Samuel Pam’s Salvation

Each weekday morning, Samuel Pam took a ten minute walk to the Notting Hill Gate underground station, rode the tube to Westminster, then walked a further twelve minutes to his office.

He always strove to avoid people in public but that Friday morning, he had already failed to dodge two unwanted advances. As he stepped onto the tube train, he noticed a vacant end-seat and quickly sat there. The end seats were favourable because you only had one person sitting beside you and you could easily escape if that person found themselves unable to contain their desire to begin a conversation.

The train filled up and pulled away. A man in his twenties had taken the seat beside Samuel, and Samuel had given him the once-over as he had sat there and had decided that he seemed reasonably harmless. Samuel took out his paperback and started reading. He was aware of the bodies swaying in front of him as the train progressed. The standing-room was always taken on the inbound journey, which did reduce the opportunity of escape but that morning Samuel was beginning to feel reasonably at ease. He turned a page and as he read the top line of the new page, the man beside him leant closer and whispered in his ear:

“Do you satisfy your girlfriend in bed?”

Samuel kept his eyes fixed on his book and turned to the next page.

The man whispered, “Leave the small size behind. No girl likes a small cock…”

Samuel looked up into the carriage, avoiding eye contact with the man and looking along the carriage in the opposite direction. Through the crowded carriage he could see the mad Spanish-looking woman pushing her way along the carriage towards him.

The man beside him whispered: “Make her cum three times a night with your new love weapon.”

Samuel felt panic swelling up within him.

The mad Spanish-looking woman had been pursuing him since he had left his house that morning. He was late and was about to leave for work but felt so hungry that he decided to make himself a piece of toast. He had placed the slice of bread in the toaster and as he pushed down the “start” lever, his doorbell had sounded. He rushed to the door and found a courier standing there. The courier said, “I have a large package for you.” When he pronounced the word “large”, his eyebrows had risen.

Samuel, puzzled, looked down at the package and told him, “It doesn’t look all that large to me.”

The man handed him a form and pointed him towards the dotted line. Samuel was just about to sign his name when he noticed the declaration next to the dotted line: “Yes, I would like to have a bigger penis…” He looked up at the man, now with his own eyebrow raised, and the man turned over the package and pointed to the large wording on the reverse:

The Dick-XL pill has been designed specifically for penis enlargement. Don’t suffer a small dick. You too could have a nine inch love weapon.

The man turned over the package again, said, “Just sign here,” and pushed Samuel’s hand back down to the form.

Samuel resisted, shouting, “There’s nothing wrong with my penis,” but the man held onto his hand and tried moving it over the form. Samuel broke free, pulled his front door shut behind him and pushed past the man on his way out into the street. Samuel carried his hunger and his irritation to the end of the street, and as he turned the corner, he noticed the mad Spanish-looking woman rushing towards him. She lived somewhere nearby and she always seemed to be pestering people in the street. She shouted out to him, “You plunge it in and leave in a hurry.”

He turned and started walking away from her. She shouted out, “You plunge it in too quick.”

He dodged down an alleyway and broke into a run. In the distance, he could hear her shouting, “Stop, stop; the fire will come after you’ve gone!”

As he was running, it occurred to him that he could not remember the last time that he had run, and that it seemed to be shaking up his whole body and hammering his knee joints alarmingly with each step he took. He turned another corner and was then only a few minutes away from the tube station. He returned to walking. He could hear his pulse thumping in his ears and his ribs felt like the flimsy bamboo bars of an inadequate cage that was trying to restrain the raging ape of his heart. He slowed his pace further, attempting to return himself to numbed normality.

Back on the tube train, he had spotted the mad Spanish-looking woman pushing her way along the carriage towards him, and the man on the seat beside him was starting to whisper something else to him and he could now feel the panic in his chest swelling further. He got to his feet and started pushing along the carriage in the opposite direction. He knew his stop was approaching and that he would soon be able to escape the train. He was trying to reach one of the doors on the platform side, but his way was blocked by an immovable wall of bodies. He looked back along the carriage and saw the mad Spanish-looking woman making steady progress towards him. He looked back through the window and the “Westminster” signs started to appear on the tube wall. He focused his attention on the doors, which were now just three bodies ahead of him. The train started to slow and everyone seemed to come to attention as they prepared to launch themselves from the train and someone who was standing behind him took that opportunity to start whispering in his ear: “Penetrate her with your large manhood…”

Samuel did not even bother to look round. The doors opened and he was launched out onto the platform amid the throng.

