by Mari Reiza
I was beside myself with jealousy, I was mortified. Lucy had so much love in her, and she didn’t know where to put it, but I knew that she wouldn’t find anywhere good in Peter, in Enterprise. Would I be any better? Perhaps she would not find anywhere good in this whole fucked-up world. It was sad. Peter had got there first but I could be the man she wanted. I could have won her, I knew what she wanted. I was that man. She wanted to be held and told that there was sunshine after rain. I wanted to hold her and tell her. I wanted to be in her dream world with her. Maybe we could change the world together or we could not; perhaps we would stay motionless living in each other’s arms.
But she kept talking about Peter. ‘Does he not engage with me out of fear?’ Lucy was asking and I nodded.
Of course, that was true. Because if she did the wrong thing, if she was herself with him, he would have to let her go, even if that was what turned him on in the first place. She would have to be punished. And they both knew it, and she was going to push him until he would punish her because she had to. She had done the stupid thing of opening her heart and believing in him and now she would have to test him to the end. And I would have to sit and watch everything unroll, as a passive audience.
Fuck Peter-Moses. He was not Moses anymore. He was a creep. And from that moment on, as I looked at Lucy’s face again, I knew the story had once again changed.
Lucy’s face was contorted and I prayed not-a-fucking-tear.
I knew that was not the best of prayers but Peter did not deserve her tears. The land of tears was so mysterious. I thought of the Virgin of Tears, human tears against those plaster cheeks.
I changed my mind.
Maybe tears were right because unshed tears could make you sour. I felt as if my heart had suddenly halved in size and my larynx had knotted and a big iron bar was cutting my chest off the rest of my body. Fear, pain, jealousy and anger scattered and re-assembled like in a Pollock painting, in bits across the page. And people think it easy? Free expression takes energy out of every vital organ until you faint. This is why you can drive so much farther if you make yourself emotionally unavailable.
‘Vittal, take her hand,’ a little voice was begging me to take her fucking hand.
Why do we assume in such moment that everyone is staring at us? Because nobody is. What the fuck would I know? This may have been the last time, the last chance for me to touch that hand and I just didn’t. The perversity of wanting and resisting. My fucking hand that couldn’t move to reach her hand that day has become a permanent splinter in my heart. And I probably even thought that it had been my own decision. Who is the devil behind the demon, who pulls the fallen angel, who starts the actor, who moves the pieces to ignite the tragedy? I still want to know to this day who that devil was, to kill him with my bare knuckles, for not letting me move my hand that day.
I sat there until Lucy left my office. Then I thought I felt an urge to go for a coffee, though in reality it was an urge to leave Enterprise’s building forever. I understand that now. And in retrospect, that is exactly what I should have done.
At Coffee Plantation, I asked my friend, the one about to invent the next Google, ‘How do you tell a woman you love her?’
The heroin-chic Polish dancer in a different Canadian wood chopper tartan shirt was not very helpful. ‘You just tell her that you love her,’ she said matter-of-factly.
‘Oh thanks. Remind me to pass on your name for the Folio Prize this year.’
My Mexican dancing skeleton smiled at me and shook his bum. ‘That's the way you do it, you play the sitar on the MTV…’ he sang. He knew my instrument.
‘Of course.’
I sat at one of the tables to think. Next to me, a man who looked like Bob Marley’s brother was trying to sell some old Portuguese lady tourists seeds from the tree of life. He was saying that they had fifteen times the energy of bananas. I need some of that, I felt like telling him. I heard the man tell the ladies that he knew he was ‘the bushman’ although it had taken him some time to understand his role in the world.
If he was the bushman, who was I?
How I loved Coffee Plantation for always having pretty much everything I needed!
‘Should I come to work here and write in my spare time?’ I asked the guys at the bar before I left. ‘Do you need anyone?’
They laughed.
Of course I should, but my hands were tied. Those fucking hands that would not touch Lucy’s.
Peter is moving to London
November 2012. I had come down from my jealousy attack when Peter called.
