Learning How to Live - 5. Fog

Roan took a swig from his water bottle and grabbed his towel as he climbed down from the stair-climber. He stretched his back and hamstrings while he waited for his heart rate to come back down from his cardio. He liked spending his lunch break at the gym across the street from his office; he found the exercise made the afternoon of stakeholder meetings and paperwork bearable.

He threw his towel over the side of the dip stand and hopped up to balance his weight over his shoulders before dropping down into a slow, deep dip; he put all of his focus on the feeling of his chest and biceps to keep the motion steady and controlled. Working out was meditation; it quieted his mind and gave him a place to be where he didn’t have to think about anything outside of the present, the feeling of his body as he moved through the exercises.

A lot of the people at work and the gym considered him to be a gym rat or would be bodybuilder but the truth is that he just liked the feeling of calm and the sense of accomplishment that came with a good workout. It was true that he’d been a little pudgy in a grade school and had always felt a little less athletic than other guys as a kid; however, he had no specific size or fitness goal beyond the push to workout at his limit.

Even after doing this routine nearly every day since he’d started this job about a year ago, he wasn’t going to win any awards for world's biggest bicep or thickest chest or whatever else people chose to compete over; he was just happy to feel alive going into the part of his day that usually made him feel dead...or like killing people. He could get in twenty minutes of intense cardio, twenty of weights and machines, take a shower, and be back at his desk with a boxed sandwich and a shake within the hour - not that he had to punch a clock anyway but there was something in the principle of the thing.

He smiled when he moved over to start doing bench presses and the trainer, Liz, met him at the bench. “Hey, thanks Liz. How’s your day going? Say…two 45s and a 35.” He tossed his towel over the bench as he went to collect his half of the plates and she grabbed the others.

“It’s going great. It’s a little quiet around here but it usually is during post lunch.” He tried to take his lunches an hour later than most specifically because the gym was empty and there was no wait for anything.

“Do you prefer it busy or when you have time to talk to people?” He slid the plates onto the bar and smiled as he took the extra 5 from Liz and added it to the bar along with the retaining clamp. He took some water and lay down on the bench.

“It’s not the number of people but which people that makes it better or worse. It’s always better when the place is steadily busy; I’d like to stay employed - College isn’t going to pay for itself.” He nodded and lifted the bar clear of the stand. She stood over him with her hands cradling the bar in the middle; he focused on her knuckles as he smoothly lowered the bar and pushed to make sure they never turned the greenish-blue of when the blood was squeezed out of them. It was silly but he didn’t want her to strain herself because of him not keeping up.

“It’s always nice to see the people who are consistent faces doing their routines without making a fuss; you wouldn’t believe the amount of attention grabbing some of the guys do in here - You’d think this was a celebrity stage or something!”

“Whew... Yeah, I’ve seen a few of them when I tried coming in the evening and in the mornings.” He stretched his shoulders and drank from his water while she slipped off the 5s and swapped on 10s. “I can never figure out how to feel around those guys. I’m not really here for attention and I don’t really like the noisy competition or the subtle judgement of whether I am lifting enough or doing it right or just not good enough to be in their space.” He grimaced as he laid back down on the bench and grabbed the bar. “How are classes coming?”

“It’s a gym; it’s always going to have competitive people in it; however, I keep asking the other trainers for ideas of how we can get people with other motivations to feel welcomed and motivated in the place. It’s hard though since the meatheads are the most consistent gym-goers.” He could only half hear her as he was struggling to keep the steady motion of the bar and hyper focused on her fingers. “We just finished midterms so classes are coming along. I am doing great in all of the physiology work but I’m not so great in the math classes.” He set the bar back down on the stand and flopped his arms out beside him while he tried to catch his breath and wait for the burning in his chest to dissipate.

“What math are you having trouble with?” He sat up and grabbed some more water. “And you can memorize all of the bones and major blood vessels but math is what gets you? How does that work?” He put his face into his towel to slow his breathing and wipe up the sweat.

“Pre-calculus. I dunno, I just get lost in all of the technical terms and symbols; it’s like we have to learn all of these things and graphs but there’s no...purpose; like they never tell you when is this going to be useful or where would this be applicable in day to day life.” He looked up when he heard her sliding another plate onto the bar.

“Are you trying to kill me?” She beamed her smile at him.

“You can do more than this. I’m just trying to keep you honest.” He scowled as he lay back down.

“Listen...I’ve got maybe four reps in me.” She just smiled down at him, upside down.

“I’ll let you know when you can stop.” He grimaced and grabbed the bar; he took a deep breath and pulled himself off of the bench and lowered himself back down focusing on pushing his back into the cushion until the bar lifted up and let it descend to his chest. He grunted and hissed as pressed the bar up and paused at the top panting from his effort. He counted the reps and while she just kept telling him ‘One more.’ until she was satisfied.