Up on the street, he adopted his quickest comfortable pace and dodged behind any opportune clusters of pedestrians so as to make himself difficult to follow. He did not look back over his shoulder but pictured in his mind the mad Spanish-looking woman gradually slipping further and further behind him. At a pedestrian crossing, he came to a halt, waiting for the lights to change. A man standing in front of him and to his left, looked round at him. Samuel noticed that his bright green jacket seemed new. He thought that he could even smell the new-ness of it. The man seemed as though he was about to say something but Samuel stepped to his right and just at that moment the lights changed. Samuel avoided the man’s gaze and resumed his quick pace.

In his office, he sat down behind his desk. His office was on the fifth floor of the Ministry for Education. He was the senior officer in charge of all policy evaluation workgroups within the Ministry. His career in the Ministry had begun twenty five years ago when he had chaired a workgroup that was investigating possible solutions to a problem that had been identified. An earlier report had found that most people experienced frustration in the workplace and in their private lives because they felt that other people did not value them. Samuel’s workgroup found that the problem lay in poor communication. They decided that if each person’s point of view were communicated adequately to other people, then this would remove all the frustrations that demoralized people in the workplace and thus have a positive impact on the economy.

The workgroup’s solution was to introduce into all schools an intense program of communication training. The most effective communication tools at that time were the methods that were then being adopted by advertising agencies to promote products in the media. These techniques were taught to all pupils from that moment onwards. The objective was to provide each person in society with the tools that they needed to enable them to get their message across in all situations.

This program continued in schools until the present day, and by now these techniques had become deeply ingrained in everyday society. The original workgroup’s report was entitled:

How to empower the population to get their message across: a report of the “Level 2” workgroup’s findings, by S.Pam.

Hence, the techniques that were being taught quickly assumed the nickname of “Spam” and anyone using such techniques became known as “Spammers” and the activity of using these techniques became known as “Spamming”.

Over the twenty or so years that these techniques had been taught in schools, Spamming had gradually increased in everyday society, and today, due to the prevalence of Spamming, Samuel, like most other people, was now used to keeping himself to himself and avoiding contact with other people as much as possible, lest they attempt to sell him a penis enlargement product, or provide him with information on a cheap source for pills to enable him to gain an endless erection, should he ever require such a thing, which, of course, he surely would do, because only winners had an endless, on-demand erection.

Samuel Pam walked into his eleven a.m. meeting. He sat at the head of the conference table. His team were already sat around the table. That morning, they were scheduled to hear a summary of the “Level 5” workgroup’s report into the eradication of the number “seven” from all arithmetic problems presented to children before the age of nine. A previous report had suggested that this might remedy the fifty fourth flaw that had been identified in his own famous “Level 2” “Spam” report of twenty five years before. The number of flaws identified in his Spam report had by now reached one hundred and twenty eight. Thirty six of these had so far been modified by making adjustments to the education material that was used to train pupils in Spamming. The flaw number fifty four was of particular interest because it had been suggested that this was a key flaw that might incline people towards using Spam to promote sex-related products. The whole Ministry was excited by the idea of eradicating the number “seven” from arithmetic problems, because this approach seemed to promise results by not modifying the Spam education material itself, but by modifying the education material in other areas. It was a promising breakthrough. The whole workgroup listened in eager anticipation as Jonathan Springer, a bright, fresh-faced graduate, began the presentation.

Jonathan, who was standing at the end of the room opposite Samuel, tapped on his laptop and an impressive-looking graph was revealed on the presentation screen. Geraldine, who was thirty-two next April and whose knees always lost the ability to support her whenever she saw Jonathan, Geraldine gasped at the sight of the graph. George, who was forty-five and was taking early retirement next March, George sighed impatiently at Geraldine.

Jonathan tapped another key and the following words appeared beneath the graph:

While cock enlargement surgery is expensive and sometimes dangerous, pills have been found to have no such drawbacks.

