by Mari Reiza
Yet they had. Enterprise had gone truly mad.
It had always been mad but it had surpassed itself in my absence, and I’m not implying that the extra bit of prior sanity had had anything to do with me. I was taken aback by the frenzy in the place.
We had become people on the extreme edge of ourselves. Enterprise had defined us and we had forgotten who we were. Now Enterprise lay in darkness and everyone was frightened, dreaming of Iosi Havilio’s illnesses, accidents, pills, gunshots and the sea. Some may have been fantasising about Rawi Hage’s conquering vagina armies or latent breasts of promiscuous albino sisters instead. At that point, it seemed, anything could go.
I surprised myself with the sharpness of my words, repeating to the queue of minions outside my office to pull themselves together. I could count on their capacity to bury my words without blame or remorse like dogs, and I felt a despicable relief when they were gone. I couldn’t take any of this shit anymore. It was so cold, the shape of dark, and the smell of hate and death. I needed out so badly.
It turned out Nal was in London. The situation must have been serious if he was in London.
I was told by Bianca that Trojan, Tobias and Alakrita were all in the presidential laboratory on the tenth floor, where they had spent most of the past two weeks.
‘The Donald Duck room?’ I asked. That is how the PEN-ers called it, I knew, and where, in fact, I found all the seniors, plotting Peter’s assassination and Enterprise’s sell-out in less than comprehensible speak and with mischievous temperament, just like Donald Duck.
I was welcomed and shook hands with my colleagues one by one.
Even Clara and Mike (I hadn’t seen them in ages), who were both now senior enough and an item, had been called in. As the years had passed, Mike had never invented anything of note (surprise, surprise!) despite getting closer to his forties deadline, and seemed to be desperately fighting old age, sporting at least five grand of essential dental work. What had happened to those teeth? Clara had stood by him in awe over all these years and transformed herself into something of a cheap harlot, having learnt nothing from her fling with the New York Mafia or Hammi’s death.
I was told Dimitri was absent, with higher priorities at stake, still pillaging the State of Israel no doubt, and Niccolò was in hospital recovering from a motorcycle accident (justice at last!), but would call in. Even on death row we needed everyone’s input, despite things being as clear as ever with only one way ahead.
I looked around the table to take it all in. It was clear.
Nobody wanted to miss stabbing Peter, demanding that he was judged, fed to the dogs, sent to the God of Death. He had fucked it up for everybody, not that anyone knew exactly what he had fucked up as our accounts had as many holes as Swiss cheese and records had been mislaid and were contradictory. ‘We are not a public company, we have not needed to justify ourselves to anybody, ever,’ Trojan pointed out. That’s about to change, I thought.
The scene reminded me of Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper, except with frayed zombies and a mechanical noise like a large rotating crane; it was relentless and it disturbed any potential harmony; it was inside my head. The noise made this Last Supper transform suddenly into Dalí’s Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory, perhaps. Behind the faces, the thorns receded into the distance, symbolising atomic missiles, highlighting that despite cosmic order, humanity could bring about its own destruction. Nal’s dead olive tree, from which a melting Rolex hung, had begun its metamorphosis into the crane’s hook. Another distorted human visage, maybe Alakrita’s, was beginning to morph into a strange fish. Where were David Hockney’s relaxing Californian swimming pools when you needed them?
Peter had incarnated Enterprise’s ascent and would incarnate its descent. He had a genius for these things. He had been unlucky to be lucky for too long.
The picture of Peter the antihero was emerging: there was Peter whose image had been under attack from Lucy’s death as if bitten by a killer rabbit; unlike the Casanova he once was, he had now been hurt by some woman outside Enterprise and lovesickness was bringing him to drink heavily, even more than before; he had also been known in the past few days to text his wife twenty times in the space of a few hours, to stop her filing for divorce.
‘Perhaps it is a bit unfair to point that last one out as a weakness of the antihero, it is his wife, after all!’ I said to the group but nobody was listening. I felt pity for Peter even if I had hated him for what he had done to Lucy.