“Eight good reps and one crappy one; not bad. Good job!” she said when she finally let him seat the bar again. He sprawled out on the bench with his eyes closed as he let the burning ebb.

“You’re a slave driver.”

“That’s what they tell me but they always come back.” He looked up at her Cheshire smile as she turned and started returning the plates to their respective racks.

“If you want a tutor, I can help you with your math.” He wiped the bench down with his towel as he stood up and collected his things. “I can probably help you with the systems of the body too.” She gave him a contemplative nod.

“I might have to take you up on that. With my work schedule here, I don’t know when I’d be able to meet up to study.”

“Well, my office is across the street and I have a pretty flexible schedule so we could do it on your lunch break or before your shift. After hours would be tougher since the building security is tighter outside of business hours.” He wiped his neck as he helped put the final plates away.

“OK, how much notice do you need to make time for me?” She looked at her watch.

“You could probably call me that morning and I could make time but give me a day in advance to be sure. Earlier is easier since it is all executive and customer meetings in the afternoons for me.” She nodded.

“Alright, I will do that. Your office and cell are on your gym account, right?” He nodded as he headed for the locker room.

“Yep, good luck and let me know if I can help! I’m off to get clean and decent again.” She waved as she walked over to attend another customer at a different station.

Roan dropped his sandwich and smoothie cup onto his desk as he stooped to tuck his gym bag under his desk before heading back out to the break room to fill up his water bottle again. He liked most of his routine; he could break his day into two parts with a totally different experience sandwiched in between to make the day seem to go faster, he worked with a couple of teams programmers that he liked and that worked pretty well together, and he got to help the programmers and customers work together. The only parts he didn’t like were the stuffy business formal requirements for his level of position, the executive meetings, and the fact that he could sweat endlessly after a workout so he was damp half of the day.

He blotted at his face and neck with some paper towels while held the stupid button on the water dispenser. Why couldn’t they make a dispenser that let you set the amount you wanted so you could have your hands back?? #FirstWorldProblems. He smiled to himself.

“There you are! Roan, the head of sales was looking for you; he said it was important.” The area administrator for his department was a hyper-social Chinese woman; she was maybe five feet and an inch or two but she liked to wear sensible heels so he wasn’t sure how tall she really was. He looked at her formal white blouse, gray pleated skirt, and black leather shoes - She looked entirely like a high school student at a private school. Added to the fact that she looked fifteen years younger than she was and most people actually assumed she was a high school student; it was a source of amusement for all of the people she befriended in the office.

“He couldn’t have just left a note on my board; you know, the one by my office specifically for people to get my attention?” He collected his water bottle and walked over to the door where she was standing. She smiled and rolled her eyes.

“You know that the only people you manage to get to use that thing are the programmers. He’s too important to write a note...” He followed her down the hallway as she walked toward his office. “So he found me instead.”

“Xie, you don’t have to reward him. You could have just sent me an email and I’d have gotten to him in the morning.” He quipped. Her name was pronounced, as close as he could manage, like ‘She-eh’ or ‘She-a’; he did his best to copy the sound when she said it but she never corrected him when he asked if he was getting it right. “Did he say what the hell it is about so I could be prepared enough to make the hike to his office worthwhile?” She shook her head and grinned devilishly; she loved it when he griped about the people who annoyed her. “Immediacy over productivity...got it.” He sighed as he grabbed his notepad from his desk and headed back to follow the woman to her desk at the front of their part of the building.

“Don’t forget you have an executive planning meeting at 3:30. And could you take these to Rita for me?” She handed him a stack of manila envelopes which he added to his notebook as he headed for the door.

“Hi Rita, Matt asked for me to stop by?” He set the stack of interoffice envelopes on the counter in front of the marketing departments’ admin. “And Xie, sends her regards.” The woman glanced up and grimaced at the pile of new work for her to sort.

“Have a seat, I’ll get him for you.” She waved him off to the colorful but hardly comfortable lounge chairs of the waiting area. He opened his notebook as he sat and tried to jot down notes for all of the projects that the sales executive might have some reason to talk to him about. It wasn’t a particularly long list; the company had three large accounts with software projects underway at the moment, two were well underway and one had only begun in the last couple of months, not even long enough for the architects and system administrators to stop arguing about what and how to start on it.

As a director of project management over the software development side of the firm, he was tasked with keeping tabs of the requirements, resources, progress, and budget of everything produced by or consumed by the handful of development teams under his department. He’d started out as a programmer and, largely, still preferred to program when he could but quickly recognized that his most rewarded trait was being able to keep up with the big picture of what the company, customers, and, ultimately, users wanted from the development efforts of the programmers. Apparently, as far as he could tell, there was an ever persistent shortage of approachable, semi-social, competent technical people so he was paid well to babysit executive projects and guide them through the mill of development and to report or escalate on changes in progress so that the other departments felt like they had some control over them. He flipped through the pages of the little book to review the project summaries and resource allocations of his department and wondered what the news of this meeting would do to anything in there. “Roan, good to see you; please come in.” He followed the broad back of the taller man at a distance.

