The Original Post

When I come into the kitchen, mom is sitting at the table writing her letters to death row inmates. A couple of them have written back before, but what she’s really fishing for is a painting. She says she writes so they know a real human is thinking of them, and she is interested in seeing what kind of visual art that reassurance might motivate a confined and doomed mind to create. She says she has some promising leads.

She has an audiobook playing out of her phone about achieving self-actualization and a state of meditative peace. She takes a long drag of a cigarette over a peaceful sentence about mastering one’s inbreath and outbreath.

“You’ll never guess,” she says. She eyes me. “You will never guess where your father is this time.”

“Door to door,” I say, “selling globes.” She rolls her eyes.

She hands me a Tupperware with her free hand. It’s warm: tofu stroganoff heated up from last night. “Your father,” she says, “has chained himself to that elm tree on the hill in the middle of Twinkle Park.”

“Chained?”

“Take him some dinner.”

So I put it in the passenger’s seat and drive over to the park that has been scheduled for demolition for as long as I can remember. The sun hasn’t set yet; I can see the whole park: stone water fountain about to collapse, baseball field with a dirt outfield and dirt infield. At the park’s center, the hill, on top of which, the elm. Also, my father. The park isn’t closed yet, but it’s almost empty, and no one is close enough to the elm for my father to proselytize to about the pernicious creep of industrial capitalism.

He looks about like what you’d expect for a man chained to a tree in protest: slender, kind eyes, white beard matching a full head of hair.

I hand him the Tupperware and ask where the bulldozers are.

“Tomorrow,” he says. “I spoke to the foreman.”

The chain is around his torso, but his arms are free. He blows on every spoonful. “Do you remember when I would bring you here?” he asks.

I confirm that I do.

“You remember that I told you to cherish it, that this is the kind of place they always come for?”

I look around at the latest casualty of the sprawl: falling apart, overgrown, nearly deserted. “It had a good run,” I say. I should know better. He just wants to be told he’s right.

My father combusts. “The implication,” he screams. “It is the principle, not just the park.” Bits of stroganoff flying off of his beard.

“Okay, okay.”

“You have to stand for something.”

A part of me wishes I could have seen the man in his prime, when he was young and spry, sabotaging construction projects with explosives and stealing indigenous artifacts back out of museums. These days, before this, about the most radical thing I had ever seen him manage was when he bought a thousand dollars’ worth of stuff at the Walmart and carried it directly to returns. To jam the bastards up, he said.

Though I suppose a man loves the eco-terrorism in his youth that he cannot endure in his age.

I hand him a cloth napkin and he wipes stroganoff dribble from his chin. I can see it in his look: I was supposed to bring my own chain.

“I can’t stay too much longer,” I say.

“I’m certain you want to.”

“I just have to go.”

“The chains can barely contain my pride in your commitment to your work.” He takes one last mouthful and refuses the rest of the dinner. He stares off past me in the direction, perhaps, from which a dozer might make a morning advance.

The reason I do have to go is because a TV show with enormous market share is ending its season tonight, and I have to be online for it. I am the brains, heart, and soul of the Fresh Mountain Soap brand’s internet presence. If there’s a conversation happening online, my job is to keep the Fresh Mountain Man in dialogue with as many people as I can. The hours are irregular, but the pay is good.

Mom never says anything, but I can tell she disapproves just as much as he does of me making a living from the capitalist strictures of corporate psycho-marketing.

I applied as a joke, submitting a character profile that was essentially meaningless: The Fresh Mountain Man’s online persona would be gregarious but not overwhelming to introverts, edgy but thoughtful, committed to social justice but not at the expense of what a majority of consumers might define as traditional values. My parents saw the application and affirmed what they saw as incisive commentary. Then I saw the pay scale and commission structure.

I let my parents think, at first, that I would be able to take the brand down from the inside.

I start to say goodbye to my father, but he stops me before I can with one waving hand, like he’s shooing a fly or waving away odor.

From the car, I get a silhouette from him being on this side of the sunset. He’s darkened up on the hill by the light all around him.