‘I have great news,’ he said.
I thought it would be about the project that was going to get me elected to Truth Leader, but no.
‘I’m moving to London,’ he added, ‘renting a pad by Selfridges.’
Had I missed something? We had talked about it before, whether he would ever move back to the UK, but he had always claimed it made no sense for him business-wise, plus that he hated London.
‘I would have moved closer to you, but Hammi agreed Notting Hill was the wrong side of the park, mate,’ he laughed.
Next he said he was keeping the New Jersey menagerie on for Sarah, that must have been his second wife’s name, and the Hamptons of course.
‘It has to be done!’ I guessed he was talking about the move. ‘Hoping the adventure will be a short one though, if you see whatimean.’
I didn’t really.
He reminded me he thought London pubs were intolerable; he could not understand why the first annual snow still brought the city to its knees year after year; and it bothered him that people believed in royalty and that Kate Middleton was going to be queen.
‘I prefer myself the time of Lady Di wearing transparent skirts to children’s nurseries,’ I said, because I did not know what else to say.
I was still working through my surprise.
‘The excitement of who was banging her and whether Charles would be reincarnated into a toilet brush,’ Peter added and laughed again. He was clearly in a good mood.
He explained he had rented an enormous top-floor flat in some grand old building, and I wondered how he would react to the leaks that came with living in the absurdity of million-pound houses in London, falling apart because of the archaic system of leaseholders and freeholders who could never agree to major works, even when they were the same people. Did he remember such quirks of life in the capital?
Oh, no! But in Mayfair, Peter’s freeholder would be an Earl of some kind, who should have got his head chopped off had Cromwell done a better job, with an efficient though insanely expensive agent fulfilling all of Peter’s desires. Still, he would be lucky if his rich neighbour wasn't allowed to extend his basement to the ends of hell, creating two years of dust and infernal noise in the process, because the council had decided to be generous in a bout of liberalism.
London was amazing, the most classist and contrived, and the most liberal society both in one. You could ride on the tube in your knickers without raising an eyebrow, but an average restaurant would not serve your child an undercooked burger to protect them from imminent death. Plus, the city’s real estate had become purgatory, having overtaken Dubai in terms of crane-spotted landscapes, with lifts floating in the morning gales and rich businessmen’s helicopters hitting them every so often in the way to crack-of-dawn crucial board meetings; it was still better than using our beloved public transport directly below!
I couldn’t wait for Peter to get to London.
‘Has the restaurant scene become any better?’ he asked. ‘I heard you have a few rude chefs, ruder than they’re talented.’
‘It’s de rigueur these days,’ I said, but Peter knew fuck all about food anyway. ‘At least there’s good golf,’ I tried to reassure him that Edinburgh and Perthshire, just a chopper’s ride away (a helicopter, not a bike!) were very nice given his Scottish acquired-heritage (shit that was his previous wife), with terrific male-only golf courses. Women had a place in the world OUTSIDE golf courses, Pe
ter had always argued, ‘We certainly don’t sideline them professionally the minute they give birth so that they can go and play golf.’
But under all the chit chat, the real question on my mind was, What the fuck is going on?
Peter would not come to live in London even if you menaced to ditch his Ferrari Berlinetta off the top of the Empire State building. Unless...
Unless it was the end.
Vittal loses interest
After the call with Peter, my mind went into overdrive for days.
What exactly is happening? Is it the end of Enterprise? Anyway, I had done it for too long. I didn’t believe in it anymore. It was a bit more complex than ‘You are exceptional, do your best and the rest will follow’. Who set the metrics? Who kept the scores? The best for what?
Enterprise, Enterprise my heart’s concern. At the beginning, I had thought that it would be like Dad used to say about driving from London to Birmingham before the M40, in the 1970s. I would have known the first part of it well enough, and I would have known when I was getting there. In the middle, I would have winged it and hoped the floor held below my feet. But it wasn’t holding and I was lost between buoys out at sea. To strive, to seek, to find and not to yield, I thought of Tennyson’s words. Well, I was yielding big, big time. Would I realise when I arrived wherever I was going? I wasn’t certain anymore.