In his mid-fifties, the man was handsome, remarkably tall standing a head above nearly everyone else in the company, broad shouldered, athletic, always dressed to a T; the secretary mill even rumored that he’d posed for a few magazines over the years. For most of the people in his company, men and women alike, Matt was a singularly intimidating and compelling persona, one who rarely was told no to anything - To Roan, he was a personable enough executive he tried to get along with...but he always asked for more than the people around him could give. “Can I get you something to drink?” He asked as they passed Rita’s desk; the woman’s head dutifully lifted to watch for his response as they crossed the small gate into the office area.

He looked at Rita as they continued down the hall. “No, thank you. I’m fine.” He saw her turn back to her work dismissively as he lost sight of her. They passed through the door of the spacious corner office and Matt ushered him in and closed the door behind them.

The room was decorated to be tasteful and impressive; it could have been called comfortable but the amount of conscious thought that went into every detail from the grain of the teak desk matching the arms of the chairs to the way that the picture frames reflected skyline of the modest downtown to the sight-line of every seat in the room - it gave Roan the impression of sitting in the palm of some invisible hand. “What can I help you with Matt?”

Matt rounded his desk and sat, pulling himself forward at his desk until he could tower above the surface of the glass and gold planner; his face appeared in double from where Roan was sitting. He placed his forearms on the surface and clasped his hands before himself and chuckled lightly. “Always to the point isn’t the only way to success.”

“Noted. I find the sweet spot for my position is being ever respectful of other people’s time - Call it a professional courtesy in our modern times.” Roan gave a small crooked smile to the man’s chest before leaning back in his chair to a position more comfortable to meet the man’s gaze. “Besides you have no shortage of cordial meetings of every sort during the day; I get to stand out by being the one with the lowest overhead.”

Matthew laughed and leaned back in his chair, matching Roan’s posture. “Truth enough. I have a new client that I’ve been speaking with about some problems they are having with customer engagement.” Roan raised his eyebrows and opened his notebook to a new page without breaking eye contact with the executive. “They want a branded app for mobile phones to sell their products and build consumer engagement with their company; it’s all home improvement products and building fixtures.”

“What devices do they want to reach? When do they want it by? How many products are they talking about? And how many stakeholders are involved?” Roan sketched boxes onto the page to capture the start of what he’d need to create a charter document for the new project.

“All of them; tablets, Apple, Android, and desktops. A few thousand. They have four lines of business and each has a handful of departments.” Matt steepled his fingers in his lap. Roan made a sour expression and looked at the man evenly, waiting. “They want to be testing it with customers by summer.”

“This coming summer? Seven months from now?” Roan pressed the end of his pen to his forehead and frowned. “You’re consistent; I have to give you that. How are we supposed to meet this timeline? With that many stakeholders, we’ll be lucky to have a scope and definition for the project by the time they want to have the product in the hands of customers.” Matt just smiled.

“They are offering very generous compensation for accommodating their needs.”

“I don’t care if they are offering sex, drugs, and military armaments - All the hope in the world isn’t going to make that timeline happen, period; and that is before you consider that our development teams are already booked on other projects.” He kept his voice even and didn’t let himself get upset; this was how the dance with marketing always went - they’d ask for the stars in a teacup by supper and settle for a nice plate of cookies by lunch the next day. “Seriously, what do we have to give them to get us there?”

Matt’s smile slipped a bit and he rolled his eyes to the ceiling for a moment. “You tell me what we can give them and give me a compelling story to sell them on and we’ll get this thing started.”

“When?”

“End of the week.”

“Matt, it’s Wednesday.”

“End of the week.” The man said flatly and with finality.

Roan grimaced, sighed, and stood. “This will impact the other work we are doing. Where does this sit in our priorities?”
He walked to the door to see himself out but didn’t turn the handle until Matt finished.

“We need this account. Make it happen.”

“I have a cross calibration meeting with the other executive teams later today. I have your permission to bring this up?” And lead the tar, feathers, and pitchforks to his office instead of Roan’s. Matt waved a hand dismissively.

“All I ask for is success; do what you have to.”

Roan laughed. “Another man once said similar words to get people to do the unthinkable.”

“Call it professional courtesy.” Roan turned the handle and walked out of the office. Monsters in suit jackets are monsters just the same.

---
Roan stood in his office and paced the long back wall. The room was roughly rectangular with a wall of dry erase boards and a wall of half-windows into the hallway that opposed them; his desk and computer were located on one of the shorter walls before a bank of filing cabinets and a table with an overhead lamp, the opposite corner was angled such that there was an outside window where the dry erase boards stopped it until reached the other short wall. There was a large monitor mounted to that far wall with a plant on the floor by the window and the center of the room was occupied by an oblong table with chairs set about it. The light in the room was provided by warm floor lamps as he couldn’t stand the color of the standard overhead lighting in the building.

