What a Good Man Does

The story of John, from humble beginnings

His name was John. He skipped down the aisles of his office space like a ring bearer, rosy-cheeked and unperturbed by his immense responsibility. Emails must be forwarded, town halls attended, conference room chairs sat upon. He wore a schoolboy’s smile. His time in the Navy supplemented his lack of higher education. He did some time in Guam, then Honolulu, and even a few harrowing tours in France. He got that Kanji tattoo in Guam - it means dragon, of course. He felt it important to immerse himself in the culture. The service makes a man more worldly. He liked Soundgarden and Sublime, he wore Adidas Campus 00S sneakers on the weekends, and he almost invested in Apple back in 1997. He could’ve been rich, but he thought he still could be one day, and he was so damn peppy it hurt.

John was climbing up the ladder at work. He loved to work, he lived to work, work work work work work. Many people asked him, what do you do young man? In response, he yanked his little trousers up, puffed out his chest, and told them proudly that he was a DATA ANALYST! It’s a job few men have the gumption to do. You see, John and his comrades are tasked with sifting through all the numbers, and indeed it is a heavy burden. They are integral to The Company’s success. Their daily tasks may seem simple, but without them, the well-oiled machine might grind to a halt. John always says that the office is like the inside of a watch; if one tiny gear stops turning, if one minuscule lever locks up, the whole damn thing is useless. John’s role is so deeply integral that much of the overflow from customer service is hoisted onto his shoulders. The Company knows he can handle it. So, every morning before tending to his responsibilities, he must sift through an endless email inbox of maintenance requests, inventory inquiries, and MailChimp ads. He is a data analyst, but he is also a stopgap between upper management and the spam their eyes need not be sullied with. They never tell him, but John knows the higher-ups are grateful for his noble contributions.

However, as time passed, John couldn’t help but wonder if they were that grateful. Take Russel, his manager, for instance. Russel’s a few years older with an aloof attitude and a know-it-all smirk permanently etched across his face. He’s a nice guy and a decent enough boss, laid back, and never gave John too much trouble. But John began to notice, the guy takes an awful lot of leisurely strolls between the cubicles. He’s always peaking over everybody’s shoulders, asking asinine questions like, how’s it going over here? Shouldn’t you know, Russel? And all of those strolls always end in the breakroom, filling an umpteenth cup of black coffee for the day, as if the distance from his office to the drip machine was a marathon. And just last week, Russel took the team out to a little Italian spot for lunch. The waitress seemed to be familiar with him, but she was particularly interested in John. Noticing this, he leaned towards her and whispered, “Don’t bother with the cubicles, hon’, the tips come from management.” Then he winked, right at John. A joke. It was just a harmless joke, John was sure. But he chewed on that joke at his desk, on the drive home, and at the dinner table with his wife, like a rubbery bit of gristle.

John couldn’t let it go. He quit the chatter with the other guys around the water cooler, and quit walking by Russel’s door to wave in the morning. He started showing up thirty minutes earlier to bang out those tiresome customer service emails. He’d have all his spreadsheets done every day by the post-lunch team meetings, after which he would march into Russel’s office and ask for more work. To an outsider, this behavior may seem generous, or exemplary of an eager employee – and unbeknownst to John, Russell took it that way. He began to see John as a standout on the team. “A real take-charge kinda guy,” he’d say to the higher-ups. “I see a lot of myself in him, back when I was less gray.” But John wasn’t doing it to impress him. Every night as he lay in bed he would regurgitate that joke like cud and fall to sleep with a jaw clenched tight. He began to have the same dream every night: stark naked, impotent, climbing a mountain of white printer paper while Russel leered at him from above. The waitress was there too, and she covered her mouth and giggled, and just as John was almost at the top he would slide back down again. Every damn night, he’d hit the ground and burst forth into consciousness, drenched in sweat with a sore jaw, thirty minutes before his alarm. Worst of all, his morning erections were gone. As far as he was concerned, Russell was robbing him of his rest, his virility, his very life force. He could never get back to sleep. All he could do was get up and work, and he could not stop for a second lest the fury overtake him.

