by Ayad Akhtar
The foundation raised money, generated press, and, maybe most important, provided an excuse to ask the wealthy and influential for help. If sufficiently moved, they might do more than just open up their pocketbooks. Organizations like these, I would learn, depended on relationships with those who had access to money and power, depended on populating their boards with people who not only understood the stated mission but also made it their own. I would learn all this when I joined Riaz’s board myself, an invitation extended to me despite the fact that I had access to neither power nor money. But I did have a Pulitzer, Riaz joked, and more important, he felt my “somewhat contrarian” views would help keep the foundation on its toes. Most of the board agreed; I was elected with only one dissenting vote. That vote came from an avuncular sometime professor of Islamic studies, now a college dean, who’d tried to teach my works only to discover—filled as they were with extremists of various sorts; teeming with buried, toxic postcolonial resentments; compromised by concessions to dominant narrative structures—that his students could make no productive sense of them. To assign my writings—he’d contended at the vote and would later explain to me during a coffee break at my first board meeting, his genteel, Cambridge-inflected reserve tested by the fierce emotion he felt about the matter—was to discover how effective they were in galvanizing every negative impression of Islam one could imagine. I was not writing literature, in his view, but rather emotionally charged rhetorical delivery devices passing for art; it was anti-Muslim muckraking, offering deceptively compelling illusions of reasoned argument in service of the destructive tropes Riaz’s foundation was working hard to undo in the first place. Admitting me to this board was, in a word, a disgrace—though apparently not disgraceful enough to merit his leaving it. I took his animadversions in stride. What else was there to do but thank him for his thoughts and pretend I didn’t care?
Joining Riaz’s board exposed me to aspects of the world I’d only read about. He fast-tracked me onto the executive committee, then turned me into a trusted sidekick. I met Hillary at the State Department. I sat next to Elon Musk at a donor dinner prepared by Alice Waters herself at Chez Panisse. I went backstage at Hamilton with a group that included Mos Def. I went fly-fishing in Idaho with Fareed Zakaria, golfing at Pebble Beach with Neel Kashkari. I flew first class to Venice, where Riaz and I spent three days on the Lido at meetings with Muslim artists there for the Biennale, then we spent three days in Abu Dhabi at a conference devoted to Islamic microfinance. A week later, we were in Frankfurt to host a gala where we raised more than a half million euros to support gay Muslims being persecuted in Chechnya. In Chicago, we dined at Alinea with Jeanne Gang and John Malkovich. In London, I shared a samosa with an MP at Chutney Mary. At the American Academy in Rome, Don DeLillo spilled Chianti into my soup.
As I made the rounds of these exclusive haunts, I came to be seen (and to see myself) as an honorary member of the privileged class. Invitations poured in. To artist residencies in Wyoming and Marfa. To the juries of the film festival in Rotterdam and a drama award in Oslo. I was asked to oversee the dispensation of funding to young writers in the “Middle East.” At Sundance, they comped me in a multifloor suite; in Munich, I was put up in a villa built for the Fairy Tale King himself. One night, at a fund-raising dinner at Blue Hill at Stone Barns, an Italian industrialist and his wife overheard me complaining about getting work done in my apartment in New York—the construction on my block was deafening. They approached me after dessert with an offer to take up residence at their exquisitely quiet summer house on Lake Como. They would be traveling through the steppes of Asia in July and wouldn’t be using it. My neighbors next door, the wife informed me, would be George and Amal Clooney—if they were there.
I went. I didn’t finish the play I was writing. I was too busy playing basketball and drinking Aperol spritzes with the Clooneys’ houseguests.
I was getting used to asparagus season in the Marchfeld and Sauternes with my fois gras. It hadn’t taken me long—a mere eight months of playing Riaz’s show pony—to start taking myself for a latter-day Saint-Simon or Samuel Pepys. I noted details of meals eaten and hotel rooms booked. My Moleskines were replete with thumbnail portraits of the wealthy and powerful, their crepe de chine dresses and Italian wool blazers, their obsession with faience and face-lifts, their drunk, lazy tongues, the putrid odors of their scented aging, the hors d’oeuvres (and cocktail waitresses) chased across the room, the private jets, the summer homes, the winter homes, and absolutely everywhere—or so it seemed—the yammering about works of art they neither understood nor liked but on which they regularly spent more money than I expected to make in my lifetime. I imagined I was penning a coruscating catalog of the new aristocracy, an outline of their outlandishness, an indictment of the enduring, indelible stain of human status seeking. In fact, my journal was no such thing. It was fatuous and self-regarding, full of obvious critique and sloppy language. Worst of all—and I do hope it will not compromise too much the reader’s view of me, though I would understand if it did—I was a pig with women. The episode with Julia at the theater in the wake of Riaz’s first visit still haunted me—an object lesson in proximity to wealth as an aphrodisiac and the seemingly endless depth of my own racially charged sexual hunger—but oddly, not in the way it had been most remarkable, for the capacious, self-revealing pleasure that had subsumed us both. That elemental reciprocity appeared to have been lost on me. Instead I feigned interest and intimacy and offered mediocre, absent-hearted sex to more lovers than I’d like to admit. I didn’t seem to care. After all, there was so much fucking to be had and with so little effort.
