by Mari Reiza
What did deconstructed fear look like?
Enterprise claimed to want people who could follow their instinct to a right logical conclusion without asking for much detail: trait T. Next they wanted boys who could be ordered and structured. If you were to have no detail, at least you needed structure: trait O. Above all, Enterprise wanted subjects who were transactional, with little need or courage for interpersonal emotions: trait t. (If they wanted a pair of hands, did they need to get the rest of the human being as well?) And finally, Enterprise preferred candidates who were indrawn, contemplative and self-contained: trait I. Hell, for most Enterprisers, was other people.
Enterprise wanted us to be inTuitive, Ordered, transactional, Indrawn: TOtIs.
I should have seen through the neat initials that all these traits smelled of fear, and that whichever Enterpriser had decided on the acronyms knew nothing about football. In fact, I soon learnt, nobody in the whole of Enterprise seemed to follow football, which definitely must have rung alarms about the ethos of the place.
And did nobody find it odd that we had been picked as TOtIs after being subjected to a battery of predefined psychological questions including how we folded our socks? Nobody did. Because the thing was, only Enterprise, which enjoyed View from the Sky, knew how to drill down to focus on things that mattered. A wrongly folded sock and you were out – such was the way of the world and we all accepted it.
Aside from brotherhood and fear, virginity was the third dimension to Enterprise’s screening, because everything seemed to be done in threes in the firm.
Enterprise wanted men who had had as little experience of life as possible and remained uncontaminated by any other work ethic. Because virgins have a heightened capacity for belief. They leave themselves open, they entrust themselves, they give themselves over and put themselves at mercy. And people are easy to terrify, but virgins are even easier.
Understandably, therefore, Enterprise classified any previous professional experience in candidates as irrelevant or even deleterious. They praised flexibility and did not appreciate set beliefs. They wanted fertile land to sow on. If anything, they hired a few ex-bankers to tell them how crap they were; that was allowed. They all hated bankers at Enterprise because they were structurally bad.
Looking back, joining Enterprise required something a bit more complicated than individual brilliance. In fact, it probably required no brilliance at all.
Once having made it inside Enterprise, offerees saw the tables turned and Enterprise’s courting machine went into fifth gear, culminating in all-care-taken events with significant others, called conversion weekends. And, having chosen the right candidates, conversion was easy. Next, our lives would become about a number. Over five years at Enterprise for Confrères, a decade for Fathers and twenty years for our highest level of Truth Leader. Some industries paid millions of pounds to hire raucous, ignorant men with established track records and raging coke habits who would make them money for three months and move on to a higher bidder. Instead, all Enterprise wanted was virgin TOtIs, high on DILAs, to commit to them forever. And I was one of them.
Nal, Trojan, Tobias and Alakrita had been chosen too, all in my same intake. I decided to start by feigning honest friendship with them and fought not to cover it with envy. But I was set to win the Enterprise game whatever it took. I was going to be up there, with Peter-Moses.
Nal was the most genuinely social of the group, despite a slight stammer. I saw him as a version of the rise of the Indian-American elite, a story in some ways similar and in others different to my own, more different than similar, really. He was to be based in the New York office (though he would later leave to lead Detroit), a second generation Indian incredibly happy to be totally American. He would bring his acquired wealth and status to bear on having everything exactly the way he wanted it. Why? Because he had built it himself (his status) with his own fucking hands. Well, more like his father had, from scratch, with his own sweat and blood. Nal’s dad had been born after India had achieved independence from Britain in 1947 and had come to the United States following the Hart-Celler Act of 1965, which abolished national origin quotas. Like many top students at the time, he had graduated with a business degree from an elite school, Wharton, after which he had enjoyed a good, if not stellar, career in a management consultancy firm, setting high expectations for his son.
