Doug looked down over his curly chest hairs, past his heavily jowelled knees, on down to where he discovered his toes wiggling furiously in the sand. This was the ultimate. Absolutely unclothed, standing deeply in this great sand hole, his shovel at the ready.

The ultimate definition, the great commercial law to end all laws. The absolute true law, the unstoppable law, the ultimate law, Doug's law at last. He raised his shovel.

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"What are we going to do with this guy? His contract goes for another six months." Lonsdale wheezed back into his pseudo suede office chair and gazed out over his bare gleaming desk. The New Corporate Policy (NCP) said there was to be nothing on the desks of a personal nature. Things like photos of children, wife, mother or girlfriend. It could trigger the anxiety and jealousy of fellow middle management workers who might have none of those and also, it might engender too much small talk from clients. He drummed the desk top, leaving little quickly disappearing fog marks as he lifted each finger and replaced it with another in a slow staccato action.

"Contain, contain......." said Erline. Erline Walsh was the council's communications manager. Looking like a survivor of anorexia bulimia, she wore a tight little suit with flared skirt around her rather baggy thin frame. Her face was lined but handsome. Her hair short, streaked with grey. Small straight green eyes that settled steadily on an object or face, when they moved.

It was fashionable to have women as communications managers in the big corporations and local body councils now. A woman could always look more reasonable and forbearing than a man in a suit, when answering curly questions from tough male radio reporters. They could stick to a line of commitment more unswervingly than a man. The public were more likely to treat as gospel anything a woman said over radio in defence of her company's actions. Also, women tended to be masters (or mistresses?) of the double negative. Brilliant at obfuscating issues. For instance:

"I did not say that we were not aware of the problem."

Lonsdale McAnley was one of the older breed of civil servant. He had started employment with the Rockditch City Council after he'd left school at the age of 17. Nowadays you needed an MBA from at least a technical institute to start there at all! It was Lonsdale's fault, you could say, that had led to Doug's escalating problem with sand.

"God, now he's even taken to putting his sand into little hessian bags and putting them through a washing machine......." Lonsdale wheezed a little more, running out of words. He had resisted the team-work principles that had come with NCP and while the other executives were working out at the council run staff rooms he had concocted a certificate from his doctor and still had his contract to fall back on. 'Tenure' it was called. Like Doug, he couldn't be sacked. At the moment, middle management was safe. Machines were taking over that role but the full impact of that was still some distance down the line.

The thing to do, Lonsdale mused, was to get to the top quickly, to be safe. He guessed this is what the motivational seminars were for - to extract every last ounce of work commitment from middle management before they were replaced. In the new system, a new dictum would apply. That is: 'The top expands to crush the rest down'. As the top expanded, more competition resulted. Maybe this is why Doug had become more frenetic.

"There's bloody sand everywhere - Doug's even painting it now." Erline sighed.

"Wish I'd never mentioned it." said Lonsdale. He was referring to the day that even he got caught up in the 'heroes of the council' concept the NCP plan pushed, when it was brought in a year ago. He had found an old copy of Better Business, dating from 1968 when he worked at the wool dump store. His boss, Ian, got that magazine on subscription. Ian had pointed out the article in it and had laughed. It was about how executives were being urged to install small sand boxes in their offices where, during lunchtimes, they could take off their shoes and sox and wiggle their toes in the sand. It was therapeutic, relaxing; brought the world back to business. Nature, the beach, sunlight, all things natural. That afternoon the executive would feel a lot better and get over that awful "three o'clock hump" when most would feel the pits of depression engendered by the air-conditioned office and the thought of another two hours to go for the day, with lunch two hours past and gone forever.

Doug's office was deemed to be out of bounds unofficially to most staff. Lonsdale had been instructed to vet anyone who wanted to go in there. Doug himself was hardly ever heard from, even though he was the councils' Chief City Planner. Doug was responsible for the assessment of all demolition and building resource consents. Usually, the consents committee got by without him but some projects were so important that they had to have him on board because, quirky as he was, he had the qualifications, and of course the employment contract, and was the man ultimately responsible if anything went wrong.

