We, the members of the association, regarded the motivational speaker with suspicion. Even his arrival in our building was itself a delivery of mysterious nature. The movers carted in his belongings in weather-beaten, antiquated-looking crates that appeared as if they had recently been found after decades under sand. In response to our quizzical stares, the movers merely shrugged. The new resident of our building was not to be seen on that day; he had made some sort of arrangement with the movers so that they would have a set of keys to let themselves in. Peculiar, we thought. The movers seemed to have detailed instructions on where to place each crate within the small unit. One of us asked a mover about the new resident, but he had few particulars to offer about the man who would soon be living in our building. Some kind of motivational speaker, the mover said.

A motivational speaker? we wondered. Many professions were represented within our building, but never this. Among our number we counted a railway conductor, a quality-assurance expert, a landscape architect, a grocery-store manager, the owner of a coin-operated laundry, a stereo saleswoman and a retiree with a degree in the humanities who had been various things, including a drummer in a marching band and a repo man. But there was no one like a motivational speaker.

He wasn’t at all the way we had imagined. One by one, each of us caught glimpses of him in the hall or down in the courtyard or pulling his car in and out of the garage. Some of us exchanged pleasantries with the motivational speaker or introduced ourselves. It was from these various encounters that we compiled the following description of the man (eliminating any small details or characteristics upon which we could not reach consensus):

The motivational speaker is unkempt, with perpetual cowlicks in his stringy, unwashed hair. His clothes are ill-fitting and frequently marred with stains, bits of food or frayed fabric. He wears tennis shoes that were white when in pristine condition, but which now bear a weathered grayish-brown hue. His eyeglasses are thick, making his eyes appear small and distant, as if the viewer looking toward the motivational speaker were gazing down the wrong end of a pair of binoculars. He always seems to have Band-Aids somewhere upon his neck and hands.

Our initial reactions upon seeing him were: Surely, this cannot be a motivational speaker. Wouldn't a member of that profession dress in a more professional manner? Certainly, there has been an error; this man cannot be a motivational speaker.

And yet, whenever he introduced himself to one of us, he always called himself a motivational speaker. He always brought it up, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Some of us posed further inquiries to the motivational speaker, seeking additional information about where he spoke and whom he motivated, but his responses were elusive. He claimed to inspire "better living among people of all shapes and creeds," but we regarded this explanation as flimsy and possibly deceptive. Later, some of us dropped hints about the parcels we had noticed outside his door, hoping to obtain information as to the function of the objects therein. He would only tell us that his line of work necessitated the procurement of numerous supplies. Again, we thought: flimsy and possibly deceptive.

The combination of these three issues — the oft-delivered packages, his unpleasant grooming and his suspicious claims about his profession — formed a matrix of anxiety in our minds. At first, only a few of us worried that the motivational speaker would actively disrupt the way of life we had become accustomed to in the building. Before long, this concern had become a majority opinion among us; and by the end of his first month, we were united in our fears.

If any one of us still questioned the dangers that the motivational speaker had brought to our peaceful existence in the building, those doubts disappeared when one of us (the railway conductor, if you must know) happened upon him one afternoon at a coffee shop approximately one mile distant from our building. The man claiming to be a motivational speaker was working behind the counter of this franchise establishment. The conductor expressed some surprise at seeing the motivational speaker engaged in such work; the man blushed, as if he had been revealed in a situation he intended to keep secret from us. The conductor said, "Oh, hi. I didn’t know you worked here."

"It’s just temporary," the response came. "Things are kind of slow now with my speaking engagements."

The conductor did not say anything else as he received his latte. He reported his findings to us that evening, and we quickly came to a unanimous vote on the proposition that something was untoward about this man who went around saying he was a motivational speaker. We asked ourselves: What sort of person becomes a motivational speaker? Our answers: Someone who has met with great success in selling real estate, overcoming disease or some other sort of triumph, and who is now parlaying that success into speaking engagements; or someone who is not really that successful but pretends to be in the hope of earning money through speaking engagements; or someone who is boundlessly optimistic about life and confidently believes that he or she can motivate other people; or someone who is deeply cynical about the ease with which he or she can persuade other people to pay money to attend speaking engagements and buy videotapes and books; or someone who simply did very well in a course on public speaking and couldn’t think of any other way to put this talent to use.

