Anatomy of Evil

by Brian Pinkerton

  “You want me to interview her?” said Carol. “I just got in. I—”

  Diane held out a piece of paper. “Take this. It’s her resume. She’s great, she’s perfect. This is just a formality for HR. She’s as good as hired.”

  Carol took the resume. “For what?”

  “Analyst. Entry level. Replacing Chris. God, I need my morning tea.”

  “Do you want me to fill out the candidate assessment booklet?”

  “No!” said Diane loudly, then quickly softening her tone. “I mean, obviously I value your opinion but it’s not necessary. The decision has already been made. I just need a warm body in there with her. Make her feel welcome. I’m working with HR on the offer. You better hurry up, it’s in Conference Room D. She might already be there. Thank you, thank you, thank you. And I’d love to hear about your vacation, maybe over lunch one day.”

  Carol took the resume. She hurried to her desk to drop off her laptop and remove her jacket.

  She stared at the resume for a moment. In the margins, Diane had scribbled: “starting salary 78,500.”

  The number struck Carol like a punch to the stomach. It was well above her own salary. There was nothing in the candidate’s resume that surpassed Carol’s own skills and background. In fact, this was a student fresh out of college with basic internships serving as professional experience. Carol was entering her sixth year for her employer.

  Carol let out a small sigh.

  “Hi Carol, how was Mexico?” a male coworker called out, passing by without stopping.

  “I wasn’t in Mexico,” she replied, barely audible.

  Carol began the walk to Conference Room D, gripping the resume. She felt a pounding in her chest. The walls began to curve and distort. Then the corridor lengthened, flinging her destination farther into the distance.

  She stopped, shut her eyes and felt a tight shudder restrict her breathing. She fought to relax. After a moment, she opened her eyes and her surroundings returned to a normal perspective.

  “Hi, I’m Amy Sibley!”

  The chirpy, fresh-faced brunette hopped out of her chair as soon as Carol entered the conference room. She offered an energetic handshake. “You must be Diane?”

  “No, I’m sorry,” said Carol softly. “Diane got pulled away. I’m Carol.”

  “Well, then, great to meet you, Carol,” exclaimed Amy with a big, confident smile.

  Carol sat down at the table and Amy sat across from her. She wore a cheerful peach-colored business suit, so new that Carol expected to see the Nordstrom tags hanging off it.

  Carol looked down at her resume. “So…it says here you’re fresh out of business school, Indiana University.”

  “That’s right, go Hoosiers!” she said with a happy punch of enthusiasm.

  “Well, tell me about yourself,” said Carol. She wished she had a formal set of questions to guide the conversation.

  However, Amy clearly didn’t need them. She launched into a crisp, well-rehearsed monologue. “I’m looking at a career in investment banking. It’s my passion. I have excellent analytical and quantitative skills. I love to tell the story behind the numbers. I’ve been following InvestOne and all of your successes and I really believe I can be an asset to the firm.”

  “At InvestOne, we put people first,” said Carol, recalling language from a recent employee engagement campaign. “We’re not a factory producing widgets. What we sell is the talent of our people, so we strive to be the very best. InvestOne is one big extended family helping each other to succeed so we can all rise together.”

  “I’m excited to hear more about the job,” said Amy. “It sounds perfect.”

  “InvestOne is united behind a single mission,” recited Carol. “Client solutions. For your role, that means deep research and analysis with an excellent attention to detail. You’ll help build financial models that analyze the impact of different capital structures, potential M&A deals, market activity, credit and risk analysis. Your assessments will help guide the investment decisions of major institutions and billions of dollars…”

  The dizzy sparks returned, dancing in front of Carol like fireflies. She continued to speak the company line without effort, unspooling a stream of words already programmed into her head.

  Carol rattled off a half-dozen responsibilities of an investment analyst at InvestOne, rolling through a well-known bullet list and concluding her speech with one additional requisite:

  “Also, most importantly, you will need to eat shit.”

  Silence.

  Amy’s little mouth popped open. Several seconds later, words fell out. “I’m sorry, I don’t think I heard you correctly…”

  “You will need to eat shit,” Carol repeated with perfect annunciation.

  “I… What?” Clearly Amy had not rehearsed a response for this moment.

  “I said you will eat shit,” said Carol. “Every day you will eat shit with a great big smile on your face like it’s the tastiest delight you’ve ever rolled across your tongue and swallowed into your gullet.”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t…”

  “It’s big business, Amy. This isn’t your fun little sorority house pajama party anymore. This is bending over and taking one for the team until you rupture and begin internal bleeding.”

  “I still don’t…”

  “Happy to elaborate,” said Carol, slamming her hand on the table. “In your job here as an investment analyst you will have no interaction with clients, no ownership of your work, no big trips or fancy events. Just a desk and a computer and if you’re lucky, a few spare hours a week for a social life because every other minute will be spent at the service of redundant layers of management scrabbling for relevance. You will do the working, they will take the credit and you will thank them for it. You will laugh loud at their jokes, applaud their half-assed ideas and feed their fragile egos on a daily basis like you would feed a pet dog.”

