Raven leaned forward with a hard, penetrating look and said, “Let’s cut the folderol.”
“Excuse me?”
“We both know you’re a sick man.”
“Excuse me?”
“Your performance at Couvade has been greatly compromised lately, and you now have a choice. You can take a leave of absence and get healthy. Check into