Backstabbing for Beginners:

by Michael Soussan

  At my door was a young, timid kid whose smile had been distorted by fear.

  Kid: Um . . . hi.

  Me: What is it?

  Kid: Well, I . . . we had an appointment?

  Me: What appointment? I don’t have anything on my schedule. Who are you?

  He told me his name, which I instantly forgot. I tried to place him in the context of the ongoing office turf war. We had employed so many new people to process the truckloads of Iraqi contracts being sent to us that I was losing track of new faces.

  Me: Who sent you?

  Kid: Ah . . . what?

  Me: Where are you from?

  Kid: Queens?

  The kid made every statement sound like a question, adding to my irritation.

  Me: What do you mean, Queens?

  Kid: That’s . . . where I’m from.

  Me: I meant what division. What department? What section? Who do you work for?

  Kid: Oh, well, nobody, at the moment. . . .

  Then I remembered. The kid had e-mailed me a few weeks ago. He was looking for “guidance,” meaning he wanted a job at the United Nations. He said he’d found my name on the alumni list of Brown University, and in a moment of generosity I had told him to swing by the office.

  “Take a seat,” I told him, somewhat angrily. “So, how can I help you?” I asked, looking at my watch. I could tell he was feeling intimidated, and for some reason I was enjoying it. He stumbled on his words and I interrupted him.

  “Why do you want to work at the United Nations?” I asked him.

  “Well, it would be a dream come true,” he said, “to be able to help other people . . . people in need across the world.”

  I couldn’t help but chuckle.

  “What if I told you it’s actually a nightmare?” I asked. “What if I told you we spend most of our time fighting each other . . . right here in the office? What if I told you we don’t really give a shit about the starving kids out there? Would you still want to come and work here?”

  The poor kid was totally taken aback. He fumbled for words, not knowing whether to take me seriously. Then I felt bad.

  “Just kidding,” I said. He smiled, visibly relieved. And so was I, because the guilty feeling I got when I thought I was spoiling his innocence was deeply uncomfortable. He would discover the truth soon enough. Why rush it? I guess that’s why parents lie to their kids about Santa. They want them to believe the world is good.

  Not too long ago, I had been just like the kid sitting in front of me. He was in awe of the institution that was supposed to advance the cause of peace and human dignity. But was that really what we were doing?

  I had seen too much hypocrisy—too many battles for the moral high ground conducted by people and nations that had only self-interest in mind. Too many turf wars, too much resentment, too much paranoia, too much cynicism. I felt drained of positive energy. The hate that had grown inside me was eating away at me, transforming me into a man I had never intended to become. What kind of person spends his afternoon trying to nail a colleague for sexual harassment? Without the consent of the person who was harassed? Jesus, I thought. I’m turning into Linda Tripp!

  By allowing myself to hate, I was fast becoming what I despised. Soon, I would probably be no better than Cindy. No better than Pasha. No better than von Sponeck or Halliday. All of us started out naïve and eager, like the young kid now sitting in front of me. The “system” had taken them in and transformed them into angry and paranoid bureaucrats who, unable even to get along with one another, were in no position to promote unity in the larger world. How had it done this to them? The answer now seemed evident. The system promotes hatred. Why? Because the system lacks that essential component of social order: accountability.

  As I listened to the young kid talk about his dreams and aspirations, I felt rotten. Where had my own dreams and aspirations gone? We parted with a promise that I would help him get his foot in the door at the UN—preferably into one of the UN agencies like UNICEF, which had a clear mandate and better management than the UN Secretariat. Then I sat back down, emotionally exhausted by the effort it took me not to launch into a cynical tirade about the UN. I swiveled around in my chair and looked out the window. I stared into space for a long time before a vision formed in my mind. It was a scary vision—that of a building collapsing, like a house of cards.

  I had to get out before it was too late. Notwithstanding my strange visions of buildings collapsing, I was one step away from becoming a bureaucrat’s version of Darth Vader. I had the ambition, I had the skill, and I had the anger. What I did not have much left of was perspective. Were it not for that kid, I might have lost it for good.

