by Mari Reiza
It is like if there were a larger life of ticking time and moving spaces, and an undisturbed world of pain and turbulence that ceased but is still there, and it has been beneficial to fit one inside another like Russian dolls. I am fleshing old fictions and finally anchoring them somewhere instead of having them wandering aimlessly in my mind causing trouble.
In a sense, I feel that Enterprise was unique but it was worthless in its uniqueness, it was not real. Now I am making it so, tying it to a new existence, and it is becoming less haunting, like a known entity. I am also taking people and giving them a voice to make them stand up for themselves because they never did, allowing them to put forward some version of events. Because in a way, I was compelled to imagine their version of events, even if I do not know whether they had this little voice in their head like I did, and whether it was telling them totally different things. Their colourful imaginary conversations inside my head are now becoming more compelling than their real world probably ever was.
This could sound like I am dealing with total fantasy but it is my story and my attempt to investigate and understand what happened, my voice inside my head and theirs. I can only apologise for that limitation but it is so hard to know anything for sure in this world. Uncertainty is an important part of life; it could well be that nothing has ever been proved about anything. I guess I could have recruited a series of ex-Enterprisers to help tease out a made-up personality to tell this tale, a result of collective imaginations. May that have come closer to the actual truth? We will never know. In any case, I am grateful to fate that no guest of Enterprise has thought of writing their account before I did. Before you did.
I think that I am overall being true to how I feel about the way things could have happened, although one cannot make definite predictions even when things have already happened. Even backwards, it is quantum theory. Things are unpredictable and often unexplainable and you can always imagine more than one explanation; it is up to who imagines it. I hope that that is good enough for you. My narrative is not true to the letter but we all felt and behaved as I describe at one point or another, and if not everything happened exactly like I have written it, or in that sequence, then it could have happened as such, because we could have pretty much made it happen like that. Or it may have also happened in a different way. After all, writing is pushing the possibilities of life to see how they could work out. We know at the end that the relevance to us of the Universe is limited to what we can grasp about it.
I have also tried to make the book as funny as possible, with a saving sense of humour that wouldn’t interfere with crediting the words. Funny like the jester’s curse, funny unless you are living it. Because there is a need to mix the things that help with the things that hurt. But I have certainly not restrained myself from sharing all the pain and contradictions, and bringing them into full view, pointing at things which I thought were wrong and not what they ought to be. I have tried to do this with some degree of disinterest so that I could see the comic side.
I know I may be confiding too much in you, dear Nuria, only because you are a woman I hardly know but like a great deal, and I feel like telling you things that I didn’t even know were secrets. I hope that I am getting closer to your heart. I certainly feel readier to descend into chaos, spit and blood, and then start all over again again. Yes, that is true. I very much look forward to starting again, and somehow sense that you do too.
Your Master in Happiness,
Dr. Vittal Choudhary Vivo
12
The Shortest Way to Happiness. Of years 2009–2012. Discipleship (II)
In which there is no thirst for knowledge and everyone bathes in uncritical satisfaction.
No need for knowledge
In which Vittal looks to deepen his relationship with Lucy; Lucy has something going on with Peter; Trojan is fucking Gert Rottenmeier; and Peter takes off golfing around the world.
Vittal and Lucy
‘When you are personally led by God’s hand, you don’t need knowledge.’ This was the note Lucy had stuck to her computer on her little desk in the corner of the PEN-ers’ favela. I smiled.
‘Boasting knowledge is beyond your calling, like advertising, right?’ She smiled back at me. For a place which was supposed to be the repository for all our knowledge, she had found the PEN-ers’ land quite bare, she confessed.
She was right. We had no insatiable appetite for wisdom at Enterprise. ‘It is insane that our founder was a Jesuit,’ Rich found it interesting being a man of God himself. ‘A Jesuit with no interest in culture?’ He didn’t buy it.
‘Maybe this was why they threw him out,’ I suggested to him. ‘He was a reject.’
Yes, at Enterprise, we clearly preferred creativity and vision to knowledge, and our ignorance could shine brighter than our intent. We claimed that we could do vision without knowledge, because God was on our side. We did not admit as much in public but I seriously believe many of us thought it.
‘Small details seldom drive large important decisions anyway,’ Nal’s wisdom, representing the firm’s collective wisdom. ‘Why would they?’
If you were going to acquire a company, would you investigate every single one of its assets? Entering a new market, would you need to know all the reasons why previous entrants had failed? Launching a new product, would it help to map how it scored against each competitor on every single attribute?
We would know the one reason why we wanted to buy that company, enter that market and sell that product.
‘The right reason is enough,’ Nav would insist.
And Lucy was correct that we believed that boasting knowledge was definitely below us. Patients wanted to know that we were humble when it came to their expertise, that we were collaborative and had some good ideas on a topic where THEY were the gurus.
We totally welcomed repeating to them what they had taught us. There was a value in making them discover how much they already knew, trying to disguise the fact that we were building our knowledge at their own expense. Sometimes I felt like a Trojan horse, which once inside a patient would look into all their drawers.
