Remedial Therapy

I’m pretty sure she just leaped onto the table. I can feel her creeping up with the soft paws of a leopard just before it disembowels you. It’s unconventional and disconcerting, but I remain silent and stoic, primarily because I’m lying stomach-down with my face jammed into a gap the size of an iPhone. And I’m not wearing a shirt.

Because I can’t see what’s going on, my other senses are super-tuned, transforming me into a cross between Edward Cullen and Forrest Gump. So I know with absolute certainty that it was the ball of her foot that she just worked up underneath my shoulder blade. She adjusts it into position. I screw my eyes shut.

The pain is like childbirth. If I still possessed the power of speech, I’d call for an epidural.

“Breathe,” she says.

I try, but I think she’s punctured my lung. My brain, vainly clinging to some hope we’re going to make it through this, has gone into survival mode. It’s activated every sweat gland it can find and commandeered all my body’s other glands—whatever they do—for some heavy-duty ad hoc sweating.

Then, as she switches feet and moves to the sore shoulder that actually brought me in here, my struggle for survival is joined by the battle not to cry. Not cry out, but cry. Actually, literally cry. I can’t go back to work with bloodshot eyes after a thirty-minute lunch break—not again, anyway—so I hold back the tears by thinking about the Roxette concert I went to last week.

Eight years later, it ends.

“Thank you, sir. Finished now.” Her voice is soft and musical in my ears now that the threat to life has passed.

“Cheers,” I say, trying to sound like she’s just handed me a cold beer. My voice, perhaps caught off-guard because it didn’t expect to be required in the afterlife, cracks like a schoolboy’s on a first date.

Despite my masseuse’s obvious attempts to inflict grievous bodily harm, the pain in my shoulder is gone. By the time I get back to the office, I’m pretty confident I could throw a speed ball…if I knew what a speed ball was. I check my hair in the mirrored wall of the lift and my newly relaxed shoulders immediately seize up. On my forehead is a giant, rectangular imprint. I’m marked for life, and I’m supposed to be in a client meeting in five minutes!

Back at my desk, I devise and execute a devilishly clever plan that involves the strategic use of leftover campaign merchandise: a corporately branded “Department of Healthy Living” cap.

My boss, Margaret, walks into our open-plan slice of heaven and glares at me. “Barney, what do you think you’re doing?”

I think quick. “Being sun smart.”

Margaret’s even quicker. “You’re inside.”

“Can’t be too careful.”

Margaret is what you might call a straight shooter. “Stop being ridiculous. You can’t wear that to a client meeting. Take it off.”

I follow Margaret’s orders and her expression turns from disdain to horror. “What on earth happened to your head? You look like you fell asleep on a baking tray.”

Truth is my only option here. “I’ve got a serious shoulder condition and I had to have an emergency massage.”

She looks at me with her all-too-familiar how did you ever get a job? face. “You had a massage at lunchtime?”

“Well, technically, it was remedial therapy. And in my defense, I thought I’d be sitting in one of those big chairs with cushioned head rests…with my shirt on.”

Margaret gathers up her notebook and looks straight at my mark of shame. “You’re not meeting with a client looking like that.” She charges away from our desks but turns back just before she’s out of earshot. “Barney,” she calls.

Could this be a reprieve? Has she realized the inherent value of having me alongside her despite my indelibly imprinted forehead?

“Put your hat back on. You’ll scare the junior staff.”

I need a massage.