The Consultant

A Short Story

Photo by 𝓴𝓘𝓡𝓚 𝕝𝔸𝕀 on Unsplash

The best part of my job is the looks on their faces in the first 90 seconds. Now don’t get me wrong, I enjoy every single moment of what I do. I’ve built my life around it for a reason. This is my calling, my artistry, from the nights of preparation to the closing moments of triumph as I roll out of the executive parking lot with another happy story in my rear view. But the pure and uncut stuff I’m on is the first 90 seconds. The moment when some power-hungry department-store-suited miniature Stalin first comes to grips with the terror of chaos. In that moment, I own the room. For as long as I want, beige people-boxes and depression-machine offices are my stage. I pace those corporately interior-designed boards like a feral tiger with a snoot of coke and a bad attitude. In those gorgeous seconds every illusion and lie crumples like the industrial 1.5-ply in the bathrooms. At the top of my business card it says “I bring the Truth.” But that’s just the beginning of a good day. The crucial next step is audience interaction.

I. Background

A contract always starts when Signal or Telegram lights up. Some Xanax-crunching executive assistant or grey-skinned accountant decides today really was the day, and they’ve had enough. By now my name circulates in whispers through fluorescently-lit breakrooms and the last few smoke breaks still kindly permitted by the strip mall office park mafia. I am hope to the shamed and broken among the phone pools and open offices of the forgotten lands. Sorry, got poetic on my own legend. Anyway, they hit me up and I get a little background. But most of the research is on my own. Everyone in the building is either surprised or has plausible deniability when I blow through. I sit there in the Fortress of Solitude for a few long evenings, running public sources and the other kind. I hit my networks, get a few tips, do a few other things that I’m not going to tell you about. I’ve never once taken a contract and not delivered. Every single corporate entity in the nation, this moment, is breaking some rule or skirting some law. You ever work unpaid overtime or catch them clipping your checks? Ever have one of those quick chats with your direct supervisor where the real conversation went in hints and unspoken threats? I appear in places where that brand of evil hangs in the air like yesterday’s Red Lobster salmon stench pluming from the microwave. By now it’s like I can smell the greed and the hubris, the disappointment and helplessness. You can just tell.

Not too much research, though. I just need a few stories, enough to make sure they can’t target and silence one poor soul the moment I walk out. Once I catch the unique flavor of despair in the new place, it’s just a little character work. If it was enough to just break the racket and slap some middle managers on the wrist, I would have stayed as a junior partner at the firm. I need theatrics. The beige demons need to feel the collected wrath of every eight-to-seven puke they ever ground to powder in their fat fingers. I’m not happy till ever fear trafficker in that place can’t imagine walking in the front door without their face in a bag. I’ll walk through their nightmares, and live like a trickster demigod in the last-call-at-Chili’s stories of the nobodies I set free.

II. Wardrobe

Sure, I could do all this like a normal person. Half the drama is probably remnants of my own schizoid personality, but it’s also pretty vital to the entire act. Think about who I represent. When I walk onto a corporate campus I am the living embodiment of every father of four and single mom in that building who can’t speak because they need to keep making payments. I am the spoken word of every front-seat sob and unsaid no. It’s easy for you to hate the normies who spend their lives docilly in exchange for heart problems and two weeks notice. But when you see them every day, you understand their choices. Do you know what it does to somebody to spend twenty years, or even five or one, systematically shredding their self-respect just to keep on struggling to buy groceries? Have you ever wanted to shut off your mind for the majority of your waking hours because consciously experiencing the nauseating passive aggression for even a few seconds more might break you? Until you’ve watched your hairline and your spouse’s respect vanish down the drain all because you can’t dare destroy your livelihood by confronting your supervisor with reality, I don’t want to hear your thoughts on the malaise of suburbia.

So yeah, I dress it all up a bit. In those few moments, I am the lightning rod for all their broken hopes and frustrated plans. I want to give them back a little something. The sleeveless leather jacket, the gloves and mullet and eye shadow, they’re all a part of that one rebellious act. Showing them that you can move through this world without being broken. It’s easy for me, because I can’t face any consequences. So I owe it to them to pave the way. I used to have a lot more props but the cigarettes and smoke bombs started activating automatic sprinklers, and that’s too much of a distraction. So I’ve had to strip things back and concentrate on those first few crucial moments.

