Intelligence

The recognition of patterns is the simplest form of intelligence.

    I stare at the paper towel dispenser in the men’s restroom on the sixth floor of 300 North Lake Avenue. It’s not one of those new, automatic ones that dispense a single clean sheet with the wave of your hand. It isn’t even the kind where you pull a lever, which spins a roll inside. It’s the old kind—where you pull out one sheet at a time. The boxes are beautifully polished chrome, so they don’t look trashy at all. They look sophisticated in a 1930s, Art Deco sort of way. The paper towels are folded together in such a manner that pulling one out allows half of the next one to be pulled through the opening. It’s the same idea behind a tissue box. One cannot survive without the other—the folding pattern and box design. When those paper towels are just left sitting on top of the dispenser because some janitor was too lazy to put them in, the folding pattern becomes a burden. You try to grab just two, but either you pull ten more, or the whole stack begins to topple over. The dispenser is, in this case, just a mantle. The janitor on the sixth floor of 300 North Lake Avenue was lazy today.
    I decide that I need to know who came up with the folding pattern. Whoever it is should be rolling. This is what I need.  This kind of idea. I use my thumb to flip through the stack of paper towels, doing what, I’m not sure. Trying to figure out how whoever it was figured this out. There is a pattern here. It’s very easy to see. Over, under. The trick is discovering the pattern in the first place. Once it’s discovered, it seems like the absolute simplest thing in the world. Dalton throws open the door and scares me into knocking the whole stack onto the floor.
    “What the hell are you doing in here, Stephen?” he says, panting. “They’re waiting for us.  In the conference room.” He is sweating. I can see the sweat starting to form at the corners of his pits. It’s soaked all the way through his suit jacket. “And they have a very nice cheese platter.”
    “With Rye Crisps?” I say, perking up.
    “Uh—No. I don’t think so. But there are some very nice stoned wheat crackers—Gah! Look—Get your a*s in there. Now. We gotta sell this thing. I’m tired of pitching. We need to make a sale.”
    “Pitch is the name of the game, Dalt,” I say, straightening my tie in the mirror.
    “That doesn’t mean anything, Stephen. I’ll be in the conference room. Eating a stoned wheat cracker with spreadable Brie.”
    “Not too many, buddy. Tuck your shirt back in; it’s riding up.”
    Dalton looks down at his slightly protruding gut and stuffs his shirt back into his pants, pulling them up higher on his waist.
    “Let’s go,” he commands.
    I give him a salute as he holds the door for me. I walk swiftly down the hall and hang a left past reception. I wave at the board as Dalton and I walk by the glass wall of the conference room.
    “Gentlemen, I apologize for the delay. Are we ready to begin?”
    The thing about selling is there’s a thing. You pretend it is the central part of your existence, and for those fifteen minutes, it is. You have to make others want it to be the central part of their existence too. You do that by telling a story. The pitch is a story in which you are the protagonist, all others are antagonists, and your thing—is the key that will ultimately result in a happy ending. It has to have romance. Action. Deceit—but not too much. Adventure, emotion, humor. Above all, people have to buy it. In order to buy it, they have to believe it. They have to believe in it.
    Dalton and I sit on the curb in front of the bus stop on the corner of Colorado and Lake. The bench is taken up by cleaning ladies on the way to their next job. 
    “What is wrong with us?” Dalton demands, as if of the universe.
    “Nothing’s wrong with us, Dalt,” I reassure, “It may be the product. It may even be our pitch.”
    “Either of those would be a pretty big problem, don’t you think? And didn’t you say that pitch was the name of the game or something like that?”
    “Yes, but they’re not problems that can’t be solved.”
    “Stephen. I’m tired of calling my parents for money. I’m tired of—I’m tired—“
    He doesn’t need to finish. I know what he was trying to say.
    “There is a solution, Dalt. We just have to recognize the pattern of failure. We need to go back over each pitch and figure out the exact point where we lost them.”
    “The pattern?” he laughs, “And what do we discern from this ‘pattern’?”
    “Dalton,” I attest, “Recognition of patterns is the most basic form of intelligence. It is what separates us from animals. Selling requires the basic instincts that animals possess, but if you want to make the sale, it requires intelligence. Now, let’s get something to eat and we’ll reconvene tomorrow at my place. Sound good?”
    “Well, we have plenty of failures to choose from.”
