by Mari Reiza
I destroyed all my How to be Successful and How to be Happy books, which had become unwelcome enemies, torn and wrinkled. It was trash. That wasn’t happiness. I tried to find comfort in old Inspector Morse episodes I had watched back in Oxford instead, when I still had a life ahead of me and had not known it would go like this. But even then, the ITV Player turned against me, and I ended up watching the series with a recurring Skoda ad peering across the screen, constantly cursing God for allowing malfunctioning technology to take over our lives, and promising to never buy a Skoda even if I managed to survive to worship Lucy and keep her and myself alive.
Enterprise is not human
After Lucy’s death, I started appearing at the office less and less. I said that I was undergoing a personal trauma and everyone backed off.
Personal trauma was like an Ebola outbreak for Enterprisers. They would stay away until it got sorted out or everyone with Ebola died. If someone brought them a piece of news remotely, at no risk to them, whilst they were couching, having some popcorn or cutting their nails, then they could be thankful for being allowed to rejoice in their good fortune, or in someone else’s misery. Otherwise they would stay well away.
I thought a lot during my retreat.
Enterprise was not human. All was ill. We were wrong, crippled antiheroes divorced from real life. My world was constructed wrong. It was crowds of blind strangers, fragile people clinging to the slippery hand-holds of status. It was the most miserable group of people I had ever seen, just killing time.
And we floated, we were lighter because we had no heart.
‘Tear a hole through my shirt and put a hot sweaty palm on my back,’ I would shout to my empty living room, ‘just so that I can feel some humanity.’
Culture doesn’t make people; people make culture. And if love is not in our culture, then we will be lost forever. We were machines, inventory shipped from project to project, from office to office, or as Peter used to say, over-excited zombies moving automatically between half-warm poisoned bodies in an orgy. It had become a will like a machine’s, following someone else’s vision.
It was animal kingdom, fear the man.
But we shouldn’t have thought that this was not human. Because this was us, what we could do and what we did do, and it was evil, and evil was us. Evil was unfortunately human. And so I began the gruesome unravelling that comes when one starts questioning his own trusting power. Could I ever have faith in myself again?
I rewatched that old French film: Un Homme et une Femme (A Man and a Woman). The intimacy, the togetherness and the empathy between human beings. I kept thinking of myself stranded in the middle of nowhere with no one but another Enterpriser, and remaining unable to feel any of those things. I could imagine the film’s lovely soundtrack running incessantly in the background and the viewers mesmerised by the inactivity between the two characters who kept playing Two Truths and a Lie. They would ask for their money back.
Would this rustiness of the heart have happened if we had been able to smell the sea? A character of Joseph Conrad said that in terra firma men go to the small devils of incoherent, pointless pursuits, and it is only at sea, when faced by the fundamental matters of the world, that they can break the chains of their own passivity. If we could have only smelled the sea, none of this madness would have happened, I thought. Lucy loved the sea.
I concluded that my soul was larger than the ordinary reality I had found myself trapped in. But I needed to start reasoning again. I thought that I would rather be a sinner than not human. Swearing, hitting, smoking, drinking, jerking off, gambling, pornography, and whatever else. ‘Give me a flip chart for an Every Switch into One Branch (ESiOB) tree!’ I shouted, wanting to mock my previous life. I wanted to sin. I wanted to feel and to love, and to say what I thought, and to be drawn to beauty and to stop being ashamed and fearful. I didn’t want to be pure, to always do the right thing and plan for the future, but to have moments of choice, freedom and danger, packed with selfish desire yielding to fate. I wanted to trust fate to sort things out anyway she liked. I didn’t want to carry the world on my shoulders anymore, and to live on planes and in conference rooms, taking decisions for things that I did not understand. Human beings were not supposed to live like this. It was enough. I did not want to be arrogant and selective and oppressive, and fake and uninterested and not interesting. I wanted to breathe fresh air, to see the light and feel the wind on my skin, and I wanted to have time and to use my brain.