III. Showtime

Getting in is never all that tough. The environments clients bring me into thrive off the rules we all know but nobody explicitly enforces. I thrive off systematically pushing every one of those awkward places until they snap. Once I’m through the door, I don’t stop making noise until I walk back out. The key is to turn yourself into a force of nature, to act with inevitability and suck all the oxygen from the room. It’s all a practiced drill by now. I chuck a couple pill speakers into corners, then my music starts. The playlist keeps growing but lately I’ve been favoring Early Oughts Emo type goodness. It’s a fine line to walk from there, pushing the crowd to the edge without starting some sort of profanity-laced rant that makes it easy for them to call security. They’ve got to want you to keep talking, even without understanding it. You bring the explosion of reality, you are cosmically necessary. Once it starts, you are speaking for them all.

I pick my target for the first takedown, usually a lower-tier middle manager with some sort of wild secret to expose. I’m already walking on desks, working the crowd, asking questions. I find the secretary he pressured into one-on-one business lunches or the assistant who missed a funeral doing his reports. I get them crying. This is key, a bit of vital cruelty that starts the show off right. Everyone in that room has to identify with the victim, to remember their own quiet outrages. They’ve spent so long stuffing down each successive tiny transgression, and now it all has to come boiling to the surface. Once I get someone in the building brave enough to tell their own story, I know I’ve won. It’s trivially easy to destroy the first guy, reduce him to stammering while I dump enough dirty laundry on his desk to ensure that he’ll be carrying a box out the front door before lunch. Management has to act on this one, I’ve forced their hand. The next steps are tougher.

Everyone knows the secrets in these places, but it’s not enough to expose them. I have to walk out with total victory, or the aftermath will be worse. So I walk up the ladder. By now I’m striding around the building, gathering a comet’s tail crowd as the show goes on. They’re willing me forward now, I can feel them begging for the next act. I have to get them laughing, cheering. It has to be their victory, not mine. By the time I pick out my first HR target, I’m ready to switch gears. Now scandal isn’t enough. We need to break enough loose to build a compelling legal case, at least in the panicked imagination of the home office. It’s time to show them liability.

IV. Closing

I cross-examine the first executive manager connected to HR that I can find. I’m turning up the heat now, because we are nearing the make-or-break moment. I explode with industry jargon, a bewildering array of citations and policies. I watch their eyes, and in one glorious moment they grasp the danger. For the first twenty minutes I am a jester, but suddenly they realize I’m a demon. Their own language of lies turns on them and bites deep. Every violation is dragged up and I press the enormity of the situation until the suit’s flickering eyes tell me I’m close. The little crowd is growing by now, starting to murmur. I’m releasing the pent-up fear and frustration of years or maybe decades. Giving them hope that maybe the universe they live in has rules, righteous laws that can’t be flouted forever. I am about to destroy the a singularity of mistruths that warped that universe. And they can feel it now.

The final movement of my chaotic symphony. I’ve got all my evidence, and crucially everyone in the building knows what’s going on all at once. No more isolating the problems and suffocating any potential blowback. Now we present the Deal to the Bossman. It’s simple by this point, all over but the crying. Everyone below management walks, with full severance packages that mean they’ll never have to work again. Or, we shut it down. Everything leaked, everyone walks out and stays out, I bring my whole network to bear. Total nuclear option. I’ve only had one firm let me press the button, and nobody has tried it since. I wasn’t exactly proud of what happened during the trial, and I think every day about the suicides. But I don’t regret the judgement they deserved, and my people got triple what they would have if corporate just signed off on the packages. Nobody tries that move anymore.

V. Walkout

The theatrics are an important part of the whole thing. They’re not for me, I have to emphasize. Ok, not totally for me. When an entire floor or entire building gets to walk out that door on their own, the electricity is like nothing you can imagine. I get to watch broken people stand up straight, their heads high, and take their own life back in a few seconds and fifty yards. They are remade, calling spouses with triumphant news and a changed life instead of the same old litany of powerless complaints and grievances. As I blast out of the parking lot in a flame-orange roadster, I’m already thinking about my next client. Another day, another collection of corporate citizens breathing free air.

Maybe I’m coming to your passive prison next. Who finally pushed past their creeping despair and decided to seize a desperate chance? Was it you? And after all, who says you need to wait for me anyway. Even if nothing changes outside you (at first), walk back in tomorrow with your mind turned on and your spirit alight. Don’t let them move you silently, through hints and murmurs. Make them come out into the light. Maybe soon you’ll see me bringing total chaos to their carefully constructed cages.

But don’t wait for me to give you permission.