"My word, that was a bad day." Lonsdale recalled.

"What, the sand episode?" asked Erline.

"Well, Doug insisted. We should have known what was going to happen."

"The application for the boat marina... what a mess." Erline mused.

Doug kept different hours from anyone else. Nobody knew why it was this way. Nobody even knew where he lived. He would arrive at ten in the morning it was thought, though nobody ever saw him actually enter the department from the lifts. He would pick up his papers and reports from Lonsdale and disappear quickly into his office with another sack of washed sand. Nobody knew when he went home. It was after the others left anyway.

The seminar was a real 'yah yah' thing. Strobes and videos with messages flashed on the walls saying 'speed, 'compete' 'the corporate for all and FAST' 'Be in the Heat - Show no Mercy'. Rolie Jocquer, the instructor from the Corporate Round Table, a division of the Boston Business Group gave everyone the message to work hard and compete with each other for results. During the last seminar Rolie had suddenly stopped in the middle of his speech. A very pregnant hush followed.

"Look under your seats." Rolie barked.

There was an awed rustling and murmuring. Staff untaped the small package under each seat. In each was peaked cap. On it were the words 'Rockditch is FAST, share the dream." Doug was never seen without his on, after that.

"Fancy turning up on site with that on." muttered Erline. "Most un-PR-like."

"What he said to the media was worse," said Lonsdale.

"We should have known we were in for trouble, the Resource Consent application being for a boat marina," said Erline.

It was strange that day. Doug, at the site armed, with the resource consent application to check it out. It was a complicated application. It involved eight separate acts of Parliament, because it was on a waterway, a beach, on water and land and there were Maori claims for part of the land and there was a small shed on it, too. Fortunately it was so complicated that it would pass easily through the consents committee so that it could be built. The law that governed this was the 'Bigger Bite Swallow Easier' principle. This principle is typical of many in business and government, where the measure of truth is in inverse proportion to the measure of reality. But how does this principle work?

Well, Lonsdale had a friend who worked as the secretary to a Government advisory committee overseeing government works programmes. One day there were two applications. One for a ten million dollar sewage scheme and another for a $200 garden shed. You guessed it.

"The Garden shed application took three hours of discussion and the sewage scheme was passed in five minutes." Lonsdale explained.

"Everybody knows about garden sheds, nobody knows what's involved with a sewage scheme." Erline sighed. "But it was the sand sprinkling that got me."

"Me too." said Lonsdale "I tried to get between Doug and the radio man covering the on-site meeting."

Doug had brought his little bag of sand and had begun spreading and flicking sand all around the site, muttering some sort of incantation:

"Sand to sand, earth to earth, Peace and tranquility, the grain of sand is among million worlds....." and words to that effect. Still wearing his ridiculous hat, his thin looped body encased in his always-worn swandrii jacket, his gold-rimmed glasses glittering maniacally.

At the consents meeting, thankfully closed to the public, the elected councillors and a few more of the planning staff including Lonsdale, and Erline, who was there to prepare a press release, were greeted by a model of the Marina perched on top of about and inches and a half of fine white sand. Grim-lipped the councillors spat out "yes, ok then., we'll pass it", when Doug had finished reading out the consents application, embellishing it with a bit of FAST rhetoric that drew blanched look from the councillors.

What did FAST mean? 'F' for fitness, 'A' for attitude, 'S' is for speed with the 'T' for team-work. Doug had made up a poem based on each word of FAST beginning a new stanza. It isn't worth repeating here. Somebody might find the text of it one day. When Doug had gone and his office had been opened up, nobody could find it. And what a sight his office was.

"What marvellous artistic technique that is. He should have won an art award," said Lonsdale.

"Fancy, the sheer inventive genius of it all," said Erline, in wonderment. "It must have taken him ages to do."

