Telos Journal Edition Three October 2013 | Page 15

Mr. Ben and the Farm Game
The Fixed Score

Somewhere on his way to work everyday, Mr. Ben gets doused with a solid bucket of
mediocrity. If only something could surprise him, he’d at least be a naïve man.
Ben is a decent albeit pasty fellow who doesn’t command respect. He simply ‘rather
not’, like Bartelby, yet without the prohibitive obduracy. How he spends his days is
ordinary, in his ordinary apartment, at his ordinary job, with his ordinary rules and things.
If he had a dog, it’d probably be ordinary too. He never earned his degree back in
Wales but acquired a TESOL teaching certification which has allowed him a job, though
with the exodus of native speakers across the globe looking for similar work, it carries
falling credibility.
Ben sometimes answers greetings without the added shame of mirroring eye contact.
And when one walks past to slap him ‘five’, he often moans unenthusiastically, as if
caught wiping his ass. Maybe it’s no wonder why he stays in South East Asia: where
white people are envied and, in some places around the countryside, seen as exotic
novelties. Ben’s students haven’t asked him to sign autographs yet, however: Bali sees
her fair share of foreigners, and the grim circles under his eyes deflect serendipitous
engagements with the shy Balinese.
Ben’s quick to draw a few weekly jokes that loosen twisting stress and uncurl the spine
so that he can consciously make it back to work each day. And over the years, his flesh
has weighed on him a man. He can recognize his shortcomings without resigning from
daily life, without abandoning innate rights to action, for example. He knows that
teaching English is an anodyne profession for native tongues, an economical incentive
for expat evacuation, as relatively genuine as monetary motivations can be for a soul—
and Ben is indeed an example of the times.
He interchangeably wears his silk Batik shirts to school everyday: a multinational in
Indonesia—where the administration hides, the curriculum is supplied like drive-through
fodder, and the teachers, like in any other school, try to freshly devise the
predetermined show. Ben was in Jakarta for a while working for the same corporation
where he fortuitously found love, his now Javanese wife who keeps his emotive ship
afloat. It was after a year or two that they moved to Bali for some added sunshine and
the professed allure that a highly advertised island provides. Ben’s lucky that they had a
branch there.
Ben’s boss’s name is Jim. Jim is a simple gentleman. He is seemingly pleasant and wellfed: one can tell by the muscles in his neck and jaw which flex when he smiles
awkwardly. He comes into work on-time and leaves on-time. Maybe it’s his being from
Melbourne that has endowed him with an overall buoyant bearing and speech. But
when appointments stretch past Jim’s comfort zone, Jim’s voice pops about
cartoonishly. He’s an adequate listener: he’s only required to listen to what’s necessary,
and he always has an empty chair in his glass-walled office for relevant concerns.