In summary, Peter was finally being rained on by the shits of life, like the rest of us. ‘It is a total calamity,’ Nal claimed.
Who would be his Judas?
Trojan, the master of the dark side. Like I hadn’t seen that coming...
Reader, I know you are thinking that as the author of my own novel, I should have killed Trojan long ago. Perhaps things would have turned out differently. You are right.
Trojan said, ‘Let the impure be purged!’ NO, what he really said was, ‘In different times, you could still count on young girls not to be suing you for harassment twenty years later, their memories retrieved by lesbian psychoanalysts who do not shave.’
What did he mean? (I couldn’t believe that Trojan had been derogatory to lesbians because that was a sackable offence, in principle.) Had someone come forward against Peter? Zainab? I doubted it. What Trojan meant was, ‘Let’s purge Peter. You all know he is impure and with him crumbling, it will be only a matter of time and the list of girls could be very long.’
How easy it is to frame someone in the court of public opinion! Alakrita, she would stand for him. She had to stand for Peter.
Wrong this time!
She was instead excavating the traces of her heart to overflow with lava against the man. She was all focused on Rahim by now, whom she had taken under her wing as a lover boy. (What happened to all that Indian-Pakistani rivalry? If only Alakrita’s family found out!) Yes, Rahim was ambitious despite being a PEN-er and up to betraying his homosexuality to make it up in the world. And for Alakrita, it was just another challenge, another shocking statement, a senseless provocation to add to her life of nonsense. And with Rahim by her side she felt vindicated, free and willing to rip out Peter’s pancreas. What happened to her engagement rock? I wondered.
The essence of the problem was that Peter was no Moses anymore, only Peter, and this helped to heighten Enterprisers’ perception of a precarious world. He had to go. It was his own fault. The four horsemen (Nal, Trojan, Alakrita and Tobias), with their minions (Mike, Clara, et al.), were bringing war, famine, pestilence, and death. They had decided.
And before I moved away from this read-through of the apocalypse, I looked at all the idiots around the boardroom table, pathetic little creatures who thought of themselves as a congregation of angels, and said to myself that the miracle was not that Enterprise was losing power, but that it had ever run the world. They laid bare their decay and exuded a feeling of irredeemable sadness. And I had been so disciplined to accept with servility the essence-less company of these repugnant men, even to yearn for their admiration!
The American writer, Susan Sontag, had apparently once said time existed in order for things NOT to happen all at once. But they often do. And at that precise moment of hell I felt that frogs should be falling heavily from the skies, to add one more calamity to the sorry picture. Susan Sontag had also said that space existed for things not to happen all to you. Hopefully, if the death of Enterprise managed to silence some of these imbeciles forever, it might at least contribute to the earth’s intellectual warming, and I wouldn’t need to move to another planet to avoid bad things happening to me ever again.
Out of the room of hell, I immediately headed to see Peter.
I was told he had stopped going out of his office other than for alcohol supplies. He was shrinking by the day. Gert had apparently said that if things continued as such she could carry him out in her handbag; she had been funny for once, ‘We could lock him in the cupboard until th
e deal is signed, or buy a steel mesh fence like people do when they carry their dogs in their station wagons, and cordon off half of the floor. We could sell tickets and ask people not to throw bones.’ She was enjoying it.
As I approached, I could hear mercilessly destructive propulsions coming out of his shattered graveyard, where he posed looking like a vintage alpha male, his eyes no longer aspiring to anything. I could tell that it was Pet Shop Boys’ ‘Always on my Mind’, playing on Peter’s Bose SoundLink Mini. It had apparently been U2’s ‘In the Name of Love’ five minutes before. But the assistants had been instructed not to interact, not to enter his office, after Peter had been rude to one of them who had just died her hair: ‘I am surprised your loss of beauty was something that ever troubled you,’ he had said to her. Enterprise wanted to curtail lawsuits at this point.
Peter sat down dishevelled on his office chair when he saw me come in. I noticed he was wearing a T-shirt that said ‘There is nothing behind this madness’.