‘But we can have great access to knowledge when needed,’ I told Lucy, trying to play devil’s advocate. ‘If patients insist on being blown away by our own knowledge, we have a great network to find someone somewhere who will know something that the patients do not.’ I thought that was probably true. ‘And we have listened to so many people over the years, transcribed and guarded their knowledge in our Professional Enterprise PAnacea (PEPA).’ That was the knowledge system the PEN-ers were supposed to operate, our own black box, but we had to have faith in it.
‘The PEPA that uses a thirty-year-old software that has to be manually handled so that it is tedious to find anything,’ her crooked smile was powerful, ‘but yes I am sure we could get for you any outstanding piece of knowledge you needed to blow your patients’ socks off.’ She laughed outright. ‘Or we’ll make it up otherwise under enough pressure.’
I loved arguing with Lucy and wouldn’t give into her that easily. Anything to lengthen my pleasure. Next I pointed out that we even published insightful papers which sometimes ended up in real journals.
‘After they have been translated from Enterprisers’ speak by editors you end up deeply resenting.’ She knew us too well, despite not having been with the firm for long. ‘Most of what you write is extra-sanitised anyway, to make sure that it does not offend anybody,’ she sighed, ‘and, as you know well, Vittal, the best way to not offend anybody is to not say anything.’
Touché.
I eventually had to agree that we often churned things until they did just that, said nothing.
‘We have been known to write keynote speeches for important conferences,’ it thrilled me to confront her.
‘Conferences where the coterie of the not always intellectual but invariably very powerful and wealthy express their opinions, and where you try to go unrecognised.’ How much I loved this woman constantly running
me into the ground. 'Why otherwise does Enterprise prefer panels instead of speeches, where you listen rather than talk?’
Next she pointed out how we loved surveying too, despite not being survey specialists either, and could churn out hundreds of the bloody things a month, a few of which we quickly tried to forget about because they happened to have been slightly ill-conceived and caused trouble. And we loved giving knowledge prizes which we created as if they were orders of chivalry for mere mortals. And… her list was endless. Anything not to give an opinion, she claimed.
She would always win in the end.
Still, the reality was that in the last few years, driven by that degrading commercialism creeping in that Gert used to complain about, Enterprisers were increasingly being pushed to be controversial with our knowledge, to take a stance.
‘What a bore!’ Trojan had not been impressed at this change in our expected behaviour. ‘The key attribute that has always helped us was that we have been able to see everybody's side!’
‘But then love means nothing if you love everybody, right?’ I had been wasting my breath with him. Love would never mean anything to Trojan anyway.
The problem was, I thought, that we were choosing arbitrary stands (often contradictory) like impostors, without passion, and creating hysteria that actually led to things that we had not foreseen and that we were going to have to live with.
Would I be able to defend my ground to someone whose opinion was genuine? I often questioned myself and I struggled to see how.
But within a year, Truth Leader election would be in the cards for me, and I was expected to accept the offer to do certain things and Lucy knew that, she knew that when she asked me if I would like to prepare an influential keynote speech with her for an upcoming conference Peter was unable to attend.
And I immediately accepted, no doubt, with a mixture of curiosity, vanity and lust.
‘Vittal, when are you going to understand that life is luck and anarchy and if you wait for things to go your way you are fucked?’ That smile again. ‘Look at you,’ she added, ‘Miriam has left you to live in New York, and you are worrying about page thirty-five of this stupid keynote story that you have made up and don’t care about. You put your head in the sand and pretend that real things don’t happen to you, that you have nothing to do with them.’
How fascinating she was, and how maddening. That page thirty-five. Again. The ability of small things to forestall reflection on the weightiest issues. Was this what I had envisaged when I had wanted more time with Lucy? I loved it all the same.
She was mad and she was right and she made me think. What was my obsession with Enterprise? It was more dread than esteem by now, but why was I unable to stop it consuming me? Reader, have you noticed this quirk of humankind before? Why do people always end up creating exactly what they try hardest to avoid? I closed my eyes and imagined Lucy as Trinity in Matrix’s clothes: ‘Enterprise is a system, Vittal. That system is our enemy. When you're inside, you look around, what do you see? Geniuses, entrepreneurs, successful businessmen, good people. The very minds of the people that we are trying to save. But until we do, these people are still a part of that system, and that makes them our enemy. You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. Many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it.’ She was good at the part.
‘Some of us have to get on, Lucy,’ I said to her about page thirty-five. ‘We can’t stop to check everything around us, to save the world.’ But I knew that I was not convincing. Wasn’t I there, as part of Enterprise, exactly to save the world, to make it better? Except I wasn’t supposed to save it from Enterprise itself.
I started to see more and more clearly that Enterprise was all a conspiracy, but I still couldn’t fight it. Yes, Lucy, you are damn right, I kept thinking. I lie to myself. I am weak and I am a gormless moron. I wanted to hijack the office intercom and shout it to the world. I wanted to send an ‘I am Vittal Choudhary, I am a moron a liar and a cheat’ confession that would become viral and be read by over two billion people worldwide. Lucy, Lucy, my heart’s passion.
