by Mari Reiza
We seemed to be fucking up a lot, at Enterprise, and so was I, personally. I had wanted badly to impress Alakrita and instead had made myself a schmuck in front of la crème de la crème at the best Italian in town. At least no one would know that I worked at Enterprise… and Miriam was not one of those jealous women (she did not love me enough) doing better research than the FBI.
In the end, I concluded that I felt doomed about things in a way that I kind of liked.
There was still hope – Enterprise had never got really big issues like climate change wrong, we may yet boil the ocean one day. And it would only be the government’s fault for believing that anything in life could be fixed by being managed, by being Enterprised!
6
Vittal Choudhary to Nuria Friedman, August 2020
My dear Nuria,
It is two months to the day since my last letter.
I have to admit it has been an agonising strain to start on this epic journey, far more than anticipated. Exorcism, forgiveness, revenge? My thoughts have come back dressed for a demons’ ball! I have visions of the weeping wall of Enterprise, full of stuffed stag heads reciting into an unbearable cacophony. It is like one of those spinning children’s nightlights, except it is loaded with rotating screaming shadows.
You see, this is a story not of one man’s behaviour but of a collective state of mind, and this means that I need to get into every character’s psyche to feel their chaos. I hear myself wondering a million times a day if my memories are faithful to the events, and how much I might be stretching the reconstructions of people’s potential motives behind them. How much freedom should I take building characters that I barely knew under the skin? How can I capture not so much the superficial likeness but their inner aura? You must understand, I need to finger the real people in them. Can I spare their decorative veneer and make these Dantesque full-blown souls scintillate against the dark background so that they can enlighten and delight us?
I will need to marry retrospective voyeurism with aspiring imagination. The complexities of these characters are crucial to working out this story. We are required to rearrange so much, fit things back together, unequally yet not at random, but with a minded thread. Cobbled bits of language reflecting this and that, memory, fantasy, unlived suppressions, speech flashes, mishearings, over-hearings, rumours, squibs and scribbles. Otherwise, we will not resolve anything, and most importantly, the account will be dead boring. So that’s it, this is to be a fictional account. I am going for the WHOLE TRUTH, but the whole truth is not nothing but the truth. I can’t manage both at once if I am to do justice to this story.
To be honest with you, I am especially panicked at sounding judgemental, and at the difficulty of judging myself even more than others. For I can have a tendency for caustic self-ridicule and to paint a very sorry picture of myself. And despite having been through life continuously pretending to understand everyone’s side, in private I am also one who does not know how to value another man’s abilities, except to compare them either enviously or with pity to my own. But I feel so much responsibility here, since I do know that there is nothing only good or bad in this story, and that it is up to me to decide.
Will my piece in the whole be graceful, encompassing and stirring with the force of magnitude that tragedy must posses? Or only a spun-out story to lessen the bother of a tiresome journey? I am not even sure if I care, or if I only want to make fun of them (myself included) to the core, for revenge. Am I watering down the pain through mockery? Of course, but then closely observed men can be so funny, as if comedy was the consolation for their afflictions. On the other hand, I do not want a shallow parody offering instant gratification. The reader should suffer at least a bit, to share my pain, our pain. Like in the works of the Italian artist, Cattelan, I want a sort of cosy wrapping that makes the reader feel safe approaching the work, only to be later punched in the stomach with some deadly serious stuff.
Nuria, be patient! I know I am not plain, but I should not be afraid to be twisted, because it was not simple at all. Simplicity, I am afraid, will not do it in this case. My thoughts are so complex, in fact, sometimes I doubt whether I should be parading them at all. What benefit will I sense from a private remembrance being explicable to another being when I do not understand it myself? Was that not the whole point of writing it, that I was looking to understand things? I apologise if I am being hyper-eloquent in expressing my concerns. But regardless of having lived through this story, or because of it, I sometimes feel totally unprepared to tell it, though I am aware that I may be the only one willing to do so. Is the essence of life perhaps to be unprepared and to let what comes come and turn us into a fountain of verbal energy? Is that the essence of a writer?
I am very much hoping, dear Nuria, that you will be gentle to my heart, show me some tenderness. You have trusted me almost instantly. And although I feel that words are art and art is a legitimate weapon to illustrate what is wrong with the world, I do not want to be accused of spreading knowledge of evil. I would be happier to charm and to laugh savagely in the face of pain and distress, to live up to Totally Unnecessary Novels Ltd. I do not want a book that pretends that it can, in any way, change anything, I would not dream of taking myself that seriously, despite my arrogance. I would indeed be satisfied with being richly absurdist in total honesty, with a touch of malice, a large touch, I admit. Producing a farce laughing at the deep terror of my life out of control, because enough time has passed so that I can laugh about it. A comedic homage with some poignancy, complex but not too personal, not too painful, because satire = tragedy + time.
