by Mari Reiza
I was soon back on my feet, to the high-octane stuff.
We were so proud of our energy at Enterprise, constantly producing. Less was never more, and there was always so much to keep me busy. It was like the sustained roar of the trading floor except that it was in my head and it did not stop at 5 pm. Exactly what I needed. At least until I had a heart attack. Though even then I would still recover amongst the best doctors and return to high-octane. Enterprise would make sure of that.
‘We care,’ Bev’s constant words.
Ten rather than five workshops a week. Twenty rather than ten invites for a roundtable. Five hundred rather than five pages of analysis. Conferencing about conferencing. Tying and untying our shoe laces. We had a special gift and felt an obligation to keep using it. Peter was so convincing. ‘If your hands changed everything into gold, wouldn’t you keep touching at high speed?’
For times low on corporate work – we started to experience a few – we had to fill the rest-time with internal homework, because pausing was a waste of time, time during which we could have changed the world. Gert would give us ample reading, not for the pleasure of reading to extend our understanding, but to increase our reading speed and be able to read multiple texts simultaneously quicker and for longer periods, without focusing on the words. ‘What the hell is the use of reading without focusing on the words?’ She insisted the skill made us into superior beings. At least it helped me forget what else was going on in my personal life. That and the travel.
Being global expanded one’s horizons and one’s day. We could be expected to be in any place at any time. ‘Gentlemen have a duty to see the world,’ Peter said, and he was right that there was no way that, given the freedom to be global, one would have restricted himself to local opportunities. ‘It’s the luckiest thing to be home everywhere!’
And I found global paid, if only to rejoice in how un-global the lowly world still was, outside Enterprise, how backward and unevolved. Trojan laughed at how the French were so French, and the Spanish so Spanish, and the Italians were totally Italian. Bev loved how the Brits could not help themselves trying to play American for the most inexplicable reason she had still not satisfactorily explained to herself. Nal insisted that he was so proud to be a product of globalisation. ‘One that has been moulded to be as bland as a processed pea, and served on a golden tray to the devil?’ Alakrita hardly had a good word for him those days. But we were ALL so proud to be so international and talked about it constantly.
And yet we acted very insular, as if all we cared for was the way of Enterprise Island. We would pretend that the world wanted badly to be nicely uniformed and marching to our thinking processes everywhere we went, and that even the fruit vendor in a small Sicilian coastal town would want to arrange expensive strawberries in front of cheaper potatoes in her stall because of Kahneman and his work on thinking biases, and how thinking is fatiguing to her clients, who would go for the closer, expensive strawberries rather than making the effort to decide that they needed potatoes. Except if they were called Pasqualina, in which case they were more likely to buy a vegetable starting with the letter p, and go for the potatoes because it was all in the mind. We could never afford to work with this fruit vendor, or her with us, but if we were there on holiday, we could not help ourselves to, as a charity, advise her on how to reorganise her stall to take advantage of universally recognised fads. Our fads.
Why did we have to think that everything had to be managed in the most efficient way that we only knew?
The fact was that we were being paid a lot of money, there was no doubt. Even if we did not want to talk about it. Money helped elevate what we did. It must have been good if people were prepared to pay this money.
‘Would we feel the same way about what we do if our patients paid us a tenth?’ Matt remained forever provocative to the end.
Maybe we would have felt a lesser urge to be so relentless, but nobody was listening. Or perhaps we would not because this was just who we were, that had we not been relentless at Enterprise we would have been overstressing about our garden roses with the same intensity. It was just our nature. Perhaps it was good to live at this pace because it stopped death getting to us, like that urban myth that CEOs die as soon as they retire because their bodies relax and are conquered by disease.
‘It’s not a myth,’ Trojan insisted.
These were the things we told ourselves to justify our way of life, to show to ourselves that we did not just do it for the money. I myself had learnt to love to be numbed out, not to think about anything. Hadn’t this relentlessness which I claimed helped me to live just killed my life?
And the thing was, we seldom gave ourselves reachable targets and consistently over-ran timelines, so we could non-stop crucify ourselves that we could have done better. Sometimes it felt as if, when it came to our health and our time, we did not run on a return on investment basis but had to put it all in regardless, for constant fear of missing something. In this sense, we truly weren’t all about the money, and this again reassured us. ‘Achievements, achievements at all time. Shine, shine, shine, and then die.’
We could not see that our achievements were not freeing us, but were setting limits. But was it possible to be happy without being satisfied? We were frightened men weighing emotions like a fishmonger does fish. If we were reaching out to happiness, should that not have been enough to turn away the fear?
My life was becoming less and less memorable all the time, and I started to wake up in the morning finding it hard to know quite what I stood for, but concluding that it was fine. I should have wished for someone to tell me that it was not, that all it takes for evil to flourish is for good men to do nothing.
What’s life worth if I ignore the killer, let him carry our another crime?