Despite his declining emotional state, the extra effort eventually paid off in his favor. It was another restless Tuesday morning when Russell called him into the office. There, he found not only Russell but also Mitch Doherty (Russell’s boss,) waiting for him. The man was older, slightly more puffy and red than Russell, but they both wore that same shit-eating managerial grin. Mitch hoisted himself up with a geriatric grunt and held his hand out to John. “I don’t think we’ve formally met, I’m Mitch.” John made sure to squeeze just hard enough to crack his arthritic knuckles as they shook hands. “Russel’s told me a lot about you, son – ‘says you do good work around here.” John’s eyes darted frantically back to Russell, who met his gaze with a knowing sparkle. “I hear you pick up a lot of slack in this department, is that so?” John could only nod in response. It sounded as though good news was coming, but his paranoid distrust for Russell had become a cloudy miasma, something hard to shake off. “We think you might be useful in a bigger role.” Russel chimed in. The two nodded in sync, expectant. This is good news. The voice in John’s head was more rugged than he remembered. Good news, but what’s the catch? Russell continued, “Mitch needs some help upstairs, and I’ve worked with him a long time, but I’m happy where I’m at. Frankly, my eyes are on retirement now.” He looked down at his hands, pausing a moment. “You seem… hungry. It’s a big leap from entry-level, but initiative stands above all else, in my experience. You’d be leading a team, putting ideas on the table. How does that sound?”

He took the offer, of course. That was the whole point of a job like this, to climb the ladder. This was what he wanted - even more than. He was skipping right past Russell and moving upstairs, skipping right over an entire rung. He got an office, complete with a lumbar support chair and a particle board desk painted mahogany, instead of the gray he was used to. But what is the fucking catch? He chewed on his bottom lip as he rocked in the cushy new chair. Russell would never stick out his neck for me, the shithead. Why the fuck would he give up a role like this, an office upstairs? He was staring into the monitor before him, still black as he watched his reflection bob back and forth, when it hit him like a half-ton anvil. Russell had played him like a fool for weeks, letting him toil and run his keyboard ragged, bringing his work to Mitch to show how well he ran his department. All of this so that Russell could humbly rescind the offer and hand it off to John, the charity case, the cubicle. It was a masterful checkmate. No self-respecting man would take a hand out like that, But John had lost so much sleep, been so preoccupied with his pervasive flaccidness, he’d let his guard down and walked right into the rabbit snare. If Russell had been slowly draining him before, this move was tantamount to cleaving his genitals clean off with a pair of garden shears.

John could only make the best of it now. To admit defeat would be debilitating, the final nail in the coffin in which his manhood now lay dying. He started showing up at six AM, a full hour before the workday began. The janitor would have to unlock the door for him just to storm past without so much as a wave of acknowledgment. He took his coffee black and with it half a Viagra. This allowed him to maintain a half chub as stalked the aisles of his floor, not slow and smug like Russell had done, but with white-knuckled fists and molars clenched just short of cracking. He trashed all of his old trousers and replaced them with wool twill slacks in Spanish grey. The color and material reflected just enough light for everyone in their cubicles, at about eye-level with his crotch, to see his swinging dick as he strode by. It was an excellent tool for intimidation, like a gun on the hip of a traffic officer. He maintained a daily practice of summoning one unlucky soul from their cubicle and into his office for a grilling before nine AM. “I assigned you this report a week ago, and here it is on my desk now… does it normally take you a whole week to complete a basic task?” The same horrified stare in return, every time. “Sir, I was told the deadline was today, and-” “So because your deadline was a week, you took an entire week to finish a three-page report? Is that correct?” He would always keep the blinds closed for these interrogations. Complete isolation was key to instilling the type of fear John desired from his underlings. After successfully grinding them down to a stain in the chair before his desk, he would shoo them out, and unzip his pants. Staring into the unpowered monitor he would attempt to massage his hard-on to completion.