‘I survived mumps, two muggings, a moto racing crash, two emergency plane landings, a skiing accident, a broken parachute whilst skydiving, four tax investigations and two wives. Do you think a nobody’s lassie is gonna take me down? She is only in the 20s,’ were his welcome words.
‘Shit, Peter,’ I said, ‘I didn’t realise she was that young.’
‘I meant that there have been twenty like her before, this year, Vittal.’
I should not have laughed but did.
‘I have now cheated so much that it has become the norm,’ he added. ‘And, as I get older, I do not regret the times that I cheated, but the ones that I did not.’
‘Well, there is a cut-off, right?’ I asked.
‘Yes, the grave.’ Peter’s speech was slurred and his breath stunk of alcohol. ‘Bro, we should try everything over the table and under,’ he went on to say. ‘We only get to go round the block once. Jewish princesses. Arab boys. Black chicks.’
I was sure Lucy used to say that. I felt a sudden pang in my stomach. I wanted to mow him down.
‘We can always ask God to have our sins pardoned later,’ he added. ‘C’est son métier. It’s his job.’
That was Hammi’s line. This man had been a fake all along, but weren’t we all?
‘If you are drunk, it is a disease today,’ he continued, pointing at his drinks cabinet full of booze. ‘If you murder your mum with a harpoon to her head, you need understanding. You are a fucking homosexual but expect to be married in church. You smash your wife’s head and walk out because you are Native American. What on earth does Native American mean, anyway? Why don’t we bring back the dinosaurs? Are they Native Americans?’ Was he senseless? ‘Awareness, political correctness, yes we know you are suffering but isn’t it great we are going out of our bloody way not to offend you? It’s all crap. Nothing makes sense anymore.’
I thought that paradoxically perhaps he was making more sense than usual.
‘Have you talked to them, Vittal? Have you seen Nal and Trojan and the rest of the shits? They think that I’m a lost dream.’
I nodded.
‘Tell them, I could easily turn into their worst nightmare!’
I could see Peter stepping up on his chair like a mad conductor, singing, ‘Alakrita bitch, Trojan Judas, Nal a cunt…’ to the movement of his hands. But he wasn’t credible anymore. The juice had leaked. Everywhere I looked I saw tiny circles of hell. Next he stared straight into my eyes in a collapsed condition.
‘Vittal, you do not understand, without Lucy I am not only alone but incomplete.’
Did he mean Lucy? I doubted whether that had been a slip of the tongue, whether he meant his new mystery conquest everyone was talking about. And I am uncertain to this day whether he meant one or the other or both, or whether they were interlinked and one was a surrogate for the other. Whoever he meant, I also wondered whether he was only circling towards loving her because she was circling away. Or whether, as it happens when you humiliate a Basque woman like Lucy, a matriarch and a mother of her people, that he was doomed for the rest of his life because she had conjured something that was coming back to haunt him. And in reality, she, Lucy, could have been so easily appeased with a bit of love and respect, and a nice glass of wine. But if you insist on waking a dragon, you have to follow your fate. Or yet another option, was this Peter’s final confession of guilt?
‘The mind of a man is reluctant to consider itself as the product of chance,’ Peter quoted Yourcenar’s Hadrian. This moron was quoting Yourcenar.
No, nothing had been the product of chance. Had it? ‘Peter,’ I said, ‘what will you do now? It’s over.’
‘I will have the best golf of my life, I guess,’ he added, trying to sound cheerful as he poured himself another whiskey.
Peter is an old man, eyes spent after a life wasted on a dream that didn’t kill his pain but left him numb. I was never going to become him now; I was going to become my own favourite poet.
Vittal resigns
Where was Nal when you needed him?
Leaving Enterprise was never going to be easy, even less after fifteen years. You did not just resign and leave. No one left Enterprise.
Yet for days I had had the Beverly Hills Cop jingle in my head, like something big was about to happen and I was going to come out smart and invincible. The book of poems, that crude, unrefined oil with the force of good pure, was going to grow and so was my heart. I was ready to jump from the world of power and money to one I hoped was made of musings and fascination, where money didn’t count one way or the other. I wasn’t going to bet on the future but live the present and make it real.
