Business Man: 4

I’m in Café Trezor, below the Building, where we come in droves, one per table with laptop and caffeine, all our chairs facing the big bay windows. It’s the street outside that takes our eyes when we lift them up for apparent thought. We don’t think, but we pretend to, and after a few minutes of watching crowds and cars, bow our heads to write or tap away at the keyboard. We’re working. Mouse-wheels wheeling. There’s a thug standing on the cold street, his big frame covered by half a cow of a red leather jacket, his head rounded by a black toque. He has a goatee and a thick jaw, but I can’t see his face because his back is to us. His hands are in his pockets. He’s big. He’s poor, because he’s asking people for change. He’s not cold, though his breath plumes at every request. He’s a hulk of heat. And he scares those he appeals for help. All of us are using him as a distraction from work, we look up at him instead of the street, at his great shoulders and dominating mass. And we thank God for civilization. We thank Him because we live in this era, and not an earlier one, where the man outside with no money would never ask: he would take, he would make certain, he would demand himself into wealth, exercise his peasantry into kinghood, into rule. But he’s trapped in this epoch. The Building above him towers with a potency he cannot match. It contends with the sky, the great up-wheres, while he contends with the miserly, the small ones, the little folk he could crush or command had he been born several hundred years earlier. Here, put a sword in his hand. Apply scars, popping, on his face. Let the dirt sit on him from nights on the battlefield. Pour the oil of ability over his head, watch his will rise up rage-wise, let the crown of competence glow upon his brow with brilliance and myth and fire. Don’t worry, we’ve got crisp white shirts of armour. It’s the twenty-first century, and the great men have been stripped of legend. The dragons are dead, the mammoth extinct, and the power of the body proved weightless against the power of Organization.