Samuel Pam’s Salvation

A short story by Fletcher Kovich

 

Each weekday morning, Samuel Pam walked to Notting Hill Gate underground station, rode the tube to Westminster then walked a further twelve minutes to his office. He always avoided people in public and as he stepped onto the train he noticed an empty end-seat and quickly sat there. These were favourable because only one person could sit beside you, so you were less likely to find yourself incarcerated in a stranger’s conversation.

A man in his twenties took the seat beside Samuel, who gave him the once-over and decided he seemed harmless enough. The train pulled away and Samuel took out his paperback and began reading. The standing-room was all taken and he was aware of the bodies in front of him swaying as the train progressed, like the walls of a human maze which confined him, unable to escape until the walls themselves disembarked. He turned a page and as he did so, the man beside him leant closer and whispered:

“Do you satisfy your girlfriend in bed?”

Samuel watched his book and turned to the next page.

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

Samuel looked along the carriage in the opposite direction, avoiding eye contact with the man. Through the maze of the standing bodies he saw the mad Spanish-looking woman making her way towards him.

The man beside him whispered: “Bring her to new heights of ecstasy with just one more inch.”

The maze wall swayed before him and Samuel felt as though he were trapped in a nightmare, wanting to flee but unable to move.

The Spanish-looking woman had been pursuing him since he left his flat that morning. He was late and was about to leave for work but felt hungry. He placed two slices of bread in his toaster and as he pushed down the “start” lever, his doorbell sounded. He rushed to the door and found a courier standing there. The courier said, “I have a large package for you,” raising his eyebrows on the word “large”.

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

The man handed him a form and Samuel was about to sign it when he noticed the declaration he was signing: “Yes, I want to say goodbye to my locker-room embarrassment.” He looked up at the man who turned over the package and pointed to the wording on the reverse:

This patented work-out for your “best friend” will put inches where it really matters.

The courier said, “Just sign here,” and pushed Samuel’s hand back down to the form.

Samuel resisted, shouting, “There’s nothing wrong with my… ‘best friend’!” but the man held 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. He carried his hunger and irritation to the end of the street and as he turned the corner, he noticed the Spanish-looking woman rushing after him. She lived somewhere nearby and always seemed to be pestering people in the street. She shouted to him, “You plunge it in and leave in a hurry.”

He walked away from her but she shouted after him, “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 he could not recall the last time he ran. With each step, it felt as though his joints were about to fall apart under the impact and his heart laboured as though it were made from the tender flesh of an abused slave’s back who was currently being whipped near to death—but still he had to go on.He turned another corner and was then only one minute from the tube.

Back on the train, he had spotted the woman pushing her way along the carriage towards him, and the man beside him then started whispering something else and he had to escape. He got to his feet. He knew his stop was approaching and he started pushing through the bodies, trying to reach door. He looked back and saw the woman making progress towards him. Through the window, he saw the “Westminster” signs starting to appear on the tube wall. The door was now only three bodies ahead of him and the train started to slow down. The maze of bodies came to attention and someone standing behind Samuel whispered to him: “It’s so easy to add inches where it matters…”

Samuel did not even look round. The doors opened and he was launched onto the platform amid the shuffling maze.

Up on the street he wove his way through the crowds, not looking back over his shoulder but picturing in his mind the Spanish-looking woman gradually slipping further and further behind him. At a pedestrian crossing, he was waiting for the lights to change when a man looked round at him as though about to say something but Samuel stepped sideways, then the lights changed.

In his office on the fifth floor of the Ministry of Education, he sat down behind his desk. Samuel oversaw all policy evaluation workgroups within the Ministry. Twenty five years ago, a report found that much of the population felt other people did not value them, both in the workplace and in their private lives. Samuel’s career began when he chaired a workgroup investigating this report, which found the problem was that each person was not adequately communicating their viewpoint to other people.

The workgroup introduced an intensive training programme into all schools which taught pupils to use the methods that advertising agencies used to promote products in the media, which were deemed the most effective communication tools of the day. This would eventually enable every person in society to get their message across in all situations. 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 being taught quickly assumed the nickname of “Spam” and the activity of using these techniques became known as “Spamming”.

Over the twenty or so years that these techniques had been taught, Spamming had gradually increased in everyday society and today, due to the prevalence of Spamming, Samuel avoided contact with other people where 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 and sat at the head of the conference table, around which his team were already assembled. They were due 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 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 had by now reached one hundred and twenty-eight, of which only thirty of these had so far been successfully resolved). Flaw fifty-four was of particular interest because it was thought it was this that caused people to use 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 had never been heard of before. It was a promising breakthrough and the workgroup listened in eager anticipation as Jonathan Springer, a bright, fresh-faced graduate, began the presentation.

Jonathan tapped on his laptop and a graph lit up the presentation screen. Geraldine, who was thirty-two next March and whose knees 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 April, 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, “You too can induce a heavenly state with your….” but he quickened his pace, stepped into his office and closed the door. His window opened onto a wide ledge which he stepped out onto, then sat on. This was his favourite spot in the building, the only place he could escape the Spammers. He sighed as he listened to the noise of the distant traffic. He looked down to the street and thought he could see someone waving up at him from the opposite pavement. He then recognised the mad Spanish-looking woman. She was shouting up to him and beckoning him to come down to the street. He edged back on the ledge, so she was out of sight. He started watching the windows of the building opposite, which was a call centre. He 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 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 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 stood up and took the last few steps to Samuel. On his last step, he stumbled and swayed out over the precipice but managed to grip a proud piece of brickwork which 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 leant close to Samuel’s ear and whispered, “Is your girlfriend satisfied with your performance?”

