by Mari Reiza
He can’t tell whether she knows where he is going. But his course is set so he goes on, just follows it now.
‘However, the maid that opened the door smiled at him sweetly. He had never seen such a sweet smile before, not even on his mother’s face, and was truly elated.’
She smiles at him, perhaps not too differently from the way the maid must have smiled at the ugly man.
‘So at the end of his stay,’ he says holding her stare, ‘he asked the businessman to buy his young maid to take her back to Alonissos, and make her his wife.’
He’s not sure he got it right, whether she will be offended.
‘The merchant said to him that she was blind,’ he explains.
The silence seems everlasting.
‘If he buys her, isn’t she his slave?’ She is doubtful.
He should have known she would be.
‘The money is only compensating the wealthy businessman for taking her away,’ he replies. ‘She will be indebted to the Ikosian man, but he will pardon the debt when she marries him back in Alonissos.’
‘It always works well for men, doesn’t it?’ She feels right. ‘But can he decide on her death if she refuses marriage?’ She was always too smart for him.
‘The triple baggers could decide who lived and died amongst their family and slaves, and although they were not themselves immortal, they could set the time of their own death too!’
She is sceptical. ‘Will he ever tell her who he is? Let her feel his disfigurement? Will he let her know that he will maim her child?’
He is suddenly scared and feels tired, unable to fight her. ‘You ask too many questions today,’ he tries to laugh it all off.
She joins him in his laugh, ‘I am in a jolly mood and I do not feel like a sad story. Isn’t it so beautiful, the weather out there? Would you not like a stroll by the Seine?’ She likes to tempt him.
He looks at her with a mixture of surprise and disappointment. ‘Are you staying here for a few days?’
‘Why does that matter?’ she asks back. ‘We have today. We have now.’
He pours her another drink. She is dying for a cigarette. Had they been at the George V they could have had a smoking room.
‘Are you happy?’ he asks her out of nowhere.
‘If I was happier somewhere else I would not be here,’ she replies.
‘I need to see you again but at the moment I am trying to figure things out.’
She suddenly feels that everything about her dress is wrong. He has made her look ridiculous. His words have changed the colours of the room, and her clothes now look too bright for the occasion.
‘Why me?’ she says unable to hide her distress.
‘Maybe because you remind me of someone. Maybe because you are strong and the only one who can save me. Maybe because I am making a mistake. Maybe because you were there at a time when I needed to feel that I had a chance at things again. Maybe because you are blind to who I am or what I have done. I don’t know,’ he says it all in one go.
She stretches her dress and plays with her cigarettes before standing up. She feels the compulsion to iron the wrinkles on the bed, where she had been sitting, but hates herself for even thinking of it, such a woman thing to do, always to be worrying about the small details, she thinks before she takes her bag from the side of the bed and walks out of the room.
He looks at his briefcase on top of his roller case and thinks of taking his laptop out of its pouch but doesn’t. A bag in a bag on another bag, all black. He is so tired. He puts his jacket and sunglasses on and leaves the room, rolling his luggage out.
10
The Shortest Way to Happiness. Of years 2009–2012. Discipleship (I)
In which Vittal lives relentlessly and Enterprisers fantasise of limitless abilities.
As Confrères, we had to control our Squads, nurture our juniors, build our own corporate patients and keep leaders happy. But when we approached the window to enter the real leadership of Enterprise, to become Fathers, then life took on a whole new meaning. We were to become the ultimate inspiration.
Relentless drive
In which Vittal makes Father; Miriam leaves him; he abandons himself to work; and he falls prey to Alakrita’s deadly charms again.
As we were coming up for Father election, we were told that we would need to manage not just one or two but four or five projects at a time, take care of seven or eight junior colleagues, and fill in for three to four Truth Leaders (whenever they were playing golf).
In addition, we would have to survive all the take-offs and landings, the jetlags and hotel room air conditionings (had human beings been built to live like this?), and check all the boxes and tick all the attributes, and keep to the moral high ground. We basically had to become manic, workaholic, arse-licking, sanctimonious, worn-out pricks. Not much change from before, other than for the sanctimonious; we had earnt that.
‘It is tough, mate. The bar’s set high but rewards are awesome,’ Peter was always cheerful.
If you made it to Father, you got an amazing post-election party at a swanky venue and could move to Kiton and Ermenegildo Zegna su misura (which means made to measure but sounds better in Italian), Hermès or Marinella ties, Gallo socks at thirty pounds a pair (even in London you could get a nice bottle of wine for that) and Berluti shoes.
‘If dressing like that ain’t make you feel like you made up in the world, then I don’t know what could,’ Peter again. He explained to me you also got to travel first class and forget that just because you travelled first class didn’t mean that you were a first-class person. ‘Tis a lot to look up to.’
I thought that the years to Confrère had been bad, that we had squeezed so much out of the lemon we had got peel in the juice.
