35. Politics Itself

“In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics’. All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia.” —George Orwell

Like the gaping insides of a gigantic pink sea clam, the parking garage of the Snail Plant loomed through the windshield of Master Park’s car.

“I’ve never seen this side,” said Jen, as they pulled into a parking space marked “compact.” It was an appropriate designation for Master Park’s aging sedan, but less so for the bloated SUV and truck in the two adjacent spaces.

She remembered Rob telling her about the mysterious employee entrance, but she had only ever seen the front side of the plant, like a sprawling fortress dominating a good seven or eight blocks of Main Street. She remembered the little gate to the courtyard where she had first met Master Park and spied on his taekwondo class; it seemed like a whole other life. Master Park had snuck out the gate after his class; but there was a real entrance, one too fussy to be bothered with.

Master Park seemed to recognize her meaning.

“We’re official today,” he said, opening his door carefully to avoid hitting the vehicle next to him. Jen turned sideways to slip out of the cracked passenger-side door and through the gap between Master Park’s car and the silver truck next to it.

They entered the building through a door that led directly from the basement of the parking lot to a large security desk. The guard seemed to know Master Park already, but he asked to see Jen’s ID.

As she rummaged through her purse looking for her California driver’s license, men of all ages passed the desk, flashed identification cards at the guard, and hurried down the hallway and around the corner. Finally, she handed him her license. He squinted at it and then up at her face several times, and she thought she saw him raise his eyebrows a few millimeters, but he handed it back to her without further comment.

“Here,” he said, handing Master Park two yellow bib-smocks. Master Park pulled his swiftly over his head, revealing the word “VISITOR” stenciled in square black letters across the chest. She was a little clumsier putting hers on, unable at first to sort out all the various straps and arm-holes. Once it was in place, it hung down to her knees and made her feel like an elementary school crossing guard.

“Ridiculous,” said Master Park, as walked down the hall, his words seemingly directed more at himself than Jen. “Nicolai Snail is out of his mind.” She looked from side to side, wondering if any of the Snail employees walking alongside them had heard Master Park’s comment, but no one seemed concerned.

As Jen, Master Park, and the Snail employees rounded the corner, everyone but Jen and Master Park veered abruptly into a large doorway on the left. Jen slowed her pace, unsure whether she was supposed to follow them.

Master Park tapped her arm, so lightly she could barely feel it, but the motion steered her straight ahead.

“Men’s dressing room,” said Master Park.

Before Jen could ask why they needed a dressing room, they passed a second door, which must have been the room’s exit. Men in sunny yellow jumpsuits poured out of the door, their color matching Jen’s borrowed vest, the same yellow jumpsuits that the men had worn to do taekwondo in the courtyard, though Jen hadn’t remembered them until just now.

“Where’s the women’s dressing room?” Jen asked.

“Hmm,” said Mater Park, sounding puzzled by the question. “I’m not sure. I think there might be one down at the entrance by the other end of the parking garage.” But his dubious tone suggested that he could not remember seeing a female employee at the Snail Plant, much less a room for her to change in.

They followed the horde of yellow men through a maze of passages so convoluted that after five minutes, Jen had no idea whether she was heading away from the entrance or back towards it.

“How’s Olivia?” Master Park asked. His directness surprised her. She felt awkward about the whole thing: having her own student when she herself was little more than a novice, the fact that, until a week ago, this student had been her nemesis, their inauspicious first day of instruction. Jen had waited two days to formally accept Olivia’s request, but she had known that she would do so from the moment Olivia left the juice bar. She felt like a sucker for being charmed by Olivia’s story; still, she couldn’t help but respond to its overriding themes of discipline and renunciation that were so common to her own life.

She had been teaching Olivia every night for the last two weeks, working it in around her own training schedule, just as Shane had once done for her. Whenever she felt strange about it, she comforted herself by thinking about a passage she had read in the New Aggressive Male book that Master Park had given her to read:

“There is no point to having enemies. When you perceive somebody to be your enemy, you give him instant power over you. He raises your blood pressure and distracts your focus. In the eyes of a smart man, there are three types of people: those he trusts, those he does not trust, and those whom he perceives wish to hurt him. The first, he keeps close; the second, he keeps at a distance; the third, he keeps closest of all.”

