The Everyday Peace of One Who Serves Two Masters

Six-thirty. The office window is still blue. Steam from the coffee drifts over a single detail aid I did not sign yesterday — the sheet for the antihypertensive, the one carrying eighteen hundred million a quarter. Ten years serving two masters. I no longer wait for the morning when choosing one of them will make things easy. The stairs I go down are still, as always, two flights.

The President's Office at Six-Thirty

Coming in early has become a habit. I walk the empty corridor and warm the cup myself. Years ago, when I was a reviewer, two hundred pieces of material stacked on my desk each month, and I marked each one in red. Now a single stamp moves four hundred field reps. My hand grew lighter, and the paper grew heavier.

At the center of the desk sits that one sheet. The way its axis is drawn makes the effect look larger than it is. Those who notice, notice; those who do not, do not. Yesterday I left it face down. Leaving it face down was, you could say, a decision of its own kind.

I take a sip. It is hot. I no longer ask whether this was right. Asking would freeze the whole day. I set the cup down, pull my jacket back on, and head two floors down.

Descending Two Floors

The office of material review and governance is two floors below mine. M is there — my successor, two removed. He sits in the seat I once sat in. The door was half open; he had already arrived. Under the white of the fluorescent light, he had the same antihypertensive proof spread out before him.

"We should stop it," he said, without looking up. "But if we stop it, next term's numbers won't hold."

I said nothing and rested half my weight on the corner of his desk. Twelve years ago I had spoken the same words before the president of that time. I still remember the dryness in my throat once I had finished. That dryness was in his voice. I did not hand him an answer. Not because I had none to give, but because handing it over would erase his reason to think in that seat. I only said, "Have the axis redrawn. Let the numbers stand on the redrawn axis." A small detour. But a detour that lets a sheet among two hundred stay one of two hundred.

Outside the Window, One Sheet on the Desk

Outside the window, people are beginning to fill the street. Some of the four hundred reps are already on their trains. Inside their bags, this sheet waits. The figure of eighteen hundred million has, up here, no thickness of paper, no smell of sweat. But on his desk downstairs it becomes one proof, one axis to be redrawn. This is not a matter of building a bridge between the books and the norms. There is no bridge. There is only the two flights of stairs I go down each morning, and the time it takes one cup of coffee to cool.

The being-torn does not go away. There was a time I thought it would — that one of the two masters would, someday, win. But the contest never settles, and I learned only to keep standing while torn. It is not pain. It is a posture. Close to the quiet tension of holding oneself upright, spine straight, for a long while.

The Peace One Keeps

Every day a fine day. Not that a good day arrives; rather, the day that arrives is lived as a good one. Today too, one sheet among two hundred goes out into the world with its axis redrawn. The eighteen hundred million stands, the four hundred walk, and he, two floors down, turns to the next sheet. Nothing is solved. And to the exact degree that I no longer expect solving, the morning coffee tastes good.

I climb back up. The office window is no longer blue. The sheet on the desk I will not leave face down. I take the stamp, check the axis he redrew, and press it. To serve two masters was never to satisfy both. It was to keep my hand on today's one sheet without forgetting either of their faces. I have done it ten years, and it is still going. That it is still going is, perhaps, my peace.

The final episode holds no answer. No morning came that cut away one master, nor any that reconciled the two. What came was an ordinary day: going down two flights in the time it takes coffee to cool, leaving my successor a question rather than an answer, having one axis redrawn, and pressing the stamp. The being-torn became a posture, the posture a habit, and on the habit a quietness settled. Every day a fine day is not a phrase for awaiting good days. It is the warmth of the hand that keeps resting on the day that has come.