 

Once home, I park it in front of the big upstairs TV and check for the email from Chett, my brand supervisor. Today, Chett reminds me that while it would be easy to think that what we are selling is merely soap, what we are actually selling is authenticity. If my job is done well, says Chett, there will be no doubt as to the realness of the Fresh Mountain Man.

The show starts, and I wait for the first moment to spike an appreciable online engagement.

Directly beneath me, my mother has gone into her room to meditate, I suspect as a way of counteracting the negative energy she thinks I am unleashing into the world.

There is a scene tonight in which the Hierophant, a long-standing villainous presence, banishes some young lovers. He almost always generates chatter, so I wade in and hit Publish on the quest for Ultimate Freshness certainly isn’t bringing anyone closer to the Hierophant, and it gets a good response.

Moments later, in an unbelievable stroke of luck, a character — I don’t remember her name — actually uses the word fresh. It’s the kind of synergy you can only dream about. I fire one off quickly — this gal gets it, and follow up with speaking of fresh, a lot of these armpits seem like they would benefit from a little bit of FMS (this being our only brand-approved abbreviation).

Toward the end of the episode, there is a sex scene, and per the Fresh Mountain Brand Guidelines, I must wait a respectable amount of time before engaging again.

While I wait, I notice in my monitors an uptick of engagement with the FMS brand that specifically involves older ladies wanting to have sex with the Fresh Mountain Man, the brand’s handsome lumberjack avatar.

Per guidelines, I bring it immediately to Chett’s attention. In the time it takes him to message me back, the movement has grown until more people are engaging the brand about the Fresh Mountain Man’s sexuality than my show-relevant patter.

Oh, wow, yeah, writes Chett. I see what you’re talking about.

I refresh the feed again and am confronted with descriptions of acts that involve soap in ways that I hadn’t ever considered.

Chett messages again: well, the main thing is you don’t want to alienate them as consumers. We’re all in trouble if you push them to another brand. Almost more than the main thing, though,  is you don’t want to give them the sense that the Fresh Mountain Man reciprocates those feelings.

Then, quickly: not that those feelings are wrong

So I wait, toe the line between brand-relevant content and awareness of the patter outside of the show. I publish a lot of us will need showers after this episode, supplemented by a winking face.

Engagement returns to normal, and the numbers attain a level that will result in me receiving a bonus.

All of a sudden, though, here’s this rube lumbering into the conversation making speculative and inappropriate jokes about the Fresh Mountain Man’s penis being made of soap.

Specifically, he writes, good luck trying to get it on with a hog that’s just going to foam up and dissolve in the moisture down there, in reply to one of the more forward ladies, for the entire world to see.

And though it’s true that the Fresh Mountain Man’s level of attractiveness was honed over many hours of focus group research, no official literature exists regarding the substantive makeup of his genitals.

I flag as inappropriate, but by the time Chett investigates the guy has already cracked off another six posts and my numbers are in a spiral. It should be a moment of triumph for me: the season finale of the show, folks online trying to have a conversation about unexpected deaths or big reveals.

Instead, my world is full of soapy insinuations. I am hearing nothing from Chett, and I am losing people, and in my desperation I make a huge mistake, hitting Publish on the poorly thought out it looks like someone’s mother didn’t wash his mouth out with enough Fresh Mountain as a child. I reply directly to the guy, shattering another brand guideline.

Immediately they let me have it, from everywhere:

Someone invents a soap-penis for you and your first thought is soap in a child’s mouth?

Over here watching the Greatfall season finale and though I wouldn’t have put perverted soap company on my list of distractions, here we are.

let’s see if this bold marketing strategy of advocating child abuse pays off.

And the worst, and most damaging: my family and I have purchased our last bar of Fresh Mountain Soap.

Chett shoots in on a video call the instant credits roll on the episode.

“This is a problem, my man,” he says. Chett is either in his 20s or his 40s. His face is smooth, his sandy hair full and wavy, but he has the weariest eyes I have ever seen. They are gray and sunken in and flanked by the lines of what could be several lifetimes of worry. Maybe Chett is timeless and has always been here, watching, guiding someone.