Nal was tall with a big frame, already business-lunches overweight by the time we first met, and had lost his hair which made him look more noble and senior than he was. He showed impeccable elegance and had a passion for spectacle cases (really?), to go with a business degree from Wharton, like his dad’s. When he joined Enterprise, he was about to marry a rich girl from Goa. I assumed that she was rich after enquiring about a photograph I had seen on a brief visit to their Upper East Side pad, where they had lived in the early years, depicting her grandmother breaking a sacrificial bottle of champagne at a ceremonial launching of what looked like Titanic 2.0. Miriam and I were later invited to their wedding in London, where her family resided, and where they had hired the whole exquisite grounds of the Pennyhill Park Hotel and had a cook flown in from Bombay.
I remember noticing early on how Nal was extremely able to travel through life without asking any questions which could slow him down. He was not going to leave any tiny bit out to self-doubt. The country club, the city spa, the lovely children in the best private schools. The red and gold penthouse just off Central Park, best suited to famous dentists or private equity gurus, with its own black velvet walk-in shoe boudoir, private butler, cigar and snooker room and a live-in Filipino nanny thrown in. The European luxuries his mother-in-law suggested from ‘How to Spend It’ cut-outs mailed out from London. The waterfront home in Florida and the ranch in Colorado he would name Antares. Nal had an overwhelming sense of entitlement and knew that these things would all come along in due time. He felt that these daily comforts were very much what he deserved.
By then, he would be focusing on philanthropic endeavours for the benefit of the masses as they advanced, because he had briefly read Carnegie and agreed that he who dies rich dies disgraced. His occupation would be that of a gentleman of sorts, mornings spent business hunting and evenings drinking shire style, with a cheerful display of heavily worn new-world charm.
In essence, I was convinced that Nal would become the motor force helping newly made Indian-Americans put the ‘b’ into bling, no doubt, remaining impassively centre-stage like the best-dressed idiot, talking predominantly and with most pleasure about himself, but always as an advert for Enterprise’s collegiate family.
Until he could bloom, Nal would work hard and lick arse. He would be egocentric and transactional but add a veneer of warmth on top to make him look like a boring company man, a nice man that would never risk doing anything but the right thing. He would become a pleasant enough Jack Lemmon in The Apartment, with a clear agenda, looking for the easy way up. With him I knew from the start that we would avoid each other and bank on Enterprise being big enough for both of us.
Trojan, in London, was a very different animal, an anxious, moody over-worrier, cold as a Finnish turska (cod). This trait came undoubtedly from his father’s side, and we all know cold is a sign of the demon. He also had a pushy American mother who was forever disappointed in her son’s achievements and could take the blame for pushing Trojan into the realms of a permanently unhappy, small politics backstabber, which gave him stomach aches and made him pale with tiredness. It also gave him some advantage at Enterprise, where persuading people rather than commanding them was key.
Trojan had receding hair and a nose like two upside-down funnels with nostrils like Salvador Dalí clocks, or just very kidney-like kidney beans. He wore furiously imprisoned teeth, like a piranha’s, intent on stopping him from breathing fresh air. The only gentleness in his profile were those blue eyes, cerulean blue. He sported an average height and look, not imposing enough for a CEO, but he could make up for the missing inches and panache i
n spite.
And this unfortunate man would try hard at everything and thrive at most things, success only to be spoiled by his constant perception that he was failing. He would put on the nicest clothes but walk awkwardly in them, say a nice word to someone and immediately retreat with regret. He had a classics degree from some elite university on the continent and thought that he could write, which he probably could, but did not because it would not pay enough (for him or his mother?), and then he felt guilty for not writing.
He praised humility and abhorred boasting, and it was, as far as I could tell, out of pure envy, not because he could not afford luxury but because he could not get any joy from it. He was mean in the small things in life, like rounds of drinks and tipping toilet attendants in exchange for lollipops. He hated entertaining. He was very private but sent an automated Christmas card with his family photo to a select long list every year, so long I was on it. His family were all blonde, pale and picture-perfect, the professional photographer had made sure of that, but all I could see was snatched joy.