He had half of the ample wall filled with projections of the teams and their members over the next year along with a few stats about the skill set of each member. The rest of the boards were covered in diagrams of his best guesses as to what the architects would say the project Matt wanted to require to roll out. He pinched the bridge of his nose careful not to mark himself with the open dry erase marker in the same hand. No matter what they did, Matt’s project would take double the team they had at least a year to deliver and that assumed that everything else was stopped essentially tomorrow. He looked back at his computer screen to see the budget projections for the current work on one screen while the proposed budget was on one of the two other monitors.

He’d spent the last several hours after close of business pulling quotes from firms that could offer to help with some of the work this project would entail and looking at the company’s older projects, before his time, to see how they handled such abrupt asks for resources previously. He thumped his head against the board nearest his desk and capped the marker he was holding.

The number of markers he went through in a week was just insane; the indispensable and yet totally disposable nature of the tools created its own kind of environmental crisis but guilt could only stop so much. He needed to visualize all the ways the company, the team, and, essentially, the current state of technology could accomplish the work being done and the work being asked for then do all of it over again with all the angles where something didn’t get done; worse, then he had to somehow provide what amounted to proof to back up his assessment. The normal work of a project manager or program director was not really this level of ask but his company had found a way to make him and his position responsible for the success of the projects the company committed to, even when he had no say in the resources available nor the projects accepted.

It was nearly midnight when Roan finally pushed open the door from his garage into his home. He carried a messenger bag filled with folders and printouts of the materials he’d collected through the evening but he’d been displaced from his office by the security guard doing his late night rounds of the offices so he’d decided that a meal and a relocation were in order. He snorted; given the time, what he was going to get was a sweet potato, some chicken and a couple of slices of bread more than anything he’d put his name behind as a meal.

He crossed his kitchen and set his laptop on the bar surface of the peninsula to face into the kitchen and let the text-to-speech program read his notes while he collected the ingredients he needed from the fridge and pantry. It’s not much of a life, he thought, but it’s a living. He chuckled to himself as he got down to business cleaning the sweet potato, wrapping it in a kitchen cloth and soaking it before putting it in the microwave; he turned his attention to the chicken breast and tossed it into a waiting hot skillet with olive oil and salt and covered the pan while he tossed some pine nuts into another dry, smaller pan to let them toast over low heat as he made a vinaigrette from pomegranate juice and some white wine mustard.

He moved his plated food to the stool side of the bar and turned the laptop around to drag it into his lap. By far, this scene was unexceptional in his life since moving here but...that didn’t make it good. He shrugged; it didn’t make it the end of the world either he thought as he took bites of his food and began typing out the outlines for his projection reports. With any luck, getting them done and into Matt’s hands before Friday would give a better chance of having a favorable impact on whatever the final approach the company would take. He grimaced thinking about how it would play out if he had brought the reports in on Friday. The worst moments were always when some crappy project was pushed through because there wasn’t enough time or an alternative or enough rational people within a fifty mile radius or ...just cause.

It was around two in the morning when he threw himself into bed without so much as a glance at the wall before he was out cold.

---
“Oh come on! There’s no way we can deliver on anything when they keep pulling the rug out from under us.” Roan stared into his mug and sighed; the process of change was the stuff of textbooks and seminars yet, every damned time it looked exactly the same. Kevin, the development team lead, sat to his left in the large room and his role in the melodrama that was unfolding was to convince the room to reject the work - as if in some socialist revolt, to overthrow the business stakeholder oppressors and cast off the yoke of injustice and unpleasant work stress. Roan shook his head at the reflection of his nose in his chai as the man rolled on with his diatribe.

“That’s not our place to decide what the work is; to tell them what we can get done is our responsibility. We need to figure out what, of this, we can do in the time given, only.” Pratik, another lead, was across from Kevin to his right. It was like the movements of a play or some stringed quartet music where each instrument alternated taking the fore to quiet the others; he smirked to himself, pleased with the image.

They sat in the War Room, a conference room that Roan had renovated for these meetings as part of his taking the job. The room was a large, nearly square, room with a ring of narrow tables inscribing a kind of cup a few feet in from the walls; there were chairs around the wall side of the tables but the middle of the room was empty but for some electrical outlets inset on the floor and ceiling. The walls were coated in a matte surface that could be used with dry-erase writing tools but were also suitable for use with projectors when they had guests who needed to make large display presentations. Hanging from a track in the ceiling were eight panels or double-sided erase boards, each mounted on swivels; these boards were filled up throughout the week with the musings or diagrams of developers or managers as they applied themselves to work or hosted mini-meetings.

The concept was to give a sort of semi-permanent library of things of interest, challenge, or crisis about the work of anyone in the department throughout the week. He’d had the room built because his last two positions had insisted on using the entirely digital systems for such things; the amount of lost information, rework, frustration, and just plain missed opportunities for improvements he had witnessed was deeply disturbing to him. People were, as far as he could tell, inherently lazy; you could fight it or channel it but you couldn’t beat it.

