by Mari Reiza
What is true is that Lucy believed in Peter. That she wanted to believe in Peter. I am sure of that. But other than that, I am not certain of much anymore. I never got to know who these people were, truly. Maybe you knew Peter better than I did.
There you go. I may have made it all up. But the truth is so hard to tell that it often needs imagination to make it relevant, to make it relatable. I stand for presentation over content and feeling over actuality. What a tortuous relationship between the author and his creations because he senses guilt that they can never escape his sadistic impulses. I feel less of a coward though, given I now said what needed to be said, even if I didn’t stand up to say it from my own mouth, and if I should have said it much sooner. At least it is out there, on paper, and people can read it. For this, Nuria, I thank you.
And on the other hand, I feel, what a strange world we live in, where people will listen to me regardless of what I have done, and not only to defend myself, but as if my crimes were in themselves of interest. Then I feel shame rather than courage, and that my only hope is that my account satisfies you in the quest for your truth.
Then a final question lingers in my heart. Why am I so eager for you?
Perhaps infatuations lack any real cause, I tell myself.
Your Master in Happiness,
Dr. Vittal Choudhary Vivo
17
The Shortest Way to Happiness. Of years 2013-2014. Demise (II)
In which there is fear from contamination and life is turned-off.
Fear from contamination
In which Felicity blackmails Enterprise; Matt gets fucked over; Lucy leaves; and Zainab follows.
We travelled the world but lived in cloisters, uninformed and uninformative. None of us had ever possessed enough curiosity to disturb our collective prideful composure. Perhaps we feared where it could lead us, curiosity.
We seldom read academic or industry publications, not even a morning newspaper, unless it had been authored, commented on or strongly recommended by an Enterpriser. There had never been space in our days for insightful plays or challenging films or documentaries either, or for a good chat to share an alternative wisdom. Having friends or mentors outside Enterprise was sneered at so that there would never be a conflicting opinion. Nor did we benchmark ourselves seriously against the competition. ‘What competition?’ And we did not talk about other organisations because they were only companies, not vocations. Companies answered to owners and shareholders and we answered to... God?
We had stopped participating in third-party market surveys or taking feedback from our patients. Any work experience one had outside our institution was forgotten the day he joined, and most Enterprisers could only remember life at Enterprise. In summary, we had forever had a particularly high opinion of ourselves and didn’t need anyone else’s opinion.
‘But at least we don’t call our patients muppets,’ was Trojan’s rebuff when I confronted him about our arrogant attitude as a firm. Was he having a go at the bankers again? It was his personal pastime as head of the language police.
‘We only put on that face that says, “Stand aside asshole, here we come,” and then walk all over their company.’
Trojan did not appreciate my remark, but it was true. Wasn’t it?
Because we were certain that everybody but us in the world were indeed muppets who wanted to be where we were. Because everyone wanted to be where we were, as far as we were concerned, a shared misgiving that united us even further than any other shared belief.
And not only did we not want to look outside Enterprise, preferring to convince ourselves there was nothing worth looking at, but we hadn’t wanted anyone looking inside either.
At our institution, no one was ever fired, no one ever sued, no one was ever in the news. You couldn’t even find our bloody buildings, because we didn’t put the firm’s name on them. You wouldn’t Google our phone numbers or the addresses for our hubs, because nothing would be there. We remained opaque. This was why we had survived for a hundred years, making it hard for anybody to judge what we did, what we charged, our results and our impact. All patients needed to know was that we were never knowingly underpaid. I think we let them see through that pretty quickly on our invoices.
I could see how, amongst Enterprisers, our shared secrets strengthened our fragile friendship. And our ridiculous levels of concealment elevated our importance. We had closed ourselves off from everyday life and become infatuated with ourselves. We saw the world only through our own convictions and wanted to perfect it.
Why did people not understand us?
