Gordon was trying to remain calm. The same way a hostage negotiator tries to remain calm. Just keep telling the bank robbers that the pizza they requested is on the way. And the signed NBA merch. And the Princess of Wales.
The carpet had that expensive gray you only notice when you’re trying not to look at anyone. Framed awards for campaigns that all had quippy titles, like “Put Yourself Out There” for a Tinder spot or “A Floor You Can Eat From” for Brawny. The chairs across from his desk were the kind where you can’t find a comfortable sitting position. Joel called it compliance furniture.
Joel and Marie sat in the uncomfortable chairs, looking uncomfortable. Eli meandered around the room. He moved toward the floating shelves at the back, touching tchotchkes with the curiosity of an old woman ready to wheel and deal at a yard sale. A bronze pencil trophy. A glass block with an etched logo from a telecom client that no longer existed. A photograph of Gordon between two men whose teeth were an argument for universal dental care. He rumaged through the bar cart near the door, leaving his greasy fingerprints on Gordon’s ornate, short drinking glasses. There were bottles arranged by how fancy the label made them look. Anything with Japanese characters was right up front. The ornately etched decanter was empty. Eli lifted it to the ceiling light. Maybe the whiskey had become vapor, and the light would reveal the trick. No such luck.
To the right, in a matching set of chairs: their doppelgängers. A duplicate copywriter, strategist, creative director, and an art director with a face that, if you squinted, looked eerily similar to Georgia. Same messy updo, same intense concentration. Joel felt his chest sink. Was it hard to breathe, or was the air in this room just really, really stale? This strange grief came over him like an intrusive pop-up ad appearing at the front of his mind.
Gordon got up from his chair and moved around his desk. He leaned casually, we’re all just friends here. Right? He tried to meet everyone’s eyes, thinking strong eye contact was the best way to exude authority and build rapport. It did neither. He looked crazy and disingenuous. He ran full speed into a speech that he had been rehearsing for hours. It came out in nervous, polished fragments.
Ensure the A-team worked on pitches. Doors and who did or did not come through them, if revenue didn’t. Optimizing teams within an inch of their life. Although he used different words for the same sentiment.
The whole thing was a bad, confusing word salad. After way too long, he finally made it to his real point, his grand finale. He finally said the quiet part out loud: change was here.
Eli, still fluttering around in the background, unintentionally broke the tension.
“Looks like you’re out of whiskey.” He said, with the same helpfulness of a passenger telling the pilot a wing is missing. Gordon quickly snapped back, telling him to put the decanter down. It was one of the few times Gordon looked moderately in charge, like he had finally nailed the right level of managerial aggression.
Eli set the crystal back with a ceremonial gravitas, mocking Gordon’s authority.
Gordon’s plan arrived with the same vibe of a magician revealing a pigeon, except this time the pigeon wasn’t crushed beneath a satin scarf. Well, maybe metaphorically. A “switcheroo,” Gordon called it, an unserious word that made the moment feel more transactional and whimsical than intended. He motioned to the doppelgänger team, officially assigning them the ExxonMobile pitch. He gestured to Joel’s team for something called the Quentin Brookes account.
Marie ran her finger down the spine of her notebook, then cracked it open. She wrote down the unfamiliar name in the center of the page: Quentin Brookes.
And that was it. Gordon silently patted himself on the back for getting through the speech, believing that everything was good. Smoothed over. Vast Bay, Blank Wall, and Tasteful Painting had told him to make big moves, and that was exactly what he was doing. He was almost giddy to hop back on the phone with them and share how brave he’d been. He smiled in the same way you smile at a toddler who is about to pet an unfamiliar dog. The problem was that everyone in this room had been bitten before.
Doppelgänger Joel leaned over the chair towards Doppelgänger Eli, whispering so everyone could hear. “They’re fucked.”
Joel’s eyes slid, against his will, to Doppelgänger Georgia. She looked back at him, slightly creeped out. For a small, stupid second, he saw the shadow of a Post-it, the way Georgia’s soft, hand-drawn lines had caught his pompadour with both accuracy and beauty.
Eli finally sat down; it had reached that level of awkwardness. The chair made him look more responsible, or at least a degree more uncomfortable. Eli didn’t look at Joel. He looked at the edge of Gordon’s desk, where the veneer had peeled back to reveal particleboard. It was all fake, all pretend. Gordon tried his best to wrap it up with a neat bow. “We need the right people, sitting in the right seats.” He left out the part about the missing people. The people who had already been escorted out carrying tasteful cardboard boxes.
If you’re new here, I write a monthly serialized novel called Everything is Advertising, about a burned-out Creative Director and his cynical team that accidentally create QAnon through a viral marketing campaign. If you like that kind of thing, you can start at Part One and catch up from there.
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