digitaldiscipline ◾ ◾ writing snippet

Intro to a short story/novel that has never gotten any further, called "Wilzon's Dialect." I pulled this out of the mothballs for a couple other purposes lately.

It had been a long, annoying, but ultimately fruitful trip. I was looking forward to getting home and opening a bottle of a nice Shiraz I'd picked up during a lull between two of the interminable meetings with Copley, Chambers & Garnet. Maybe I'd even have a glass in the bathtub to counterpoint an effervescent LUSH bomb if I had the energy to be truly decadent.

It was while entertaining such fantasies during a seventy-minute layover in Baltimore that an almost-familiar voice brought me up short as I picked up my laptop after clearing security between concourses. "Janey?"

"Doug?" At first glance, Wilzon looked great. His charcoal grey suit was a muted contrast to the crisp white of his collar and cuffs, and the dull luster of the watch on his wrist bespoke some serious quality rather than ostentation. After a moment, though, I could see he looked tired. Not the exhaustion of a full day spent traveling, but something deeper and more fundamental. He looked worn out.

"Do you have a minute?" He might have been on the verge of begging if I declined. I nodded and cast a quick glance at my phone. I was a little off-stride, but ten minutes wouldn't kill me. He shook my free hand in both of his, which were empty and well-groomed and cool, and we found a relatively unpopulated bank of seats, where we set up a buffer zone with our one personal item apiece on the adjacent chairs.

"It's been a while," I ventured, taking note of the sparse threads of silver in his hair. In the sixteen years since we'd been classmates in business school, one lunch during a mutual layover in Chicago a half-dozen years ago was the extent of our contact since leaving the nest. I might or might not have been soaring, as an associate at my firm. Wilzon had definitely caught an updraft somewhere, and ridden it long and well.

He'd been a strong student but not a cutthroat bastard, making a lot of hay from insight and affability, and I wouldn't have put it past him to charm his way up, given the right circumstances. He'd be years away from hitting his Peter Principle ceiling, if he had one.

Thoughts of Prometheus never crossed my mind.

"Heading out, or heading home?" His voice seemed tightly controlled, out of phase with the easy manner I remembered, and he was hunched over, worrying a ring on his right hand back and forth as he spoke.

"Home. I got away from the Beltway as soon as I could." The decision hadn't been entirely mine to make; despite the locus of business there, I didn't have the ability to distance and disconnect myself from the omnipresent currents and undercurrents that swirled through the region - a narcotic miasma for some, a choking caul for others. When it was suggested that I'd be more valuable in one of our regional satellite offices, it was easy for me to agree, even without acknowledging the unspoken context.

He nodded without looking up at me. "I keep trying to stay away. Somehow, nobody listens when I tell them that. They all hear what they want to hear."

"You're still in DC?" I wasn't that surprised; Wilzon was the kind of person you'd expect to see on any number of 24/7 news channels as an expert in some field or other, sounding calm and confident, sensible and assured. The hair, the suit, the eyes, the whole mediagenic package. The fact that he would know what he was talking about would probably be an afterthought when image was everything.

Wilzon was perfectly doomed in Washington, a figurehead on the prow of a ship he neither built nor captained, pushed forward through whatever storms might come, to arrive at fortune or disaster without the ability to so much as turn his head or close his eyes. The city used everyone in it that way, or ignored them utterly.

"What's eating you, Doug? You look miserable."

He took a deep breath and closed his eyes. Practically in a whisper, he said, "You're right. I am. And I need your help." He turned towards me, and I could see the tension of control drain out of his jaw just before he spoke, the kind of smooth baritone my company would kill to have in our stable for voiceovers, promo spots, anything. It was a voice that cut through every other sound in the world and became the only thing you heard. It was impossible not to hear what that voice said.