‘Dad, help me to live. Am I allowed to live? Is that in the plan somewhere? Dad, I need to live or I will die. Trust me. You have to trust me on this one. It is the right thing. It is not like the marriage to Miriam, I promise. I cannot stand watching any more of these tortured and torturing souls, frosting their insides for some higher purpose that I do not comprehend.’ I added, my chest bursting with agitation, ‘For the enemy hath persecuted my soul; he hath smitten my life down to the ground; he hath made me to dwell in darkness, as those that have long been dead,’ from Psalm 143.
I decided we needed poetry more than ever in a world where marketing and sloganism had sucked the meaning out of life. We needed precision. We needed small details. We did not need a slideshare strategy for happiness, we needed a book of poetry. And I had personally accumulated so much fucking dirty laundry. I could not see through things anymore. Could I ever get the stench out through poetry? How do people live with all the baggage? I could suddenly empathise with men developing selective memory with age; it was an evolutionary advantage, a necessity to keep on living. I felt buried in dirty laundry. This really had to be like living in Gomorrah’s land in the outskirts of Naples, surrounded by heaps of rubbish.
‘La nature humaine est effroyable. Human nature is frightful,’ someone, no, probably a lot of people, had said it before. I was almost sure that it was in a play by Molière. I felt reassured that I had come to the same conclusion as one of my heroes. But I needed to keep positive. It had been A Long Way Down for me in the past decade and the only way was up now. Positivity was the key here. Perhaps I could meet sexy actress Imogen Poots on the roof of the Coq d’Argent, ready to jump off like in the film, and we would elope to Spain on holiday and save each other by writing poetry. ‘Clarity of mind and positivity,’ I urged myself. Still you could not blame me for giving in to dreams because anything would make more sense than what I had in real life.
I thought of the history of Enterprise in one hundred objects. Instead of a Minoan mask, an iron cross or a Gutenberg Bible, what would we have exactly? Headphones? A BlackBerry? An IBM laptop? A BrightCell presentation? An iPhone? A Tumi bag? (And I obviously need to clarify that I had nothing against BlackBerry, IBM, Tumi or Apple who may have been paying my salary for years.) Objects told us about our history and history determined how we lived: La haine. The hatred. La Nature Humaine est Effroyable, that could be the title of the exhibition. Human nature was timeless. We hadn’t learnt anything.
But things were going to change. I was going to change.
Yet, how could I tell people that the person they had known for years was a fake and that there was a real me coming out? Vittal 2.0, in your home soon. They would laugh and think that it was a mid-life crisis and deep inside they would panic, repeating to themselves that I could not do that. I was breaking the rules. No one could get out. How many times had I heard that! We were all in it together. No one could go back. What would happen if I got out? I could not get out. They needed to be right about that so that they could go on living.
I was tired. I was tired of not professing any real political views nor a self-standing opinion on current affairs, of showing neither cultural curiosity nor a liking for intellectual debate. I was fed up with exchanging Byers & Prigs-type indicators, academic scores and Two Truths and a Lie. I was bored by elevator speeches describing people in five minutes as if that was all the complexity their characters deserved. I was worn out with the influencing techniques and the networking games. What was wrong with listenin
g to people over a beer? I was infuriated that I could not discuss the World Cup scores with clueless colleagues, and was instead forced to indulge in solitary ways to be social. Enterprise had built me a wide network but I still had no friends. And I concluded that digital-virtual was wonderfully enabling but had failed to produce beauty. It did not offer proper interplay at different levels, a canvas for giving birth and making love and just plain dying in slow motion, giving us time to think. Where had all that gone? What did I really know of the people with whom I had shared my fate for the past fifteen years?