“I’m sorry,” I say.

“I shouldn’t have to remind you that a pro is expected to be able to handle some brand sexualization. You’re working on the internet, guy. Defuse without ignoring or dignifying. It’s, like, page 2.”

“‘I know,” I say. “I’m sorry.”

“I need to know if you can’t handle the primetime television window. We have other people, and we have less demanding time windows.”

“I can, I can.”

“It’s one thing to say it.”

“I know, I’m sorry. It’s been a long day. My father is chained to a tree.”

In the end, Chett decides to withhold my bonus but retain my services, so things could be worse.

 

I spend that night on the edge of sleep. I am brought back from the brink of a dream by involuntary kicks and thoughts of soap. In the morning, mom has left a plate of eggs and a note telling me to take it to the park. She wants me to bring the plate back.

Rusty jungle gym, abandoned dugout, collapsed infield fence: Once there, I take it all in like it was new. Past childhood, the only people I knew who ever came here were the stoners in high school. This was their dugout.

My father looks at me with red-rimmed eyes, more gray than he has ever been. I think he’s lucky it didn’t rain, but I keep that to myself. There is a bulldozer facing him, without a driver. “They went for coffee,” he says.

I hand him down the eggs and a fork. It occurs to me that he must be sitting in his own urine.

“You think it’s not worth saving,” he says.

“I didn’t say anything.”

“Somehow I missed you becoming a divine judge of park worthiness.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

Behind me, the rolling crunch of park gravel being walked on, and a construction worker ambles up. He keeps walking past the dozer until he’s with us. He uses my shoulder for balance to lean down and hand my father a coffee. “Thank you, Joshua,” my father says in a whisper of gratitude.

Joshua raises up, makes a deferential noise to indicate the coffee was no problem, shakes my hand, and walks back to the bulldozer.

“It isn’t Joshua’s fault,” my father says. He hands me back the plate. “That’s a good man. Doesn’t have a choice.”

I check in on the Fresh Mountain profile. The user whose family is no longer going to enjoy Fresh Mountain has sent me a message directly, continuing to outline the ways that the Fresh Mountain Man has failed to uphold a moral obligation. It is unclear from the wording of the message whether it is meant for me or for the Fresh Mountain Man himself. I can feel my father staring at the phone in my hand.

I am not required to respond to this sort of direct contact, since no one else will see it. Still, I reach out to Chett for guidance.

“Must be interesting,” my father says.

“Mom wants to know how much longer.”

“Does she.”

The grass that’s left here waves in hard wind.

“Do you get bored,” I ask.

“You just don’t get it.”

 

I take the egg plate home, and mom sees that I have brought back her diningware only, not her husband, and returns to her meditation. I have a message from Chett.

A little sensitive after last night, I see, he has written. Jkjk. Well, though, it is complicated. You can’t dignify this person’s idea that every bit of playful banter needs to be put under a microscope. We have made a brand commitment to some value edginess and if that means we alienate a prude here and there, that is a risk we have taken into account.

A second message comes through while I’m reading the first: if, though, you have that rare opportunity to win a consumer back, it could be worth trying as long as you’re able to maintain the edge plus softness that makes FMS so distinct among formulated shower care bars.

And as long as you can do so in a way that doesn’t suggest you have done anything wrong.

(which you haven’t, in this case).

So, off the clock, I reach out to the family values guy. I tell him we like to have fun here, and that I hope a little bit of playful banter won’t impede his quest for the Ultimate Freshness.

An hour later, this reply: this apology is too little too late for my family and me. (This, even though a direct apology to an individual user of Brand Content would be impermissible by the terms of my contract.) Some things are just more important. We are very happy with our new soap.

I try to reply further, but I discover that this person has blocked me.

Trying to salvage the night, I log back in publicly and try to find whatever broadcast event is currently at high engagement. I reply to a post by the NBA’s reigning defensive player of the year, to tell him that his dog — beloved of the internet for weeks now — is Fresh. I engage the broadly popular and meme-literate Secretary of the Interior to congratulate her on Fresh forest initiatives.

