Alpine

Gambit 3 - Breaks

"America, the land of opportunity. In this great nation, anyone can pull themselves up by their bootstraps and climb to the top of the ladder. And yet, the majority small businesses fail within a year of establishment. Why? Do most would-be business owners somehow have the ingenuity and initiative to start driving down the road to entrepreneurship only to find they lack the grit to follow through? Of course not! As any well-established business knows—"

This was his third run through of his part of the presentation. Before the recitations began, he had sat on the stairs above me for hours. Smoking through a pack of cigarettes until my side was covered in a veneer of nicotine ash. Every time he finished a Crossroads, I thought he would extinguish the burning edge on my skin. Every time, he snuffed them out on the staircase, grinding the cigarette into a crinkled nub. Then, he dropped the useless husk onto my shirt. Its smoldering heat threatened to ignite the damp cloth but never managed to do so.

His final move was to pick up the nubs, drop them into the empty pack box, reseal it, and balance it on my skull. After that, he stepped over me, and the melodic drone began. Meanwhile, I laid there like a corpse. Afraid that, if I moved, the pack would clatter onto the floor and bring his attention back to me.

But fear does not last forever. At some point, the body accepts it as a baseline state of existence. Basically, I was bored with the monotony of it. So, I cautiously took the cardboard box and moved it to the stair. I stiffly pushed myself up on my good hand with gritted teeth. My other hand went straight for my sore neck. A twinge of pain. I looked at the bandage around my palm. It was soggy and smelled musty. My fingertips were wrinkled from holding a tight fist on the wet gauze for so long. A trickling of oxidized red stained my hand. First order of business: change the gauze before I died of blood poisoning.

Thankfully, I still had gauze left over from the roll he bought at the gas station. I had shoved it into the pockets of my jeans. Unfortunately, I was not wearing that pair then. I tiptoed upstairs, agonizing over every brief creak of floorboard. When I reached the upper landing, the memory of my duffle bag laying by the overturned coat tree came to me. I suppressed a sob as I slunk back down the staircase. From the bottom stair, the innocent floor looked menacing. The dozen or so steps to cross it would put me directly in his line of sight.

"These kinds of growing pains can easily cripple any business, despite the marketability and profitability of its goods and services. Even a large corporation with experience in navigating these scenarios can find itself in peril during unexpected economic downturns if measures are not taken to ensure there are sufficient liquid assets to maintain operations. Which begs the question: how much is enough? And how sure are you of your—?"

I was three steps into the room when he paused. Instinctively, I froze like a rabbit. As if that would somehow hide me from him. A silent laugh rumbled through his form. Then, he stilled completely, as if he were a statue that had come to life only long enough to mock me.

I convinced my legs to lift and swing forward with the effort and fluidity of a drunken baby taking his first steps. When I reached my duffle bag, I half-kneeled, half-collapsed onto the floor. He resumed his monologue while I dug around in the bag. I hated what he was signaling to me. He would not be practicing unless he was still sure that, somehow, we were going to make it to the conference. When would he give up? What was it going to take for him to accept that we were trapped here?

I found the jeans, and the gauze was in them. The roll of stretchy, mesh felt so real in my hands. As though, despite knowing it would be there, I had not expected to find it. It was an unwelcome realization that my faith in even the basic laws of physics was gone. I lurched to my feet and stumbled across the floor to the bathroom.