For the developers, engineers, and technical types that made up much of his work, the laziness didn’t mean avoiding work - they’d all throw their lives away if given half the chance and a bottomless well of coffee and candy; it was avoiding investment into the working well-being of others: they would spend entire weekends hardly leaving their desks to work out some senselessly technical puzzle that they were interested in but they wouldn’t spend ten minutes writing anything to explain the solution or the technical puzzle to anyone else. This amounted to a constant churn of people writing code and noodling on problems that had to be tackled for whatever project a person was working on yet, they were finding solutions to the same problems that other people had been doing an egregiously short time before them. He couldn’t take watching it or arguing with the developers to document, update, and report on their work so he offered them this room. Now they just came in here as a quiet work lounge when it wasn’t being used for meetings and they put their ideas onto a board and took pictures with their phones that got logged and sent to him. He’d discovered that once they understood he was happier with them writing things on a board than them sending him email or trying to catch him in the hallway to give him some random update the developers were almost enthusiastic to write their stuff on the boards.

“Look, I’ve got work to do. We’re wasting time on this and we all know that marketing is going to push forward with it anyway. Can we just give them a stupid estimate, check the boxes, and get on with it??” Josh, the voice of disgruntled resignation and logic for the group, chimed in. Roan sipped from his mug and let them continue on with their debates. When he reached the bottom of the mug he would force the conversation to the details he actually needed them to vet but, until then, it was just easier and, probably, more productive to let them feel like they’d had their say. He’d stopped wearing a watch specifically to avoid staring at it during meetings like these and the others he hated; the rate at which he could down the hot liquid from his comically large mug was pretty consistent so he just used that - People seemed to feel less rushed or patronized when he did it this way.

He watched the play go on. Ultimately, they would understand what his report was to marketing, they would tell him what they needed revised, and, finally, he would tell them to forget the whole thing and leave it to him. After that, he’d have to go back to his office, make the changes, then generate the charts, calendars, and diagrams the executives would actually read - It turned out words are too much for such folk so...pictures it is. He’d have to send all of the materials to Xie for editing and printing; afterwards, she and Rita would handle the scheduling of the meeting, hopefully while he was at the gym detoxing from the whole ordeal.

Roan started and looked over at a sharp thump against one of the tables. “No! We’re not going to do this; we aren’t going to keep rewarding their bad behavior - It’s ridiculous!” Kevin stood, leaning over the table on his hands as he stared down at Josh. The other two men grimaced; Roan rolled his eyes.

---
“I can’t believe this. How are we supposed to be a solutions company and all we can offer a client of this caliber is six months over budget, totally incomplete, and will cost a fortune?” Matt didn’t raise voice but his inflection and posture said it all.

“I get that you are disappointed-”

“Disappointed? I don’t know what the hell your department does all day that we can’t deliver more than this in a year.” Matt ran one hand through his hair as the other held the stack of projections that Roan had created for the meeting; his face was a shifting tapestry of stress and indignation. He was probably trying to convince himself that the projections were a lie or some sort of trick to give the development teams lush jobs filled with carefree leisure and lavish vacations. Roan was standing and looked out the window behind Matt impassively.

“Yes, well, that is its own special problem.” Matt scowled at him; his gaze threatening. Roan smirked. “Back to this though, there are four project plans there; you can pick the one that you can best sell. At the bottom of each I left a list of comparable former projects that followed the respective plan in the past so you can offer them relevant testimonials to the quality of our work.” Roan met Matt’s gaze.

Matt frowned. “I didn’t expect you to rush through my request haphazardly putting together some crap that would just get the work off of your desk. Did you think that getting it done in a day would stop me from questioning your work? I expected better from you.” His frown slipped into a blend of reproach and a sort of predatory leer. Roan kept his face a mask of respectful acceptance but he could feel his face tighten as his ears moved under the grim resolve he felt at knowing his opponent so well.

“The last packet is a list of projects run by your two former project management directors; it details how those failed under your demands. I included summaries of those project plans and their objections as well.” Matt’s glower deepened as he bristled. Roan let a little of the heat he felt dealing with the man reach his eyes. “We both know that I will be the one hung when this project tanks but I wanted to go on record as having said I told you so.” Matt set the papers down, pushed back from the desk, and eyed him carefully. Roan simply waited.

“I can assume you’ve included projections for us hiring or outsourcing for additional resources?”

“Of course, along with the possible sources we could use for each and cost estimates.”

“Thanks. We are done here. I’ll let you know what happens.” Roan smirked as he was waved to the door; he turned sharply and departed without additional response. He found a sort of satisfaction in this part of his job too; there was a kind of art to delivering the truth the audience didn’t want to accept in ways that made it, if not impossible, dangerous to ignore. He smiled into Rita’s questioning expression as he passed through the gate beside her desk.