    “That’s the problem with your attitude, Dalt. You’re a pessimist. Failure is not a negative result.”
    “And how do you figure that?” Dalton asks in his most sarcastic voice. “We don’t make any money if we fail.”
    “Come on, Dalt. You’re just hungry.”
    I help him to his feet. We walk down Lake Avenue to Souplantation to eat our fill of salad, chicken noodle soup and blueberry muffins.
    I need to wake up and get it together. I feel like I’m losing my edge, though I never truly had any edge to begin with. Well, that’s not entirely true—I shouldn’t sell myself short. I do have an edge. It’s meta-cognition. Dalton calls it self-analysis. But he doesn’t have it like I do. I have been able to boil our business plan down to the absolute simplest form possible all through meta-cognitive thinking. It’s a pattern. Just like how those towels fold one into the other. It doesn’t matter what the product is. I will hop from one product to the next until I find a winner. This is what separates me from the rest: I’m not a believer in my product. I’m a believer in the process. If I can recognize the pattern, I will win.
    The line at the Souplantation is horrendous. But it’s worth the wait. I make a half plate of salad: just romaine, seasoned croutons, cheddar cheese, crispy noodles, and honey mustard. Dalton gets a little of everything. Even a small spoonful of Joan’s Broccoli Madness, which has bacon bits and mayonnaise. I take my tray and move to the soup. The chicken noodle is my favorite. Next I grab a small plate and take a couple small rectangles of focaccia and cheese pizza and a blueberry muffin. I find a small table in the corner and set my tray down then turn back to the soda fountain to get some iced tea. When Dalton finally joins me, he has two bowls of soup, firehouse chili and New England clam chowder, three plates of pizza, focaccia and muffins and a small dish of penne with tomato sauce.
    “This is the kind of model we need to go on Dalt,” I say with my mouth full of lettuce.
    “A restaurant? Stephen, we don’t work in the restaurant industry. The people we’re pitching to don’t work—“
    “Ah, ah!” I saw, seizing this teachable moment. “But there is a pattern here. Look at how they order the salad bar. Look at the layout of the different buffets. It’s that pattern that brings people back.”
    “Or it’s that they have some amazing blueberry muffins. And I wouldn’t necessarily call that a pattern—it’s more like a system.”
    “No, no, Dalt—It’s definitely a pattern. A system is much more complex. System implies parts working together to form a mechanized whole.”
    “What’s so bad about that?”
    “Nothing. But within every system is a pattern. Look at paper towel dispensers for instance—“
    “Oh God, is that what you—“
    “Just! Listen to me for a sec,” I demand, my breath quickening, “This is the simplest example I can think of. You have the towels and the dispenser. Used together, they form a system, but—it is the pattern that the towels are folded in which makes it possible. Over, under.”
    “Give another example,” Dalton responds instantly.
    I’ve never heard this kind of enthusiasm from him before. It catches me off guard.
    “Okay—Uh—How ‘bout—Like a clock. The gears of a clock. Even more demonstrative than the paper towels. You have them all working together to form a system that makes the clock work. But the gears themselves are designed according to a pattern. They have teeth and spokes and—It is that pattern that allows the system to work.”
    “So—how does this pertain to us then?”
    “Because, Dalton. Folks in the business world are always in search of a system. Most never find it. Few will, at best, stumble over it. If they could only recognize patterns—That’s why it’s so important. That is how we will succeed.”
    “But how do we find it? I’m tired of searching.”
    “All in good time, Dalt. That’s why I’m always looking.” 
    Dalton and I have two meetings set up for the following week. We give a perfect pitch in the first. We spent a lot of time reviewing our process and cutting unnecessary elements.  Part of our pattern of failure has been letting Dalton speak too much. He can be clunky, and he repeats himself. On the other hand, if he doesn’t speak at all, we agreed, then the client might think something is wrong with him. Or that he is my personal bodyguard, which is not the message we’re trying to send.
    I stare at the cheese platter while Dalton and I wait for the board to return with a decision. They have Rye Crisps. They are fanned in a circle around the outer edge of the platter. A line of Triscuts lines the inner edge of the Rye Crisps. Inside those is an array of cracker-cut cheeses: Colby Jack, Mild Cheddar, and Monterey. In the center is a pile of summer sausage slices. The pattern is so simple. Like the gears of a clock. I munch a few Rye Crisps quickly and carefully because I don’t want the board to return while my mouth is full.