There was no need for me to stay at Enterprise watching Peter’s slow death and Enterprisers’ demise played in authentic maddening glory. We knew that we would be taken over. The lawyers had said what they had to say. The advisors had said it too. How many more committees did we need? How many more embarrassing speeches from Peter barely standing up? Was he really going to come up with the lunatic trick that would save us? Our fortunes were even being discussed in the press. How embarrassing.
Rummaging in one of my drawers for some paper to write my leaving speech for Nal, I found a scribble. I turned it to see a round stain from Lucy’s wine glass, from some evening meeting we had had in my office once where she had brought a bottle. All her doodles on that page suddenly meant the world to me. She would help me write my last words.
Nal looked like he had been put in front of a squad of executioners.
‘You have been here for fifteen years, Vittal. You are one of us. We count on you,’ he repeated for the third time.
‘Nal, it’s over,’ I insisted. ‘Enterprise is over. It may be a matter of weeks or months but there is no future and the good days are behind us.’
‘You may be right,’ he admitted. ‘But it is only because we were too big. We can go back. A core of us can go back and do something small. It will work again.’
I didn’t agree.
‘We were doing the right things,’ he added. ‘We had the right frame of mind.’
I pleaded for him to stop.
‘Is that not an idea? A core of us? What about all the people we were helping? Who will help them now? Those morons who are taking us over? You know that they can’t.’ He was in denial. Some digital letters seemed to run on a screen projected across Nal’s head: ‘UTOPIANS FADE, CHIEFS REMAIN.’ Was Nal a man who could come out of a hole into another hole?
I was becoming too old to take all this malarkey and felt the irritation mount. But next, I immediately felt pity for him. For someone who had been so sure of himself, Nal looked like a hunted deer. He must have run numbers in his head: the ranch, the Florida waterfront villa, the university fees, the wife’s Amex bills, the fifty grand holidays, the cars, the staff. The idea of being stripped of all he had must have been so frightening, totally unimaginable.
What was he going to do next, when the market would be inundated with so many of us looking for a job? Ask his wi
fe’s daddy for help? How humiliating. I couldn’t help but feel a soothing pleasure buzz. There were always casualties in mergers, weren’t there? We must have known, we had advised on a few ourselves and run the staff models. Would we still love each other or would we backstab to survive, to hang in there? We would be rushing to the best lawyers and headhunters to get the best deals, keeping details from others we had pretended to care for and admire. And if there was any justice left in this world, we would be browbeaten into becoming taxi drivers, pizza deliverers, parking attendants and cinema ushers. But of course there wasn’t a hope in hell for that!
‘Nal, I said I want out. I do not want to be doing this work anymore. Our success has, to me, become indistinguishable from panic. The constant anxiety and self-justification make me feel cynical and empty. It seems as if we have been for years hanging ourselves by our own nooses,’ this was the long-winded version. In short, I should have said, ‘Depuis quelques temps, je resent que vous me faites tous chier. It has been some time since I feel that you all piss me off (or literally, make me shit),’ as articulated by Lambert Wilson in a recent film I had not seen at the time. ‘I want to be alone,’ I added. ‘A reclusive hermit lifestyle. No. I want to be surrounded by things that I do not understand and to have the rest of my life to work them out. Not a few hours. Not twelve weeks. But the rest of my life. I want to be responsible for a piece of life so obscure that no one else cares for it, and I want to look at it in minute detail. I do not want to study only the surface and miss the small bits that make life interesting. I want to understand the chaos in my head.’
Nal seemed confused, as if I was speaking a foreign language.
‘I want to build a new world around me of better things that I will slowly make familiar. And when they are, I will not move immediately onto something else but enjoy them and let them gradually grow, so that I can look at them again, in more detail. I want to understand and explain and mow my own part of the lawn, like Nicholas Barker,’ I said. ‘I just want to mow my fucking lawn, leisurely. OK?’