Link to Part II

For the next week, the watch was silent, and I began to forget about the incident.  I had grown accustomed to its weight and the feel of it on my wrist, and I now put it on each morning when I got out of bed without a second thought.

It was Saturday, and I was heading off to a dreaded but long-overdue appointment with a financial counselor.  I had been putting off getting my finances in order for several years after graduating from college, but it wasn’t until a few days previous that I had realized how behind I was.

At lunch one day at work, I had come into the break room to find my coworkers gossiping, as was usual.  But this time, instead of talking about the latest hookups or screwups in our company, they were talking about retirement.  As I took a seat and began listening in, several men were bragging over the value of their retirement 401ks, a virtual pissing contest to see who had more money.

The longer they talked, the worse I felt as I munched on the pasta salad I had brought.  I didn’t have a retirement account set up at all!  In fact, I only had about six thousand dollars to my name, all in my checking account.  I had been contemplating opening a savings account at all, but hadn’t even pulled the trigger on that small step.

That afternoon, I had resolved to get my money problems squared away.  However, after an hour staring at incomprehensible jargon on the internet, I had placed a call to a local finance firm and gotten an appointment for Saturday with a personal finance counselor.

Now, I was downtown, walking into a tall skyscraper to make my meeting.  I made my way through a maze of cubicles, guided by a pert receptionist in three-inch heels, until I arrived at a large, glassed-in office with a desk inside and a man behind the desk.

Inside the office, fortunately, I found Stan, and Stan managed to immediately defuse my concerns with his firm handshake and easy, self-depreciating nature.  I had brought along my bank statements and explained my situation, and Stan nodded understandingly and listened patiently as I talked, never interrupting or cutting me off.  He congratulated me on the decision to get my money in order, and explained that I had plenty of options.

“First off, we are going to want to get you started on some retirement accounts,” he said brightly after I had finished, pulling out a couple sheets of information and a pad of yellow paper.  He passed the yellow pad over to me, along with a pen, so I could take notes.  He walked me through employer matching for 401k accounts, and a few charts quickly showed me how great this was.  He then talked me through setting up a savings account, and configuring my bank account so that some of my paycheck would automatically be put into savings, removing the temptation for me to spend it at the spa or on a shopping spree.

“And now, on to personal investments,” Stan continued, reaching for another sheet of paper.  “A portion of your paycheck should go to your 401k, a portion should go to your savings, but some should also go into investments.”

“Wait, why?” I asked.  “Isn’t that what the 401k is for?”

Stan smiled.  “Your 401k is an investment, yes, but you can’t use it until you retire.  Personal investments let your money do work for you, but are still available to you for withdrawal at any point, so that you can use them earlier!  They’re great for things like buying a house, big purchases that you can’t always predict.”

I nodded, following along, and Stan passed over a sheet of paper.  “There are a lot of different funds that you can invest your money into, but I’ve been recommending this fund to my clients,” he explained.  “It’s caled Pilco, and it’s been doing exceptionally well for the last few years.  Many of my clients have put all of their investments into Pilco and done very well.  We can set up an account for you here, and just like savings, the money will automatically be invested by us here, without you needing to lift a finger!”

The idea made sense, and I began to open my mouth to ask where I had to sign.  However, I was cut off by my watch, buzzing suddenly on my wrist.  I glanced down at it, and it stopped.  Was it trying to tell me not to invest?

Stan was looking at me expectantly.  Once again, I opened my mouth, and the watch began buzzing again.  “Is there something I sign for that?” I asked, ignoring the vibration coursing up and down my arm.

With a flourish, the financial counselor passed over a legal form.  “Just sign at the bottom,” he said.

I picked up the pen, but the buzzing seemed to intensify, and I couldn’t hold the pen steady enough to sign.  Stan’s expression shifted very slightly as he watched my arm shake.  After a couple of botched attempts, I finally set down the pen.  “You know, I think I’m going to pass on this investing fund thing,” I said.  “Do you have any other ones instead?”