Samuel stood up and left the room. In the corridor, a secretary approached him. She started to say, “Make her cum three times a night with your….” but he quickened his pace and managed to avoid her. He stepped into his office and closed the door behind him. His window opened onto a wide ledge. He stepped out onto the ledge and sat there. This was his favourite spot in the building, the only place he could be by himself and escape the Spammers. He sighed, relieved, as he listened to the noise of distant traffic. He looked down to the street and he thought he could see someone waving up at him from the pavement across the street from the Ministry. He then recognised the mad Spanish-looking woman. She was shouting up to him and waving her arms as though to beckon him to come down to the street. He edged back on the ledge, so that she was out of sight. He started watching the windows of the building opposite. The building had once housed the government’s institute for the statistical evaluation of natural healing, but it was found that none of the healing activities could be quantified mathematically, so the institute was disbanded and the building let to an insurance company who set up a call centre there to handle domestic insurance claims.

Samuel looked from window to window, watching the phone operators gesticulating at their screens. Five minutes later, he noticed someone tapping at one of the windows, apparently watching him. He looked more closely and recognised the mad Spanish-looking woman. He heard a voice, looked round and saw a man kneeling on the ledge a few windows along from him.

The man said, “Don’t jump; it’s not worth it,” and he started edging towards Samuel.

Samuel said, “Oh, go away, you ridiculous man; I’m not trying to jump.”

“You must have something to live for. Let me talk to you.”

The man edged closer. Samuel waved him away and said, “I’m not trying to jump. Go away.”

“You don’t fool me. It’s not worth it. Don’t do it.”

Samuel shouted “I won’t! There, now go away.”

The man edged along the ledge. He had been crouching down and clinging to the wall, but he now seemed to gain his confidence and he stood up and took the last few steps that separated him from Samuel. On his last step, he stumbled and swayed out over the precipice but managed to grip onto the proud piece of brickwork that framed each window. He sat down beside Samuel and gripped his arm. He rather stupidly (Samuel thought) told him, “Now, if you’re going to jump, you’ll take me with you.”

Samuel, who was still seething at the man’s stupidity, told him: “And if you fall, you’ll take me with you.”

The man then leant close to Samuel’s ear and whispered, “Is your girlfriend satisfied with your performance?”

Samuel shouted “What?”

The man said, “With an extra three inches you’ll take her to new heights of sexual pleasure.”

Samuel grabbed the man’s hand and tried to free his grip from his arm as he shouted at him, “You’ve come out here just to tell me this; you might have killed me!”

The man gripped his arm more firmly and said, “Millions of men around the world have tested this system and their girlfriends say they are the best in bed.”

Samuel wrestled the man from him, stood up, climbed back into his window and shut it behind him. The man stood up, gripping the proud brickwork around the window, knocked on the glass with his head and shouted in through the glass: “Punish her with your nine full inches.”

Samuel closed the blinds and left his office. Outside, a receptionist, Clair, whom Samuel had always been attracted to, stepped over to him to give him a message. It was something about the slight irregularity in the curve of her nose that fascinated him. Initially, he had noticed this and had started watching it out of curiosity, but then he had found himself becoming addicted to it, and now she was the only one of his staff whom he would always find the time to stop and talk to. Usually, though, he would not hear her words and would be feasting his eyes on that curious curve in her nose.

She stepped over to him and said, “A Miss Segovia is on her way up to see you.” She looked down to the piece of paper in her hands and continued, “She says that your stick is burning her up.”

Samuel pictured the mad Spanish-looking woman standing in front of the lift on the ground floor, watching the floor-indicator as the lift raced down to collect her. He told Clair, “I’m going for an early lunch,” and he fled to the fire escape and took the stairs down to the ground floor. He usually went home for an extended lunch break, since this was the best way to avoid contact with Spammers. The underground was much less busy than in the morning and he would often manage to get home to his house and back to the office without being offered a single penis enlargement product. Today, he turned the corner back into his own street and found two fire engines blocking the street and a considerable crowd gathered. When he reached the first fire engine, he looked up and saw that his home had been destroyed by fire. When he saw this, three things ran through his mind.

Firstly, he recalled pushing down the “start” lever on his toaster and hearing his front doorbell sound at the same time.