At work, too, the man was inward and transactional and driven by pure anxiety. He toiled hard and aimed to please, upwards, whilst downwards he was an invincible warrior, an invertebrate schemer and a clear believer in ‘Si vis pacem, para bellum.’ And he was terrified of physical contact, the human touch. It was a major character flaw even though I would not have wanted to touch him in a million years, for fear of being frozen to death in that instant. If you held him, watched him intimately, or breathed close enough for him to hear it, you would risk a fit of rage, a spoiled kid’s tantrum which could end your career, but you would never know what had happened... Executions were clean. And Trojan was also didactic in attributing to others some of his own defects. So that, because he minded terribly to be touched, he assumed others would mind that too and therefore touched them as much as he could. And it was only when he himself initiated touch that he could be touched without that terrifying him, because he was rejoicing in the expected suffering of the touched. Does any of this make any sense?
As he gained exposure with clients, Trojan became an efficient, charming, empty vessel, a mouthpiece for everyone else’s ideas. He did not know anything, but his Machiavellian mind would conjure and scheme and bring together all that the client needed, this was his distinctiveness. He was swift and exact in his motions and, despite his inner turmoil, succeeded in building an appearance that others were inclined to trust, with the right balance of credulity and cunning. It was the client charm that would serve him, that and the fact he would have eaten his infants alive would it have made Bev or Peter-Moses happy. But I could bet my heart that in private he defecated looking at Peter’s picture in his lavatory.
I was sure Trojan’s favourite colour was acid green with a tinge of yellow tending to bile, and that he would one day turn into a many-headed serpent Rockefeller, then retire at sixty-five to become a miniaturist spending all his time amongst thousands of small soldiers, re-enacting with utmost accuracy all of history’s bellic conflicts from the comfort of his tattered sofa. I knew from the beginning that Trojan would always be my worst enemy and I had to be careful.
Instead, Trojan’s inseparable companion, Tobias, was dangerless. A geek with a strong German accent and an engineering degree from an unknown university (unknown to me, but then I was primarily an anglophile who would have never willingly crossed the pond for Germany), he was the first person I met on my first day at Enterprise, looking lonely as we waited for Bev’s speech.
In hindsight, Tobias’s physique betrayed him. Whilst I hardly knew at the time that he would eventually descend into mental darkness, he looked exactly like Simon James in Ayoade’s The Double, a modern version of Dostoevsky's novel I saw later in 2013. This had to be a sign. He had married a Chinese student whilst completing his PhD, and was from the start based in the Berlin office, although he was originally from Hamburg, from a neighbourhood that he liked to claim had produced a couple of decent tennis players, the obligatory number of dentists, a celebrated magician, more arrogant cut-throat lawyers than needed, no entrepreneur millionaires and one serial killer. One serial killer was enough, but maybe it was him.
Tobias’s father had been, in all, an inventor, a pharmacist, a middle manager, right about Hitler, a drunkard and sometimes a violent man. His mother had been, in all, barely there other than physically. Tobias loved lists and being precise. He had set his life out in photographs on slides at a Share Your Story Enterprise meeting in our first week. We finally had someone who was willing to broadcast their anima, it seemed.
Our complex hiring rubrics had failed?
It was a false alarm because we could not understand what Tobias was saying half the time, so there was no real threat. Maybe he was being too technical, or just German best: Das beste oder nichts, the best or nothing.
If you teased him, he could be edgy and defensive, and you could easily hurt his pride. But he was not naturally loud or violent in public, he would recoil into a corner and brood.
He painted himself as a time-permitting bon viveur, but he hardly knew what living meant. He was a well-oiled German machine imprisoned by work, though we later learnt that behind this workaholic gizmo dreaming to grow a heart there was a Casanova with a punch for mousy, bespectacled women. He liked girls sweet, loud, ungracious and below his rank, that was what appealed to him. We all saw the way he spoke to Cate (to be introduced later). Even though it was in German, the intonation gave it away, with the gestures and the smiles and that shaking of the leg. The fit of German engineering was coming to life.