Jen was unsure whether Olivia was “someone she didn’t trust” or “someone whom she perceived wished to hurt her.” At the moment, her intuition pointed more towards the former, but her actions seemed to point towards the latter; she was spending more time with Olivia than anyone else.

It’s okay, Jen told herself. She really is someone who tried to hurt me. So it is only fair for me to keep her closest of all.

There was another passage in the book that was helping Jen feel all right about her relationship with Olivia. It was in a chapter called,” Dominating the Conversation.” The section that stuck in Jen’s mind discussed how to deal with conversational conflict.

“Don’t defer. Don’t be rude, nor polite; be unconcerned. Practice this with people in your everyday life who you usually avoid conflict with: your boss or an annoying coworker, your mother-in-law, even your girlfriend or wife. Rather than appeasing, arguing, or avoiding, try stating the truth calmly and factually. This will be highly disconcerting to your opponent.”

This tactic had largely shaped Jen’s interactions with Olivia.

“How does that look?” Olivia would ask, throwing a sidekick that was uncannily precise for someone who had only learned it a week ago.

“It looks good,” Jen would say, unsmiling, showing no sign of approval other than the word itself. “Snap it back faster.” She focused on giving instruction without conveying pleasure or disdain for Olivia’s accomplishments and shortcomings. Hearing her own dispassionate voice, Jen thought to herself, I sound like a martial arts teacher. Perhaps that why Olivia never seemed disconcerted, as the book had predicted she would; perhaps she had expected it.

“Here,” said Master Park, as they finally emerged from one of a series of dark hallways into a large open vestibule lined with elevators. Jen slowed her pace, but Master Park walked past them, to a plain wooden door, painted the same color as the drab walls, almost invisible except for the lighted green exit sign above it.

He opened the door and led Jen up flight after flight of stairs. Four, five, six, she counted, as they turned the corner onto each successive, poorly-swept landing.

At the seventh floor, she knew they would have to exit, because the stairway beyond it was blocked with a bolted screen gate; “Roof Access—Authorized Personnel Only,” it read. For a moment, she felt worried that Master Park was going to make her sneak past somehow, just as he had done with the gate to the courtyard. But he opened the door to the seventh floor and walked through without holding it for her.

They emerged to a hallway so beautiful that Jen couldn’t help but cry out in amazement. The wall across from the stairway and the elevators was all glass, tinted a pale turquoise color that caught the sunlight and projected dancing diamonds all across the walls and floor.

“Look!” she said, walking to the window and looking down. They were several floors up now, not six—they must have been more than one story underground when they entered the stairway—but perhaps three or four. Still, from this height, she could recognize the courtyard below, the first place that she had met Master Park and watched the yellow-suited students doing their taekwondo exercises.

“Ah yes,” said Master Park, standing next to her to look. “I’m here too much. I forget to appreciate it sometimes.”

Jen suddenly remembered that she had been expecting to play chess in that courtyard. “Didn’t you say we were going to play down there?” she asked.

“Too cold,” said Master Park. “We only actually play there in summer. The rest of the time I suppose we are just overlooking the courtyard.”

Of course, Jen thought, wondering why she hadn’t questioned his statement before. She had been envisioning a bunch of old men with funny haircuts sitting at tables in the courtyard, just as they did year-round in the park in Santa Monica. It had been getting warmer in Michigan, perhaps even warm enough for courtyard taekwondo, but certainly still far too cold for something as sedentary as courtyard chess.

Master Park began to walk again, down the hall to the right, and Jen followed him, wondering where they would be playing. This building seemed awfully fancy for the workers to be playing games in; she didn’t get the sense that they were headed towards a break or recreation room. She remembered Rob saying that this building was the one the Snail Corporation always took guests to, because it was so fancy. Perhaps the players weren’t Snail employees, but some kind of guests? Jen hadn’t even thought to ask Master Park who the other players would be.

