Chapter 6: Corporate Disco

Year: 1972

“What's wrong with growth? It's the natural position of reality, isn't it?” As the plume of cigarette smoke wafted upward, his sincere brow seemed to tremble. The surrounding Earth tones made his already light skin appear pallid.

The boss's secretary scrambled in, rotary phone in hand. “It's Rodgers, he lost the numbers.” The boss stared for a moment at the ornate detailing in the dark walnut table. He stood slowly, clumsily knocking over the cheap modular seating.

“He sounds panicked!” she said, as he quickened his pace to the credenza. Kneeling and rifling through some papers, he said, “I'll take it in my office. Thanks, Sandy.” Without breaking his unsteady gait, he glanced toward the table. “I'm sorry, Corban. I just can't. You're a good kid, but that's not what I built this for, Mr. Jefferies.”

Barely noticing the faint clacking of keys or the newly hyped-up but now turned-down soft rock dressed as Library music, Corban sat in familiar solitude. He knew his boss was a lone thread in an unraveling cord—a cord he intended to galvanize. With each puff, he tried to accept more fully that such innovation required demiurgic aspiration. Ray Elmond’s voice echoed in his mind: “New ideas take boldness.”

Corban's inner voice was free of any deleterious intentions. Yet the spaced pendant lighting cast a hard-edged shadow over his eyes, telling a different story as he thought to himself, “We need to create purpose. We need to create meaning.” A Golden Age director would have fired any cinematographer for achieving anything less than such a prescient lighting effect.