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Chapter 4
Forever Sunday Island
Day 13.
I awoke before the alarm and prepared as if for work. I showered, had a touch of breakfast and coffee, then dressed and groomed for the monitor. I had my data book at the ready and recited what tongue teasers I knew to warm my voice and get mouth muscles and tongue working, as my daily measure of jawboning had dropped precipitously and put me out of practice.
Thus armed, I embarked upon the to-do list, beginning with follow-up for dormant applications and any openings newly advertised, attempting to get through the labyrinth of agencies and middle men to a company's HR for a first contact.
At some point I almost began to enjoy myself that morning, as if playing a game. A game is the only sense to make of an insensible activity, isn't it? I knew I could spend all day with the headhunter middlemen without coming an inch closer to a company's hiring manager. I well knew the uselessness of the time I expended. I was Sisyphus, grinning through the grimace of futile labor.
To my credit, I thought, I actually did manage to speak with a hiring manager, though it was plain this success against all odds was important to no one but me. I nearly fumbled the interview from the outset, as the guy resembled a childhood classmate in my adoptive town. Dennis, I remembered, gave me my first childhood taste of inequity. He was poster child for the kid who had everything—wealthy parents, a mansion home, toys of every craving—and he was handsome, popular, and intelligent too. He made me, a pimpled egghead in my early teens who was lucky to have foster parents, perfectly sick. In no time the interview soured, torpedoed by a memory. The chemistry quotient in every interaction seemed fickle and cruel.
Whoever gave me harbor in this financial storm would have my loyalty, but being fake was plainly sufficient for these people. Fake was perhaps preferred, in fact, since one is then ever on trial to make good on the fakery. Was I then not fake enough? Should I make my fakery more transparent? Was there a nuance to this art of the interview I was yet missing?
"You're a bastard bred to disloyalty..." The Old Man's words resounded in memory. If these employers believed I was the sharpshooter they sought, what could they expect for loyalty?
I played back call after call to try to hear myself through their ear. I winced, grit my teeth, turned away and groaned in the watching and listening, my voice indicator flashing political alarm all over the spectrum time and again. Inconclusive was better than a steady reading in the pink, but as the LieCo slogan said: "True blue shows through."
By the time I finagled another interview on the Net, I had arrived at the happy construct, and perhaps I even convinced myself as well, that they needed me as much I needed them; and eventually I settled into this self-assured tone, trumpeting my personal stock, my professional brand, like a shrewd and agile grifter.
The nuns at the orphanage had counseled me for being hypersensitive and prone to over thinking, and thanks to them I made myself learn countermeasures. I learned how to act, to perform and project the personality expected in a selective manner. I learned, in effect, to lie, and found I had a knack for it. So much silence now filled my days that I fairly enjoyed sounding off in the ego of the confident applicant. In this self-sell state, the semantic voice guard indicator on the Netbox did not once display a Democrat or pinko reading.