But then I also want to confess, though not in the pathological way of those who look for fame in scandal, to seek some explanation, and to make a small gesture towards redemption in the hope to offer a vision of acceptance and hope, to be free-falling and newborn again. I know I will need to reveal patterns of guilt, affection and regret, but also to relay the brutality in the indifference to life, and the misery we chose to ignore, all with a sense of emotional balance. It may help to paint a semi-imaginary world to display these painful realities in a way that they don’t feel so close to me, so that I am not totally blinded by feeling.
I want to write because I did not talk, it was my handicap. But will my work pay me back for my suffering? I am hoping that at least your body will, and I excuse myself immediately for my bluntness.
And, my dear Nuria, you can rest assured that I have your interests at heart, even if I can only guess what they are. I want to please you and to accommodate them. You are my muse, my patron. After all, I may be doing this for you, although, of course, ultimately, I am doing it for myself, as in most things. And for Barton Fink, because every time I start a new book there is Barton Fink, as the fear of not rising to the job. The picture of that woman in his hotel room, Consolation, standing for the blurring of art and reality, and the absurdity of art which reflects life directly. Are you to be my Consolation?
Nuria, I enclose my first chapter with this letter. It is a cockshy for you to shoot at, but please do not torture me more than necessary. Do not whip me for it reminding you of so many other works because lives are all interlinked and nothing is unique, nothing happens in a vacuum and the asides can be more interesting than the destination. Do not torment me for there not being enough dialogue, that my thoughts recoil like up to the Church of Panagia in Folegandros, or that I digress or swear too much. It is my story and I know that it will be the one you want to hear. I also know that I will only get one chance to tell it. Promise me that you will be a sweet teacher. You should be nice to this afflicted soul, punishing himself to save us both.
Come close to me, lovely scourge, I’ll show you the tango. Trust me to share some time, before your heels disappear into the night.
Your Master in Happiness,
Dr. Vittal Choudhary Vivo
7
The Shortest Way to Happiness. Of years 2000-2008. Desire (II)
In which there is a common fictio
n but no chain of command and everyone shares in the love.
One Enterprise Fiction
In which Vittal has new recruits; they all try to keep sane; and he shares ‘some’ time with Miriam.
Despite luring individuals with the promise of an experience tailored to them, One Enterprise Fiction (OEF, almost like egg in French) trained disciples to look, feel and think alike. We didn’t look for people who strived to be different, but for those who found comfort in the invisibility granted by being the same. ‘Mercenary focus-group conformity versus a leap in the dark,’ Peter had put it once. Harmony at the expense of creativity, even of humanity.
We believed that it was the human ability to unify small groups behind certain fictions that had allowed men to become history’s most successful species. Fictions like national legends, organised religion, limited liability companies, or like Enterprise. Humans could routinely suspend disbelief about Harry Potter, and we did the same thing with human rights and we did the same thing with money. It made sense we could do it with Enterprise. We just needed to metathink, which meant thinking about the way that we were thinking, to shape our collective faith in the fiction of our imaginary legal code, OEF.
Have you got it, Reader? Were we crazy?
No. There was a business sense to OEF, we were told. It trained Enterprisers to apply and have applied the same standards, judge by the same value set and use the same language. I could pick up the phone to any of the over one hundred missions in Enterprise, and the person at the other end would know exactly what I was thinking. It also meant that Hammi could re-enact Montezemolo comic sketches by that Italian comedian, Crozza, (‘Renato, no Valerio, ah Giorgetto!’) trying to tell us apart, and that corporate patients would not find out when they were handed a different Enterprise team to the one they had been promised, because we were all interchangeable.
And most importantly, it allowed Enterprise to be very efficient at managing inventory, another word for us, Enterprisers. Enterprise was proud to have one of the best inventory deployment strategies in the world. OEF ensured that we were not people but inventory. OEF made us into processed peas, ‘nicely lined blue fishes to be hooked out by the King of the Universe’, PEN-er Rich had once written in a song that would later make him famous. This was a step further than corporate clones, no name other than X, not even a number like prisoners. We didn’t even care for a number.
To people on the outside, we may have looked like those small, derelict, Colombian rural towns run by the drug lords, with their inhabitants hooked on lethally addictive adulterated coca, skeletal and apathetic, gazing with vacant eyes. Perhaps they even gave us names, called us Enties, like the Moonies after the Reverend Sun Myung Moon and his Unification Church. Was I the only one to see the craziness of this state of affairs? We certainly seemed to be brainwashed not to see OEF as a plight but more like having reached harmony.
The point was we should never dream of putting our personal stamp on anything, because that would be like committing suicide at Enterprise. And this simple threat made everything so healthily vile and insanely boring, yet sweetened in Enterprisers’ eyes by the virtue of becoming a better being, a uniformed pea. It seemed to suit so many of us really, who continued to put forward a variety of arguments to prove that this was how superior humankind had always been, and what it had always aspired to, the ultimate dream.
‘Please, let’s convert to the cult of inconsistency,’ I shouted when alone. ‘I want unique conglomerations of pulsating arteries and bundles of nerve fibre. A fossil is not the real thing. A creature is not its skin and bones.’