This is how John made his way up the ladder. Half a Viagra became a whole, then two, then two in the morning, and one after lunch. Behind his back he was nicknamed “Woody,” but to his face they were silent. Even eye contact with him became a potential hazard. The HR complaints piled in, but John’s specialized form of workplace terrorism was fine-tuned to skirt around any serious violations. Yes, he expected all work to be done before deadlines, yes, he expected everyone to stay after and come in early, yes, he often made grown men cry and hair fall out. But his violence was restrained just so. The paranoia Russell had awoken in him was now a well-fortified prison, a panopticon to encase the animalistic bloodlust that drove him ever upward. By giving it small tastes of freedom, little glimpses of the outside world, he established himself as an unshakeable warlord within The Company. But he was still hungry. His penis had gone completely numb from being hard so often, and he had ceased all attempts to produce anything from it. All the Viagra did was keep it hard for show and run his heart rate up, constantly racing, like a cougar tensed to pounce on its prey. And all that time, Russell’s despicable, slimy, rotten motherfucker’s grin hung in the peripherals of his mind.

There were no more floors left to climb. John was at the big table now. His office was a full-sized suite, complete with a kitchenette and a real mahogany desk. His wallet flowed ever over, long ago superseding the amount of money one man could spend. Assets, investments, vacation properties, all of it completely meaningless to him. He observed the world through a tunnel at the end of which was some unknowable release. All of his accomplishments up to this point, all the middle management halfwits he had surpassed, were reduced to notches on his pistol. But on this particular day, in the boardroom atop all boardrooms, there was a buzz in the air beyond the sterile fluorescents. The Shareholders were lined up along the edges of a long table, with John at one end and an empty seat at the other. Through the double doors beyond the empty seat emerged Mr. Sampson, The CEO of The Company. He slowly rounded the chair and descended upon it with grace, an ancient owl landing from its final flight. He clasped his knotted fingers together on the table and stared down at John over the rim of his glasses. He licked his withered lips as he opened his mouth to speak. “Ruthless. Ruthless… is what you are, John. I’ve heard it from every corner of this building. It’s made you a successful man. A rich, successful man. Ruthless was the path that every man in this room walked to sit here today.”

A young blond woman in a fitted navy skirt suit approached him from the shadows, handing him a manila folder. “I didn’t go to school, John. I didn’t have any prospects as a young man. My Pa worked his ass off, worked his knuckles to the bone, just so that I could get my degree. I was the first in my family to do so.” He passed the folder to the Shareholder closest to him, who then ceremoniously passed it to the next, and down the line, it slowly came. “Pa was a good man. A decent American man, salt of the earth. I wouldn’t be anything without him. And do you know how he died, John?” The folder was inching closer to John, a wave of hot anticipation approaching with it. “In a puddle of his guts. 40 floors he fell – lost his footing on a steel beam and doooown he went.” Mr. Sampson twirled his finger in the air and whistled to further illustrate this point, and then chuckled.

The folder landed finally in front of him. John stared down at it, and then looked back up at the rows of Shareholders. They were all smiling, But Mr. Sampson was not. He did not move a muscle. The energy that radiated from the folder was heavy, rippling with heat, like sticking his face into an open oven. Mr. Sampson rose from his seat and began a stroll around the table towards him. “My father was an idiot, John. Two years shy of retirement, he lost his life building what now serves as a low-income housing unit. When people talk about me, they use that as a point of pride. They say I come from humble beginnings. But I am not proud of him. I have bested him in every conceivable way, and he sacrificed his life to let me. That is what weak men do.” Mr. Sampson moved behind John’s chair and placed one hand on his shoulder, the other on the edge of the folder. “This is what good men do, John.” At that, he whisked the folder open. At the top of the folder was a picture of Sampson posing next to a corpse, hung on a hook like slaughtered beef, the skin flayed from its body. All that he could identify about the deceased was that he had been a man, judging by the disembodied genitalia Sampson held up next to his carcass.

As he fully took in what he was seeing, that release at the end of the tunnel took form as a screeching beast. Snarling and vicious, it crashed across the table until the chain about its neck pulled taught, leaving it just close enough for John to feel the heat of its breath. It was enormous, blotting out the light in the room, drooling voraciously over the pile of pictures before him. He began to sift through them, revealing image after image of every Shareholder in the room posing next to a similarly disfigured body. They all had their methods; sawing, burning, slicing, and chopping, some even choosing starvation. They had all clearly taken their time and enjoyed it. John had forgotten to take his Viagra in anticipation of this meeting, but right then he was stiff as a rock. A small wet spot was forming below his zipper. Mr. Sampson and the beast spoke in unison now.