And as the days passed, the downward spiral took me deeper and deeper.
Do I have a duty to make money? If so, how much and what for? Are we (our wives) not spending the stuff in the goldfield as soon as we find it, regardless of the amount, constantly stepping outside our means? So, what does it build?’ A hook around our necks that keeps us in place.
Of course, we had to suspend our reasoning about these facts, forever, or live in the knowledge that we had become slaves. Indebted to our necks. Did the Koran not say that, ‘Those who consume interest cannot stand except as one stands who is being beaten by Satan into insanity,’ (I told you, dear Reader, that I quote anything and everything!). I was wondering what the Bible opined in this regard. Perhaps Enterprisers were indeed being beaten into insanity by Satan, and it was better not to know about it.
I sat and wrote:
what am I here for? make money, only to have a better life, now that I have one, make more money, but I don’t have time for my wife, what will your friends say? what will you become? do you really dare to jump off the boat!
I was determined to overanalyse the wreck of my life, in poem form.
I next found myself agreeing with Lucy’s very personal belief that anyone who pretended to live by schedules of fifteen minutes should be hanged. ‘Send in the inquisition!’ she would shout. Seriously, could anyone achieve anything of any real value in fifteen minutes? Not even if they were a genius. To make ourselves work at this pace was pretending that we were machines, putting ourselves through routines to bring up the little psychos in us. Microsoft has created the wrong precedent, I concluded to myself. Some days I wished that I would get a ‘Sorry I just don’t feel like it today!’ screen message. GREAT. Finally, the tolerant computer that lets you off sometimes. I would go home and have a party. (Who with…? All my friends had gone.)
I knew it was a mockery. How much we were prepared to hurt and self-deceive in an attempt to satisfy our yearning to prove ourselves, to prove that we could do whatever was expected of us. These were not even our aspirations. These were not our targets. These were not our dreams! These were someone else’s dreams? Maybe I just couldn’t. I wasn’t a machine and I was bored of being a mushy pea. Perhaps I could not do this anymore. ‘Enterprise, we live by it, with it and in it,’ we used to say. It selected, trained, motivated, managed and led us. I looked back at my last three years. They were supposed to have been my Building Discipleship years. Did I feel proud of myself and could I inspire others? And did I ever want to inspire them to live in such a way?
I was very aware that I had not been elected to the top of Enterprise because of individual brilliance, and in the past ten years I hadn’t achieved anything brilliant, even if most of my peers would assure me that I had. And if I had a son, which I unfortunately (or fortunately) had not, I wouldn’t be desperate for him to join the elite of Enterprise. Because, what would it prove?
I was pleading to God to please break it to me that he had not put me on this sacred earth and given me all this power of self-wank to follow instructions, and to be measured by some random metrics designed by bleeding idiots. ‘Please put me out of my misery,’ I was supplicating.
Carnegie had it framed at the top of his fireplace. ‘He that cannot reason is a fool, he that will not is a bigot, he that dare not is a slave.’ Nal had told me this. Had he understood the quote? I guessed that I was the third type, the slave, and that that was supposed to be some kind of relief. Perhaps there was still hope, more than if I had been a bigot, or a fool?
I need to break free! I told myself, I can’t go on.
Then I went on.
Alakrita is moving to London
Within merely a week of Peter’s news, Alakrita called me to say that she too was moving to London. She was visiting in a few days and would like to meet me.
Something was definitely going on. I felt the fear and the lust of seeing her again. Alakrita, my dick’s desire.
The day she landed in my office, the large engagement ring was back on and I had to make a real effort not to imagine it over forbidden places.
Was the bitch really going to get hitched? Did the poor sod have a clue of what he was getting into? I took her to Nobu this time, sushi still being the best non-offensive food. After the 2002 episode, I wanted to play things safe. Even if it was over ten years later!