I knew that Alakrita had been bitten by a scorpion at the age of six (a truth that looked like a lie! she was good at playing the game) and that she liked her socks folded neatly in rows. She didn’t need to, her dad’s name would have got her into Enterprise all the same, regardless of her sock-folding patterns. I did not know that she had cut off her ten-year engagement three days before her wedding because her fiancé had requested anal sex, which she thought was derogatory to women and possibly meant that he was gay. Alakrita, my dick’s desire. I did not know that she was in her ninth cycle of IVF (well, I only knew after Felicity’s moral foundation play), and that the same jerk who wanted anal sex did not want to marry her until he was assured that he was not getting damaged goods. I did not know that she had been passionate about Indian dancing when she was little, or that she dreamt of living in Paris one day. I did not know that she had watched The Lunchbox recently and cried (hard to believe!) or that her mum and my mum had been born in the same hospital.
I didn’t know that Trojan’s mum had lived in a mental asylum for the past ten years and that she called periodically to tell him that she had died. She had apparently tried to shoot his dad some years before when he attempted to run off with a talented stripper, and Trojan had freaked out because it had been all over the papers. How on earth had Felicity found out? I did not know that Tobias had been sending postcards to China over the past three years with mechanical regularity, to his tiger-mothered children living with his soon-to-be ex-wife. Except that they were not really his children but those of his twin brother (he actually had a double!) because his wife had found out that he was infertile.
I didn’t know that Mike’s dad treated him like a loser and favoured his brother who was a CFO at a top oil company and paved his parents’ home with petrodollars. I did not know that Matt’s mum was dying, or that Nal's third kid was born with some unpronounceable syndrome and he was growing up alone with a Mexican nanny and a Colombian security thug at his Colorado ranch because, ‘It is better like that for everybody.’ I had no clue that Clara had a twin sister (did we positively select for twins at Enterprise?) who had got the wrong side of the coin and become a belly dancer to pay for Clara's education, before giving herself with verve to whoring in a Catholic brothel which she found character-forming as a life career. This was all the more disturbing because Clara had been the one, despite her contented nun expression, who for years could never be persuaded to remain clothed.
And Peter, he didn’t even have a father! He hadn’t been a truck driver’s son after all. But we know that people without fathers tend to believe that anything can happen. For all I knew, Peter may be the next Earl of Lindsey!
And the sins of these people should have been so pleasing to me, because it meant that they were more than peas. You will agree, Reader, that to be successful, to be a hero, doesn’t mean to be untouchable. There may be nothing wrong with undermining people’s status and showing that they are vulnerable. This may reinforce their position and the fact that they are sacred. But, at the same time, these sins also confirmed that my colleagues were liars, hiding below that veneer of morality. How on earth could they take the moral high ground when they had been exposed? Emperors can’t lose their clothes, not when they have claimed that they never will. Disrobed to be humbly human after all. Felicity’s moral foundation, was that a fatal end or a hopeful beginning?
Why were we ignoring these major parts of our lives when we were reaching out for success and happiness? How could we suspend belief and pretend that these were not our lives? Professional advancement was our only bedrock. We thought that we didn’t need to be human but look godly. It suited us not to get too intimate, not to get to know, because we would never give credence to L’Elegance d’un Herisson (The Elegance of a Hedgehog).
I had read somewhere about a renewed hunger by humans for shared physical experience. ‘Music sales have fallen whilst festivals are booming, print and individual museum visits are in decline whilst events and exhibitions thrive with people looking to share a civic space. Offices have gone open plan and hotel lobbies are full of guests, albeit solitary on their laptops. They are still in the company of other guests, when they could have chosen to be upstairs in their own rooms alone.’ Trend spotters want to believe in this renewed hunger to share with our human fellows. But it is not, I concluded. It is solitude, solitude best enjoyed in company. And that hasn’t changed in years. It is only that there are more lonely people now who need to be side by side, generating warmth and safety. It is so easy to market. There are millions and millions of dollars to be captured out there in civic space warmth, fake warmth. But what are they exactly sharing, these bodies, other than pretend warmth in numbers? You can be surrounded by vivacity and be very much alone. Do they really give a damn about each other? No, this is not companionship; it is shared isolation. They don’t want company, they want an audience. Not even an audience, a backdrop. That’s what Enterprise had provided, a backdrop.