At this news, Stan frowned slightly, but he pulled out a couple of other funds that “were more stable, but weren’t providing nearly as great returns as Pilco.”  I looked them over and found one that seemed to be somewhat reliable, as far as I could tell from the mass of complicated data on the sheets.  My watch didn’t seem to protest at all as I signed for this fund.

The rest of the meeting wrapped up without incident, and I thanked Stan profusely for helping me get my money in order as I left.  He modestly brushed aside my gratitude, but before I left, he mentioned the Pilco fund once more.  “Check it out every now and then for the next week or two,” he encouraged.  “I’m telling you, it’s making a ton of money.”

Over the next week or so, I did watch the fund, searching for it on the internet every few days.  Just as Stan had said, it seemed to be on a steep and steady climb.  Why had I trusted the buzzing of my watch and not invested?

In fact, two weeks later, I was ready to call Stan and have him change my money over.  I decided to look up Pilco once more.  As the web page loaded this time, though, I felt my mouth drop open in surprise.

The fund had just collapsed completely!  News reports were saying that it had been some sort of scheme the entire time, and the investors had lost everything.  I had nearly been one of those poor souls!  I lowered my phone in shock.

Apparently, the watch had been right once again.  I resolved, then and there, not to ignore its buzzing again, even if I didn’t understand why it was warning me.

Link to Part I.

The next afternoon, my friends dragged me out to happy hour after work.  Of course, I really didn’t need that much convincing.  They were going on and on about how this new bar they had found had all the cutest guys, and I did have to admit that it had been quite a while since I’d enjoyed any male company.

“Susan, you need to just jump in!” insisted one of my coworkers, Danielle.  “Look, just smile at the first hot guy, and let him buy you a few drinks!  It’s easy, especially for someone as pretty as you!”

I smoothed back my brown hair, looking around the bar.  Ordinarily, I wouldn’t have been quite as outgoing, but a couple of gin and tonics had loosened my inhibitions a little.  Letting my gaze roam, I spotted one guy leaning against the edge of the bar.  Tall, with slicked-back black hair and a leather jacket over his button-up shirt and tie, he looked dangerous – and sexy.  He was casually looking around the bar as well, and I gave him my best “come-hither” smile when his eyes fell on me.

The man smiled back, and I watched with mingled trepidation and delight as he sauntered over to me and my group of coworkers.  “Hey, I’m Cain,” he said smoothly, leaning in next to me.  I could see the five-o-clock stubble on his face, and suppressed an irrational urge to run my hand across it.

I introduced myself, and learned that he was a marketing guy.  “But I drive a bike, so I don’t totally fit into corporate culture,” he smirked, tugging at the lapels of his jacket.  He was a few years older than me, but his shirt was tight beneath his jacket and I had to admit that the rippling muscles beneath were totally doing it for me.

A few minutes later, I had finished sipping down the last of my gin and tonic, and Cain didn’t let it go unnoticed.  “Hey, let me grab you another,” he said smoothly.  “Gin and tonic, right?”  I nodded.  “Yeah, I need another beer as well.  Maybe you could grab a booth while I get the drinks, someplace a little quieter?”

As he headed into the cluster of people around the bar, I turned and gazed around the room.  There was one booth open, towards the back, so I headed over to stake my claim.  A minute later, Cain was back, grinning as he slid me my drink.  “Tip the bartender early on, and you get the best service,” he told me.

Nodding and smiling as if he had just imparted great wisdom to me, I reached down for my drink.  As my hand closed around the glass, however, I suddenly felt a buzz shooting along my arm.  Was my phone going off?  No, I realized – it was the watch!  The watch on my wrist had lit up and was buzzing loudly, making my hand shake and slop a little of the drink onto the table.

“Something wrong?” Cain asked, his eyes narrowing slightly as he looked down at my watch.

I let go of the glass and held up the watch, stabbing at the buttons until the buzzing stopped.  “No, sorry, just a new watch that one of my friends got me,” I said apologetically.  I reached down for the glass again, but the watch resumed its buzzing, this time after I had lifted the glass up nearly to my lips.

I once again paused, frustrated.  Of course, Alex had gotten me something that malfunctioned at just the wrong time, when I was trying to not seem like a fool in front of a new guy I’d met.  An instant later, however, my eye caught something worrying.

