“The important thing is to have it.”

 “It cleanses body and soul.”

They were talking about Vaseline.  NEW Vaseline. Matt thought what they were doing was test marketing in Thailand. The young Chinese-American guy, Bob Li, with the advertising group from San Francisco and Silicon Valley had shining beatific eyes, and said, “We don’t have to test it. We know. First you wash your face. Then you wash your body. And you’ve washed your soul. You put the lid back on the little jar, put it in a prominent place in your home of work space. Or both. Use two.”

He repeated the first motto: “The important thing is to have it.”

Matt couldn’t help asking. “VASELINE?”

“Yes. NEW Vaseline.. If you use two, one home, one at work, you’ll bathe with each.”

“This is promotion then?”

“Of course. Missionary promotion.”

“Everybody on earth buys two, you sell billions.”

“Correct.”

“But eventually—Nobody buys because they have.”

“Oh, no, no. You bathe daily, don’t you?”

“Well—usually… Sure. But not everybody does.”

“That’s why the promotion. We’re trying to get them to. Cleanse the earth.”

“Second motto: It cleanses body and soul.”

“YES!”

Matt was in the cab of a tractor trailer. Bob Li was driving. The cab was like a small van, had a back seat, even though it was pulling a sixteen wheeler full of pallets with little jars of Vaseline. In the back seat was an early 20’s woman with a lap top and a clipboard full of paper notes, whom he’d tried asking questions of, but she seemed too pre-occupied to answer. What was Matt doing there? They had hired him for something. He was important to their operation. Observe it? Record it? 

The truck pulled into a loading dock that was somehow also the side pedestrian entrance to a retail mall, and a bunch of guys with blue-grey aprons and clipboards, like  hybrid  clerk-scientists, came running, and because Matt was in the front passenger’s seat they began enthusiastically welcoming him. He said, “No, no, no”, and pointed them toward Bob Li and the nameless, and yes, faceless, woman in the second seat.

The greeters’ energy was enormous, and though the first arrivals now ignored him, a second phalanx harangued him with questions he didn’t understand the words to, not because they weren’t in English—they were—but because he knew he had no answers for them. When the interrogating got to be too much, he thought if he just gave them a bit of what they wanted he’d get them to stop. So he said “Vaseline”, and it worked. All smiled and nodded in knowing agreement.      

Bob Li was handling the questions, and Matt climbed in the back seat beside the researcher. Now that he could see her, she was Caucasian, wore glasses and no make-up, and was pretty in a plain way. 

He asked, “You’re from the Bay Area?”

She nodded.

“How does selling Vaseline in Bangkok help your sales in San Francisco?”

She stopped what she was doing, whatever it was, long enough to look kindly at him as though he was the dumbest low tech moron she had ever encountered.

He got it. “If they buy it here, they’ll buy it there, and everywhere.”

She smiled satisfaction at his enlightenment. Her eyes, magnified under her glasses, had the same glow of conviction Bob Li and all the guys in the blue-grey smocks had.

So, it was another answer. THE answer. But Matt knew what was going to happen. They would succeed. Yet, somewhere it would get misinterpreted. In parts of the undeveloped world they’d think they’d said “Gasoline”, and people would bathe with that and get the same shiny eyes, because they believed. And then there would be big problems. Between those who believed Vaseline cleansed the soul, and those who believed Gasoline did (Gasoline capitalized, a very Proper Noun) and they’d take steel gallon cans and put them in special places on their bureaus at home and desks at work. I don’t have to tell you the trouble caused. Turn on CNN. No wonder Matt was having dreams like this. Somewhere, somehow, there was something or somebody who was going to make it all alright. Yes, there was. If we could just all agree on What. or Which. or Who.

But we wouldn’t.  Because we know, even if we did, we’d still find something to disagree about. Not one excuse, it’s another. Come ON. It’s happening already.

Somebody is offended in ways not even imagined. Because they were mentioned. Because they weren’t mentioned, therefore snubbed. Because it didn’t get them right.

You see? See how it starts? And it was just a dream. Nobody responsible but everybody’s responsible.

What are your dreams about?

                                   MAM’S SIDE OF IT   

I don’t know how I got into his head or his dreams or his story. I was hired as an expert petroleum jelly marketer, which means I have to show somehow that my salary pays off in sales. Bob Li is my first echelon real time supervisor, which means he sees what I do, so I have to do something. Very often what I’m doing is obfuscating, using jargon and points I’ve created, but he won’t admit to not understanding because he can’t seem stupid. Sales keep going up, and he takes credit for that, but secretly believes it’s my undecipherable magic, or could be, so I coast. Bob has glowing eyes because he’s happy—happy with the great salary and perks, and I’m not complaining either.

So a wraith appears in the front seat of the cab as we’re delivering product in Bangkok, asks Bob some meaningless questions, and just as our store managers are greeting us, jumps in the back seat with me. Guesses I’m from the Bay Area, just as you might expect an ethereal presence to already know, then starts asking marketing questions about why we’re promoting it in Bangkok (which you’d expect an ethereal presence to already know.) He finally gets it’s because we want to sell it everywhere, and we market it as religious, salvific.

With others, we’re building cathedrals. One is where we were delivering, at the renovated Emporium Shopping Mall in Bangkok on Sukhumvit Road, with golden vaulted columns rising to exalted heights, silver light playing majestically on the gold. It  continues upwards as if to Heaven. I know you know. There’s one like it near you. They’re truly places where one can worship—stores—but this disgruntled spirit that invaded our tabernacle is a spoiler. If he thinks he has better ideas, why can’t he articulate them? Does he want to go back to a little grocery store, vegetable store, butcher shop? Hello, how are you today? Misses that. What’s wrong with what we’re doing? It’s making my life better, and if you’ve helped only one person today, you’ve made the world a better place.

He’s gone now, thank Vaseline. I think he woke up. Let him haunt somewhere else the next time he has one of his reveries. We can’t accommodate him. We’re going to keep on doing what we’re doing and he’s irrelevant,

You’re either with us or you’re against us.

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By Patrick Breheny

American ESL teacher and fiction writer living in Bangkok.