They followed the hallway, circling the courtyard, without passing a single Snail employee. Finally, Master Park stopped at a large, heavy-looking door. He pressed a button at the side of the door, and a voice projected from speaker: “Who is it?”

“Park,” he said, letting out an angry, vocal sigh.

Something clicked electronically inside the door. Jen wondered what all this security was about; why were they playing chess in a locked room with an intercom?

After a few more seconds, the door swung open. A tall, slender man wearing khaki slacks and an expensive-looking black sweater greeted them. His hair was tied back into a ponytail that reached close to his waist.

“Come in, come in,” he said, hastily, ushering them into the room as the heavy door swung shut behind them with a loud clicking noise.

They walked into a luxurious board room that was even more beautiful than the hallway. The far wall was all glass, in the same shade of turquoise as the windows in the hall. But unlike those windows, it was also adorned with delicate vines creeping downwards from the top of the window, already dotted with tiny purple flower buds.

The inside of the room was filled with plush, velvety armchairs, positioned around a conference table that seemed to have been fashioned from the highly polished cross-section of a giant, gnarled tree.

On the table, there were two stately-looking chess sets. One was set up for a new game; the other had its pieces distributed around the board. The only other person in the room was sitting behind this second set, a small, wiry-looking man whose face looked about sixty, though he was dressed like a teenager in a torn-up t-shirt and dirty jeans. He sat with one sneakered foot up on the seat of his fancy chair, hugging his arms around his knee and scowling down at the board.

The tall, pony-tailed man lowered himself into the other seat nearest this chessboard without even saying hello to Jen or Master Park, although he did flash Jen a quick smile of recognition that seemed to suggest that they were old friends.

Master Park pulled out a chair for her and then sat down himself to watch the game in progress. The chair was as comfortable as it had looked, but Jen felt distinctly ill at ease. She had expected a bunch of Snail workers, the same sort of friendly, tough-looking guys that she had seen in the taekwondo class. She had not prepared herself for this fancy board room or for such a small, intense group of players.

Despite her annoyance, she forced herself to turn her attention to the board. Now she understood why the man in the scruffy t-shirt was so surly—judging by the captured pieces on the each side of the board, he was down by two pawns and a bishop.

Looking at the board itself, it took her a moment to turn the pieces into something that made sense. For a moment, they were as opaque as a wall of squiggly shapes; and then, as though a light had turned on, the meaning of the positions became clear as decisively as one of those posters with the hidden images that could only be seen if you looked at them crossed-eyed.

The bishop that he did have was stuck behind his queen-side pawns, pinned there by the pony-tailed man’s well-positioned knight. Jen watched intently, becoming increasingly stressed on behalf of the white pieces, as the black pieces moved in slowly but decisively for the kill. Jen was reminded of a spider she had seen once on a nature show; it immobilized its prey limb by limb, until it had no choice but to lie still and await its death.

After seven moves, the man in the t-shirt lay his king on its side, rose from his chair, and walked over to the window, were he stood staring out with his arms crossed and his back to everyone in the room.

The man in the nice clothes and the ponytail turned to Jen and Master Park, seemingly unconcerned about his brooding friend.

“Park!” he exclaimed, greeting him as though they had not been sitting in the same room for the last half hour. He opened his arms as though he were about to lean across the giant table and embrace Master Park. Instead, he extended one long arm.

“Nicolai,” said Master Park, leaning forward to reach the taller man’s hand across the table.

Nicolai, Jen thought; where had she heard that name?

As though he had heard her question, Master Park introduced him: “Jen, this is Nicolai Snail.”

Nicolai Snail—the founder and CEO of Snail Construction and Mining Equipment.

Nicolai Snail extended his hand with as much affection as he had shown Master Park. “It is a pleasure to finally meet you,” he said, his voice made somber with a tint of an accent that Jen remembered, from the historical plaques at the Snail visitor’s center, must be Russian. “It feels like I have had to wait forever.”

Chapter 36