But as I listened to Peter, I wanted more. Because when Enterprisers had everything a man could want it still wasn’t enough. We were the comical creature that loved the process of attaining but not quite having attained. Wealth rarely buys peace of mind. You need power for that, which meant you had to keep going. And when we gained power, what would we want then? I should have understood why an intelligent man cannot become anything seriously. But I didn’t.
Vittal makes Father
My Father election party in January 2009 would always be remembered as the one where the cheese went missing. And this was definitely nothing to do with Who Moved My Cheese: An Amazing Way to Deal with Change in Your Work and in Your Life, a very much revered self-help title in the firm which I frankly never found that helpful.
The event was hosted at the Natural History Museum in London and, of course, we had the whole place to ourselves, both because Enterprise could afford it and because we were bound to secrecy and playing up security threats always felt exhilarating.
Fathers worldwide, established and newly elected, Truth Leaders and significant others, meaning wives, although they seldom felt very significant, had all been invited to the party. Miriam and I arrived late, as she had made sure to arrange her only business meeting of the month on that very day, or perhaps she was delayed by an extended manicure appointment. The first person we crossed coming in was Peter-Moses’s wife, who must have been wearing twenty kilos of jewellery around her neck. I was not sure how she could stand up. I would have wanted to introduce myself and chat about... her tartan (the only thing I knew about her), even if rumour had it that she would not be Peter’s wife for much longer. But of course we were not seated with them, and she had to rush off to her table.
I discovered we were with Niccolò instead, the muppet from the Rome office I had worked with in Milan, and I was envisaging an exceedingly crap evening from the word go, from when he stretched a hand to Miriam and I feared she may have carried a screwdriver in her huge handbag. (She had been known to carry such things around, and use them. Perhaps that was why she needed such large, expensive handbags.)
Miriam immediately asked to clarify if Niccolò was the Grande Dame fellow and I swallowed. ‘Manipulative scum-eating f
uck,’ she mumbled next under her breath and I drank every drop of alcohol I could get my hands on around the table in the next half hour, in the hope that dinner would pass quickly.
After dinner Bev delivered her usual incomprehensible speech, mixing up the names of the elects, and announced that Enterprise had prepared a present for new Fathers, a delicacies hamper. ‘But some cheeses have gone missing!’ she added in surprise cum disappointment to the list of unintelligible dribble she had pronounced throughout the evening.
I had heard of gold watches and fountain pens as promotion presents, but I had never heard of cheeses. And I regretted, on my Father’s election day, having that sinking feeling again, like on my first day at Enterprise, that I should have been at Goldman Sachs. Unlike many other successful people, cheese was the price Enterprisers paid to be humble.
Alakrita was the first to voice complaints. ‘How can Enterprise splash out on dinosaurs and a private band singing ‘We are the World’, plus three international circuit speakers at ten grand a pop to teach us to have an orgasm whilst thinking about ourselves, yet keep our election present down to cheese!’
I should have told her it was twenty-five grand per speaker. ‘Alakrita, it’s to make sure our status doesn’t go to our heads,’ was all I said. Alakrita, my dick’s desire.
And next everyone was talking about the missing cheese.
‘Who moved my cheese? Who moved my cheese?’ Peter was yelling amused across the room.
‘Is there a gold watch in the cheese?’ Hammi was shouting, half-inebriated from a nearby table, as someone who didn’t need to give a fuck about gold watches or cheese.
Music came to the rescue, as if the event was trying to be some sort of party!
Next, Bev approached me to dance.
‘What?’
She would not take no for an answer. She was highly intoxicated, but it was probably the only way that she could stomach those ridiculous speeches.
I was worried that she would fall on me. Death on election day crushed by an elephant, like in that novel of the man who does not want to attend his hundredth birthday. I had not wanted to attend my Father election either, but at least that man had managed to get someone else killed by the elephant. He was cleverer than me.
That was not all.
I learnt from Peter over a late drink at the bar that evening that I owed my promotion to a killer chart. He had managed to convince the elections committee that I was an amazing thinker, to do with that survey-based curve showing how superior quality paper could make employees and customers happier.
‘FUCK!’ was all I could say.
That had been that slide by Mike, the one where Rich had found a mistake now to be perpetuated ad infinitum.
‘The Enterprise PAper Matrix, EPAM,’ I repeated incredulous to a drunken Peter, who could not care less whether EPAM was true, false, a con or the name of a bunny girl. Correction. He would have stood to attention if he thought it was a bunny girl.
‘It could become a household name in the next few years and they will write a book about it to be available in all good bookstores,’ he joked at my expense.
I toasted with Peter, thanking heaven we were doing God’s work!
Still, no one found the cheese that night, and Bev sent an All-Fathers email on the day of Epiphany, at midday, expressing her disappointment that the Fathers of Enterprise had not risen to the occasion and failed to live up to the integrity that was expected of them. She couldn’t believe that someone had run away with the cheese.
I understood after that party that my new Fatherhood status was to be more of the same at ramped-up intensity, with more at stake. Someone had screwed me in an extra turn.
We thought that we were good as long as we were moving.
‘A hundred things to do, only one thing to be,’ we kept being told.