‘Christ! Keep it still, that leg,’ we would shout at him.
What we did not know was that once a week for a couple of years since joining Enterprise, Tobias had gone to a cheerless office in Harley Street, Hamburg, where a succession of bland, middle-aged lesbians with made-up degrees from specialist colleges had tried to figure out his obsession with work and how that was destroying his marriage. This cost him five hundred euros for half an hour.
I could get blown for that amount, several times. But it was still less than what we charged for advice at Enterprise. Poor man, I felt that he should become a colourist upon retirement to compensate for the darkness haunting him.
At work, Tobias was all camaraderie downwards, and upwards he earned prizes for being constantly available, any time of day or night, and for having travelled four continents a week for sustained periods of time. He offered mentees a holiday with him every year (no wonder his wife wanted a divorce), and sent them weird books for Christmas.
He often amazed himself with his own deceptions though, like after an early(ish) call-it-a-day at the London office once, when he marvelled at the number of people out for fun in Soho.
‘Some people do have a real life, Tobias.’ The lights of Wardour Street... Did he even know David Bowie?
I knew in my heart that if Tobias would ever end my career, he would do it probably by mistake, without noticing, or tricked by Trojan. Because in truth, although he behaved like an unbalanced potential deviant, he probably aimed to be a simple chap, busy and content, trapped in his mind’s console, at the centre of the thousandth round of Enterprise Games to stop business lords in Cuckoo Land from inadvertently sticking their employees together with anti-cog glue, which would lead to the end of the world of ideas...
And finally, there was adorable Alakrita, in the New York office, who looked a mixture between Cruella de Vil and Nicolette Sheridan, the one in the Martini TV commercial who does not say a word but you don’t care. In fact, given her bad tempers and shrill voice, it would have been an added bonus for Alakrita not to say a word. Because, despite the fact that her name sounds like alacrity to the undiscerning ear, the woman seemed not to have shown cheerful readiness for anything in her life.
Alakrita was tall and slender with large breasts, lightly toned Indian skin and black ebony hair, giving her a queenly iciness. Her face was paradise at every corner, especially those lips. She smoked like a ch
imney and looked like a doll. She wore a three-carat yellow canary diamond in a platinum setting on her right hand and you kept a mental note of where that was at all times. It had been given to her by her ex-boyfriend and never returned when they broke off their engagement.
Alakrita’s male fans, of which there were many, dreamt of her mobile mouth, but also lived in constant fear of having their balls cut off and hidden in one of her shoe boxes, never to be found again. We all knew that she would make a great leader one day. It helped that her dad was the chairman of one of India’s biggest conglomerates and her aunty ran one of the few companies on the sub-continent trying to come up with real innovative drugs.
I had left India – how many Indians did I have to work with whilst not in India? Had the country taken over the world whilst I had been taking naps at university?
Alakrita, every dick’s desire and a master of her own world, treated everyone with contempt from the day that she landed at Enterprise, and her viciousness was more pungent the lower you were on the scum ladder. Some of us were uncertain whether she actually held a valid university degree (essential to carry out Enterprise’s prestigious work), but this would not stop her. If you worked with her, she might send you email instructions without vowels for you to panic, demand that you sign impossibly high-ranked individuals to her events, and get her invited to the most exclusive roundtables held under Chatham House Rule (we had just become the type of people who knew what Chatham House Rule is).
And you would succeed at your own peril because that would only exacerbate how much she hated you. But she still despised people who were not leaving their skin behind to be at the top of the world. She could not understand them. They wasted her time. She did not see it as patronising that everyone should desire what she had, the top seat. Life without multi-carat diamonds and five hundred dollars-a-head sushi dinners at Masa was not worth living for. She seemed clear on that.