'Consultancy_6' / Liam Diviney
“I am Daniel *Consultant* - I do everything you can imagine and some things you cannot.”
This draft starts between January heat waves when Sydney becomes a warm tin of Coke. Daniel is walking along a fenced off park. He has finished work and is making his way to a friend, who is celebrating their birthday at a bar seven-hundred and twenty-seven words away. When the people at the party ask what Daniel does, he will answer “retail”. Daniel will wince at his response because he knows that these strangers will apply the factor of “retail” to the sum of “Daniel”. This employment is something of myself I’ve shared with Daniel, but what is next is his own creation. If only a few people at the bar recognise him, Daniel will tell these strangers that he is a “consultant”. Lying awake at night, beyond the borders of these one-thousand, four-hundred and twelve words, the strangers will be confounded by the boundless concept of a “consultant”. Consultant Daniel will yes yes assertions that everyone must be fulfilled and challenged and simultaneously inspired by their high paying job and this fiction will make Daniel feel impressive. Retail Daniel is already in love with Consultant Daniel by this point. I couldn’t hate him more this time around.
The original draft of Consultancy starts this way and moves towards three vignettes held together loosely by Daniel walking through them. Many of those moments have been replaced with excel spreadsheets, black sharpies, and other lies. I am afraid these absent moments will worm their way into the corners of this story. Floating dandelion clocks and cannibal roommates have nothing to do with the one thousand, four hundred, and nine words here that make up Daniel’s life. They were here when I started working on Daniel three years ago in 1EXPERIMENTING WITH TREES DRAFT.doxc. I liked Daniel’s history with synthetic grass, the way he can say a little with too many words, and his ending. There is a lot more to like about Daniel here in 5.2FINALFINALConsultancy.docx. I’ve kept that ending I liked so much in the first draft when someone is “hearing none of it over the crawl of the music”.
Social hypotheticals and anxiously imagined futures roll over Daniel’s mind and onto the pavement when he takes his phone out from his pocket. While I measure my mental state by the mass of mid 2000’s pop-punk in my Spotify history, Daniel walks. Daniel walks when I confine him to a single small bedroom and even marches in place when I hold him still. He measures his mind in the steps that his smart phone records when he moves with your eyes through these sentences hoping to reach another side. Daniel hopes for another side with a cushy bureaucratic position and an indifferent partner to boost his Instagram influence. Draft 2.3DONEDONEDONEconsultancy.doxc. was the only draft to end this way for Daniel. It received harsh criticism upon submission.
There are four-hundred and forty words left until Daniel reaches the bar and his attention has been grabbed by the tufts of grass escaping the park walls. I like to think I am smarter than Daniel, but he is much prettier than me and is far more sexually experienced as all protagonists of male writers ought to be. What we share is mostly the bad parts of ourselves. But I gave him this memory, which is mine, because I think it is the kind of wholesome thing an idiot would think. The last thing Daniel remembers about his primary school was the replacement of non-synthetic grass in the playgrounds and oval with synthetic grass. We don’t know why. We guess it was more affordable or efficient or safe. We wonder if there was a word for the feeling when your primary school replaces all its non-synthetic grass with synthetic grass. Feelings P.S.N.G.S.G. or like PSRATNGWSG or how you get all PS2NG2. Maybe there doesn’t need to be a word and Daniel could approach any stranger and ask how they were and the stranger would reply that they are fine and ask the same of Daniel at which point he’d answer that he’s feeling like his primary school has replaced all his non-synthetic grass with synthetic grass and the stranger would know exactly how Daniel felt.
Daniel approaches the bar now. He has skirted the perimeter of a fenced off park and dodged a paragraph where his cannibal roommate confronted him about being a bad friend and a worse gardener. Daniel finds a way to drown or desiccate even the hardiest plastic fern. Daniel adds the number of steps recorded on his phone to an excel spreadsheet before entering the bar. That spreadsheet automatically generates a graph of Daniel’s steps that allows him to visualise his ups and downs. The stable lulls that dawdle in place until the ground gives way to gutters that double the Y axis. The graph is primarily job experience for Daniel’s bureaucratic consultant future, but it also helps give him some perspective. He finds it easy to become lost on the perimeter of a rundown park on our way to becoming a consultant. Daniel hopes to see himself falling, catch himself, and pull himself up by his own shoelaces. I once coloured my calendar every day according to how I felt. This kind of objectivity terrifies Daniel. The best weeks rolled into rainbows across the page, he said, but what do you do after months of black sharpie?
I removed the cannibal roommate for Daniel’s sake but I need him for a simile I like in four-hundred and seventy-five words. For one-thousand, four-hundred, and fifty words Daniel is thinking about how his cannibal roommate is correct even if he does derive sustenance from the flesh of other humans. I wonder if characters in stories get sad after you stop reading them or writing them. I hope so.
The bar is overflowing with meat pies and tolerably priced cans of beer. The music is slow enough it allows Daniel to approach something that can be described as dancing. He makes the rounds - I am Daniel *Consultant* - I do everything you can imagine and some things you cannot – and participate as best he could in this linguistic furniture that serves to facilitate a meeting between him and someone whose time I thought he would enjoy. That someone is currently pursuing a lucrative career. The career will allow them to, against the advice of their parents, support a dependent like Daniel when he follows his bureaucratic dream by issuing paperwork to use the fridge and managing their performance in bed with several regular interviews and listening sessions.
If Daniel asked them what their happiest memory is, they would recall relief on the first weekend after moving out of home in their final teenage year. The fear that their cramped room in an out-of-the-way share house would be dark and clandestine was thwarted by a small window that reached every corner of the room with earnest sunlight. Time was spent lazy and lovely in that light, alternating between trash TV and their lover. They have censored this memory and stymied it with affordable red wine. Redacting the fullness of self-consciousness, fear, and impending anxiety with the flavours and sounds of wines and bodies until it held the unreal perfection of a water-colour painting. Something foreign, European, and romantic, that was produced by a painter who mostly sold paintings of flowers on postcards in museum gift shops. This fullness is forgotten for their own sake. A fullness of something I can’t give them. Instead I give them a memory of its absence and the accompanying distaste for postcards and paintings of flowers that they picked up when their rainbow days sprawled out into black sharpie months.
Daniel knows nothing of the small window and their accompanying distaste for paintings of postcards because to open by asking someone what their happiest memories are is an odd and vaguely threatening thing to do. They were shedding the mannerisms and idiosyncrasies left over by a lover from a small window when they staggered into another like a missed counselling appointment. Now here is Daniel, a third, thinking about gardening as he stumbles from side to side vaguely in tune with music. They dance poorly together for some time, holding each other awkwardly like two unfamiliar bodies trying to kiss. Daniel leaned in and softly said that, I feel like my primary school has replaced all my non-synthetic grass with synthetic grass. They smiled at Daniel, hearing none of it over the crawl of the music.
Image: "Nightclub?" by V31S70 is licensed under CC BY 2.0
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