---
Roan grunted as he hit the mat and rolled to his left to deflect the momentum of the woman’s arm as she landed against him; she grabbed for the collar of his gi with her free hand and he looped his left leg around her right calf as her weight settled onto the arm on the mat. He smirked as she raised up and tried to grab his collar with her other hand; it was an easy way to get enough leverage to choke him but.. He kicked her left leg out from under her center of gravity and set his heel into the mat; he pressed and rolled on top of her and he now had his forearm pressed against her upper chest; he smiled pleased with himself. The woman raised an eyebrow and used her fists on his collar to shove his body up and away from her as she used her now free right leg to press her knee purposefully against the inside of his upper thigh. “If you want to keep it; don’t get cocky.” He laughed and shifted himself to a kneeling position off of her and offered his hand to help her up as he stood.

“I wasn’t being cocky; I was just having fun. I will remember the warning though.” He lifted her clear off of her feet as she braced herself against his arm and forced him to pick her up before jumping down onto her feet.

“We’re supposed to be sparring, not having fun.” She smirked as she admonished him and dropped down into a crouch.

“Does it have to be one or the other?” He bounced on his toes to loosen up and stepped his left foot just past her left leg in a lunge when she waved for him to attack. He grabbed her by the shoulder of her gi and pulled her against his shoulder as he stepped up from the lunge and thrust his hip against hers, pulling her over his knee through the hip check. He released the jacket of her uniform and let her fall to the mat unceremoniously as he stepped back out of her reach. She flashed a smile that was all teeth and threat at him as she jumped up to her feet in an impressive display of her athleticism. Linda was not an opponent he should be goading and he knew it; she was several years more advanced than he was and she could be particularly shrewd at winning.

He wiped the sweat from his face as he set his feet apart and lowered himself into a crouch; he gestured for her to start. The woman rushed him and he tensed, raising his arms to block her from hitting him; instead she grabbed between his elbows and locked her fingers on the edges of his uniform jacket just below his rib cage. She tucked herself into a ball that swung just between his legs and kicked out her legs, using her weight and momentum to pull him forward off balance. He toppled to the floor, slamming his face into the mat as she slid clear behind him.

“When your opponent can win, yes. And only a dead opponent can’t win.” He grimaced, winded, and rolled onto his back. He lay flat and tried to press his shoulders into the mat to ease the pain between them or crack his back one. That fall had hurt and his neck was ringing from taking the brunt of the fall through his face.

“Resultados arriscados, mas bon.” Lagarto, the dojo leader, half praised and half reprimanded Linda as he came over to where Roan was laying and felt his neck before forcing his head to the side. He blinked and winced at the sharp pain and the accompanying loud pop that came from his tortured neck. “Descanso.” He pointed to the cushions at the edge of the sparring mats. Roan rolled onto his stomach and crawled to the cushion to rest as he was told.

He’d been attending the dojo ever since he’d found it when he’d moved to town but he was early enough in learning Portuguese to still be disconcerted by how easily he could follow remarks without exactly knowing what they meant all the time. Commands like ‘descanso’, ‘proximo’, and ‘pare’: ‘rest’, ‘next’, and ‘stop’, respectively, were easy enough to pickup, even when you considered that there was usually no translator and Lagarto was harder to follow in English than he was in his native tongue; however, how he knew the gist of the exchange with Linda was a little mystifying.

Brazilian jujitsu was certainly a violent sport but, as far as Roan was concerned, it was a lot of fun and a good way to drop a ton of stress in the short hour long sessions this place offered. If the gym was his meditation then this was his play. It was hard work, make no mistake; however, his body and mind really liked the intensity and dynamics of it all. The Tuesday/Thursday sessions that he attended were held in the evenings and the dojo was only a mile and change from his office building so he’d usually change in the office bathroom, walk/jog down here, and then jog back to the parking garage. He only carried a small sack with him for his gi and his water bottle.

He stood to retrieve his bottle and Lagarto waved a finger at him in admonishment; he sat back down and sighed. The sessions were a little over half warm-up exercises designed to harden the newcomers and to wear out the more experienced participants so that the sparring portions would involve less intense displays of strength or athleticism - It was hard to showboat when you knew you were going to have to fight every person in the place for three minutes until the time ran out on the session. It suited Roan just fine since it meant the general atmosphere was never particularly combative or even that competitive to him. It was just a bunch of people sweating and learning together; though, he had to admit, many of the older members seemed to take things a lot more seriously than he did but, he suspected, that probably had to do with how they were actually competition level practitioners.

He was happy to join when he found that he was not required to compete outside of the dojo; the ethic of this place was one of almost egalitarian communal-ism: Everyone followed the usual belt ratings to establish proven expertise but the way the sparring was done he’d spar with competitive champions and housewives alike, every session. Members moved up in belts by a combination of internal testing of skills and competitive fights against three other opponents a couple of times a year for placement qualifiers. If you wanted to go the competition route, you could, you just had to also then attend the regional competition qualifiers. He wasn’t even a little interested in being ranked beyond getting to learn more skills.