Secondly, he recalled that he had not renewed his building’s insurance. When the insurance had been due for renewal the previous year, he had been phoned by a salesperson from the insurance company, but because the salesperson had bombarded him with Spam, he had ended the conversation and declined to renew his insurance.

And thirdly, he recalled that his lifetime’s work had been stored in the paper files that had lined the walls of his home office. For the past twenty years, he had been working on corrections to his original Spam education proposal. His corrections were designed to remove all the flaws that had been found in the system. He had painstakingly worked out modifications to the educational material which were designed to make it impossible to use his Spam techniques for the promotion of products related to sex. When he looked up and saw his ruined house, he realized that all his work had also been destroyed.

A fireman approached him and was about to speak to him when Samuel shouted, “I don’t want my penis enlarged!” and fled.

He made his way back towards the Notting Hill Gate underground station. He now had no house and his purpose in life had been destroyed, so all that he had left was his job in the Ministry and the curious curve of Clair’s nose. Somehow, he instinctively found himself being drawn towards Clair’s nose. But on his way to the station, he was passing through Pembridge Square when he found himself looking at the communal garden there. It was a long, rectangular garden with a high hedge surrounding it. He had passed this garden countless times on his way to and from the underground station, but he had never really taken any notice of it. Today, he somehow felt drawn towards the garden. He walked through the gate and sat on a bench at the edge of the garden. He started watching the plane tree across the lawn from him, when he became aware that he was not alone. He looked over to the next bench along and saw that the mad Spanish-looking woman was sitting there, also watching the plane tree. She looked over and noticed him, then stood up and crossed to his bench. She sat beside him and returned to watching the tree. He did the same.

After a moment of calm, with only the distant sound of passing traffic and the occasional burst of bird song to fill the silence, she turned to him and said, “My name is Andrea Segovia. I do not play guitar.”

Samuel said nothing.

She told him, “I come to tell you your bread stick is on fire.”

He said, “My ‘toast’, you mean?”

“You toast? Eh? What to?”

“I was making toast.”

“Who to?”

“—My ‘bread stick’?”

She looked suspiciously at him and asked, “You were toasting to your bread stick? This is a strange country.”

Samuel noticed that her nose curved in a similar way to the way that Clair’s nose curved, only Andrea’s nose curved in the opposite direction. This somehow seemed to excite him.

Andrea said, “I come to tell you you go too quickly. But now it is too late. Your house has gone.”

Samuel watched her dark eyes. There was something deeply simple about the look in her eyes, as though they saw the world stripped of complications; and they seemed to be looking back at him in this same uncomplicated way.

He said, “I know you were trying to warn me. I can see that now.”

“But you went too quick, and I could not catch you.”

“I know.”

She said, “And now I am lost as well.”

She explained that she always tried to help people, but that they could not understand her and could not see how she was trying to help them and this always made her lose her job. She had only been in this country for just over a month and she had already been sacked from three jobs. And now, because she had followed him that morning, she had been late for work on the first morning of her new job and had been sacked again. If she had not seen his toaster starting to catch light that morning, or if he had been able to understand that she was trying to help him, she would have been in time for work and would still have her job. And now she was lost. Her rent was overdue and her landlord had locked her out because she could not pay it. So she now had no job and nowhere to stay.

“People can never understand me,” she told Samuel. “I am only trying to help them, but they can not understand. Is it my fault?”

Samuel realised that if he could have ignored the language problems and made an effort to understand her, despite his suspicions that she might have been trying to Spam him, then he would have saved his home and his life’s work, and Andrea would still have her job and somewhere to live.

She asked him again, “Do I do something wrong?”

He said, “I assumed you were a Spammer.”

She frowned at him. “That does not sound good. You should assume the best in people and dismiss all your bad thoughts. Because bad thoughts are just badness inside you. Why would you want badness inside you?”

“It’s what I’ve always done. I think about the things people are doing wrong, so that I can find a way to correct them.”

She told him, without hesitation, “No, no, that is wrong. You are focusing on bad things. You should dismiss those, and what will you be left with?”

Samuel felt alarmed by her words. They seemed to cut right to the heart of the matter. He wondered how such a simple-seeming person could so easily see right through him.

She told him, “Only goodness. That is what would be left.”

