by Mari Reiza
She had no interest in kids, only smoking, and she did so as and when she pleased. Her look that melted me told me as much.
‘You will set fire to yourself one day,’ I added before I kissed her as passionately as I could without arousing suspicion.
‘Well, you might like that, wouldn’t you?’ she replied casually, then went on to tell me proudly that all the assistants had complained, as well as her peers, including ‘tossing back-stabbing Nal’, and even Tom M., our CEO.
The office firefighting trainees had been to talk to her. The warden of the building had had her summoned. They had called in the police and the New York firefighting service to reason with her. But she was still here, her mulish self, all in one piece, looking pretty. Alakrita, my dick’s desire. I had been so right to come and see her.
I thought of doing a little book of songs and poems, Lifestyles of the Hot Smoker, in her memory. Becoming Confrère seemed to have freed my creativity. I definitely seemed to be writing more.
‘Vittal.’
She came up close to my face and I feared her lips and my mind rallying.
‘In life you have to fight to get what you want,’ she said blowing smoke in my face. ‘Come here, come to New York.’
She was inviting me to her red lips, and all I could see were millions of rose petals hiding her naked standing body. She was an American beauty asking me to America. I had to oblige. I could now confirm that back in London, the first thing I would do was to ask Bev for a transfer.
Bev responded to the American cornucopia with mockery. Well, she was Scottish.
‘New York is not Edinburgh, and one needs to keep close to one’s roots,’ she insisted. She had apparently asked to work from her castellated house in the Edinburgh suburbs when she had made Father, coming to London only once a month, but it had not been possible, she said.
I pointed out that she had not kept close to her roots then.
‘Why America?’ she almost cried at me. ‘Huge guys with cosmetic replacements, Ken-like hyper-white dentures and shiny paint jobs, driving around in vast cars pondering about what to eat next,’ she paused, perhaps realising she had overreacted, I thought at first. ‘This is when they are not eating IN their cars! Rubbish.’
But, wasn’t that just like what she did? She was known to drive one of those huge Range Rovers costing over one hundred thousand pounds to pollute the planet, and she certainly ate like a pig, probably in and out of it.
‘Living in a place like America, at a pace like Americans, is to destroy humanity and the earth,’ she continued.
She had been doing so much of that environmental project crap and it seeped out of her, even if she still kept her 4x4.
‘Why would you want to live somewhere that has gone from barbarism to decline without passing by civilisation?’ Her words were borderline vicious, certainly un-PC and didn’t follow Enterprise’s code of ethics, but she obviously felt very strongly about losing me to America. ‘Do you really think that you have better prospects out there?’
The obvious answer was yes.
Why on earth would I have wanted to go to the stupid country whose fucked-up medical system had killed my granny if it wasn’t to become a millionaire?
On the other hand, I also found myself abhorring the ‘rags to riches’ crap most Americans still believed in. Their upward mobility bullshit gave them such a false sense of justice. What about helping working class people rise within their community rather than marketing to death the odd isolated case that upgraded to the next class? But then, I yearned to become that marketing case. Even if I knew that the US lifestyle was bad, my university friend Carlo had been adamant about it, talking from his own schooldays experience when he had been hosted at that D.C. household where the kids survived on ice cream from the freezer and the family parrot died of neglect.
But what did I have in London? What did I have to lose?
The case was quite clear for me, although I was finding it difficult to explain to Bev, unprepared and under pressure as I was, and all I could manage in the end was: ‘I have always wanted to be an Englishman in New York.’
Really?
Bev was about to come down on me like a ton of bricks. Her eyes had even stopped ticking, arrested in surprise that I could say something so dumb.
‘Vittal, you are NOT an Englishman, you are an Indian boy and you should never forget it.’ It sounded final. It was also racist, a sackable offence, AND TRUE.
And I knew what she meant, that she would never sign my transfer, and that my dreams of nights smoking away with Alakrita would be going up in her smoke. And at that moment all I could hear was Carlo singing De Gregori to me, a naive romantic with a kid’s moustache: between life and death I was choosing America.
As predicted, Enterprise denied me the move.
Peter assured me that it would make no difference. He would staff me on his projects from London and I would work in America. ‘Where the shiny green of the plain is proof of God,’ I said to him all excited and he pissed himself with laughter. But even in this global world, I couldn’t help feeling that geography was destiny, that things were looking up for the new Buffalo Bill.
Sharing the love
In which Enterprisers live the dream; Vittal survives as a Confrère; and morale needs to get propped up.
We deserved to be loved; instead we were often misunderstood.
But at Enterprise we all knew how it felt, the constant pressure to achieve. ‘Shine, shine, shine, until you die.’ The burden of being special. Someone somewhere owed it to us to recognise that we were heroes, that we were doing the right thing and saving people. And they often didn’t. ‘Shame on them!’