  Carol leaned across the table, staring at Amy’s face. Amy’s eager smile was disintegrating.

  “You will submerse yourself in arbitrary busywork that serves no function other than preserving the jobs of others,” said Carol. “You will waste countless hours trying to untangle the demands of a leadership team that lacks any integration, coordination or clarity. There will be so many chefs in the kitchen that what you produce will be inedible and vomited back on your shoes. You will have no control. You will be a puppet pulled apart by a dozen squabbling puppeteers. Forget everything you learned in school. You are not paid for your brain. You are paid to indulge stupidity. You are paid to say yes to bad ideas. You are paid to make other people feel good about themselves. You are paid to follow orders without deviation or original thought. Everybody here is pushing a personal agenda based on fear or greed or both. You will know your place and like it.”

  Amy’s smile had entirely evaporated.

  “What’s wrong?” said Carol. “Don’t lose that smile. When you enter these walls, no matter how else you may feel, you smile. If someone says something wrong and idiotic, you smile. When others talk over you at meetings to render you inconsequential, you smile. If someone robs you of your weekend and personal plans with insane demands, you smile. When you get reamed in a room full of people to make someone else look big, you smile. You smile until your face hurts and your head wants to explode. Smile and the company will smile back, but don’t trust anyone because they are all out to get you. Your colleagues will be passive aggressive, looking to undermine you at every turn. Your managers will grab credit for your success and push down the blame for their mistakes. The executives are out of touch and clueless and their ignorance is lethal. They are gullible to the devious, suckers for glib self-promoters, unable to sort fact from fiction and unwilling to take the time to listen. That’s because they are too absorbed in their own fat heads, convinced every random brain fart is a nugget of gold. If something work
s, they will break it. They are determined to throw a monkey wrench into a well-oiled machine because at least it shows they are making a contribution. They do not want to be inconvenienced by high standards. They want one thing: obedient servants. You will spend your life here with one goal: to become the person that other people want you to be. Your tombstone will read: I did what they told me. You will begin dying the day you start your job here. Your first week will feel like a month. Everything will be big and new and scary, moving in slow motion, consuming your senses. Then the newness wears off, like fresh fruit turned rotten. You will settle into a routine that blurs the days together into an endless smear. You will go cold and then you will go numb. You will live on a treadmill of tedium. The years will shoot by like days. You will sacrifice everything for this job. Your health, your family, your sanity. You will breathe your pain like oxygen. Not even sleep is safe. This place will invade your dreams. You will compulsively check your emails and phone messages every ten minutes. You’ll find something new to stir you up every time. This company will keep you on a very short leash. The demands will crush you. The pressure will squeeze you. The rewards will be modest, just enough to keep you coming back for more, a gold-covered lock on a rusty cage. You will get old here, you will get fat and tired and joyless, performing your duties for your corporate master until one day you completely lose your identity, your individuality, your hopes and dreams. You will become nothing more than a piece of office furniture, a benign object that serves a function but will be replaced when it breaks and you will break, you will crumble, you will want to rip out your hair and gouge out your eyes and pound on your lifeless heart and beg for a second chance to live because you will have thrown it all down a sewer hole of rats and rabies and excrement. You will regret this day until your last dying breath, the day you entered the belly of the beast and lost your soul.”

  Amy fled the room, crying.

  Carol returned to her cubicle. On the way, she passed Diane’s office. Diane looked up from her papers and asked, “How did it go? I hope you didn’t make her do all the talking.”

  “It was fine,” said Carol in a flat tone. “It was good. Everything’s good. Happy Monday!”

  Diane nodded and returned her attention to her spreadsheets. “Yes. Happy Monday,” she muttered.

  Carol returned to her desk. She sat down and opened a file drawer. She dug around for a moment until she found what she was looking for: the InvestOne organizational chart.

  She slapped it on her desktop and took out a red pen.

  She mapped out her game plan.

  She circled the row of vice presidents and senior directors. She wrote next to them: increase exposure to leadership. In smaller handwriting underneath, she created a list:

  The only work that matters is what they notice

  Build a schedule, log minutes, increase face time by 90%

  Campaign, posture, take credit, be sticky

  Next, she circled the bottom layer of the chart, a vast wasteland of tiny boxes of anonymous colleagues. She wrote: Stop wasting time on the lower elements. Reallocate energy to focus only on leadership. No more favors to help struggling coworkers. No more wasteful chitchat: lobby guards, cleaning staff, secretaries, etc!!

  Then she circled a middle layer of managers and wrote: De-position middle management. Build doubt around their decision-making, ethics, accuracy, leadership potential. Pit paranoid weasels against one another. Remove obstacles. Start with Diane.

  Finally, the red pen trailed upward to the ultimate prize at the top of the org chart.

  Carol circled the box that read Executive Vice President, Richard Stammet.

  She crossed out his name in a quick, slashing stroke and replaced it with “CAROL HENNING”.

