"So, Mr. Lorenzo." He sat down with a huff, his office chair squealing once, sharply, under the weight he'd dropped into it. "Did they tell you why you're here?" 

"I was told a malfunction...?"

Crap. I'd asked a question. That's junior sales rep's mistake number one. Never ask a question, even when you are asking a question, end it like a statement. I assumed my upward inflection was due to jet lag, and hoped he would cover for me by responding quickly. Nod reassuringly, restate the word "malfunction" in an appropriately somber tone, and then tell me what was actually going on.

He didn't. He just steepled his fingers and stared at me across his glass-topped desk.

If one of the porters in the hallway hadn't greeted him as Dr. Richardson, I never would have thought he was actually a doctor on a cruise ship. His pasty skin, his puffy eyes, his chewed fingernails? All wrong. Where was the tan? Where was the too-white smile, and the little sun-squints in the corner of his eye?

I shifted a little under his gaze, my clothes creasing around my body. I had sweated and cooled so many times today that each fold seemed to have stiffened into a separate entity. "Well, I was told they have been squirting people in the eye, which is difficult to believe. They're just not designed that way."

He leaned forward, elbows squeaking on the glass. "I don't give a good goddamn how they were designed. You haven't been here. You haven't seen the people coming into my office in agony, Mr. Lorenzo. Agony. Several of them have been almost blinded." He leaned further forward, so I could see tiny red veins beginning to invade the whites of his eyes. "People are scared to leave their cabins. Refunds have been demanded. Royale isn't going to care what it costs to fix them or how much of your schedule they screw up. They need them fixed. Now."  He sat back and said more mildly: "Or else I have a feeling the things are going overboard. All of them."

"I'm here to fix them. I'm sure I'll have it done in no time." I was using the most confident version of my voice, the one I used when a customer was on the fence but on tiptoe, and only needed a nudge.

He pinched the bridge of his nose. "You know there are six hundred?"

Uh oh. I suddenly had to chew back a yawn, which clashed with the confidence I was trying to maintain. "Well, they're not all malfunctioning." Jack had promised this would only take a couple hours. There was no way they were all broken.

He shrugged, sat back in his chair, and I thought I saw a bit of a challenge in his eyes when he said, "Who knows? It seems like most of them, given the number of people I've seen. I guess you'll just have to check them all." He spread his hands and lifted them slightly toward the ceiling.

I stood up and my legs, still stiff from the plane, emitted a hot dull ache. "Well, then. I'd better get started."

"Start with the one outside the spa," he said as I left. "For some reason, people on their way to a massage scream pretty loud when a hand sanitizer squirts them in the eye."

#

Jack, my boss, called the day before and told me that he'd signed me up to meet the ship in Athens. I'd talked to him as I packed one-handed, holding the phone away from my ear to compensate for Jack's too-loud phone voice. He seemed to think he was using a tin can.

"It's like a circus out there, apparently," he yelled. "They're telling me the things have gone nuts. They're squirting people in the eyes!"

"In the eye?" I laughed. "No way. There must be a mistake. They're pulling your leg, they're trying to get you to pay for half a cruise."

"I've seen pictures! This isn't a joke. It's hideous Matt. All kinds of irritations and infections. No one's gone blind yet, but I suppose it's only a matter of time."

"What are these people doing, squatting down and trying to get their face sanitized?"

He laughed once, just a single cough of a chuckle to acknowledge that I'd made a joke. "No. Just walking past."

I zipped my carryon. "No way. Not only would they need to recalibrate the sensor for distance, but they would need to drill a hole in the casing to let the..."

"Hey!" I held the phone further away. "I don't want you to diagnose the thing now. That's why I'm sending you to meet the ship. Royale Cruise Lines are our biggest clients, Matt. Did you know they're our biggest clients?"

I sighed. "Yes."

"Fix those machines, Matt. Fix them. And notice I'm not sending a technician all the way out there just to fix them, I'm sending a sales guy. The sales guy. That's you, Matt. You're the sales guy. You're there to make them fall in love with those machines all over again. And sell more!"

"Got it."

"And get in and out fast, okay? No one likes a mooch."

"Okay."

"I mean it, Matt!" The voice was reaching painful levels again, even though I had checked repeatedly that my handset was on its lowest possible volume. "We don't want it to look like you're just trying to get a free vacation."

"I'm in, I'm out. No worries, Jack."

"Great. And Matt?" He paused, letting suspense infuse the static-filled silence. "If you fix this, all of us back at HQ will remember who it was bailed us out of this. Is that understood?"