Even when I had thought I had met a real person at Enterprise, a glow from an open window on a sleeper train shooting through the night across a tundra, opening to share his human flaws with other humans, it had been a forgery, a theatrical mise en scène. Like Daniel, the short, fat, gay Truth Leader with the voice of a clown, who acted with the assurance of nerve of blue blood. The one who had shared the Starbucks coffee with the PEN-ers. His small, dark-rimmed glasses worn on the tip of the nose could remind of Mary Poppins reading the level of cough syrup and gave him an intellectual air. He acted loud and friendly, loving to young people with a certain potential. Rahim had once looked at him like his Patroclo, as Daniel swore and name-dropped and scribbled incomprehensible but genial instructions on his office flip chart. And despite Daniel being the type of freaky man to have the shade of his petunias match that of his red leather sofa and his coffee table sent from DePadova in Milan, both a shade darker than his lovely expensive wine fridge packed with pink-coloured energy drinks, he had at first looked the part of an open-hearted man, discussing details with dear friends of the surrogate mother to his child-to-be, and builder issues in his recently acquired French château which was being turned into a microbrewery. His personal life was his pride, he claimed! He had the human touch. He was flesh and blood and emotions. But all he was was a perfect forgery, a showman knifing into you until he felt part of you, like a friend.
But he wasn’t.
None of us were. None of us made the time to know or let our real selves be known to each other. It hadn’t been important. All those little things I would never discover about what made the human bit in each of my colleagues tick! I wanted to break out shouting and screaming over Enterprise frozen soil, and breathe its sacred air, to remember forever how it felt to be dead.
I lived in DEATH.
Is there more to ordinary people than what they do? We were what we did. We were Enterprise. We were dead. I did not want to live amongst dead people anymore. Then I preferred to live alone with my words. My poems were not much but at least they were alive. In my head I was 'Destination Unknown': I didn't know where but I was going. My poems would take me there. It was all that I had left.
Peter has gone insane
It was December and I was going back to the office with a plan.
I stopped by Coffee Plantation, where they welcomed me like a prodigal son. It felt good that someone had missed me. I had missed them too. I sat at one of the high tables where a
ridiculously over-aged and over-gadgeted, well-manicured male, wearing huge headphones that made him look like a monkey, was talking loudly over Skype to a mate in Australia. He was claiming to be some sort of yoga student about to move in with a hot chick to share an apartment in Miami. ‘By invitation,’ he insisted. He must have been implying that the invitation came because he was such a hot pants. Next, he was sending a photo to his interlocutor of the female in question as they spoke, probably a shot of a random beauty off the net. I would not have been surprised if there had been no person at all at the other end of his call, and that he was making it all up for the benefit of the whole coffee shop. He was being that loud. The bottoms of his black cotton track-suit kept sliding to let us glimpse the crack of his arse, whilst he was explaining how he would have enough money left to go to India after Miami, despite his current course being so expensive. ‘I will replenish my kitty in Miami coaching slimming exercises to older women in much need of my services,’ he assured all of us in the coffee shop, who didn’t want to hear it.
I closed my eyes in despair. Unfortunately, in the past month that I had stayed away, the world hadn’t changed. Although as soon as I got to the office, I found that it actually had!
Enterprise was selling, if there was enough to tantalise a prospective buyer.
It had been decided. Not unanimously, but nearly. This was the news awaiting me: Peter was now playing king under constant fear that someone else was about to play ace. (I never knew if the quote was first used by Bernard Shaw or Eugene Field but I’m using it and shamelessly misquoting one of the two.) Peter was apparently also reeling with pain inflicted by a woman he had fallen in love with outside Enterprise. That was the second piece of news. I thought that Peter and pain for a woman were antithetical concepts. Things could not have changed that much that quickly, surely.