Surely it would have. Imagine having to soak a cup of sand in a special dye, dry it out in front of the office heater on newspapers or, sometimes apparently, on old resource consent files that had somehow gone missing and had never been found. Then painting the polished hardwood rimu panels of the office with a strong slow-drying glue. After a number of cups of dried coloured sand had been prepared (so that's where the council run cafeteria cups went to?). Doug would fling the contents of the cups in wildly sporadic patterns of colour all over the panels. Then a paint brush with bright blue paint would be used to paint messages over the colour.

"FAST, the innovators," "RECORD - 30 consents a day," "Lonsdale useless." Rolie Jocquer for ATTITUDE." (he was the American management scientist who set up the Programme). And the hats. Doug had driven nails in the polished hardwood all round the walls and had dozens of peaked hats hanging on them. He'd sprinkled sand on them ever so carefully. They all had similar messages to what was on the walls.

Even Doug's framed Master of Planning degree from a posh American university didn't escape the paint and sand treatment. You could just see "Mast..." through the plastered and smeared glass.

"It was the sand bed that got me," said Erline. "he must have bloody slept in it at nights."

Maybe he did. Nobody ever did find out where he lived. The address on his employment contract was a house that had long been demolished and turned into a car park. The consents application for that demolition was the only piece of paper to be found in his desk.

The sand bed had been added to, over time. By that, it was discernible that boards had been added to the sides to make it higher and deeper. The insides of his sand bed consisted of a deep hole in the middle and sand pushed up against the sides. It was total immersion. It was as if he spent the night curled up in it, like being in a womb.

Then one day Doug didn't show for work. Nobody noticed much nor seemed to care, initially. But because there were a large number of consents applications needing his signature as Head of Department, somebody had decided to investigate.

A department car was missing. It had been checked out to Doug the day before.

"Didn't take long to find it." said Lonsdale, the morning after it was all over.

"What a way to go," said Erline. She had been working on a press release about the matter all that morning. The radio news people had been ringing her for comment all morning, too.

"What's the business about the sand.... is it true that he ate the stuff and choked?"

"Do sand castles get building consents.... har har har...."

"Hey what salary was this guy getting for sprinkling sand all over the place......?"

Lonsdale kept a low profile. He was already redesigning Doug's office for his imminent, he hoped, elevation to the position of Rockditch Chief Planner. Little did he know they would put it out to advertisement for applicants world-wide. They eventually chose a Fijian Indian graduate from Harvard with a doctorate in City Planning and Lateral Motivational Techniques. There were plenty of such graduates around like that. The contract was not an expensive one. Dr. Missingh, his name was.

He would re-organise the Department into an effective fighting unit. Lonsdale would be down the road to lie fatly on the beach in his retirement. Erline would be kept on because, being a woman, she could absorb the new lateral motivational techniques. A man doing that would be too argumentative. There would be a new fervour and flavour in the Department. Something of a mixture between the intensity of Amway and Scientology.

Boston's 'FAST' was out. Eastern corporate philosophy, based on the comparative models of perception and activity as opposed to the Western model, which was 'incursive' perception, was 'in'. It's slogan was 'REAL'. Real? Yes. 'R' - relax, 'E' - enjoy, 'A' - align, and 'L' - live. Real was in, Fast was out. A whole new ball game.

The council's planning offices were draped in Indian, Chinese and Indo-Chinese and Melanesian drapes and artworks. It was a swap, or deal that had been made with a Chinese businessman wanting a resource consent to build a back-packer's hotel in the old main post office. The artworks in exchange for the consents. Everybody was happy. REAL was here.

And Doug? They found his car, actually the council's car, at the beach. One of Doug's poor, now lonely peaked hats was lying on the sand. They never found his favourite swandrii coat. It had been assumed that Doug had thrown off his hat and walked into the sea. They never found his body. They neither saw hair nor hide of Doug again. He had disappeared, completely.

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Doug looked at the shovel again. Gripping it and smiling, then looking up at the mountain of beautiful recently dug sand overhead. Would it work? He didn't need a planning consent for this one! From the bottom of his hole he swung furiously at the base of the sand mountain above.

It was all over in an instant. Sand to sand, womb to sand, sand to womb. Grains entered his throat, nose, heavily, his breath eased off. Pure bliss, endless sleep.