You Look Nice Today by Stanley Bing

Author:Stanley Bing
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781596917187
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2019-11-24T00:00:00+00:00

26

It had been a few days since our hero had been in the gigantic office building that housed his corporation, and everything looked both immeasurably bigger and incalculably more tiny than he had remembered it.

Lester, the security man who had sat for twenty years before a phalanx of monitors at the entry to the corporation, sat there still. But he greeted Harb with a slightly different visage than he had employed in the past. Lester had been with the company for a good long time and knew all the players. It was clear to him that Harbert was in the process of being reevaluated. This did not necessarily mean that he could not in some way come back into prominence, and even if he did not it was not Lester's way to denigrate any of the former executives who came by his station. Everybody, eventually, did come by his station in reduced circumstances. So it was not for him to judge, nor did he do so. But there was a different pitch to his greeting.

"Mr. Harbert," he said, without the mix of excessive grandiosity and flippancy that was his trademark style with successful executives. On this occasion, he was genuinely friendly and looked Harb in the eye, man to man. That just about said it all as far as Harb was concerned, but in his new condition he found he did not resent it, and that, too, made him very sad.

He had never really noticed the elevator before, viewing it simply as a transient location of no inherent status whose purpose was to convey its occupants from one place to another. He recalled being filled, in the past, with an irrational resentment toward those who stopped what he thought of as "his" elevator on its way to its destination, either up in the corporate aerie or down to ground level. Now it was all one. Up? Down? Who cared? He considered the nexus between his job and his suburban existence. That double reality had defined a certain person who seemed to be there no longer. Who needed that person, except for the money he brought in? His children were well on their way to being grown. They spent more time with their friends, or up in their rooms on-line, than with him. On weekends, the four of them no longer went on family excursions. He had tried to enforce some such in years past, with mandatory museum visitations and healthful country hikes, but had, after a time, been hooted down not only by the kids but by Jean as well. He was living in the past, he was told. It was time to move on, not cling to the activities that once rendered all of them such mutual pleasure. Very well, then.

The elevator climbed for a long time, then gave a slight ding and coughed to a halt on the floor that had housed his office for many years. The doors slid open. In the waiting area outside the elevator bank was a gaggle of executives, deep in discourse.

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