The man who had moved into the building recently did not appear to match any of these descriptions, as far as we could tell, though perhaps he was a cynical con man or pretender. The problem with this theory was that, at least in our presence, he did not seem to be pretending that he had been successful at anything. Nor did he seem to have especially dynamic speaking skills. And he was working at a coffee shop.

Although it seemed obvious to us at the time that this so-called motivational speaker was likely to wreak havoc on the idyllic relations among the residents of the building, we realize that this is difficult to justify in retrospect. What precisely was it that we feared? Was it merely anxiety that this man was a fraud, and that his fraudulence would bring shame upon his neighbors? Did we believe his guise as a motivational speaker concealed something considerably more sinister, a scheme of criminal plots or unnatural experiments so evil that all of his neighbors would be engulfed? Or did we fear that he was telling the truth, that this was what a motivational speaker truly looked like off-stage? Did we fear being motivated?

No rational line of reasoning can explain why we were gripped by premonitions of calamity, but believe us: We were so gripped. Something was amiss, and so I (the aforementioned retired drummer, humanities graduate, repo man, etc.) suggested that our surveillance efforts were insufficient. The only way to protect the building, I told the other members of the association, was search and seizure. Or at least the search part. The seizure could come later, if we found anything worth seizing.

A few of the association members objected to this plan, but it passed by a solid margin. Naturally, since I had proposed the plan, they elected me to carry it out. Nevertheless, considering the votes cast at the association meeting, one can hardly hold this first-person-singular solely responsible for the actions that ensued. I am merely acting as a spokesman here. "We" are just as responsible as am "I" and therefore it is entirely appropriate to continue this narrative in the first-person plural in which it began.

By means of stealth we gained entrance to his one-bedroom unit on the second floor — means of stealth learned during years of work as a repo man, which we need not recount in detail here. Suffice it to say, we gained entrance to the unit of the supposed motivational speaker while he was out one afternoon, while we also kept a watch upon his movements inside the franchise coffee shop, in case he might return home unexpectedly. Suffice it to say, our means of gaining entrance left behind no scratches or marks of any kind on the door or its frame, no indication that we had ever been inside the unit.

Our immediate impression once inside was that the self-proclaimed motivational speaker had not done much unpacking since his arrival in the building. Many of those dusty crates remained exactly where they’d been left by the movers, only now they had numerous unopened parcels piled atop them. Indeed, the only visible furnishings were the minimum necessities: a couch, a table upon which to eat, a couple of chairs arranged around the table, a few lamps, a television and videocassette recorder, and, in the bedroom, a bed and a dresser. The walls were bare of posters, calendars or decorations of any sort.

Although, in retrospect, this state of affairs might not seem especially incriminating, at the moment of our entry into the alleged motivational speaker’s home, the spartan quality of his accommodations only heightened our belief that things were awry. Surely this was not how a motivational speaker would live. And this scene did nothing to douse our fervent desire to see what was inside all of those crates and packages.

We had come prepared for the possibility that some of the parcels would be sealed. We had brought along tools of the trade, enabling us to open these boxes surreptitiously, to peek inside and then reseal the containers. If any evidence existed to prove what this man was up to, in all likelihood it would be inside the unopened parcels and crates.

The first couple of boxes we peeked into contained nothing sinister, only clothes, kitchen appliances, odds and ends such as plastic bags of nails and screws or stacks of magazines — the sort of junk one might expect to find inside the boxes of someone who had recently moved into a new domicile but who hadn’t had an opportunity to unpack everything. These things neither confirmed nor refuted his claim to be a motivational speaker, and they did not affect our suspicions about him one way or the other, and so we continued searching.

We discovered one of the crates was filled with thousands of pamphlets labeled "Better Living," which did in fact appear to be the sort of literature a motivational speaker would hand out to the audience at a speaking engagement. In hindsight, one might think that this finding would have allayed our fears about the man, and prompted us to seal up the crate and leave his unit. Instead, the pamphlets only made us wonder whether this man had hijacked these materials from a legitimate motivational speaker. Perhaps he had murdered a motivational speaker and stolen all of his paraphernalia, and now he was attempting to take over the speaker’s identity, capitalizing upon the success of this man whose life he had taken. A preposterous notion, you may say, but we legitimately feared that such atrocious deeds had come to pass, and thus we felt it was incumbent upon us to open some of the smaller boxes in search of further evidence.