  I turned around and looked at my computer screen. I had never written a letter of resignation before. I fumed at the thought that I was letting Cindy off the hook, that I let her beat me without fighting back. But years later, I would thank heaven for my decision to desist. Cindy was the wrong enemy. We had been set up and manipulated. The person pulling the strings would soon get rid of her, too. If Cindy and I had shared information instead of fighting, we could have connected the dots of a truly rotten scheme. Many years would go by, many people would die, and many buildings would collapse before that final secret could be unearthed.

  CHAPTER 21

  Exit Strategy

  John Mills, our spokesman who had passed out suddenly one day after lunch, eventually returned to the office with a new look and an entirely different personality. The doctors had found a tumor in his brain the size of an orange and had cut open his skull to remove it. As a result, John returned to us with no hair on the left side of his head and a new tendency to speak the truth in all circumstances, without regard for decorum. The New John Mills helped me make my last decisions as a UN employee.

  “This is the worst place I’ve worked in my whole career,” he would say. It was not such an original statement. Every one of my directors had said the same thing, except they said it in private, not walking through the corridors. When outside visitors would appear, John would greet them with a “Welcome to the sinking ship!”

  He would be out of the office for extended periods of time because of his operations. When he’d return, I would try to bring him up to speed on new developments. But he couldn’t really focus anymore. In the middle of a briefing, he interrupted me with a question.

  “What are you still doing here, Michael?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “But how about you? You’re still here.”

  “Forget about me,” he said. “You’re still young. You’re wasting your energy here.”

  “I guess we all are.”

  “You know, Pasha has been doing some things he shouldn’t be doing.”

  “I know that,” I said. John looked at me quizzically. So I pursued. “I mean, some of his management decisions make no—”

  “I’m not talking about management decisions, Michael.”

  “Well what . . . what are you talking about?”

  “I’m saying you’d be smart to get the hell out of here. Sooner the better.”

  I had written a nuclear letter of resignation a few weeks back, right after meeting with the young job seeker. It was a long letter, full of criticisms and grand declarations. I walked around with a copy of it in my pocket, waiting for something, or someone, to make me mad enough, and thus courageous enough, to sign it and slam it down on Pasha’s desk.

  “Here,” I said to John. “Read this.”

  John took a token look at it and laughed.

  “What’s funny?” I asked.

  “Do you know how many of these letters I’ve written in my career?” he said. “The longer the letter, the less likely you are to sign it. If you really want to go, it’s two lines, and you’re out.”

  “I guess you’re right,” I said. “I just need some kind of plan.”

  “John Lennon said it best,” said John. “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.”

  “Funny
you should say that,” I said. “Boo used to say the same thing. But I don’t agree. I believe in making plans.”

  “Well,” said John, “take it from a dying man. . . .”

  “What?”

  “Look at me, Michael. I’m dying.”

  “John, you’re not dying. . . .”

  “Shut up, Michael. I am dying.”

  I held his gaze for a beat, then looked down, repressing an urge to leap over the desk and hug him as tight as I could.

  “I can tell by the look in the doctors’ eyes,” said John. “The second operation didn’t solve anything. Chances are this is it for me.”

  I was at a complete loss for words. My eyes filled with tears.

  “Anyway,” he said, as uncomfortable as I was, “get the hell out of here. You might not get another chance, you know. If you stay now, you’ll probably stay your whole life. You’ll get married, have kids, and you’ll be stuck. So go. Get out of here while you’re still young.”

  At twenty-eight, I was still young—but not quite as young as I had been when I started. I now had a secretary who called me old-fashioned when I tried to dissuade her from getting a tongue ring. I now had kids in the office calling me sir. I had a chiropractor telling me to avoid crossing my legs at meetings. I no longer watched MTV and had no clue what artists sang the hits I whistled along to in the shower.

  Three and a half years had gone by, yet I felt ten years older. But something was bugging me. Before leaving John’s office, I turned around.