Samuel shouted “What?”

The man said, “With an extra two inches you’ll take her to unimaginable heights of 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 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. The man stood up, gripping the proud brickwork, knocked on the glass with his head and shouted: “Punish her with your nine full inches.”

Samuel closed the blinds and left his office. Outside, a receptionist, Clair, whom he had always been attracted to, stepped over to him to give him a message. There was something about the slight irregularity in the curve of her nose that fascinated him. Initially he began watching it out of curiosity, but then soon found himself becoming addicted, and now she was the only one of his staff whom he always made the time to talk to.

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

Samuel pictured the Spanish-looking woman standing at 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 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 Spammers. The underground was much less busy than in the morning and he would often manage to get home and back to the office without being offered a single penis enlargement product. Today, he turned the corner back into his street and found several fire engines blocking the street and a considerable crowd gathered. When he reached the first fire engine he looked up and saw his flat had been destroyed by fire. Three things ran through his mind:

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

Secondly, he recalled he had not renewed his buildings insurance. When the insurance had been due for renewal the previous year, he was phoned by a salesman from the insurance company but because the salesman bombarded him with Spam, Samuel ended the conversation without renewing his insurance.

Thirdly, he realized his lifetime’s work was stored in the paper files that lined the walls of his home office. For the past twenty years he had worked on corrections to his original Spam educational proposal. Over recent months, he had painstakingly worked out a modification to address flaw fifty-four, the “promotion of sex-related products” flaw. When he looked up and saw his ruined flat, he realized all his work had also been destroyed.

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

He made his way back towards Notting Hill Gate underground station. He now had no home and his purpose in life had been destroyed, so all 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 but had never taken any notice of it. Today, though, he felt drawn towards it. He walked through the gate, sat on a bench and started watching a plane tree across the lawn from him, when he realized he was not alone. He looked over to the next bench and saw his Spanish-looking pursuer sitting there, also watching the plane tree. She looked over, 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 her nose curved in a similar way to Clair’s, only Andrea’s curved in the opposite direction. This seemed to excite him.

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

Samuel watched her dark eyes. There was something simple about the look in her eyes, as though they saw the world stripped of complications; and they looked 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 told him how she always tried to help people but they could not understand she was trying to help them and this always made her lose her job. She had only been in the country for a month and had already lost three jobs. And now, because she followed him that morning she was 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, or if he had been able to understand she was trying to help him, she would have been in time for work and would still have a job. And now her rent was overdue and her landlord had locked her out, so she had no job and nowhere to stay.

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

Samuel realised if he could have put aside his suspicions and made an effort to understand her, then he might 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 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, which seemed to indicate she saw right through him, as through a flimsy disguise.

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. He realized there did seem to be a simple, irrefutable truth about her ideas, but this realization was just a suspicion flitting 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 she had over-simplified everything to the point where she had missed the “real” content; that is, the content he saw. But then, when considering his own ideas, he realized 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 he had bought into and that, once you had accepted this illusion was true, then it did seem totally convincing, but that if you took a step back 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, all these ideas in his head made his brain hurt; there was a deep soreness in his head, as though his mind were trying to hold up some heavy weight that was difficult to keep balanced and difficult to support.

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 he might be attributing to her words wisdom 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, then smiled and told him, “But I like you.”

He was about to warn her not to offer him a penis enlargement, when he managed to dismiss his suspicions and instead he simply said, “Thank you,” and he found himself surprised by just how sincerely he meant it. He thought about this for a moment then 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 chased for as long as he could remember, and he began to suspect he had perhaps been misguided, perhaps he had remained inside the illusion of his own ideas for too long and had been toiling to reach a destination that simply did not exist. Perhaps the destination had been created by the ideas themselves, and once he had released those ideas from his mind, the destination would 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 take their place?

Again, he became aware of the simple fact that his brain was sore. Perhaps, he thought, this alone was telling him he was doing something wrong. If thinking his usual thoughts made his head hurt, then was it not obvious 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. The desire seemed like some animal instinct that was perhaps akin to a vibrant child buried deep within him calling out for escape, a child who had been smothered by the clouds of all those illusory ideas his professional life had perhaps consisted of; but now he could sense those clouds parting and could feel the sun warming the face of the child within him. He felt a sensation within his chest like the beginnings of a smile, 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 he could change the direction of his whole life. Previously, he had not even considered this. But now the idea was there, like a wild animal roaming around him and alarming him with its mere presence. His alarm diminished as he became accustomed to the idea. 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 both wondered what would become of them.

 

15 March 2008

28 October 2010, edited (reduced by 773 words)

 

Read Andrea Segovia’s point of view.

Read my sketchbook entry on the inspiration behind this story; on editing the story; on the further editing of the story; and also my discussion of further episodes.

 

See readers' comments on this work here.