So we prided ourselves in nurturing one another and worshiping our own leaders. For our leaders, planet Enterprise looked rosy. It was like, ‘Aha! here comes another admirer.’ They were repeatedly raising their hats in modest salute, to the tune of clapping hands. It remains one of the Universe’s greatest enigmas for me, how vain people manage to persuade others of their worth. Yes, I can now see there may have been an excess of deference in Enterprise like that inspired by pagan idols, so much exaggerated admiration, so much nodding. It was amazing people didn’t break their necks, that none abhorred how other people received credit for things undeservedly. One wondered who needed who more, the celebrity the disciples or the other way around.
We all praised one another for the number of peers we helped and mentored; Fathers talked to each other with a sense of personal affection and admiration; we obsessed over our mental well-being, that we needed to be the nurturing type to our own, to raise our health-index. (Well that was our business after all.) We were all involved, entangled, in pretend-love with each other, out of fear. We were giving up our lives in the search of appreciation, but we should have understood how appreciation isn’t love, and love does not need it.
Peter was great at playing the love game.
He had mentored over eighty per cent of our leadership at one time or another, and one hundred per cent of the Enterprise female population. Even if the female population was tiny that was a lot of fifteen-minute slots! He was a hero who provided for those he pretended to love, only to demand the fullest recognition for his care. In truth, this request humiliated him because, being clever, he was himself doubtful of the worth of his mentoring. But he was convinced that there was no other way in Enterprise. Being mentored was both free and necessary, even if you would have been freer without it, but you wouldn’t have survived in our world.
Trojan, Nal and Tobias would share stories with love in their eyes, of when Peter had told them how to write a strategy plan which had turned around a patient’s fortune over a twenty-minute phone call, or helped them think through their careers changing their course to make them better men. Loving the powerful could definitely get you to places.
But it was our duty, at every level, also to show care for those in supportive roles and even for colleagues that we helped leave Enterprise, preserving th
eir dignity, reputation and confidence, at least in the outside world. Internally, though, being advised to leave was like the plague. Although we still loved leavers for doing the right thing, which justified their and our specialness.
The truth was that we were lonely people, kind and cruel, arrogant and insecure, always only as good as our last achievement. We wanted love but we could not invest in it; we did not have the time – it would distract us from achieving. We were too busy doing important things, adding up numbers and ensuring our future happiness. No fruitful, long-lasting relationships would come from our way of life, and we thought that would be fine. Admiration would be fine, even if it did not live up to the love of need that decides human from machine when blood, bones and brains have become replaceable. It was a different kind of love, alien at first, then the only thing we knew.
Empowering wacky dreams
We loved mental wanking at Enterprise parties, it elevated us so that we could better admire each other’s divinity. These little episodes often reminded me of Catholic school when you were invited to chaperoned groups after church to discuss sexual abstinence.
At Enterprise it would work something like this.
Four Confrères in a room full of juniors, a luxurious room at a lovely country hotel. People would have received an invitation that would force them to drop everything and come from the four corners of the world. I was myself giving up a pre-Christmas motorcycling trip around La Loire with Carlo for this event: 8 am start sharp.
Nal would commence by saying to Trojan, ‘Christianity is a made-up religion.’
‘As opposed to what?’ Trojan would reply, ‘Hunger Games, for example?’
‘Hunger Games could be a religion in two thousand years,’ Tobias would enter into the conversation not to be left out.
By this time, a round of seated junior Enterprisers with twinkly eyes would have formed on the floor, around Nal and Trojan’s funky designer stools. Juniors liked the floor because of the connection to the earth, helping them to remain pure and in contact with their inner selves and their tribe chieftains. Sitting close to each other on the floor also helped reach a good posture for salvation.
‘But surviving two thousand years matters,’ Trojan would say, ‘it gives Christianity a different repute. Will Enterprise survive two thousand years?’ A trick question from our Machiavelli. We all knew in our hearts that Enterprise had to last two thousand years. Why would it not?
‘As a scientist, I sometimes struggled to believe in God,’ I would suddenly add, from my identical stool next to Nal. This was total bullshit, but being a Confrère, I was expected to enter these conversations with my peers. I ticked the box.
Tobias would next retort, from another identical stool besides me (Enterprise panels usually came in three if you were Fathers or above, like divinity, but we were four because we were not Fathers yet and things should not get to our heads): ‘Science has not displaced mythical thinking but become a channel for it. We are inhabiting an imagined world of myths and fantasies.’
There was a gasp from the audience. Juniors loved Tobias and thought he was a clever genius. I thought instead that he had definitely short-circuited by now, entered into a tale where he was a knight defending the world to lead it to the right future. And I worried that if his mental state went unchecked he could start building a war arsenal in his cellar in Hamburg during the weekends, letting his fictions run free. I would not have liked to be his neighbour, religiously carrying out my annual boiler inspection like a good citizen, only to be blown up by a first world war mine inappropriately stored by an Enterpriser on the edge. And it would make for such bad publicity!
‘Does Enterprise not believe in God?’ would be Nal’s incoherent new thought. ‘What do you think guys?’ he would add pretending chumminess with his enraptured audience. He would be looking for a gasp as big as Tobias’s.
And of course there would be no answer, because there never was. Admiration for leaders, and we were young leaders now, was such that aspiring juniors could never dream of rising to the occasion with a good answer. Anyway, it had been a rhetorical question. We did not give a fuck about what any of them thought, we didn’t expect them to rise to any occasion, until it was their turn, until it suited us. Nal just loved so much the sound of his own voice.
