This Might Hurt
Stephanie Wrobel
For my sisters,
Jackie and Vicki
Look down at me and you see a fool.
Look up at me and you see a god.
Look straight at me and you see yourself.
—Charles Manson
Split
THE GALLERY IS the size of a high school gym. Vaulted ceiling, white walls, movie screens on two of them. A dozen visitors line the perimeter of the dim room. Shoulder blades tap the walls. A low buzz fills the space while the spectators wait.
In the middle of the room is a chair and table. On the table is a medical tray: gloves, gauze, gardening shears. A spotlight illuminates the empty chair.
Waiting with a briefcase-sized camcorder on his shoulder is a crooked-nosed cameraman.
A door opens. When the artist enters, a hush falls. She glides to the center of the room. The cameraman focuses his lens on her. The movie screens fill with her image: thick lashes, long neck, steely gaze. This is not her first stunt, will be far from her last.
She puts on the gloves and stares straight into the camera. “Fear is not real,” she says, “unless we make it so.”
She sits down.
Picks up the shears.
Extends her tongue.
Cuts.
Gasps but does not cry.
The camera catches it all. On the screens the audience watches a tongue split in half. Someone faints. Others wail. Not the artist. She remains steady.
Blood pours from her mouth.
I
I want to live a life in which I am free.
THE WORLD’S GONE mad. People always say that.
On the contrary, we’re much too sane. We’re going to die someday, every single one of us. Never again the touch of a soft breeze. Never again the pinks of a setting sun. Yet we still rake the leaves come fall. We mow the grass and plow the snow. We spend all our time on all the wrong things. We act like we’ll live forever.
Then again, what should a time bomb do? It has only two options.
Tick or explode.
1
Natalie
JANUARY 6, 2020
I STAND AT the head of the conference table. The chairs around me are filled with men: short, tall, fat, bald, polite, skeptical. I direct the close of my pitch to the CEO, who has spent fifty minutes of my sixty-minute presentation playing with his phone and the other ten frowning at me. He is past his prime, trying to disguise the fact with hair plugs and a bottled tan.
“Using this new strategy,” I say, “we’re confident we will make your brand the number one beer with men twenty-one to thirty-four years old.”
The CEO leans forward, mouth slightly ajar as if a cigar is usually perched there. He oversees a household-name beer that’s been losing market share to craft breweries for years. As sales have slipped, my new agency has found itself on thinner and thinner ice with this client.
He looks me up and down, sneers a little. “With all due respect, what makes you think you”—he spits the word like it’s a shit sandwich—“can get inside the mind of our man?”
I glance out the conference room window, squint at the Charles River in the distance, and count to three. My team warned me about this guy, a dinosaur of corporate America who still believes business belongs on the golf course.
What I want to say: Yes, however will I peel back the layers of such complicated minds? Can a simpleton ever truly understand the genius of the noble frat star? For now they crush empties against their foreheads, but someday they will command boardrooms. Someday they will be you and insist they got to where they are through nothing but sheer hard work. By then they’ll have traded the watery swill you call beer for three-hundred-dollar bottles of pinot noir. They’ll still spend their weekends falling down and throwing up, only now they’ll do it in hotel rooms with their best friends’ wives. When Monday rolls around, they’ll slump at this table and wonder why I don’t smile more often. They will root for me to break the glass ceiling as long as none of the shards nick them. They will lament the fact they can no longer say these things aloud, except on golf courses.
What I actually say: “To get up to speed on your business, I’ve spent the past two months conducting focus groups with six hundred men who fit your target demo.” I scroll to the appendix of my PowerPoint deck, containing forty slides of detailed tables and graphs. “I’ve spent my weeknights collating the data and my weekends analyzing what all of it means. I know these men’s occupations and income. I know their levels of education, their religion, their race. I know where your guys live, their lifestyles and personal values, their attitudes toward your brand as well as toward all of your competitors’ brands. I know their usage frequency, their buyer readiness, and the occasions when they buy your beer. I know their degree of loyalty to you. When I get on the train to go to work or am lying in bed at night, I relisten to my interviews, searching for any insight I might’ve missed. I can say with confidence, I know your guy as well as I know my own father.” I wince involuntarily. “Which means I know him as well as you do. I don’t think I can get inside the mind of your customer. I know I can. Because I already have. With all due respect.” I grin so the jab sounds playful instead of aggressive.
Everyone else in the room appears impressed. My assistant, Tyler, forgets himself and claps. I shift my eyes in his direction, and that’s enough to make him stop, but by then the others have joined in, both the clients and my account team. The CEO watches me, amused but undecided. It was a risk, publicly challenging him in order to galvanize the rest, but I’ll rarely interact with him; I’m told he shows up to advertising meetings only when he has no one else to antagonize. The marketing team members are the ones I need on my side. The CEO sits back and lets his underlings finish the session. He leaves halfway through the Q&A.
Five minutes later the clients have signed off on our strategy brief for the year. Handshakes and back pats are exchanged. Invitations to lunch are extended for the first time in months. The account team stays with the clients but I bow out. My lunch hour is for catching up on e-mail. If my inbox is empty, I spend the hour at the gym.