He stood and bowed when the current round of sparring was almost up and waited until he was signaled to return to the mat. He was paired against a lanky guy with a mop of black hair hanging over his face; it got old to even think about people’s height when you were only just at the national average of height like Roan was so, unsurprisingly, Nathaniel, or Nathan, was a good deal taller than him at nearly six four or five. He was older than Roan at thirty-five and, even though he was probably two hundred and seventy-five pounds, he looked significantly thinner than Roan since he carried so much of it as bone. Roan leered aggressively and crouched low as he met the man’s stunningly dark blue eyes. “Comecar!”

Roan dropped to his knees and grabbed the leg of Nathan’s pants at the knee to his chest before he kicked out to sweep the man’s other foot; he kept tension on the man’s thigh to make his fall a bit more gentle before stepping over the man’s hip, pinning his knee under his shoulder.

“Bao verredura! O que agora?!” Roan grimaced, the instructor was right; now that he had pinned the man, he had to figure out a way to end the fight. The rules of the game were that the fight wasn’t over until your opponent submitted, lost consciousness, or was otherwise rendered incapable of fighting; the idea being that a bar brawl wouldn’t just stop because you scored a technical hit or move on your opponent.

He grimaced and took a deep breath before tucking his left leg under Nathan’s thigh and rolling onto his back, dragging Nathan’s leg with him. He tucked his foot under Nathan’s butt as he wedged the man’s foot under his arm and threw his other foot over Nathan’s hip as Nathan turned to bring his other foot into play. Roan pushed Nathan’s free foot over the leg he had trapped and rolled his leg atop Nathan’s.

Roan watched Nathan’s face as he slowly leaned back into a knee bar, putting pressure on the man’s kneecap. Nathan’s face immediately went to a look of scared surprise and tried to struggle; Lagarto stepped into Roan’s vision behind Nathan and held up his hand for Roan to stop. One of the assistant instructors came over to translate.

“Nate, stop moving.” Nathan relaxed his back onto the mat and looked down his nose at Roan. “If you struggle or he leans back, he will break your knee.” The rapid fire strings of the Portuguese were almost comical against the English words. “This is a position you should submit any time you have that option. It is possible to escape if he makes a mistake or you can find a weapon but not without serious risk of injury to your leg.” Nathan tapped his shin twice and Roan released him.

His instructor put his hand on his shoulder as Roan regained his feet. He met his gaze attentively. “Boa jogada. ...Inicio desleixado.” Roan nodded and the assistant raised his eyebrows at him in askance.

“Good play, horrible start?” Both men smiled and nodded at him as Lagarto clapped him on the back good-naturedly.

“Sloppy start but well done!” the assistant called as they walked away, “Keep going.”

It felt like a couple of hours passed in the remaining seven minutes of sparring as he headed off of the mat to find his water bottle; he was dripping with sweat, totally winded, and had the glow of tired satisfaction that he came here for. He closed his eyes and rested his head against the mat covered wall by the back of the dojo as he caught his breath and let his heart rate become something other than a snare drum roll.

“Hey, good match, man!” He felt a hand on his back just below his shoulder.

Roan chuckled. “You’re just happy they saved your knee,” he answered in good humor. He felt the thud against the mat as Nathan turned and leaned against the wall beside him.

“That too. How’d you know to do that?”

“I didn’t. I just...I dunno, I tried to think of a way to use the fact that I already had your leg where you couldn’t use it and that was the first thing I could picture that would seriously hurt.” He chuckled to himself.

“So, what, this is like chess?” Nathan nudged his shoulder with an elbow. Roan glanced and smiled at him without lifting his head.

“It is totally like chess. It’s like butcher’s chess. How to break a man joint by joint.” He grinned evilly at the wall as Nathan put on a shocked expression.

“Gruesome!” Roan stood and stretched as far as his body would extend backwards. When he came back up Nathan was watching him thoughtfully.

Roan raised an eyebrow. “What?”

“I don’t know how you do that.”

“Practice.”

“Fine, I don’t know why you do that.”

“It feels good...and I think I wanted to be a monkey in a former life.” He laughed.

“Voce esta no lugar certo para aprender!” They both turned at the sound of their instructor’s baritone.

“He said you’re in the right place to learn - to be a monkey that is!” the voice from the other side of the room explained. Roan smiled at his instructor and nodded at the other man’s translation.

“I’ve had about all the gobbledy-gook I can take for a night.” Nathan laughed under his breath. Roan frowned at Nathan and shrugged.

“It’s just a language like any other.” Nathan regarded him and nodded.

“Hey, are you busy this weekend?” Roan deepened his frown at the thought of the weekend and shook his head.