In the words of George Monbiot, I’d become a neoliberal courtier, a subaltern aspirant to the ruling class, bearing the foundation’s not-for-profit coat of arms expressly for that purpose, an eclectic and exemplary defender not only of inalienable human rights and enlightened rage but also of freedom itself, both sexual and monetary, an eager frontline recruit for the purported progressive ideological battles of our time. My awakening from this stupor of self-congratulatory entitlement would be swift and brutal. An accumulation of private and public misfortunes—a copper penny rash on my palms, my mother’s death, the election of Donald Trump—would disabuse me of my will to benevolent privilege. I’m ashamed it took me so long to wake up to the bankruptcy of this purported moral vision. Until then, I was susceptible; I was culpable; I was a willing and enthusiastic advocate; this vision of the good life felt good indeed; I was a believer in the politically enlightened late-stage capitalist individualist creed; I loved Obama; I was tongue-tied with awe when I met Sergey Brin. Who could blame me? What more, what better, for me, for anyone else, did the world have to offer?
Before my tumble from this worldview, I spent more time thinking about money than ever before. I knew the life I was leading was predicated on capital. I knew I didn’t have any. How much longer would Riaz let me float along on the swollen river of his seemingly endless lucre? I didn’t know. Money was no object to him, of course, but I could see the writing on the wall. Whatever luster I possessed for those he used me to impress would eventually fade. They would tire of my ten-cent words and my canny political provocations. I would fall out of favor, and when I did, it would mean returning to life in my dim, tiny Harlem one-bedroom with only my imagination—and my iPhone!—as sustaining distractions. No more fancy scenery to oppose to my fear, to the constant worry that I mattered not a whit to anyone beyond myself. Put crassly, I didn’t want a life in which the 2 train was how I did most of my traveling. Indeed, I now despised the subway—its screeching, the press of its surly, smelly throngs, the predicate of predetermined stops that shaped my daily itinerary. With Riaz, I rode about in that sleek black Mercedes limousine that had so enchanted Emily on their night out. I felt the same about that quiet enclave on wheels as it slipped through the city’s hustle-bustle, parting the crowds, fetching us from one door, dropping us at another. If we walked, it was because we wanted to! I knew I would n
ever have money like that but also knew—had always known—the usual pittance that foundered in my checking account was not enough. I needed more. Much more. The example of my friend Danyal Ramin had haunted me for years. Danyal was likely the most extravagantly talented of my college classmates, a theater artist who’d studied in Vermont with the Bread and Puppet troupe before starting his own group in Brooklyn; a visionary designer and director whose arresting shows went up at the Public and were invited to Avignon and Salzburg; a singular voice hailed by critics as a New World heir to Tadeusz Kantor; and a man who’d gone for much of his adult life without health insurance. He got married. Had a child. The pregnancy was covered by Medicaid, and so was the new family, until they weren’t. When Danyal was diagnosed with a rare blood disorder, well, you can probably guess the rest of the story, its entropic denouement by now as much a staple of American life as apple pie: a well-meaning crowdsourced appeal online raised enough money to keep the wolf from the door, but only for so long. Treatment was expensive—the medications alone ran into the hundreds of thousands—but his parents found the money. He survived. His theater company didn’t. Neither did his marriage. Last I heard, he’d moved back home to North Carolina, where he was working at a Starbucks. At least the job gave him benefits. A once-in-a-generation talent, mind you. Making double-shot extra-wet lattes for real estate agents on bathroom breaks between appointments.
Danyal was but one of many I’d seen fall prey to the gap between the logic of their talents and the treachery of an American society that abandoned the weak and monetized the unlucky. You had to be brain-dead not to know you couldn’t really flourish in this country without inordinate amounts of cash or extraordinary luck. I’d been the beneficiary of the latter and had always worried how long I would make it without more of the former. In the wake of my experience with Riaz—my initiation (if you will) into the reality of the only good life in our great land—my concerns about money were no longer just prophylactic, various forms of worry about rainy days. No. Now I realized what I’d been missing all along. Here was true freedom. Serious money was the only path to liberation from the indentured servitude of twenty-first-century lower- and middle-class American life.
An artist? Really? Are you kidding me? And you expected what, exactly?