Alakrita’s deadly charms again
At first,I had bet on work being enough to knock me out through my post-Miriam phase, but it wasn’t. I needed the drug of sex. Not that sharp pang of love in the stomach projecting raw, well-meant, sweet kindness, but pure sex.
I wanted it so badly that I could smell it in the air, soapy.
I thought of American Pie and made a pact with myself that my penis would not remain flaccid, strictly no apple pies though. Next, I became engrossed with Alakrita, even more than before. I am not sure if this was despite the fact or because she was all the way out in New York, like Miriam. It added to the thrill, maybe. And Alakrita’s breasts were fuller than Zainab’s, my alternative in London.
My inner voice became the voice of pornography, phallic. Sometimes I surprised myself at my own thoughts to the point that I worried that they hadn’t come from me. I started having recurrent dreams of Alakrita, a desert cobra, and Vittal, a snake charmer. I thought of Alakrita, masturbating everywhere. I imagined that I was a sailor in full uniform at the dock watching prostitutes, she would come up to me in a tight, red-leather outfit and sniff my crotch. I felt her red long nails deep into my shoulders as she yanked me back and turned into a creature with a thousand mouths, sucking the blood from my neck like a starved animal. It was so real that it was not a dream, more like a visitation.
My thoughts were turning seriously vulgar. What was happening to me?
I would close my eyes and see her nude, laughing at me, wearing nothing but a cigarette, asking me to insert my hand until it twisted deep inside her, nearly in reach of a gold ping-pong ball. The audience clapped for the magician and his assistant as the ball came into view.
‘Madness is such a pleasure, such a relief from the daily pain of living,’ I would tell myself.
I thought of Alakrita all the time in my hotel rooms, in BA’s business class seats, at the office and at the patient sites. I had to check emails thoroughly to make sure that I had not mistakenly typed her name surrounded by erotic trash.
The interminable hours Alakrita spent masturbating in my mind!
I did some arithmetic quickly in my head: I could say seven full minutes on average, three times
a day, although sometimes I had faced unwelcome interruptions; there had also been some prolonged, spectacular epics; let’s say six days a week for the past six months, accounting for the odd day of abstinence when I was in counselling about Miriam, because I could not concentrate then – I was not a total prick after all…
I didn’t need the calculator for this, I had excelled at Enterprise’s numerical entry tests. I could do it mentally. ‘It is over three thousand minutes of Alakrita giving it to me, nearly sixty hours,’ I shouted in my office. ‘Alakrita, my dick’s desire!’ That was more working time than I had devoted to my last Enterprise project! At the standard Father hourly rate my vice was costing Enterprise serious money.
I was still married to Miriam. Did this equate to being unfaithful?
Oh, what had I become?
I had relentlessly improved myself until my dream had taken over and there was nothing left of who I had once been! I was but my dream’s slave.
Then Dad called one day to say that Uncle Vijay was dying of cancer. I was still expected to be at the centre of my family’s universe but felt like a kid, playing and failing in a made-up world whilst everyone wanted me to fix things. Big things like... death?
‘What do you want me to do about it?’ Dad was not impressed.
That day I went home early and threw myself into my poetry books, some of which I had not opened for years. Now that Miriam was gone I had taken the boxes from underneath the bed. She had actually arranged for the bed and the sofa to be shipped to New York, so Mum and Dad had taken pity on me and brought the old futon and an armchair from my university days, until I booked some time off work to get the flat together somehow.
I kept putting it off.
But in the desolation that Elgin Crescent had become, E. E. Cummings was bringing hope that day... of finding myself in the sea.
The next morning at Coffee Plantation it was broad hair-band day.
My heroin-chic cutie received me with a furtive naughty look. She was on fire, on for coffee with an attitude. She had been telling a dried-up cow that she would not be served until she hung up her mobile. The client had kicked and screamed but left without a coffee.
What would my life have been had I had an attitude? I thought. Had I refused to live with my ear stuck to a phone and my arse on a plane, to compromise everything to be the best for someone else? I was in urgent need to re-find my real self.
‘I also miss the days of the fixed line,’ I said, smiling at my coffee cutie. ‘But technology has us contactable everywhere, so ubiquitous it has replaced cigarettes,’ I added.
‘Until we find the cancer of the hunched shoulders, squinting eyes, wrecked fingers and melted brains.’ She was right. I had not much time to grow an attitude or I would die.
Limitless ability fantasy
In which Peter grabs a higher title and a new wife; Trojan and Tobias get busy; and Lucy joins.
We had an entrenched belief that there was no limit to our abilities.
Enterprise could deliver on any challenge from stopping cancer to a rocket to the moon because God was on our side. This belief that we received regular holy communications to aid us in our endeavours provided us with a better psychology and a manifest destiny. We became confident in getting what we deserved in life, which was nothing short of inheriting the Universe, of course. But underneath this self-assurance there was some anxiety, as if we knew we were living at the edge of ourselves, controlling and holding ourselves, with hysteria flickering in the background: ‘farrogance’, fear-led arrogance, I say now that I can diagnose it clearly.