“Nope, no plans for the weekend.”

“Want to go for a hike with me on Saturday?” Nathan’s brow furrowed and he licked his lips as he rubbed his hands together. ”I figure since it’s still warmer than normal, I should get in as much nature as I can - I figured you might enjoy it too.” He smiled at him hopefully; Roan laughed and nodded.

“Sure, I can do that.” The man’s smile deepened as his face lit up; he punched Roan in the arm lightly.

“Awesome, I’ll send you directions tomorrow.”

---
“Alright everyone, thank you for another great week! I have passed out the binders with client responses to this week’s progress; as always each of your team leaders will review those that are specific to your team for root cause and assignment in next week’s work load.” Roan cracked his knuckles as he looked at the ring of faces before him again.

The walls of the war room were cleared off as the week closed out so the room looked sparse and ready for new ideas to him. This wasn’t really his favorite part of his job but it was the only time when there was no adversity or outside interference into his work; the only point of today was team building and process improvement through organic exercises aimed at keeping each member of the team engaged as well as to confer a sense of value to the work each of them did.

“We’ve got recognition and grievances, puzzles, and internal requests, after that, it’s Friday and the floor is open. Who wants to start?” Kishore raised his hand from the corner of the room and began reading from the list of filed praise and complaints on the table before him when Roan nodded in his direction.

“I lost an hour of productivity this morning when I updated to the latest code and found that the system wouldn’t start when I tried to run it. It looks like someone made a change to how the configuration is read but didn’t test it against a clean environment.” Roan nodded and held up his hands.

“OK, what makes this one stand out for you? How do you think this one happened and how can we improve it?” The entire exercise was like this; throughout the week he had to track all of the complaints and praise to keep an eye on morale and items impacting the progress of the teams; as payback...or reward depending on who you asked, they each got to read the ‘anonymous’ list of them and speak to whatever items they wanted. The room would hear why it was important and vote to keep it or dismiss it; kept work would become a group exercise to design a solution or way to encourage it if the item was praise, dismissed items were simply voiced so people could air their frustrations and let it go without attacking others.

He, honestly, would never have imagined in a million years that group training would ever be in his future but here he was. These sorts of exercises weren’t for everyone but he and the department leadership kept a focus on personalities that could work in this sort of environment to maintain the flow of work and the department cohesion. He took notes both on his notebook and on the dry-erase surface behind him as the man finished his appeal to the group for why this mattered and how it could be different.

“And the vote?” He counted the hands in favor and the opposing hands wishing to dismiss it. “Sustained. We’ll come back to this one later. Next? Yeah, Joy, go for it.”

The meeting was winding down when Xie knocked on the door to the room. He looked over his notes and bracketed the amount of work he’d have to put in to get ready for the following week. He’d have to take all of the counts and notes and log them into the project log then create tickets for the team leads to hot-potato between each other on Monday to figure out who would handle what. It was definitely enough to fill the rest of his afternoon.

“Thank you again everyone. Before we close out our social director has something to say.” He opened the door for the woman. “Come on in, we’re all done.” He gestured her to the center of the room for her announcements.

It was typical for some of the department to get together for an afterwork social on Friday’s; this week wasn’t any different from the rest. The group decided that they were going to a gameroom, arcade, and bar combination called ‘The Ball Room’. He rarely attended the things figuring nearly any happening was bound to be more trouble than it was worth. It wasn’t that he didn’t like the company of the people but, rather, that they were work people - It was hard to be himself with co-workers since it never took long before the oddness of being him became a sticking point for other people. He sighed and collected his things to head back to his office when Xie cut him off by the door.

“Hey, uh, can I convince you to join us tonight?” She folded her arms behind herself and leaned forward as she looked up at him; she was the picture of a five year old asking for candy. He laughed.

“What and ruin my reputation as the unsociable guy?” He cocked his head to the side. “What’s going on tonight?”

She looked off at the floor in the corner somewhere. “Well, I have a friend who is joining us and-”

“No.” He gave her his most exasperated look.

“Oh come on! It’s just a couple of drinks with the group.” She moved her hands to her hips and set her shoulders.

He squeezed his face in his hand. “Xie, what have you done?”

“Nothing! Seriously, it’s just a friend stopping by and I’d like you two to meet.” He sighed; this was the mess he was trying to avoid by not going to these stupid after hours events - And she knew it. “Come on, beyond light conversation and a little food; it won’t even be a big deal.”

He let his head roll back on his shoulders. “Xie,” he started warningly.

“I promise. No pressure, just come out with us.” He sighed.

“Fine. Don’t do this again; it’s not fair.” She scowled.

“What?! I didn’t do anything. You’re such a baby; you talk and hang out all day at work. What’s a couple of totally more pleasurable hours after going to hurt?” He grimaced and stepped past her.

“I’ll see you after work.” He headed back to his office to get the rest of his work done before they headed out.

“Grumpy ass.”