“THIS IS WHAT A GOOD MAN DOES, JOHN. HE TAKES THE FOOD FROM THEIR MOUTHS, REAPS THE HOPE FROM THEIR HEARTS, DRAINS THE LIFE FROM THEIR EYES.”

Their voices shook the room violently, demolishing the walls he had built up over so many years. He was so close now, all these years he had been waiting for something, and he never knew what. But now it was clear. The Beast and Mr. Sampson both howled at him through open-mouthed smiles, their eyes rolled back in expectant ecstasy. Without being told John knew exactly what was asked of him. He shot up from the chair and burst through the double doors, moving right past the elevator and beelining for the stairs. A hundred floors he descended, never slowing in pace, never losing breath. He ran without hesitation until he found himself on the first floor. Most of the cubicles were empty, and he could hear a chorus of voices chattering and laughing from the breakroom. He proceeded through the central aisle, grabbing hold of a tabletop paper cutter from the receptionist’s desk as he went. Adrenaline pumped through veins like gasoline. He ripped the blade from its base with ease as he approached the doorway, finding all of the entry-level cubicles huddled around Russell. He was standing over a grocery store sheet cake with the words “Happy Retirement” scrawled across the top in blue icing. One by one their faces dropped as they turned to look at John.

“John?” Russell’s eyes widened as they moved between John’s face and the blade in his hand. “Are you okay?” He had barely finished the sentence before John cried out with rage, lugging the paper cutter’s base over his shoulder and hurling it at Russell’s face. It met his nose and popped it like a grape, spraying blood across the faces of the workers closest to him. Panicked screams erupted as Russel fell to the floor. John leaped across the table, crushing the cake beneath his leather shoes, and fell upon the dazed old man. He brought the blade down hard on the top of his head. It slammed through his balding scalp and splintered his skull, and John pulled it out and brought it down again. At first, Russell’s arms moved as if to shield him, But John hacked away at those until they were cleaved off. Slowly his body reduced to flailing, and then twitching, and then to complete stillness as John minced him into a paste. The room was painted crimson from floor to ceiling. Finally tired out, John dropped the blade at his side and rose from the pile of gore that was his former boss. He ran his hands up his torso slowly, over his face and through his hair, breathing out the first sigh of release he’d felt in nearly a decade. All of the cubicles had fled except for one, a girl no older than twenty-four, cowering and wheezing in the corner. She was all red too. He opened the cabinet below the sink, pulled out a roll of paper towels, and placed it on the counter next to her. “Clean yourself up and get back to work,” he ordered her, before straightening his jacket and leaving.

No police came for John. The very next day the break room was shiny and white again, and the remains of Russell’s mangled corpse hung on a hook in a freezer. For The Company, it was back to business as usual. Mr. Sampson announced his retirement and John was swiftly named as his successor. Even better, after all those years, he had finally found his release. He killed whenever he could, by tens and hundreds and thousands, and when he did profits skyrocketed. He bit the heads off of innocents like shrimp at a buffet, and spit their decapitated skulls out onto his desk after sucking the eyes from their sockets. The shareholders laughed and clinked glasses when he did. John never got cancer or had a heart attack or a stroke, never even had to have a hip replaced. He retired with enough money to fill a thousand football stadiums, and he didn’t give a cent of it to anybody. He was interviewed by every journalist in the country, and was plastered on the cover of Forbes more times than he could count, and when he appeared on the morning news he was posing with a hatchet caked in blood. Nobody stood in his way. He died of old age wrapped in silk sheets, surrounded by servants and loved ones. When they erected his mausoleum, they placed a plaque at the front that read:

HERE LIES JOHN, BELOVED BUSINESSMAN AND PHILANTHROPIST, THE EPITOME OF THE AMERICAN DREAM. FROM HUMBLE BEGINNINGS HE CARVED HIS LEGACY ON THIS COUNTRY, PROVIDED JOBS FOR THE WORKING MAN, AND LEFT THE WORLD BETTER THAN HE FOUND IT. THAT IS WHAT A GOOD MAN DOES.