There is nothing more to inspire any kind of broad engagement tonight. Regular-season baseball, the NBA, procedural reruns. In my browsing I find myself watching a local news piece about the park. In a manner I find nearly hypnotic, they are rotating a 3D model of the future mall that will take its place after demolition. The tree my father has chained himself to is right on the spot where there will be an entrance to a popular retail space. There is, in fact, a vested brand interest in the success of this mall. The Fresh Mountain line of products will include this mall in its continued push into retail spaces. (Even now, detailed market research is being done about layout, color scheme, general consumer-friendly tactics.)

It might be that this family values person has gotten farther into my head than I thought, and I am losing sight of the importance of the masses in the face of an individual zealot. Still, an odd thing happens while the 3D render of the exterior of a Cheesecake Factory rotates: The swell of protective feeling that I should be feeling for the steady growth and expansion of the Fresh Mountain Brand I am instead feeling for my dad, who has done nothing but chain himself to a tree and be an asshole about it.

I think for a moment and then, in the official voice of the Fresh Mountain Man, I have this to say: without sweat, we would have no need for soap. If you really want to earn your Fresh Mountain, you need a great park to sweat in. Help out today. And I link the news story of Twinkle Park’s demolition.

This is a misstep. Attaching the FMB to a social cause without approval from way up past Chett on the flagpole alone could get me in major trouble, let alone to reduce the Brand’s scope to so small a park. I avoid the internet, go to sleep, and wake up scared.

Downstairs, my mom holds out a standard ham-and-cheese sandwich to me, inhales three-fourths of her cigarette, and tells me to fix on virtue like the pole star.

The sandwich is a specific kind of gesture. I know this. Mom is telling my father that he can rest well on the strength of his convictions, but the length of his crusade has passed the point where she’s willing to make him a meal he enjoys. My father knows this too, and when I arrive with it he just stares mournfully at the bread.

I look at the park. From where we are, with a storm cloud rolling in and the shadow of the storm masking the park’s deficiencies, it looks like maybe the kind of place that could seem beautiful if you cared enough about it.

The bulldozer is staring him down, with its bucket tilted so water won’t pool in it.

My father chews, there is the wind of a pressure drop, distant traffic, a goose somewhere. Then: voices.

A local news van crunches over the gravel, and then I recognize the bright pantsuit, forceful tone, and unblinking eyes of Monica Tritt, Channel 4, unfurling herself out of the passenger’s-side door. Behind her, trailing cords, a heavy cameraman. By the time she makes it up to where we are, her voice has been here for what seems like 10 minutes.

“Local hero,” she says. “Misunderstood rebel? Citizen. Activist. Citizen-activist.”

The words hang, not connected to anything. Syllables that can be cobbled together later or mixed after the fact into something like a coherent thought.

The voice is smooth, but seems like it could break a pane of glass if she needed to.

“Monica Tritt,” she says. “Channel 4.”

In the face of this attention, my father is stoic. He stares ahead, ignorant of everything but the tree and the chain. He doesn’t answer any questions, and Channel 4’s Monica Tritt is left with no choice but to vamp with facts about the park’s history.

In this moment, I confront the messages from Chett. They have built all night; they are legion.

My first mistake was that I didn’t have (or ask for) permission from anyone on Fresh Mountain’s Brand Directorial Team before addressing an engagement issue in a social setting. (Though, I am told, the Fresh Mountain Company remains dedicated, certainly, to the preservation of all plant dignity, but often the most aligned brand strategy involves what the handbook calls “dignified silence.”)

Another mistake was to tether the brand’s concern to this area where I live, which could be perceived as the limitation of scope (all brand strategy ultimately is concerned with growing until it is an unlimited thing).

The first four messages are all like this, and by the fifth I am threatened with termination. But, by the seventh message, something interesting has happened: Things have maybe never been better for the Fresh Mountain Brand.

The engagement numbers are wild, so wild in fact that we are vanquishing the Sunrise Corporation. (Though there is a valley between us in terms of the quality of the product, favorable perception of Sunrise Soap is disproportionate because of the involvement of a certain celebrity, and the Sunrise Giant remains our most enduring Brand Entity Adversary.)