He watched her for a moment, struggling to reconcile her simple philosophy with all his own intellectual struggles of the past twenty five years, but he could not reconcile the two. He realized that there did seem to be a simple, irrefutable truth about her ideas, but this realization was just a suspicion that had flitted through his mind, for he could not quite grasp it. And yet, when he considered her words from the point of view of his own ideas, she seemed to be insane. It seemed that she had over-simplified everything to the point where she had missed all the “real” content; that is, the content that he saw. But then, when considering these ideas of his own, he realized that they too could also be seen as a sort of “insanity”; he could accept that the ideas in his own head, which he had lived with for so long, could just be an illusion that he had bought into and that, once you had accepted that this illusion was true, then it did seem totally convincing, but that if you took a step backward from the ideas, then he could accept that they probably were simply an illusion, like most other belief systems. But then he realized that because he was “inside” his own particular insanity, he had no choice but to be fooled by all his own illusions. So, he had to conclude that he just did not know who was right, or what was right. The only thing he knew for sure was that as he thought about it now, he realized that all these ideas inside his own head made his brain hurt; there was a deep soreness inside his head, as though his mind were trying to hold up some heavy weight that was difficult to keep balanced and difficult to support. His mind felt tired.

He told her, “I think you’re as insane as I am, but I think I would rather have your insanity than the one I’ve been living with all my life.”

She frowned at him.

He asked her, “Would it be possible for me to adopt your insanity, instead of my own? Tell me, how do I deliberately become insane?”

She said, “Eh? I don’t follow. You have to decide for yourself. You cannot understand me, so how can I tell you?”

He again found himself stumped by the simple, penetrating clarity of her words. But then he began to suspect that he might have been attributing to her words wisdom that she did not intend. He said, “But hang on—if you can’t follow me, how do you know what I’m asking?”

She said, “Eh? I don’t understand you. Your accent is strange.” She watched him with her simple dark eyes for a moment and then she smiled and told him, “But I like you.”

He was about to warn her not to offer him a penis enlargement, when his mind managed to dismiss his suspicions and instead he simply said, “Thank you,” and he found himself surprised by just how sincerely he had meant it. He thought about this for a moment, then he said it again, but a little quieter: “Thank you.” He nodded to himself: Yes, he really did mean this most sincerely, and it felt good. He again thought about all his previous work, about the ideas he had been chasing for as long as he could remember, and he began to suspect that perhaps he had been misguided, perhaps he had remained inside the illusion of his own ideas for too long, and had perhaps been toiling to reach a destination that simply did not exist. Perhaps the destination had been created by the ideas themselves, and that, once he had released those ideas from his mind, then the destination would magically vanish. But of course, he could not simply dismiss ideas that had driven him all his adult life—for those ideas were his life. If they were not there, what would there be in their place?

Again, he became aware of the simple fact that his brain was sore. Perhaps, he thought, this alone was telling him that he was doing something wrong. If thinking his usual thoughts made his head hurt, then was it not obvious that he was doing something wrong, or was it simply that such problems, were difficult, and so that was why they made his head hurt? He did not know. The only thing he knew was that his head did hurt, and so some part of him wanted to escape from this burden that had been his path for the past twenty five years. This desire within him then seemed to come more clearly into focus. It seemed to be some animal instinct that was like a vibrant child who was calling out for escape, a child who had been smothered by the clouds of all those illusory ideas that his professional life had perhaps consisted of; but now he could sense those clouds parting and he could feel the sun warming the face of that child within him. He felt himself beginning to smile, but not on his face; he felt the smile within his chest, as though his heart were starting to fill with happiness, as a barren land receives the first trickles of a long-awaited downpour. He then realized, for the first time, that it was possible that he could change the direction of his whole life. Previously, he had not even considered this. But now the idea was there, like a freed wild animal, roaming round his living room, alarming him with its presence and with the idea of what it might do next. His alarm diminished as he became accustomed to that animal’s presence. And he could then clearly see that the events of that day had been both his downfall and his salvation. He returned to watching the plane tree.

The two of them watched the plane tree across the grass from them, listening to the distant sound of passing traffic and occasional bird calls and they both wondered what would become of them.

 

Please leave your feedback on this work here. All comments are appreciated, no matter how short (or long). If you're not familiar with using blog sites, there are instructions on the LEAVE FEEDBACK page.