"Yes, sir," I said.

And it was.

#

After I left Dr. Richardson's office, a smiling and nodding porter offered to show me to my room. "No," I said. "Thanks, but I'm only going to be here a few hours."

"Oh, no, sir." According to his nametag, he was from Cambodia. He continued to smile and nod as if his neck were on a spring. "Royale is sure you will be here days. Please. To the room!  It is quite lovely."

It was small and windowless, but the shower and the narrow bed looked equally tempting. But I resisted. I didn't even change clothes, although the thought of a fresh shirt and pair of underwear - and especially a shower - was strongly tempting. I'd planned to change at the airport, but customs spent a long time looking through my tools - so long that I was almost an hour late to meet the Royale representative, who seemed to demonstrate how pissed he was at my tardiness by chain-smoking during the entire drive to the port, filling the car interior with a blue haze until my coughs were genuine, not just hints for him to roll down a window.

And now, there was still no time for a shower. The ship left Athens tonight at six, and I needed to be done by then. Because as Jack said, no one liked a mooch. As wonderful as it sounded to have a free vacation, it wouldn't look good to my boss or his boss or Royale, our biggest client. Anyway, there really wasn't any way for the machines to be squirting up. I was betting it was all just a misunderstanding or an exaggeration. A big, expensive joke.

It was 11 am now. No problem, I thought as I closed the door to my cabin. No problem at all for Western Sanitation Solution's quarterly top ranking salesman, two quarters in a row. I'm in, I schmooze, I'm out.

My company manufactured hand sanitizing machines, which automatically dispense .03 ounces of sanitation liquid (with natural aloe extracts) when you place your hand under the sensor. Touching the unit wasn't necessary, but it didn't stop most people - at least those I'd seen at trade shows - mauling the poor things, tapping them, pushing on them, or rubbing them, as if exhorting them to give up their little squirt of alcohol. Royale ships were fitted with 4500s, our most attractive and also our most expensive model. They have spherical tops set on an asymmetrically curved pedestal base. "Sleek but sturdy," said the trade magazines. "Resists tipping with a uniquely artistic shape." The top half of the sphere is translucent, so you can see when the sanitation fluid is running low.

It was hard to believe they could squirt people in the eye. The sensor that allowed the machine to detect the presence of someone's hand wasn't strong enough to detect the presence of anything further than an inch or two away. And even if it was that strong, the machine was only designed to squirt down.

"Good old 4500," I said, as I approached the one outside the spa. "You won't believe the things they're saying about you downstairs."

I was just out of arm's reach, when I saw the red eye of the motion sensor. It had seen me, and I turned away just in time. The alcohol hit my ear. Keeping my face turned away, I dropped my tool bag and unscrewed the top half of the sphere. I felt my way under the bag of fluid for the shutoff switch. The whole time, the thing kept hurling streams of sanitizer into my ear and hair with spitting sounds.

When I'd finally turned the thing off, I wiped out my ear, which felt uncomfortably cold.

And then I saw them watching me.

It was difficult for me to write (physically) when I was young. In the stories I wrote during first and second grades, my Es were shaped like 3s and my Ss resembled a complicated river hieroglyph more than a letter. I felt an agonizing gap between thinking of a story and being able to write that story down. 

My parents always encouraged me, and were continually creative in coming up with new ideas to help me tell my stories. I dictated to them, used a typewriter (very briefly), and spoke into a tape recorder, but none of that really worked. I wanted to see my stories in my own writing, as time consuming and challenging as that process was. Without the encouragement from my parents, it might have been tempting to give up when teachers ignored my plot to criticize my penmanship.

The older I get, the harder it has been for me to find time to write. I wish I wrote every day. I wish my desk was neater. I wish I had detailed profiles that included my characters' favorite vegetable. I wish I got up at six every morning and wrote while coffee steeped in a French press.

Instead, I tend to write in the equivalent of wind sprints. I wrote For Your Protection in three days, and although it needed significant editing, it was a heady experience to create the skeleton of a novel in such a short period of time. On the surface - and perhaps even a layer or two down - it's a relatively light and comedic piece.  But it also explores questions about hypocrisy: Does cleanliness truly mean godliness? How often do we focus on only surface appearances? And is that always wrong?

I type most of my stories now. But there are still times when I go back to using paper, mostly to be able to see actual pages of my work, not just images on a screen. And sometimes I write longhand just for the pleasure of creating forward-facing Es.