‘Page thirty-five needs to be right,’ is all I repeated to her.
After my meetings with Lucy I often went down to Coffee Plantation, stopping by the toilets for a tug to calm down. It was probably inadvisable; Enterprise toilets were badly designed and it would have taken long to be rescued by security had I passed out.
Vittal, the waste of your fucking life!
Lucy’s favourite designer was Temperley. I had learnt that at a networking dinner I had hosted with her for new-joiners where they had made us play Two Truths and a Lie. I had probably told the organisers myself to put the abominable game on the agenda. My mind was on other things than stupid agendas by that time. Other things like Lucy, my heart’s passion, and considering the root of my desires. Was my desire for Lucy a displacement of another, less approachable appetite? Perhaps freedom?
Lucy told me later that she had lied and that Manoush was her favourite designer. ‘I always lie to Enterprisers because they do not deserve the truth.’ Maybe she was lying to me then.
Her dresses were feminine, bohemian and handcrafted. They were more sensual than sexy and they flowed, with embroidery, sequins and colorful prints that moved with her as she walked, as if the silks were alive. All her dresses covered less than what Enterprise suggested and more than what I would have desired, and succeeded at letting you imagine. Her handbags were tiny, one hundredth of any of Miriam’s bags, and she wore them bandolier style across her chest, as if she was about to jump on a horse leading her to a faraway adventure.
One day, I asked her if she would have preferred to be a man; I thought that she would like me being bold like that. It was meant as a compliment because I could see that she was above her current job, I thought that she was only doing it because she was a woman, maybe because she wanted to have children and man a family.
‘Woman a family,’ she corrected me, and I sensed immediately that I was making a hole for myself with my arguments. ‘Vittal, would you give up the feeling of someone growing inside you to improve the chances of you becoming a CEO?’ she asked me.
Did she really expect an answer to that? She did not.
‘Even if I could reincarnate a thousand times, I would still choose to be a woman,’ she answered herself. Then with a cheeky smile she added, ‘Do you think Alakrita would too?’
How did this shameless girl know that Alakrita was – or would it be ‘had been’ by now – my dick’s desire! I was thankful for my Indian complexion. ‘I think that she would sell her grandmother just to be a Truth Leader in this wanking firm, not even the CEO,’ I replied after catching my breath.
‘Is that why you would like to fuck her?’
She could be deliciously excruciating. She had not said that, had she? I, to this day, believe her words must have played only in my mind.
But it was easy for Lucy. She can afford be bold, I told myself. She had never known what it was to be really poor, thieve to eat, wear second-hand clothes and fuck for money. Well, neither had I, for that matter. But Lucy had never felt trapped like I had. It is easy for her to have high principles, I kept trying to convince myself.
And was that not what I wanted? Someone so foolishly sure of herself with the confidence to give it all up on a whim? She had to save me.
Lucy said that it would be good to get Mandy from the PEN-ers involved in our project for the final push ahead of my conference speech. Mandy who made me think of Canada, of hockey and Mum reading those coloured books with women covers by Atwood, and of vast woods and grizzly bears and water carriers which scoop thousands of gallons (or litres) of water, and which were the reason why they never found the body of Barney's friend.
I immediately panicked, thinking that Lucy did not want to see me anymore and feared that I was going to miss her tragically. Her self-assurance coming to the office wearing those gold New Look
ballerinas that she had bought one size too small and cut open at the toes (she had told me herself, unashamedly), and that velvety Marc Jacobs leopard skirt (an exception to her trademark silk prints), she had grabbed for twenty pounds from a second-hand shop. She was so wonderfully disrespectful to Enterprise’s dress code. No, it was better. She did it out of spite to tarnish what we thought was stupidly sacred for us. She would have looked good with a garbage bag on anyway.
How it turned me on thinking of her in that leopard skirt, plastic yellow cleaning gloves and a hair band with gold bits of sequins holding her long hair out of her face, as she cleaned her bog. A content Madame Duflot!
‘Do we need Mandy?’ I finally took the courage to ask.
I enjoyed our one-to-one time so much I didn’t want it infected.
I had been asking her at every encounter what she was listening to, what she was reading. She must have thought that I was a weirdo but I was working her out little by little, what gave her that self-assurance: Money? She earned a number of multiples less than me of course. What she had lived through? Age? ‘I am over thirty,’ she used to say. ‘No one tells me what to do anymore, not even my father. You think you will?’ Of course I didn’t. She would have chewed my arm off like a panther.
I loved her eagerness to cause affront even in the smallest symbolic things. I could imagine her using a Venini vase gifted by an estranged rich aunt to keep her spaghetti in a hidden corner of her kitchen, a small humorous act of defiance denying art its value to give it her own. Peter could have of course kept his toilet rolls in Venini vases too, but only because he would not have known who the fuck Venini was.