BY Dr. AGONSON
The slow trickle of twenty years, twenty years of unforgiven insult and injury, had welled up deep within his soul like a vast, subterraneous pit filled by the leaking fangs of venomous serpents. You might not know it, if you passed him in the hall or walked by his cubicle. His comportment was, if not exemplary, never abnormal. Ordinary, some might call him, save in one respect, his face. Whether he was born ugly, or the growing ugliness of his interior had begun to warp his external features, I cannot say. I have no pictures of him before he came to the company, and none older than five years ago. It’s hard to imagine him as a boy, though I suppose he must have been a child at some point and had a mother. Somehow it seems ridiculous to suggest that Mr. Brunstone had a mother. Whether he was born ugly or made so, I cannot tell.
I can say that his face was a prime target of ridicule. The majority of said insult was whispered behind the man’s back, but the younger Jackson was not afraid of any HR complaint. Mr. Jackson was our founder, and so the younger Jackson, whose continual lateral movement among the company’s diverse departments testified to the love those departments had for him, felt free to speak his mind about Mr. Brunstone’s face to Mr. Brunstone’s face. Not just the face, though. The younger Jackson pointed out many other qualities of Mr. Brunstone to Mr. Brunstone, such as his deficiency regarding height, his ragged leanness, the baldness of his head, the grating sound of his voice, the choice and manner of his dress, the general smell of him, and the quality of his cooking.
Much of this was quite unfair, and if the younger Jackson had disliked Mr. Brunstone’s sandwich so much, he hadn’t of stolen it. The younger Jackson took it too far, everyone agreed. However, Mr. Brunstone’s qualities had a marvelously distracting quality to which the younger Jackson seemed oblivious; that is, as long as the younger Jackson had Mr. Brunstone’s face to contend with, it became well known, he would leave nearly everyone else alone. This has its like in the natural world with sacrificial alloys. It was true, in ’93, that Mr. Brunstone quit. I suspect that he was blacklisted. I know he received no recommendation from us, and by ’94, he was back. Wherever the younger Jackson was placed, there Mr. Brunstone found himself assigned.
After twenty years, it seemed the sorry affair would finally end. Mr. Brunstone and Mr. Jackson were retiring, and the younger Jackson was to become the new Mr. Jackson. He was visiting his new offices, which were being renovated. The windows had been removed to be replaced by different windows which better suited the ego of the new Mr. Jackson. The room was a very cold room, a thin film of plastic and a series of yellow barricades the only protection offered the interior against the howling winds of the exterior.
I heard a knock and found a timid figure opening one of the mahogany doors. In came Mr. Brunstone, bent over with age, his face uglier than ever.
“What do you want?” barked the new Mr. Jackson.
“A word,” rasped Mr. Brunstone. He pulled a file from under his arm and handed it to the new Mr. Jackson.
“Goblin,” said Mr. Jackson backing away from the papers.
“You should look them over,” said the old man.
I took the papers and began leafing through them. What met my eye was a series of rather explicit photos involving the new Mr. Jackson while he had been the younger Jackson.
“I know everything,” said Mr. Brunstone. “And I’ve got proof. You can keep that copy.”
I pulled out one of the pictures and showed it to the new Mr. Jackson.
“I want,” said Mr. Brunstone, “a million dollars.”
That was when the new Mr. Jackson began to laugh. I cannot deny a certain comic aspect. The sincerity and that ugly face and that stooping posture—the fact, as well I knew, that Mr. Brunstone had waited too long, that a few weeks before might have ruined everything for my employer, but now that the papers were signed and the transfer finished, these meant nothing—or the triviality of the sum. I understood why the new Mr. Jackson laughed.
It was too much, however, for our Mr. Brunstone. I saw it in his eyes. I saw that dark pit of poison waiting in his soul. It was over in a moment, and the two of them tripped over the barricades and fell through the plastic film; and the laughter turned to screams and then silence.
Tale Told 