We were restless by nature, we were doers even before we were thinkers. It was like rest was bad. We hated our weekends most. God should not have rested on the seventh day. If we, Enterprise Fathers, had had anything to do with making the world, we would have kept going, if only to create some other scrap of wasteland. ‘God, call us next time!’
Our personal time charts showed eighteen-hour days, making secretary salaries comparatively competitive on an hourly rate (not really). We minimised Pool (non-patient) Time (PT) because it was embarrassing, and never took our full TOR (time off religion, or what normal people would call holiday) allocation. Not much change from the Confrère world there.
We often led Squads on tedious projects which were far from world-shaping, but still checked our emails with naivety every ten minutes – what am I saying, ten seconds – in case something we had done had actually changed the world. Again, not much different from when we were Confrères, although the number of life-changing emails one was cc’d on had been multiplied by a factor of one hundred.
But it was really our calendars that became much more complicated. They became hell on earth. That was the real change. Our calendars had meetings and calls back-to-back. They looked like colourful patchwork. None of the ‘Six meetings today? How on earth did I allow this hell to be scheduled?’ business. NO. EVERY minute of the day was accounted for. We were constantly double-booked and triple-booked. The more senior we were, the more booked we were, until we were reduced to offering five minute slots to which we arrived seven minutes late and had to solve the world in minus two minutes. It could be done.
The thing I soon realised was that when you were a Father, you did really live in a timeless, placeless world. You were constantly on air. We lived on the famous global conference call. We were in A but in reality we listened to B. It was time C but we were in D. It was fascinating. When you were on air, your time really stretched and you could achieve across people and dimensions. Anyone who has not tried such an experience has not lived life, not to its full potential. Of course, so much activity could raise logistical challenges, especially as we had a duty to involve as many people as possible at any one time in any decision. This meant a lot of schedules crossing, many people were always late. Almost nobody was ever on time, and this was especially true for conference leaders. Was it a casual disregard for bourgeois punctuality? It was not their fault. Planes were often delayed and client conferences constantly overrun. We had to deal with an imperfect world, outside Enterprise. We had not built our own planes yet.
Thus, we would start conference calls when there was CORE rather than FULL house. This meant that, as people joined late, we would try to match beeps to names, and if the speaker was skilled enough he could keep talking uninterrupted. If the late joiners were very senior, then someone would need to re-cap the call for them. It could be confusing and sometimes the speaker might address someone who was not there, but someone else would answer in his place as we were all interchangeable, and we hoped that they were from Enterprise (well who knows with technology security leaks these days?). But you could surely tell from the calibre of the answers anyhow.
We always concluded calls with next steps and this was a junior or female task, as it was thought of as lowly and secretarial. We all knew that there was a good deal of pointlessness to nearly each and every conference call, yet it was customary to thank each other and especially the conference chair, the speakers and any senior participant after the meeting. Very seldom would we have meeting minutes, with so many meetings, meeting summary emails would have required an extra hour a day developing repetitive strain injury from pressing delete.
The back-to-back scheduled activity meant that, when a meeting was re-arranged, it was worse than at Heathrow control tower. Slots for seniors had to be taken months in advance and could only be moved to occupy slots that had been cancelled or moved at short notice. Cancelling and re-arranging meetings must have taken Enterprise assistants a good part of their day and only the most skilled could handle it. We did not care, we just wanted the right meeting invites in our inbox.
Meeting cancellation rates and methods would vary across E
nterprisers. Below Confrère rank, cancellations could suddenly appear in your calendar or you could find out after waiting ten minutes into a fifteen minute call. Sometimes you would get an apology from a good assistant, often you would not. It was understood that patient work came first, for whoever was the senior person supposed to be having a meeting with you. Then, I learnt that if you were senior enough, playing golf could also come first.
We lived in a multitasking world, never mind that single-tasking was to become the next multitasking. ‘We are always too late on the fads,’ Alakrita agreed.
‘Perhaps we are too early for the next round on this one?’
You never knew because we needed to change modes all the time. It was the nature of our vocation. But we had set on multitasking for now, which meant that even when you managed to have a conference call with a full house and an engaged, uninterrupted speaker (almost NEVER), most listeners were on mute doing other things like typing and chatting, and checking the internet and making plans for Squad dinners. Trojan was often getting out of a taxi in a foreign country and struggling to agree the journey’s price with the taxi driver. Nal was always under search for not having taken his belt off whilst passing through one of JFK’s multiple scanners from hell. (I wondered whether he was just pretending whilst being jerked off by his personal Thai masseuse at some dodgy parlour in downtown Detroit.) The really clever ones, like Alakrita, may have been listening to two calls at the same time, double-tracking or even triple-tracking like the Wolf of Wall Street, which felt fucking bizarre to me when I had tried it.
It all usually meant that when the energised speaker opened the call to questions there was invariably silence, or a moron politely demanding for the last sentence to be repeated. ‘Idiot!’ It was usually Tobias who increasingly lived in his own world.