Why did they have to write vertically (we did horizontally), start at the beginning (we started at the end!), insist on facts rather than pictures, fail to get up for crucial calls in the middle of the night, to have meetings every five minutes or travel round the world at least twice a week? In short, why were they fucking impossible and content with achieving next to nothing in their lives?
And in such a closed environment as Enterprise, unconfirmed suspicions could easily become superstitions under the wrong influence, and they did. So that we would always look at a man outside Enterprise and mourn his failures, and seek to fix him. Perhaps, had we actually looked farther than our own nose, with a clearer mind, we would have discovered that the world was already better than we thought.
Perhaps the world did not need our fixing.
Felicity blackmails Enterprise
Felicity’s incident was unexpected although I had always known she would be trouble. She wanted to publish her play (hardly Molière, but still) and it was about Enterprise. I had never thought of her as the creative type but I guess after so many years at Enterprise she had a lot of material. It was clearly explosive material that had to remain secret. We needed an emergency meeting.
Peter promptly called in the S.S., that was Samuel Sanderson, who excelled at knowing fuck all and never committing his ass to anything whilst charging you triple time, in pure lawyer style. He read the play and advised to settle, because he claimed it could be very damaging at this fragile time for Enterprise.
Settling with a PEN-er was extremely embarrassing and Gert, the office manager, was going up in arms. ‘Kill, kill, kill!’ she was saying. ‘Felicity, after twenty-five years. How could she do this to us?’ It was a blow. We had given Felicity a self-harming mania but had still hoped to get away with a bottle of champagne when she retired. And that was an upgrade from the usual cava for PEN-ers.
I read the play. It was good and it was outrageous.
The things she said about us, about Enterprisers. All probably true.
The general theme was dirty secrets and ruined lives. It was about a character not dissimilar to Felicity, who had set up a moral foundation to blackmail people not dissimilar to Enterprisers into betraying each other’s secrets. At the end, the main character had published all the sins in the open, as punishment.
‘They are OUR secrets!’ Gert could not get around what was happening, as if such a betrayal was beyond reason, out of the scope of reality and belonging only to Shakespearean plays or Greek tragedies.
The fact is, it had all started with Gert. Felicity hated Gert and was secretly in love with Trojan, who she publicly vilified. Gert had given something on Tobias not to be exposed herself. Tobias had in turn given something on Trojan, after all that loyalty! Trojan had given something on Mike, who was a prick and who had sold Alakrita’s secrets, even if he was fatally in love with her, but only after being in love with himself. And one after the other, the spider web had grown and Felicity’s moral foundation had everybody’s secrets. It felt like slapstick. Odd pairings, strange realities, peculiar connections. It was unthinkable. Like when you sit in Green Park and see the punk, the banker and the old elegant English lady conversing on the same bench and you can’t believe there could be a story between them, neither an epic nor a sitcom. The secrets were so absurd, they were farcical. It couldn’t be real (though it was) and it couldn’t be published. Because i
t would sell like hotcakes.
I will say again that I had known from the beginning that Felicity would have poisoned us. But had we poisoned her?
Her play was to open at Palco, an experimental pub theatre in St. Albans.
We couldn’t risk it.
She had apparently sent the editor a carnivorous plant with her manuscript stuck at the back and a message saying ‘Like it’. And he had. (And I know any Reader who has tried to publish before is thinking that carnivorous plants cannot get you published in this day of strict submission processes. But you are welcome to try!)
‘It is farcical,’ insisted Gert. ‘Ridiculing people like that should be forbidden.’ The world could laugh at the Pope and the Prophet. It was freedom of speech. But Enterprise was untouchable. And what Gert did not realise was that the real world she knew nothing about might not care much about the fact that it was Enterprise per se the play was talking about. Who the hell was Enterprise? Perhaps they may have even overlooked that. Were we as important as we thought we were?
Nevertheless, we had a senior ‘hug session’ reminiscent of that cold, high-end Milanese family in Luca Guadagnino’s film (I am Love), who must stick together to defy humiliation and grief. I could sense the violence of pigeons trying to free themselves in that room.