Let’s throw in a referendum, I should have said, Eurovision song contest style. What do people think? Send in your votes. If you think Enterprise believes in God press the number one on your laptop, otherwise press the number two. We promise you it is completely anonymous, and the results will appear live on the big screen, in a neat column chart using our very own BrightCell. But it would have been construed as mockery, perhaps.
Of course, we believed in God. Enterprise believed in God. We were God senders on earth, right? We prided ourselves on being objective scholars following hypothesis-driven experiments, but it was simpler: if God had sent you one of us he had decided that your company should live, and otherwise it should die.
‘All corporations believe in God,’ said Matt, el clandestino.
He was a loose cannon.
‘All America believes in God,’ he would add. ‘After all they are a fucking miracle, a place born of prisoners and violent delinquents who, for a while, managed to actually function as a great country.’
Nobody laughed other than Matt himself.
Nal would not be pleased; he would cross Matt out in his little notebook, despite insisting he was totally entitled to voice his own opinion, and he would himself go on elaborating endless crap regardless. Later on, he would perhaps ask me to have a word with him. Matt was my junior after all.
I would glance down our agenda.
Is our duty in life to make money? Why is it not to make art? Is it not to make life?
Next.
How to measure happiness: a watch that takes note of your moods and suggests you have a Guinness like in Minority Report? (We must have worked for Guinness recently, how could alcohol have got on the agenda otherwise?); a phone that rings when anyone does a Google search for happiness, like Mrs. Prada’s? (We must have worked for Prada too!).
There was also a concluding exercise where we would all have to hold hands.
We believed ourselves important men with big wacky dreams, almost as big as those of the managers we worked for. No, bigger. Bigger and better. We could solve anything. We would be discussing the sex of angels next, anything to hear the sound of our own voice. I must have known it was utterly nonsensical but I still couldn’t tear away from it.
Life as a Confrère
My first project as an elected Confrère was with cocky Mike, the Californian cordial, and thoughtful Rich from the PEN-ers under my wing. Mike knew it all and often fucked up, whilst Rich never wanted to say a thing but was invariably spot on.
I had followed Peter’s advice trying to build my own clients quickly, corporations that no one else in Enterprise wanted. I had gone for paper products because of the simple logic that people needed them for both their eyes and their arses. You would have thought this a bad move with everything moving to electronic, but some companies were doing well. Perhaps the fad of e-books, originally designed for NASA astronauts to reduce bulk and read in the dark, would dry up when space missions stopped, given they kept blowing up.
Anyway, it was good to pretend to have the moral edge with my controversial Ecological Paper stance. ‘All those land clearings for data centres, do you think that they don’t destroy forests?’ I told people like a broken record.
It was getting me noticed and that was what Peter-Moses had said that I needed to do. And to show that I supported my own shit, I was even asking my new assistant, who I shared with five other Confrères (wasn’t overworking lowly paid people immoral under our ethical code?), to print all my emails and fax them to my hotel for me to read every night. She hated me and I was probably overdoing it, but was enjoying my newly found authoritarian streak. ‘I can be a leader with some idiosyncrasies too.’
/> And what I was savouring even more was my junior Mike’s pain. For a Silicon Valley cock who had all sort of latest versions of mobile devices constantly strapped to his ass and thought he was to become the inventor of the next Facebook, my behaviour was excruciating, working in paper goods was excruciating. Helping a paper patient rethink packaging to reduce production costs and enhance branding and employee motivation was excruciating. And I was enjoying every minute of my arrogant minion’s excruciation.
After the paper project, I moved fast to work with Matt, el clandestino, and new-joiner Clara at one of Peter-Moses’s small clients in New York, the only client that he was prepared to share with me.
Still, Peter-Moses was making things happen for me and I felt like I was on a roll at Enterprise, favourably compared to Trojan who was busy licking Bev’s bum with Dimitri as a little helper (thank God I had managed to get rid of him). In moments when I needed encouragement, I pictured Dimitri’s sanctimonious speeches making Trojan’s vital organs catch fire, which would spread to the latest treatise by his bed entitled ‘How to Rip People’s Hearts Out’. He would have to write it all over again.
Clara was also a welcome addition to my team, being a woman. Or so I thought, that I would cherish working with a female for a change. I learnt she was one year below Matt, based in New York and self-appointed to the Latin society, as Enterprise encouraged representatives for all minorities mainly to fulfill political correctness targets and to ensure a fairer world. But contrary to all my combustive Latino sexy bitch expectations, Clara turned out to be a nun.
The first time we met, at the patient’s site in New York, I quickly undressed her mentally, as I was doing regularly by now with any woman I met. And I knew in an instant that she was a wilted flower. Her face had that nun expression with a sharp nose. Her hair looked like straw so that she wouldn’t miss chopping it off at the convent. She was pale like in devoid of blood and her body moved as if it didn’t know whether it wanted to live or die. Had Enterprise got to her that quickly or had she always been like that?