Was I the only one to feel that God had given me a brain to use it? That otherwise he would have written rules and instructions on a board himself?
Perhaps our seniors thought that they could write commandments because they were doing God’s work.
Why had we decided to live in this fatalistic way, out of our own control? Did I have some peculiarity in my nervous system to perceive things that other people didn’t? Did I lack the concentrative faculty of my colleagues so that my mind wandered undesirably? Could we not decide over our own lives for fear that we would throw them away? In a time when America was the elite that ruled the world, OEF seemed so un-American. I remember thinking we needed mirrors in our offices, to reflect us in our surroundings so that we could understand the past, the present and the future all at once. Where was our common sense? Common sense seemed to be a rare superpower at Enterprise. No, it was a real disadvantage, it got in the way. We preferred Framework 5, which developed exceptional people in five branches, each with three sub-branches to which we referred daily in our Personal Journey Plans (PJPs), fuzzing over Odyssey and Yearn scores to track where our souls were headed.
It was all about following a journey to make us into better people: mentors preserving low self-orientation to gain wide-ranging privileged access; genial influencers bringing out the best in others to create discipleship, creative truth solvers with rigour; generalist gurus contributing specialist expertise; disciplined arrangers able to see the patient’s side and base decisions on conviction. What did these things mean? Could I still keep some of my real self after being put through this grind?
A mushy pea with a difference?
NO. At this stage of our careers, it was essential for us (Trojan, Tobias, Alakrita, Nal and myself) to present a cohesive wall of green.
‘Give us your soul and we will let you be happy,’ Enterprise was telling us.
It was madness. But I still needed to prove to myself and those around me that I could do it, that I could be up there with Peter-Moses.
The new recruits
September 2003. After three years, I had unofficially made it to the next stage of Enterprise. For the first time at the firm, I would have people in my Squads working FOR ME, my own pool of fresh-blooded minions. I rounded them up to Coffee Plantation one day we were all in London.
Matt seemed down to earth and rough at the edges, inhabiting a petite and agile yet odd body like that of Frankenstein’s monster with the neck of a swan, the arms of a mechanic and the legs of a ballet dancer. He sported ungovernable hair, a big nose over crowded teeth, and rough paper skin that needed the constant moil of a fat Turkish masseuse at the Cemberlitas Hamam.
I asked him to introduce himself, and it turned out that he was not a ‘virgin’ but came from another job, and that he already had a personality. He must have been an experiment, well outside Enterprise hiring rubrics, I reasoned, and I made a note to have a word with Gert, the office manager, as soon as I was back in the office. I could foresee it would take little for colleagues to start to moan about Matt’s lack of selflessness and his ‘will to have fun’, as he put it. People who did not suffer regularly felt like rubbing egg on our faces at Enterprise, and I needed to anticipate any issues with my juniors if I wanted a smooth path to my official change of title.
Two minutes into his introduction, Matt also openly declared that he liked money. ‘Not for what it is but for what comes afterwards,’ he said. ‘I believe in reverse alchemy,’ he called it, ‘the transformation not into money but out of it.’ He insisted that was what he was ultimately looking for, which was not something we understood.
For Enterprisers money was bad even if we were drawn to it like flies to Sfenj in the souk of Marrakech. I could envisage Matt would soon be shunned by many if he didn’t radically change his ways, reduced to be el clandestino lost at the heart of Babylon, left to rock in his wooden horse until the bridles turned to dust. Even in our Squad, I would not be able to stop colleagues contriving him to feel shittier than the realities he would bend through. I felt a nightmare scenario unfolding in front of me.
I would have to advise the poor man in private that he was better off joining his brother as a hunting safari organiser for the rich in South Africa, that’s what he told us his brother did. He would be happier than constantly reading books about how to be happy, something he told us he did.
He didn’t be
long at Enterprise one bit. But I wondered if he would end up doing all the usual things that got people stuck, like building assets that made him feel the duty to preserve them, and eventually develop a perverse joy in carrying his sentence as a clandestino, alone and misunderstood, to the tune of his ukulele. Yes, he told us too he played the ukulele, definitely unheard of at Enterprise. I had never told anybody other than Richard that I played the sitar.
Next up my new lineup was Michael.
Mike, the spaced-out rich kid who had been the youngest at everything, joining us in New York but to work in Europe. (We regularly did this kind of thing at Enterprise because we were extremely proud of being global and liked to challenge ourselves unnecessarily.) He wore smoothed hair combed back onto his baby Jesus curls, and had perfect teeth. ‘After so many years of braces…’ he smiled, and perma-tan pectorals.
Is that the Silicon Valley look, the Californian cordial? I wanted to ask him.
It made me sick just looking at him, imagining his dressed-down version, with AG jeans and Mykita glasses. But I had to admit that he did look handsome, in that dastardly, villainous way women love, and I could tell it was revenge, from the ugly shy bullied kid with braces he had probably been at school, to turn into the handsome, respect-the-cock young man.