Still holding the glass up before my eyes, I swirled it slightly, now ignoring the buzzing of my watch.  It wasn’t just my imagination!  There was something very faint swirling at the bottom of the glass.  It looked like . . . powder?

My eyes rose from the glass to Cain, and I nearly flinched at his expression.  Cain’s face still portrayed simple concern, but now I could see the hint of rage, of something much more sinister, hiding at the edges.  “Oh my god,” I gasped.  “Did you put something in my drink?”

For a moment, I saw Cain try to maintain his facade, but then it fell away from his face like a mask.  “You stupid bitch,” he hissed at me.  “You aren’t supposed to notice anything!  God, that damn watch of yours had to go and ruin everything, didn’t it?”

I opened my mouth, but he was already getting up from the table, storming off towards the door.  I managed to find my voice.  “Stop him!” I yelled, pointing at Cain as he tried to get away.  “He tried to roofie me!”

The bouncer, a massively built man at the entrance with a shaved head, perked up as soon as he heard my cry.  He looked down as Cain tried to slip past him, and one hand the size of a dinner plate tightened on the back of that leather jacket.  Cain twisted, glaring back at me as he tried to get free.  “Shut up, you whore!  If you had just drank it, this wouldn’t have happened!” he cried.

The bouncer didn’t need anything more, and I watched as he hauled Cain off to the back room of the bar.  I didn’t know what was going to happen to him, and I frankly didn’t care.  I grabbed my jacket and headed out of the bar to catch a ride home.

It wasn’t until I was in the back of the taxi that I looked down at my watch.  It had stopped buzzing and was once again only displaying the time.  “You knew, somehow,” I said out loud, knowing the words were true.  “You knew that I was in danger, and you warned me!”

The watch did nothing, of course, but I felt a sudden surge of connection towards it.  Maybe Alex had finally managed to pick out a suitable present after all.

As I unwrapped the present that my friend Alex had picked out for me, I tried to muster up the expression of delight that I knew I would need.  I knew that his intentions were good, but Alex always managed to find the oddest and most useless gifts.  One year, I had received a small robot that was supposed to wander around my apartment and clean my floor, but instead ended up mostly just sulking in one corner near its charger.  Another time he gave me a disturbingly large golden spider, all metal and springs, that would scurry about horribly with a few twists of a wind-up key.  He meant well, but he could never quite understand that I wasn’t as thrilled with his geeky pursuits.

The wrappings fell away to reveal a small box with a picture of a watch on the front.  A large blurb at the bottom proclaimed the “improved rumble feature” in capital letters.  Surprised, I didn’t have to work quite as hard to seem delighted.  I had been meaning to pick up a watch in any case, and this would save me a few dollars, even if it wasn’t quite my usual style of accessory.

“Oh Alex, I love it!” I exclaimed.  “I’ve been needing a watch!  It’s perfect!”

Across the couch, Alex beamed back at me, and I felt a slight twinge of shame.  I had known for months that he had a crush on me, but I just never felt quite the same way towards him.  Pulling my eyes away, I pulled the watch out of the box, slipping it onto my wrist.  It was a little larger and bulkier than I would have preferred, but the rubber strap fit snugly and the weight wasn’t unreasonable.

I looked back inside the box for the instruction manual, but the box was empty aside from some crumpled wrapping paper.  Glancing down at my wrist, I saw that the watch was already displaying the correct time on its black face.  Oh well, no need then.

The rest of the party flashed by, and I was saying goodbye to my guests at the door.  Alex came up towards the end, and I held out my arms for a hug.

“It’s actually a really cool watch,” he said, as we stepped back away from each other.  “It has this rumble feature, which is supposed to alert you to danger somehow.”

I glanced down at my wrist.  “Danger?” I asked.  “Like if I’m going to be late for an appointment or something?”

“Something like that,” Alex said.  “I don’t really know how it works.  I was hoping you could tell me how it goes.”

I narrowed my eyes at him.  “Oh, I see.  I’m your guinea pig, is that it?  Your test subject for this thing?”