  “I really thought this was my calling.”

  “What?”

  “You know, working for the UN.”

  John smiled. “And do you still think so now?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, let me put it this way, Michael. There are many things you don’t know. There are even things going on right here in this office that you don’t know about.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like some people are doing things they shouldn’t be doing.”

  “What are you saying, John?”

  “I’m saying you won’t regret leaving. Now get out of here. I need to pretend to be working.”

  I took John’s advice and drafted my two-line letter of resignation.

  At first, nobody took it seriously. People at the UN write up letters of resignation all the time, as John had said, but few people actually act on them. Pasha didn’t reply, hoping I would change my mind. But when it came time for my “goodbye drink,” I think everybody realized it was for real. It was December 2000. I had worked for the UN for more than three years.

  “You’ve done it!” said Spooky. “You’ve actually done it.”

  “How about you?” I asked. “Are you planning to stick around?”

  “The game is not over,” said Spooky. “Besides, I kind of enjoy the air of Greek tragedy that surrounds this whole operation.”

  “Cheers on that,” I said.

  “To Michael leaving the sinking ship!” said Spooky, raising his glass for a general toast. John Mills had started a trend. Everybody was calling the operation a sinking ship now.

  We were having cocktails at an Italian bistro close to the United Nations when a mustached man showed up, sat alone in a corner, and ordered an orange juice. I hadn’t noticed him until Spooky came to whisper in my ear that I had the “honor” of being “watched by the Iraqis.”

  Spooky pointed his eyebrow in the direction of the man. I raised my own eyebrow in disbelief, but Spooky frowned to confirm his claim. So I decided to check out the man for myself. Ignoring Spooky’s advice, I turned my gaze directly at the supposed Iraqi operative.

  I caught him by surprise, and he immediately looked away. I waited until he did a double take to confirm that I was indeed staring at him. At this point, I smiled and raised my glass to him. He immediately looked away again. Come on, a little toast. . . . I kept looking at him provocatively, but he was able to resist the temptation to look back. A normal New Yorker would have asked me what the hell my problem was. Instead, the man glanced around for a bit, then settled firmly on his glass of orange juice, as if he had noticed something truly fascinating about it.

  Two options. Either he was indeed an Iraqi operative or he was a freaked-out Middle Eastern tourist who took me for a gay man on the prowl. I settled on the former. Spooky said he knew the man’s face from previous occasions. Eventually, before the Iraq War, the man with the orange juice, who worked at the Iraqi Mission, was expelled from the United States for “activities inconsistent” with his diplomatic duties. This was UN-ese for spying.

  I felt somewhat proud that the Iraqi regime would be so eager for me to leave that it would send an agent to observe my farewell drinks. I still hadn’t resolved the question of whether Pasha had been pressured to sideline me after the Iraqis saw my memo to von Sponeck. But I decided to give him the benefit of the doubt. It was not only I who had been sidelined; it was my whole division. And at that time Cindy remained the person who had the greatest to gain from sidelining the Program Division.

  Pasha had never been a role model to me, but as an elder and someone who had, after all, provided quite a bit of entertainment to me, I felt I should say something nice to him before leaving. So I wrote him an e-mail in which I called him a “good soldier with a good heart.” There was no way I could call him a great manager with an inspiring vision, but still, my words touched him enough that he invited me to lunch.

  At the lunch, he tried to persuade me to come back after a few months. My master plan at the time was to spend all of my savings on a semester of film studies at NYU, the assumption being that I would immediately break into Hollywood and make millions, of course.

  “Well,” said Pasha, “if you change your mind, give me a call.”

  I nodded, satisfied that I had managed to leave without burning any bridges.

  “When I was your age,” said Pasha, with an unusual smile on his face, “I considered going into the theater. But my family told me it was an occupation for homosexuals. So I ended up here, at the theater of the absurd.”

  CHAPTER 22

  Just When I Thought I Was Out . . .