Indentured servitude. It was a formulation I took from Riaz. We spoke often and at length about what it took to flourish in what he called the System. Riaz was not alone in diagnosing social ills, bandying about the latest statistics, conceiving of paths to better futures for his fellow man, woman, and dog—these favorite pastimes of the moneyed class, though Riaz went deeper than most. To him, the System was fully evolved, by which he meant optimally effective and efficient. It specialized in the manufacture of debt, which was the great enabler of capital, the surest means to, yes, indenture the vast hordes of the lower and middle class (and the nation’s youth) to the process of money’s growth. For what grew now were not communities or economies but capital itself—and debt was the means, which meant it was also, now, the dominant cultural logic. Debt prescribed social realities, guarding and guiding the choices that made up most contemporary human lives—domicile, health, education, the prospects of one’s progeny, and now (and most centrally) access to the devices that did the lion’s share of one’s cognition. Of course, Riaz explained, debt had always been a way to entrammel the masses—it was from him I first heard that famous John Adams quotation: “There are two ways to conquer and enslave a nation: one is by the sword, the other by debt”—but something was different now. With the advent of Reagan and the innovations of Milken, this predation on the populace was now the very basis of our increasingly global economy. The current of anger growing across the world had nothing to do with immigration, he believed, but was all about the System that debt had created, an inescapable, asymmetrical, transnational force. The people paid into this regime with their catalogs of monthly debt payments and subscription fees, all to support what was now the only true political order of our time, a corporate regime that offered no representation, no vote, no participation in either the velocity of its appetites or the bearing of its destructive course. If you weren’t part of the System, you were just grist for its gullet; your life and the lives of those like you were mixed and milled into portfolios of fixed monthly payments—for everything from cars and college tuition to streaming services and same-day delivery—payments that accrued only to the benefit of the ever-increasing mountains of money that were our real masters. People felt all this without knowing it, Riaz would say, and the effectiveness with which the truth was kept from them was a sign not only of the System’s genius but also of its maturity. (Even the System’s own crises, like the near-collapse of the financial system in 2008, ultimately served—Riaz would explain—only to expand the reach of its ever-more-encompassing power.)
If he seemed to speak in moral terms, it wasn’t because he believed things needed to change. He felt certain no such change was possible. But to “make a real mark”—he would say—you needed to understand what everyone was up against; there was no excuse for anything less than all the clarity you could muster about the world as it truly was. Back then, I thought I understood what mark he wanted to make and imagined I was helping him to do it, however modestly. In truth, I thought I understood it better than he did: that the charity was cover—psychological and otherwise—for his race to a billion dollars. Once he had that, I thought, he would finally feel redeemed, finally feel that he was the best of what Americans thought they could be, finally know that he belonged.
It turns out I was projecting. I had no clue what he was really up to.
And it wasn’t until I saw my own money grow that I would find out.
5.
When my mother died, in May of 2015, she left me $300,000. I did the usual thing someone in my shoes did: succumbed to the advice of a financial planner, who offered to invest it in the stock market for a fee. The concerns I owned went down and up and down again, and after months of fretting—for, in the circles in which I now traveled, all the talk was about another looming financial crisis—my holdings showed a net gain of $14. Riaz offered to invest the money for me. We were enjoying a drink in his kitchen, a superlative Japanese whiskey for which he’d paid some astronomical amount of money. Chilled with granite stones, it was yet another invigorating march of contradictions—rich, crisp, mellow, bright—so common to my time with him.1 I sipped and marveled; I marveled and sipped. Riaz seemed vaguely distracted as he stared out his wall-size view of the day fading above the East River and, beyond it, the low-slung, dimly lit industrial thorp of waterfront Astoria. He mentioned rents in the South Bronx rising. I mentioned I had money I needed to invest.
“How much?” he asked.
I was embarrassed to say, but I did. To my surprise, he was impressed. He knew my mother, though trained as a doctor in Pakistan, had only briefly worked as one here in America. That she’d been able to put aside that much money to leave me when she died was no insignificant feat. “She left another three hundred to our local mosque in Milwaukee,” I added.
His eyes lit up at the mention of the mosque; he wanted to know who’d started it and when. I told him I wasn’t exactly sure who, but it opened in the late ’70s. I recounted the troubles I remembered between the various ethnic groups—Albanians, Arabs, Hindustani Muslims—who had raised the necessary funds together but then couldn’t agree who was in charge.
“What was the process with the municipality?”
“What do you mean?”
“The city paperwork. Was there any trouble with that? I mean, because it was a mosque?” His interest was uncharacteristically pointed.
“I don’t know. I never heard anything about it. This was so long before 9/11. I don’t think folks in Wisconsin had the first clue what Muslims even were back then.”
“Where I grew up, they knew, all right,” he said with a sudden, vivid anger. “And they were vicious about it.” He paused and got up, then went to the
kitchen counter, where he stood beside a thick bouquet of large round purple-pink burrs in a crystal vase. He loved these flowers—if you could call them that—and always had them in vases around the house. I didn’t see the appeal. They had no scent, they weren’t particularly pretty, and if you weren’t careful, the thorny stems and bulbs could draw blood. He set down his glass and reached in carefully to arrange the bouquet.
“What is that stuff, by the way? I always see it when I’m here.”
“Tartar thistle,” he said. “There was a field of it behind my mother’s backyard when she was growing up in Rawalpindi. She found some in the Poconos one summer, and you would have thought she’d struck gold. She clipped a bagful and planted it in our backyard in Pennsylvania. That first summer it took over the garden like wild mint. Tough as hell.”
“Looks it.”
“Full of life. Whenever it spilled out into the yard, it was impossible to kill. There’s only one store in the city that carries it. And the only reason they do is because I have ten dozen delivered to me every week. One of the great things about having money.”