‘We are Enterprise family, our ties like blood ties!’ Peter tried to show he was still in command.
Perhaps to some at that precise moment it felt that we were the closest ever, all humming to the same song like pulsating erections in a strange cacophony that smelled of fear and shame, ‘If you could save us, from the ranks of the freaks,’ we seemed to be saying. Because we were the good ones, and everyone else around us had turned into freaks, or so we thought.
But no one came to save us. We settled, paid Felicity off.
We had to save ourselves. We had been hurt by Felicity’s incident, having to admit that we had a bad apple inside all that time. We needed to rebuild an absolute assurance of nerve and body that we were still the best and could achieve anything, that we were doing the right thing, that we were not the freaks.
‘If nobody is coming to take us over the rainbow, then we have to make our own rainbow,’ Tobias said. He had definitely gone mad but we all agreed with him.
Matt gets fucked over
For as much as Matt, el clandestino, had hated Bev, she had been the one to keep him alive at Enterprise. Once she was gone, it took Trojan and Tobias (under Trojan’s mastermind, of course) five minutes to fuck him over without remorse. They had been wanting to get his patients for a long time, and with workloads dying rapidly, grabbing more clients was key.
But then it was kind of inevitable because Matt had never been one of us. He had always been alone, a castaway, an island lost at sea. It had been a mistake to hire him from a competitor at such a mature age, when his brain had already been formed and he could never have truly fitted into Enterprise.
And it had been easy for Trojan to invent something about a client having lost trust in Matt, some serious deviant shit, and get Tobias to finish the job, claiming Matt had developed an odd relationship with illness – the Matt-flu – and that he couldn’t cope with his load.
Matt must have thought that being ill reasonably often was the only way he could justifiably escape interaction with the madness he had got himself into, the madness of Enterprise. But it backfired because Enterprisers saw through what he felt and were hurt by this lack of respect, admiration and love for his work at Enterprise.
I asked Matt whether he had got a good firing speech, at least.
‘Pretty much like Jeremy Irons to Demi Moore in Margin Call but without the expletives,’ he said.
‘Cool!’ that was better than the usual ‘You are great, but somewhere else’ always delivered low on emotion with plenty of arrogance.
He was told that Enterprise would help him to get another job. Suddenly it was a job. It was not a career anymore. It was not a raison d’être. Everything had changed. ‘I kicked the Enterprise ethics tableaux on the floor,’ he told me. It had been framed in silver for his new office after he had become a Father.
PEN-ers took Matt’s firing very badly. He had been friendly, he was a good guy. He was balanced. He was different. He was balanced in a different way. He was el clandestino but he had been almost one of theirs, they thought somehow, even if he was different.
But that was the core of the problem. We did not want Enterprisers hearing an alternative view, anyone whispering negative things in their ears. The ears were the most important part of anyone’s body, in our mythology. We had the ears of the most powerful men in the world and we knew what that meant. We didn’t want anyone but Enterprise to have our ears. We were scared of being corruptible and corrupted. Money could corrupt us. Fun could corrupt us; it would interfere with our relentless drive. We could become addicted. Thinking our own thoughts could corrupt us. We didn’t want Matt, who had done all of those things, coming anywhere near our ears. Morality out of fear. We had been bullied into morality until we were fearful, scared, terror-stricken. Frightened people are cruel and no one truly understands what pushes the aggrieved towards terror.
Of course, I told Matt that he would be fine. We always had to say that. We always had to tell lies to people who needed them. It was part of telling the truth. Truth, lie, who can tell one from the other, who decides? I told Matt that so many people had been there before and were there now, and that he was not alone and everything would work out in the end. But I was not sure.
Then we played The Police together as a goodbye, him at the ukulele and me at my sitar. All castaways, a shore. God tell me I’m not alone.