Because the packages wrapped in brown paper would be difficult to open and reseal without leaving behind traces of our invasion, we opened a box that seemed to have been taken out of its outer mailing wrapper. Its contents proved to be a single videocassette labeled with the same title borne by the pamphlets.

Though it may have been more prudent to sneak the tape out of the domicile and watch it in safety elsewhere, we chose to view it on the premises. We turned on the new resident’s television and placed the tape into the videocassette recorder. We were then surprised indeed to see an image of the same unkempt man who had recently moved into our building. He was standing on a platform in front of a large audience. The clothes he wore were not all that different from those he typically wore when see around our building — somewhat cleaner, certainly, but still far from suave — but somehow his entire appearance was transformed. He wore the same glasses, but now his eyes were perfectly visible, as if the direction of the binoculars had been reversed. Now his eyes were magnetic, his voice melodic, his speech articulate and poetic and humorous.

We wish that we could recount here exactly what it was he said during that speaking engagement captured upon the videotape, but our summary of it would be pitifully inadequate. Despite ourselves, we found ourselves enraptured in watching his performance. How could this be? How could this poorly dressed man with such an inadequately decorated condominium who was working at a franchise coffee shop be such an effective motivational speaker? How could our suspicions about him have been so misplaced?

It was only while watching that videotape that we became acutely aware of how misguided we had been, how much shame we deserved for having conspired against the motivational speaker and for having illegally entered his unit — yes, we freely admit that it was an illegal act, and we throw ourselves upon the mercy of any legal authorities who may choose to take action against us. Watching this tape, we felt goose bumps and looked down to see the hairs on our arms standing up. Better living, he said. Surely, we thought, there must be a better way to live than this. He’s right, he’s so right. We must change our lives, we must be more charitable toward those unlike us, we must strive to make the world a better place, we must enjoy our own lives more at the same time that we are making the world a better place, we must stop illegally entering other people’s places of residence, we must stop using burglary tools—

We were so caught up in watching the videotape on better living that we hadn’t heard the railway conductor’s signal that the man was returning from the coffee shop. Even the sound of him unlocking his door barely registered. It was only when the door swung open and he stared at us sitting there, watching the tape, that he said, in a voice much different than the one he used during his speaking engagements, "What the hell are you doing in here, uh, Rutland? That’s your name, isn’t it? Rutland?"

We pointed mutely at the TV, trying to think of something to say.

"Well?" he said, adjusting his glasses. We could not see his eyes, not in the same way we could on the videotape; they did not have that magnetic look.

"Roger. My name is Roger Rutland. We, uh... This tape is excellent."

"That still doesn’t answer my question. I’m going to call the police."

We pleaded with him — again, I feel it is wholly appropriate here to speak for the entire association, even if I was the only member in the room at the time. We pleaded with him not to bring the authorities into this matter. After having seen his inspirational message on that videotape and having been inspired, we thought he would be more sympathetic toward us, but no matter much we begged and beseeched, he would not remove that hardened expression from his face. We could hardly blame him, though. We imagined what it would be like to be a motivational speaker, living among us, surrounded by suspicious neighbors. In such circumstances, how would you motivate yourself to motivate others?

He dialed 911. We began to say something about why we had been so curious about him, what had driven us to such deeds, but we did not know where to begin. We tried to explain the shared culpability of all the association members, but he did not seem to understand what we were saying. We called out the names of the other members of the association, the other residents in the building, but no one would come to the aid of the spokesman. Not one of the others had the courage. We are gutless cowards. Don't we realize we must remain united in our endeavors, come good or ill? That we should not abandon our spokesman, popularly elected with a clear mandate, he who has taken such great risks for our common good?

Finally, there is a knock on the door and someone announcing himself: "Police." The motivational speaker goes to open the door.

We are such fools.