Apex Hides the Hurt by Colson Whitehead Read Free Book Online

wedding.”
    “Oh Jack.”
    “The ice swan alone.”
    “Jack.”
    “Okay, okay. Well I think your company does good work. I think New Prospera is a great name.”
    He raised his mug to New Prospera. That’s one vote for you.
    .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .
    When he accepted the assignment, the clients gave him a packet on the competition. Sometimes it was important to know what you were up against. Sometimes it didn’t matter at all. At any rate, when asked about how he came up with the name Apex, which was often, he always kicked things off with a brief preface drawn from the information he received that fateful day.
    In the promotion materials for the Johnson & Johnson Company he got the lowdown on the creation of Band-Aids. The year was 1920. The place, New Brunswick, NJ. Earle and Josephine Dickson were newlyweds. He was a cotton buyer for Johnson & Johnson, she was a housewife. He worked for the country’s number-one medical supply company. She cut herself. Repeatedly. Every day it seemed. She was clumsy. She had household accidents. Through the modern lens, he told his audience (a comely young lady at a bar, poised sophisticates at a dinner party, a dentist), he interpreted the young lady’s constant accidents as sublimated rebellion against the strict gender roles of her time. He’d attended a liberal-arts college. Perhaps she wanted to be a World War One flying ace, or a mechanic. He didn’t know. All we have are Band-Aids, he said.
    Every day Earle would come back from work to confront his wife’s wounds, cotton wadding and adhesive tape in hand. He pictured her through the screen door, offering her latest domestic tragedy for his inspection when Earle came back from the office, red-eyed, anxious, what the heck, let’s throw in a trembling lip. After a while, Earle decided to take himself out of the equation. He placed gauze at regular intervals onto a roll of tape, and then rolled the tape back up again. That way, whenever Josephine had one of her little cries for help, she could help herself, and if she happened to slice herself while cutting off a patch of tape, well what could be more convenient. Earle of course mentioned this innovation to his colleagues, and the rest was history and brand-name recognition, was Band-Aids, competing brands of adhesive bandages, was Apex, his toe.
    .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .
    New Prospera
. If he lifted the whelp by the heel he’d find the birthmark of the Fleet clan. Albert Fleet’s shtick consisted of resurrecting old nomenclature motifs just before they were about to come back into vogue. Old hound dog sniffing, he had a nose for incipient revival. The good ones always came back, the steadfast prefixes, the sturdy kickers. When you counted them out,
Pro
- and -
ant
would stumble back to the top, bruised and lacerated but still standing, this month’s trendy morphemes and phonemes lying at their feet in piles. Everything came around again. Languages were only so big.
    He had effectively killed off
New
when New Luno hit it big, and at the time everyone warned him that it would look like he was merely chasing a trend, and that sort of thing was beneath him. Anywhere you looked that year, something was New. But success shushes those kind of accusations. If Albert was lugging New back onto the scene, you better brace yourself for a full-blown renaissance. New was new again.
    Prospera
, that could have come from anybody on the team. Had that romance-language armature, he was pretty sure it was a Spanish or Italian word for something. What it meant in those languages, that was unimportant, what was important was how it resonated here. The lilting
a
at the end like a rung up to wealth and affluence, take a step. A glamorous Old World cape draped over the bony shoulders of prosaic
prosperity
. Couple a cups of joe to clear the head, anybody in the firm could have come up with that one. Everyone a suspect.
Prospera
left no fingerprints on its gleaming