Evidently, in the aftermath of what we are now playfully calling my “little stunt,” even the Sunrise Giant himself (voiced by the celebrity, seen with the celebrity and others at live action/animation hybrid events) has glommed onto the park with enthusiasm, acting fast to avoid the perception of being on the back foot. The celebrity’s foundation is now involved, and more importantly the conversation around the issue is directing people back to the beginning, to my original post.

The final message from Chett congratulates me on showing initiative.

I fire off a dig at the Giant, something public about how much good “us little people” can do when we set our minds to it. It gets a good response. I take the best of the good responses and amplify them, to show the world how good the responses are. I consider my father. I ask myself, what has he actually done? Saved only one tree, or started to save it.

The camera on my father stops rolling, and Monica Tritt allows her mic hand to slip. She looks at the sky, sighs loudly. She snaps a look at my father and storms past me back to her van. Only after she leans down does my father turn his head in her direction.

“Dad,” I say. I walk over, show him the phone, the post and the positive response it’s getting.

“Easy to take a stand sitting down,” he says.

“You’re sitting down,” I say.

“My ass is in the dirt, at least.”

“Your ass is in your bathroom.”

 

I forget to take the sandwich plate home, but I sleep as soundly that night as I ever have. No dreams of soap or terror. The first thing I do when I wake is to check the conversation, see that everything is still going well. I refresh the messages and see a private one from Chett.

We have a problem, he says.

I lose all of the swelling sense of pride and control one gets when operating on a high level. That feeling melts, like waste in the rain. There is a response, public, in which my mistake from earlier is embedded: the soap-in-mouth fiasco. Beneath it: the Fresh Mountain Man wants you to keep parks open so he can expose his soapy penis to kids, probably.

I can’t defend myself. Doing so would dignify the attack and keep the soap penis narrative in front of the brand audience.

The biggest danger is of the thing becoming a meme. If that happens it will live for days, maybe longer, with the brightness and intensity of an exploding star. The visibility will be so wide as to more or less detonate the brand, and my role in it.

The most frightening thing about the meme threat is that it may have happened already, and just hasn’t metastasized across the internet to us yet. I can’t help but picture the meme spreading in a threatening color on a map of my enemy’s expanding territory, like urine across the front of my chained father’s jeans.

I spend all morning refreshing the brand profile until Chett changes the login info. I am locked out, and for a moment I forget to breathe. The silence in my room is crushing.

My mother, smoking two cigarettes at the same time, comes into my room and hands me another sandwich. She sees immediately that I’m not doing well and puts a hand on my head.

“Don’t worry about the future,” she says. “It doesn’t exist. No future, no past, just one moving image of infinity. Look at this.”

She pulls a small canvas out of a reinforced postal envelope.

“What do you see?” she asks.

To me, it looks like a painting of nothing, or a painting of paint. Swirls of colors mix together to make other colors. It seems to draw the eye to the middle where the most mixing has taken place and the color is the darkest, but I find nothing to say about it. I tell her I don’t get it. She turns the front of it toward herself again.

“I see the truth about time,” she says.

She turns it back toward me and I try again.

 

I’m still trying to imagine the painting when I take the sandwich to the park. There’s a storm moving in. The ritual endures — my father takes the food. I say nothing. Then, the first few drops hit, and I watch my father’s hair get slick against his head and separate from itself. The skin underneath and between the white hair is showing.  The full head of hair is one of the things that people admire about him, and I know he is vain of it, and I feel something like relief or pride at seeing his hair exposed as thin and separate. My father is wet, and I look down at him. Maybe this could be the painting.

The rain, like it does sometimes, intensifies for not more than a few moments and then stops completely. The parking area is a gray swamp, the stoners’ dugout, at a lower elevation, is nearly underwater.

My father’s face is peaceful, his head back against the tree. His hair in swirls, not un-paint-like. So I put a hand on his neck and tell him I can take his place for a while, if he wants it. He just looks down at the sandwich: soaked through, gone, beyond saving.