    They are only out for five minutes before they come back in. Generally, not a good sign.
    “Gentlemen,” one board member begins, “All though we find your pitch both compelling and interesting, we have decided not to purchase any product at this time. On behalf of the board, I thank you. Good day.”
    I rub my temples in the elevator. I want Dalton to think the rejection hurt me like I know it did him. He is slumped in the corner, his head hanging, limp. It’s not a problem. We still have one more meeting. If that fails as well, then we’ll rethink the strategy again. Eventually, we’ll come to a solution. Edison tested thousands of materials before he came to tungsten. We just hadn’t come across our tungsten yet.
    “We need to clear our heads, Dalt,” I announce as we exit the elevator.
    We take the bus to the northern most stop on Lake Avenue. Then I start walking up to where the street ends.  We turn left and walk down Alta Vista Drive, finally hanging a right onto an unnamed road that winds into the mountains.  By this time, we’ve walked about three miles, mostly uphill.
    “Where are we going?” Dalton wheezes.
    “You’ll see.”
    The mountain road curves for a few miles into the hills of Altadena before coming to a small parking lot. From there the road continues down in to the canyon. But we’re going to the summit.
    “Follow me,” I say.
    Dalton complies. There is an overgrown path that begins a yard from the bend in the road. I push the brush back and struggle past tall grass, gnats and an occasional bee. We are both drenched in sweat. Foxtails stick in my slacks and Dalton’s, jabbing our calves from time to time. Dalton lets out a little gasp every time he’s poked by one. Finally the grass turns to sand and rock and opens into a small clearing. Half of the San Gabriel Valley at sunset is visible below.
    “You used to be able to see the ocean from here,” I tell Dalton, “At least, that’s what my grandfather always told me.”
    Dalton looks at me, but doesn’t say anything.
    “Sometimes I just come up here and do nothing. For hours. Just think. And listen. Try to hear what the world has been trying to tell me, you know?”
    Dalton nods.
    “Breathe it in Dalt. Breathe in that air. We’re above the smog here.”
    I take a deep breath, hold it, and let it go in a slow, steady stream. I smile at Dalton.
    “We’ll make it, buddy. Don’t you worry. We’re so close to narrowing it down. I can feel it. Can’t you?”
    Dalton puts his hands in his pockets and shrugs.
    “We’ve just been circling and circling. Doesn’t it feel like that? Like we’ve just been circling around the answer for so long, coming closer and closer. We’re right there. Like we’ve been talking about it this whole time and not even realized it.”
    I close my eyes.
    Dalton pushes me as hard as he can from behind. He’s much stronger than I ever thought. I tumble forward, down the hill. I don’t get much time to think before I fall off a cliff. It’s not very high, maybe twenty feet. So that doesn’t give me more than a few seconds to think after the initial shock of what has happened passes and my head clears. Somehow those seconds expand into full minutes, maybe even hours. I suppose they could have been days if I wanted. Sunrises and sunsets flying over the valley as if the sun were on some celestial wheel. I never had the chance to come up here during a sunrise. My grandfather told me it was spectacular: the shadow of the mountains shrinking back as the sun grows higher, revealing the valley as it awakens.
    I am able to remember, in those brief seconds, the day I met Dalton. Perhaps I promised too much. Business school can do that to you. I was just as naive as he. Just as hopeful. We are the same. I can almost see the sun sink behind the line of the horizon. Just another second and it would have been gone. I wish I could have seen more sunrises. I wish I could have reached enlightenment. I wish I knew how I never saw this coming.
    I open my eyes and turn toward Dalton. But he is gone. It is dark now and I wonder how long I’ve been standing here. I don’t bother calling his name. The evening breeze makes me shiver. My clothes are still wet. I imagine the celestial wheel again, spinning and spinning. If I could only skip ahead to the day I figure it all out without growing any older. I wish I could just disappear.

Reviews

[Sorry Infamous]

The character development in this story was strong, which is hard to do in a short story even if it is supposed to be character driven. I did find myself feeling sympathetic towards poor pathetic Dalton when I think I should have seen the weakness in Stephen. The ending was smart, typing in something so simple as an ancient napkin dispenser to the meaning of life.

[DevilsNeedLove2]

This is the most entertaining short story I've read in a very long time. Very well-written, too. Thanks for posting it.