‘If you take a bunch of young insecure kids, seclude them and burden them with ‘You have been chosen to do the right thing’ messages, they will turn,’ Peter had always claimed unashamedly. ‘You will extinguish their capacity to be critical and they will turn. And they could probably be made to achieve things that they never thought they would.’
If they don’t seriously fuck themselves (and others) up in the process? But that he never said as openly.
Together with our better psychology, we should have at least been provided with a supportive body of learning to make us into the better people that we were supposed to be. But it is difficult to teach someone how to fly to the moon! And it was increasingly up to us to invent a justification for our own specialness, which was lethal.
Peter-Moses grabs more title and a new wife
It was official that Peter-Moses had become second in command to Edd in New York, overseeing some of the sectors with the biggest clients. The idea was that he would eclipse Edd in no time to head the New York office.
Trojan and Tobias, who had become Fathers at the same time I had, were to report to Peter, overseeing Peter’s same sectors in Europe. I, instead, was to cover some smaller European sectors and report straight to Bev, who was still heading the London office and the overall European operations.
It was a big re-hash with, as usual, everyone claiming their new role brought the greatest opportunities. In reality, the changes had little logic other than to piss us all off. All but Peter. I would have to schmooze to new patients, Trojan and Tobias would get some of my old patients and most importantly they would get Peter, but they would also get each other, to hate each other’s guts as co-heads of a portion of a portion of Enterprise’s world. The inseparable T&T, thrown in the same pit until they chewed each other alive. Everyone had to remain challenged.
And still those years felt to us like the most beautiful moment in Enterprise, like the Montparnasse of the 1920s, the super-genius era of beautiful, artistic Paris. ‘Was that not when Galliano was at Dior, Jacobs at Louis Vuitton, McQueen at Givenchy and McCartney at Chloé?’ Miriam would have said, and I wondered how she was doing in New York.
Peter was celebrating his promotion with a house party, giving me an excuse to be in New York soon. He was inviting everybody who was anybody at Enterprise, eager to show off his new pad and introduce us to his girlfriend, as his divorce had just come through: ‘Who wants to be married to a woman who makes you wear tartan?’ he had famously said.
It was spring by then and I had been spending too many miserable weekends flopping around my Paris and London flats in my new divorcé-ish status. I thought that a party would do me good. Peter had insisted that I should stay at his over the weekend and I didn’t say no.
Peter’s new house was located at Alpine, apparently the most expensive zip code in the US, about fifteen miles north of midtown Manhattan. The address was Bald Cypress Grove and I Googled on my way there that the bald cypress was one of the rarest trees in New Jersey: there were quite a few specimens lining Peter’s driveway.
‘Welcome to my French chateau for art lovers,’ he said, hugging me on arrival.
Of all the amazing things I admired Peter for, I had never thought him an art lover.
He was alone, other than the maids and waiters rushing around preparing for the evening’s party, but seemed in great shape, and immediately offered the obligatory tour after I had parked my wheelie in his hall.
‘Do we have time before the party? Should I have a shower and change?’
Peter was obviously dying to show me the house and ignored my pleas.
I soon got the picture of what his new mansion had to offer. Aside from the usual rooms one would expect, in Peter’s palace lived ten bathrooms, enough fireplaces to start the Great Fire of London, a movie theatre, a library, a ballroom, two extra kitchens, a conservatory, three stairways and a glass elevator. An exercise rotunda, a golf driving range, the required tennis courts and swimming pool along with manicured gardens, and a real Turkish bath brought all the way from Side, as well as a wine cellar and a motor court for six cars. It was a full-blown American horror, lavish but base, that was if you wanted to pretend an inherent duality in things. Otherwise it was just a plain horror.
‘The front doors are hand-carved mahogany, mate,’ he pointed out at the entrance, our starting point. ‘And see this fucking six-metre entrance hall, it f
eatures its own hand-painted mural, man.’ I could tell he was smug even if he was looking at the ceiling.
‘Your own Tiepolo’s Apollo Bringing the Bride?’ He pretended not to get the irony. The mural must have been by the same painter as the art ceiling we later saw in the dining room that could ruin the appetite of every rich bastard who ever ate there.
Down the hall, Peter showed me a music room big enough to hold two grand pianos, though from what little I knew, Peter’s music interests were limited to DJ Westwood, Wham!, The Scissor Sisters and Vicky Pollard. To his credit, he had turned the space into some lad’s dream with a decent gold cabled stereo and DJ system and golden Flap, the very sofa that I had asked Miriam for!
I made a mental note and promised myself that I would be buying one as soon as I was back in London, now that Miriam was out of my life. I was being assertive.
Further along, the revelations continued.
‘My favourite features in the double master bedroom are the two separate full bathrooms, so you never have to see your lady at it,’ he confessed. They must have been so very intimate.
It occurred to me mid-tour that the house looked extremely un-lived in.