Laughing, Alex threw up his hands in mock surrender.  “Sue, you’re too smart for me!  You’ve seen through my nefarious plans!  I am foiled!”  As he called me Sue, smiling, I felt another twinge inside.  Alex was the only one who shortened Susan down to Sue.  He really was a great guy, and I knew that he would be a wonderful and caring boyfriend.  But I’d just never had that spark, and I couldn’t pursue a relationship when I didn’t have love as a driving force.

After he had left, I went up to bed, placing the watch on my bedside table.  It had a couple buttons, one of which activated a small backlight and one of which seemed to start and stop the second hand, a bit like a stopwatch.  The third button didn’t appear to do anything, however, and I guessed that it perhaps related to the “rumble” feature, whatever that was.  The watch certainly hadn’t rumbled tonight.  I shrugged and closed my eyes, letting sleep come.

Link to Part II

“Okay, fruits this time!  One for every letter of the alphabet.”

“Apples!”

“Bananas.”

“Clementines.”

“Durian.”

“Eww, the stinky fruit?  Etrog.”

“Etrog?  What’s that?”

“It’s from Judaism.  Figs.”

“Grapes.”

“Honeydew.”

“Indian figs?”

“Sure.  Jackfruit.”

“Kumquats.”

“Ooh, it works this time!  Lemons.”

“Melon.”

“Nectarines.”

“Oranges.”

“Pears.”

“And we’re back to Q.  Any ideas?”

“Quince?”

“I thought that was a veggie.”

“Look, let’s just move on.  Raspberries.”

“Strawberries.”

“Tangelos.”

“Ugli fruit!”

“Gross.  Vanilla.”

“Watermelon.”

“No clue on X.”

“Yellow plums, though!”

“And finally, Z.  Um.  I’m stumped.”

“Hey, we got the majority of them!”

“So, can you come up with a vegetable for each letter of the alphabet?”

“What do you mean?”

“Like, can you name a vegetable that starts with each letter?”

“Um, maybe?”

“Try!”

“Avocado.”

“Bok choy.”

“Carrots.”

“Dandelions?  Do those count as vegetables?”

“Sure, why not.  Eggplant.”

“Fennel.”

“That’s not an herb?”

“Herbs aren’t vegetables?”

“Point taken.  Garlic.”

“Habanero peppers!”

“Nice one!  Iceberg lettuce.”

“Jicama.”

“Kumquat.”

“That’s a fruit.”

“Oh, damn.  Kale.”

“Lettuce.”

“Mushrooms.”

“Napa cabbage.”

“Onions.”

“Peppers.”

“Q?  Does any vegetable start with Q?”

“Quince!”

“Well done.  Radish.”

“Sweet peas.”

“Turnips.”

“U?  I’ve got nothing.”

“Me neither.  SKIP!”

“Vidalia onions.”

“Watercress.”

“X?  Again, the toughest thing in the world.”

“I don’t think there is one.  Yams, though!”

“And finally, Zucchini!”

“We did it!”

The man stared down at us from the podium, his eyes glittering as he gazed out at the sea of upturned faces.  “Motivation,” he thundered.  “Motivation is the guiding force, the one driving energy that I hope you all have.”

His voice was resounding, drowning out the rustle of four hundred graduates in ill-fitting plastic robes.  I could hear someone talking behind me, holding a whispered conversation with their neighbor.  I tried to block out the noise, focusing on our speaker.

“Motivation,” the man repeated.  “Sadly, I can tell you right now, from right here, that most of you will fail this simple test.

“All it takes in life to survive is motivation.  And I say that, so simply, it sounds so easy!  All you need to do is know what you want, work for it, and all your dreams will come true.  It sounds like the kind of advice we tell to naive young kids, the kind of sugary crap that is bottled up and sold by every half-hour animated kids show on television.  ‘Work for what you want, and you will succeed!’  And we all know, inside of us, that it will never be that easy.  We have all learned to see the more cynical side.