  Chapter Twelve

  Patrol Officer Rodney Martinez watched various scenes unfold through his windshield as if he was channel surfing a succession of bland television programs. Parked against the curb near a busy intersection in Rogers Park, he witnessed vehicles gliding through a stop sign without even a brake tap. A skittish young vandal emerged from an alley gripping a canister of spray paint, a fresh gang logo dripping behind him on the side of a secondhand shop. An agile, fully able woman parked in a space reserved for the handicapped and hopped out to dash to her appointment at the hair salon. Several cars plunged the wrong way down a one-way street, nearly hitting pedestrians. A man in a long coat quickly and smoothly pulled out a pair of bolt cutters to snap a chain and steal a bicycle from the front of a popular pizza-by-the-slice restaurant. This last scene produced a small stir from Rodney. He realized he was growing hungry. He liked pizza.

  When the bicycle’s owner came out to discover his bike missing, he threw a tantrum of big gestures like a silent comedian and scrambled off to find the thief, still clutching his slice. He ran in the wrong direction.

  Rodney looked away from the intersection. He stared up at himself in the rearview mirror.

  The eyes staring back belonged to a stranger. This same stranger held him captive in his seat, turning his butt into cement, diffusing his sense of duty with indifference. Rodney experienced a curious absence of outrage at the unlawful acts around him. Everything hummed with an equal sense of neutrality.

  When Danita reached out to him on the police radio, he responded in his usual manner, crisp and polite with well-worn stock phrases. She reported a possible robbery in progress at a convenience store two blocks away.

  “Headed there now,” said Rodney.

  He drove to the familiar location, a common site for robberies at all hours. The owner did not own a gun. Rodney parked his vehicle and climbed out. As he approached the convenience mart, a wild-eyed, long-haired man emerged. He saw Rodney and immediately changed his course, running in the opposite direction.

  Rodney entered the store.

  A middle-aged employee with glasses leaned against the counter, clutching a bloody wound on his side, just below the ribcage.

  “What the hell, man, you let him get away?” shouted the employee. A nametag above his shirt pocket read “Darrell”.

  Rodney walked up to Darrell and looked him over.

  “The fucker stabbed me,” said Darrell.

  Rodney nodded. He turned and entered a nearby aisle. He walked several steps until he came upon a snack display. He reviewed his options and removed a long stick of beef jerky from a cardboard container. He tore open the plastic sleeve and took a bite.

  “You’re shittin’ me!” exclaimed Darrell.

  Rodney finished the beef jerky and then fixed himself a cup of coffee. He added cream and sugar and gave it a healthy stir.

  He returned to Darrell, sipping the coffee.

  “Aren’t you going to call an ambulance?” said Darrell. “Can’t you see I’m bleeding here?”

  Slowly, Rodney reached for his police radio. He ordered an ambulance and reported details about the crime scene.

  “Tell them to hurry!” shouted Darrell, placing fresh paper towels against his wound.

  “You’ll be fine,” Rodney told him. “We’re all fine.”

  Later that afternoon, Rodney was called to Sullivan High School, where an afterschool fight had broken out a few steps from the flagpole.

  Rodney stood in a small crowd of students observing the increasingly violent brawl between two young men.

  “Anybody want to place bets?” Rodney asked the teens nearest to him. “The big one’s strong, but he’s slow and getting winded. The little guy is scrappy and not afraid.”

  “Aren’t you going to stop them?” asked a young girl, hugging her textbooks, terrified.

  “This is part of your education,” responded Rodney. “Have you studied Darwin? Survival of the fittest. You could write a paper on this.”

  The smaller boy in the fight grabbed a rock and smashed it into the larger boy’s eye, causing a loud crowd response—a swirl of ga
sps, squeals and cheers.

  A pair of teachers descended on the brawling kids to pull them apart. Several students helped out.

  “Show’s over,” said Rodney. He began to walk away, joining a stream of students leaving the schoolyard.

  “Officer Martinez!”

  Rodney heard a young voice call out his name. He turned to see Jamie, the boy he had discovered prowling parked cars several weeks ago and lectured in his front seat.

  “I’m doing it!” announced Jamie.

  “Doing what?” asked Rodney.

  “What you said. I’m going to get a B average for that ticket to Comicon. I got an A-minus on my Geometry test. I’m getting Bs in English and Science. I think I’m going to do it. I’m going to Comicon!”

  “Well, we’ll see about that.”

  “Now I know what to do. I got a routine. I go to the library every night. I time it. I just needed a place that’s quiet to help with reading and memorizing. I know how to prepare. I’m really learning about this stuff, just not doing it fast to get it over with like I used to.”

  “How many hours are you studying?”

  “It depends. Sometimes one, sometimes two or three.”

  “Each night?”

  “Yeah, can you believe it?”

  “That’s a lot of hours,” said Rodney. “You know, there’s an easier way.”

  Jamie looked at him, curious. “Really?”

  “Tell me this. If you have an objective, a destination, a place where you really want to go, do you take the path that’s fifty miles or two miles?”

  “Two miles,” said Jamie. “That’s easy.”

  “Of course. The shortest distance between two points.”

  “Right,” said Jamie.

  “So I’m going to tell you about a shortcut. I know how you can get more of what you want…faster and easier.”