We got some bubbly to kick off our lunch and congratulated each other on our Truth Leader promotions. (Yes, I had taken his poison and Peter had obliged after all.)
Alakrita had her usual spilling-the-beans rant about everyone and everything at Enterprise as I kept reverting back to my own uncontrollable thoughts: I could see myself taking the butter knife on my side (why a butter knife? sushi does not need bread or butter!) and caressing Alakrita’s inner thigh with its blade under the table. I had got this scene from a book, I was sure. It could not have come from my well-balanced brain (or so I hoped). I was realising how much I hated the recent trend of no tablecloths, especially when it was getting in the way of visualising my desires properly. Nobu could surely afford tablecloths given the prices.
I concentrated again: Alakrita would hold me and lift me by the wrist, then rush me past the counter of the bar to one of the Park rooms (maybe the Boris Becker suite?), slam me down on the bed, snatch the knife from my hand and use it to open my crotch with one movement of her hand, the chino’s buttons flying in the air like a broken pearl necklace. It was terrifying and so enjoyable...
Alakrita’s shrill voice brought me back to reality and I quickly called the waiter to take the butter paraphernalia away. He looked at me as if he could not understand how these objects offended me. ‘Just do it, man.’
I had no idea how much Alakrita was still fucking Peter despite the big rock being back on her finger, but I hoped that she would be able to tell me more about what was going on.
‘Peter is to become the new head of the London office,’ she offered as we got on to things.
‘What’s happening to Bev? Why on earth would Peter come to London rather than wait to fill Edd’s position in New York? Isn’t Edd leaving?’ I had too many questions.
‘Edd is leaving. Bev is leaving too,’ Alakrita sighed, ‘but I’m not prepared to disgrace the poor woman.’
‘For God’s sake, Alakrita, you have always hated her guts.’
‘The US business of Enterprise is slowing fast due to unforeseen competition.’
‘But I thought that we had no competition,’ I said with a mocking smile. ‘Are we not unique?’
‘Enterprise’s headquarters are shifting to London,’ Alakrita replied, dead serious.
> It came as a surprise despite me having been aware of the slowing US business for some time. ‘It’s an extraordinary piece of news,’ I said.
‘That’s not the news,’ Alakrita was quick to add. ‘Tom M. is sick, he will retire. And they will be looking for a next-in-line CEO.’
All the pieces of the puzzle were clicking as she spoke. Peter-fucking-Moses (who was not Moses anymore) to be the next CEO of fucking Enterprise. ‘Now that IS news!’
She smiled.
III
DEMISE
13
Nuria Friedman to Vittal Choudhary, December 2020
My dear Vittal,
You are right that it is the capacity to distinguish the way things are from what they ought to be that makes us moral beings, and the eternal optimist is not a paragon of virtue but a fool. Do not be afraid of being radical. Radical, radix, root. You need to drive to the root of things, and you know that anything short of that will not do. If this means that you need to push different possibilities to see how things may have worked out, to change the sequence of events or distort the events themselves to get to understand their meaning and arrive to the root of how you felt, what you did and why, then so be it. As you say, the relevance of things is limited to what we can grasp about them.
I do indeed perceive so far your uncertainty in the way things happened, and how you have filled the holes with your own imagination. That is exactly what a reader can expect from a personal account, and you do not need to beat yourself up over it or feel like a cheat. I do not see the elaborate contrivances of your fictional history as a hallmark for your spiritual dearth. On the contrary. But always remember your responsibility as an unknown legislator of the world, because it is your take on events and how you relate them to the larger life, how you put those Russian dolls into one another and give them a new raison d’être, that will stick. That new life will become THE life, and it will change everything that was. Like Christine Keeler did to Jacobsen’s chair. So you have a gift to place words like atoms one after the other coherently to create new worlds. But are you the master of your own articulation and to what purpose? Are you creating someone else’s world, amusing yourself to disturb the Universe, even making some worlds disappear? That is all very well but you should know why, because you will be held responsible for it. It’s the moral philosophy of fiction.