“And yet, there’s a reason why we continue to bottle up and sell this garbage.  At its heart, when you dig past the layers of bullshit and overly sweet goo, there is truth there.  Motivation, hard work, really is the key to success.  The problem is that nobody truly understands just what hard work truly is.”

Around me, I could hear more fidgeting.  People were getting antsy.  We had been cooped up in this hot auditorium for hours, waiting in a gigantic, single-file line to receive our high school diplomas.  Now, people wanted to leave, to head off to the parties, the celebrations, the drunken bonfires and pointless cheering that would mark our leaving of this level of education.

“See, here’s the issue,” the speaker in front of us continued.  “When we hear of hard work, we think of a long day’s effort.  We think of hard work as the dedication to show up at a job every day, for eight hours each day, five days a week, for forty years.  We imagine doing that, and we think to ourselves, ‘that is hard work.  That is the motivation that will get me to where I want to be in life.’

“And when we imagine that, we’re wrong.

“The problem is that working eight hours a day, forty hours a week, two thousand hours a year, is not the maximum.  That’s the minimum.

“Working a job, putting in the hours, merely establishes a baseline.  It’s not just holding a job, because everyone does that!  No, for true motivation, you must rise, head and shoulders, above the rest of the world.  If you’re at the top of your class, you need to find a smarter class.  And if you’re not at the top of your class, you had better fight to get to the top of it.

“To succeed, you need to take on all the work you can handle, to set your sights on the highest peak and never waver in your constant fight to get there.  And yes,” he continued, pounding on the podium, “it will be a fight.  It will be a fight that will take years, a fight that will be fought in a thousand battles every day.  You will question the path many times, be constantly tempted to abandon your course.  And most of you, at some point, will give in to temptation.”

By now, whispered conversations had sprung up all around me.  The man was gazing out into the crowd; he had to have noticed.  But I almost felt as though his eyes were resting directly on me.

“Motivation,” he said firmly.  “Motivation is key.  Do you have it?”

I stared at the pile of mementos sitting before me.  How untidily they were piled there, in that heap.

At the bottom, pulled down by its weight, I could see the medallion.  I had barely managed to graduate with honors.  When I had been presented with that medallion, it had validated all of my hopes.  For a moment, I had known that I could overcome challenge, and I had naively marched forward, certain that, bearing this talisman, all problems would fall before me.

The thick stack of papers, there, those were my stories written for a critical writing class.  The professor had praised both their composition and execution, telling me how I was a “natural born storyteller.”  I had returned home that day after class with a beaming smile that just wouldn’t seem to vanish.  Of course, then I had filed the stories all away without making any attempt to publish them, but that warm glow stayed with me for weeks.

Two small matchbox cars.  Those had been given to me by the kids I babysat one summer, small tokens that represented so much more.  Every day, I had been forced to pry them away from me to leave, as they hugged me, telling me how much they loved me and wanted me to stay.  They had picked out these cars, their favorites, to bestow upon me.

The bookmark, sitting near the top of the pile, had come from my girlfriend at the time.  We had dated for years, and she knew that I was constantly losing bookmarks.  It had been a great present, and I had made sure that, of all the bookmarks, this was one that I never lost, never misplaced.

So many more items, each a memento of my past.  The blurry pictures from my Bar Mitzvah.  My first paper that had received an A in college.  A copy of the school paper with my article on the third page, my name in ink for all to see.  Bottle caps from the first drinks I had ever consumed.  A roster from my fraternity.  So many belongings, tiny treasures that represented an integral part of my past.

I struck the match.

At first, the flame didn’t want to take, and it flickered on the edge of life.  After a moment, however, it recovered against the soft breeze and flared up, leaping into angry red life.  I held out my hand, the match suspended above the pile.

For a moment I was paralyzed.  I took a deep breath, willing my trembling hand to still.  Then, with a sigh, I released the match.

I had soaked the pile in plenty of lighter fluid to ensure that it would all go up evenly.  The match ignited the fumes, and the fire roared into life.  I watched my things burn, so many remembrances that were gone in a matter of seconds.

As the flames died down, I turned and walked away.  The sun was shining down, and the soft breeze ruffled my hair.  The world stretched out before me, filled with promise.