Lucy leaves
April 2014. It had taken her three months to come back to see me but Lucy was in my office and I was elated by her sweet smell of onion. (She had once told me that men liked the smell of onion and insisted I watched Javier Bardem with Penélope Cruz in Jamón Jamón.)
As she sat down, I tried haphazardly to put my hand on her knee but it went wrong.
‘What are you doing?’ she asked.
I actually did not know what I was doing, it had happened instinctively, and my face must have betrayed me. I thought I was probably just punishing that hand that had been so unresponsive a few months back, trying to show it who was boss.
‘No man has ever put his hand up a women's dress looking for a lollipop,’ she added, fixing me with that brazen smile again, until I felt I wasn’t sure if she had painstakingly planned for me to touch her knee somehow.
Next she said that she was leaving, and all elation was sucked up into a vacuum.
Apparently, they all knew.
The story was that she had tried to move internally but Peter had put in a bad reference, after three years of pristine reviews. The bastard was not so righteous after all. He needed to show her who was boss; nothing has more strength than dire necessity, all that testosterone finally bursting out of control. He just could not take it, that she did not want him. How vicious and spiteful! because we all felt very threatened when our superiority was not confirmed through veneration, because we had sacrificed so much for it. We knew that we were there to persuade and not command, but at times of supreme disloyalty we could not keep to our own virtue. We abandoned. And we did not understand that the first person we destroyed by betraying our integrity was ourselves.
Lucy’s voice was slurred through her account, such a contrast to her opening joke, like a tape machine playing back when the batteries are dying. The lack of energy was painful to watch.
‘I believed in him,’ she said. ‘I wanted to believe in him. I tested him and he failed,’ she added. Her lower lip quivered. ‘I pushed him to see how much he was what he pretended, and he fell at the first hurdle’, she went on. ‘He may go on to bigger things, I am sure, but he knows that he has failed at the small things that matter.’ Her tone was rightful. ‘He may convince other people but it may be harder to convince himself. We both know it,’ she concluded, looki
ng straight at me.
Both Lucy and Peter or Lucy and me? I was uncertain.
Then, she replayed the steps to her firing aloud, very slowly, in more detail, as if it was more for her own sake than mine, as if she still needed to understand it and believe that it had actually happened, that he had been capable of behaving like that.
There had been a final call. ‘So what will you do now?’ Peter had said. ‘Have not decided yet,’ she had replied. ‘You owe it to me to explain why you want to leave,’ he had added. ‘I do not have a choice,’ she had said. ‘I wanted a different role.’ He asked, ‘Why didn’t you come to me first? You should have told me before,’ he was angry. ‘But, Peter, I told you when my mind was made. In any case, we did not have that kind of relationship. You did not exactly discuss the details of your life with me or listen to mine?’ She had dropped it like a bomb. He was offended. He implied that he could be mean if she wanted to play it that way. ‘No, Peter. I am not playing; this is what it is,’ she had clarified knowing well how much it hurt him to hear that, that there had been nothing special between them in her view. ‘You offer me ten minutes a week of your time, and think I owe you lifelong trust,’ she had added. ‘Anyway, it was not to be,’ she had pretended it was not such a big deal. ‘And now I will never know what happened,’ she had told him after a pause. ‘Of course you know what happened,’ he had replied. ‘No, I do not. Peter, please enlighten me.’ ‘All I said was the truth,’ he told her. ‘I am not the kind of person that says otherwise. I told Keith not to extend you that offer, that you were no good for it,’ he had said in triumph. He had wanted her to know all along, that she worked for him or nowhere else in Enterprise and he could make that happen, he DID make it happen. ‘Well, at least I know now. Thanks, Peter.’ Long silence. ‘I did not want you to leave without saying goodbye, Lucy. I wanted to thank you for your hard work. And I wanted you to know that I am here if you want my help.’ ‘Well, thank you, Peter. Thank you.’ ‘I wish you the best, Lucy.’ ‘Me too, Peter.’