  NEW YORK CITY, OCTOBER 2001

  At 5:30 in the morning, the phone rang. I was so confused at first that I almost picked it up. Then I remembered I was at my girlfriend’s apartment. Ha! I ducked under the covers and found a comfortable spot to lay my head while she fumbled with the receiver.

  Since leaving the United Nations, my life had improved considerably. It was not always easy living without job security, but freedom from the cynicism that permeated the halls of the United Nations had done me a world of good. I had fallen in love, lost some weight, and was working on acquiring an entirely new set of creative skills at NYU film school. Unfortunately, the bubble of optimism and prosperity that had enveloped New York at the turn of the millennium had recently been pierced by the attacks of 9/11, and living in Manhattan was fast becoming a dark, almost fictional experience.

  My girlfriend was still groggy when she answered the phone. Then I felt her tense up. First, she said, “What?” several times. Then she said, “OK, OK,” and eased herself out of bed to write something down. Then she said, “All right, I promise, I promise,” and hung up.

  “Wassgoingon?” I mumbled, eager for her to come back to bed.

  “My stepdad says I have to get on Cipro,” she said.

  “What? ” My head jumped up.

  Cipro was the industrial-strength antibiotic people took when they got infected with anthrax. My girlfriend had recently visited her mother in a New York clinic where traces of anthrax had been found. Apparently, someone from that clinic had gotten sick from it, and every visitor in the past forty-eight hours was asked to get on the medication.

  “Is it with a Y or an I?” She was wondering how to spell Cipro.

  “I think it’s with a Y,” I said. “You want me to take you to the doctor?”

  “It’s 5:30 a.m,” she said.

  “Right.
Do you feel any . . . like, any symptoms or anything?” I was worried. It’s not every day the person you love gets exposed to anthrax.

  It turned out that she was fine. But that morning, since we couldn’t go back to sleep, we each got a bit paranoid about any kind of marks on our skin. Hers was totally clear, but she kept going to the bathroom to inspect herself. And frankly, I spent a few minutes in front of the mirror too. I hadn’t dared ask her if anthrax was transmissible, because I didn’t want to appear selfish at a time when she was the one in danger. But it is impossible not to think about such things.

  We watched CNN for about an hour. Paula Zahn was telling us the first symptoms of the disease were similar to those of a “common cold.” That was really helpful because we both had a bit of a common cold. The whole thing seemed surreal. Anthrax used to be the name of a rock band, for God’s sake!

  “You sure it’s with a Y?” she asked.

  “I don’t know, baby. But I’m sure they’ll know what you mean.” I pressed her in my arms again.

  Who the hell was attacking us? The media were as clueless as the rest of us, and they were doubly panicked because they had been the primary victims of this attack. They weren’t exactly accusing Saddam Hussein, but his name was bandied around as someone who definitely possessed the bio-agent anthrax. It was a matter of public record that the United States had sold anthrax spores to Iraq in the 1980s, ostensibly for use in preparing animal vaccines.

  Warnings of further “spectacular attacks” and government-issued alerts did little to assuage our fears. Most people who live in Manhattan are perfectly capable of experiencing panic attacks without help from the federal government. So with John Ashcroft warning us of “generalized unspecified threats” every time he heard “chatter,” we lived in a constant state of alert without ever knowing what that was supposed to entail.

  On the morning of September 10, 2001, Saddam Hussein could have been standing in front of his bathroom mirror, humming along to Sinatra’s “My Way.” He had done it all: confronted the Great Satan, survived Desert Storm, quelled all the uprisings and coup attempts, weathered the sanctions, kicked out the weapons inspectors, showed Clinton who the Desert Fox was, profited enormously from the Oil-for-Food program, rebuilt his palaces, bribed half the world to lobby on his behalf, and made a dramatic comeback on the Arab political scene by sponsoring suicide bombings against Israeli civilians. While his population was supposed to be suffering, Saddam felt rich enough to announce that he would offer $30,000 to $50,000 to families of bombers who exploded themselves in Israeli cities.