by Will Wiles
This locative reverie was obliterated by a hard, flat blow between my shoulder blades, delivered with enough force to knock the strap of my tote bag from my shoulder. I wheeled around, part ready to launch a retaliatory punch even as I experienced sheer unalloyed bafflement that anybody could be so assailed in a public place, in daylight. What greeted me was a wobbly smile, wrinkled linen and strands of blond hair clinging to a pink brow.
“Afternoon, old chap. I say, I didn’t take you off guard, did I?”
“Jesus, Maurice,” I said. “What the hell do you think you’re playing at?”
Maurice put up his hands. “Don’t shoot, commandant!” He chuckled, a throaty, rasping gurgle. “Don’t know my own strength sometimes, it’s all the working out I do.” Comic pause. “Working out if it’s time for a drink!” The chuckle became a smoker’s laugh, and he broke his hands-up pose to wave me away, as if I was being a priceless wag.
“You startled me,” I said, stooping to pick up my bag.
“So what’s in store next?” Maurice asked, leaning over me to examine the map. I became uncomfortably aware of the proximity of my head to his crotch. The crease on his trouser legs was vestigial, its full line only suggested by the short stretches of it that remained, like a Roman road. “You going to ‘Emerging Threats’?”
“Yes,” I said, straightening. I wanted to curse. Trapped! It would be impossible to avoid sitting next to Maurice, and there was no way to skip it: “Emerging Threats to the Meetings Industry” had, after all, been requested by a client. Sitting next to Maurice meant having to put up with his fidgeting, lip-smacking and sighing, and a playlist of either witless asides or snores. It had all happened before. And afterward he would ask what I was doing next and if I said I was going back to the hotel there was a very real risk he would think that a fine idea and decide to follow me, and we would have to wait for a bus together and sit on it together, or I would have to spend time devising an escape plan, inventing meetings and urgent phone calls . . . the amount of additional energy all this would consume was, it seemed to me, almost unbearable. I wanted to lock the door of my hotel room, lie on the bed and think about nothing.
“Bit of time, then,” Maurice said, looking at his watch. “I’m glad I ran into you again actually, there’s something I keep forgetting to ask you. Do you have a card?”
“Excuse me?”
“A card, a business card. I’m sure you gave me one ages ago but”—he rolled his eyes in such an exaggerated fashion that his whole head involved itself in the act—“of course I lost it.”
For a moment I considered denying Maurice one of my cards—it would be perfectly easy to claim that I hadn’t brought enough with me that morning and had already exhausted my supply—but I decided such a course was pointless. The cards were purposely inscrutable and were intended to be given out freely without concern. Just my name, the company name, an email address, a mailing address in the West End and the URL of our equally laconic website. I gave Maurice a card. He made a show of reading it.
“Neil Double, associate, Convex,” Maurice recited in a deliberately grand voice. “Ta. What is it you do again?”
“Business information,” I said. I am quite good at injecting a bored note into the answer, to suggest that nothing but a world of tedium lay beyond that description.
Maurice blinked like an owl. “What does that entail?” he asked. “I’m sure you’ve told me all this before, sorry to be so dense, but I don’t think I’ve ever really got a firm handle on it. Strange, isn’t it, how you can know someone for years and never be clear what their line of work is?”
I smiled. There was no risk. “Aggregating business data sector-by-sector for the purposes of bespoke analysis.”
“Right, right . . .” Maurice said, his vague expression indicating I had successfully coated his curiosity with a layer of dust. “Great . . . Well, we had better get moving, I suppose. Aggregating to be done, eh?”
We started our trek toward the lecture hall. People streamed along the MetaCenter’s broad concourses and up and down the banks of escalators, redistributing themselves between venues. Homing in on the right room, narrowing the range of possible destinations, finding the right level, the right sector, the right group of facilities, I felt a rush of that peculiar, delightful sensation that comes in airports sometimes: of being an exotic particle allowed to pass through layers of filters, becoming more refined. Except that Maurice, a lump of baser stuff, was tagging along after me. And all the way, he kept up a monologue—inane business gossip, his opinions of the MetaCenter, what else he had seen that day and what he thought about it.
The lecture hall was larger than the previous one, with ranks of black-upholstered seats fanning out from a modest stage, where chairs and a lectern were set up. Almost half the seats were taken when we arrived, well ahead of the starting time, and most of the remainder filled as we waited for the session to begin. There was an expectant babble of conversation, although I wondered if that might be more due to the fact that everyone had just eaten—or drunk—their lunch, rather than due to any treat in store. I took the schedule from the information pack in my bag and examined it again, to see if there was anything particularly alluring about the talk. The title, “Emerging Threats,” was so ill-defined that it might have lent the event broad appeal. Next to the listing was the logo of Maurice’s magazine, Summit—it was a sponsor. He hadn’t mentioned that. I glanced at Maurice, who had seated himself next to me. He was staring into space, mouth slightly open, notebook and digital recorder on his lap. Like me, apart from the open mouth. He was uncharacteristically quiet, even focused.
Electronic rustling and bumping rose from the audio system: the three speakers had arrived on the stage and were being fitted with radio microphones. I closed my eyes and wondered how much of the discussion I could pick up through a drowse if I let myself slip into one. A gray-haired man was introducing the speakers—the usual panel-fodder from think tanks and trade bodies; middle-aged, male and stuffy. One of whom was very familiar. It took me some moments to establish that I really was looking at the person I thought it was, and while I stared at him, he found my eyes in the audience and smiled at me. It was Tom Graham, hands interlaced in his lap, legs crossed, sleek with satisfaction.
“Last of all,” the master of ceremonies said, reaching Tom, “a man who really needs no introduction—a fairs man through and through: Tom Laing, event director of Meetex.”
Applause.
“Always the same old faces at these things.”
“We must stop meeting like this.”
“Small world.”
“Groundhog day.”
“Another day, another dollar.”
“Are you here for the conference?”
“Why else?”
“All well?”
“Fuck, stop, just stop, I can’t stand it.”
Adam and I felt the same way about male small talk: we hated it. He introduced me to the term “phatic utterance,” words said purely as social ritual, not to convey any real meaning: when you’re asked “how’s it going?” and not expected to reply. Noise, he said, useless noise; a waste of human bandwidth. Trim out all the phatic utterances and interaction could be made a lot more efficient. That was the way he thought, and I loved it. Away with all that hopeless banter and rib-jabbing. But we had turned this shared belief into our own form of banter—a private game, where, on running into each other, we would try to keep up the dismal phatic chitchat for as long as possible, repeating the same old clichés and phrases and saying as little as possible that was new or interesting until one of us cracked and stopped and we could talk about things that actually mattered.
“That was quick.”
“I can’t take any more small talk. I’ve just come from a funeral. My father died.”
“Oh. I’m so sorry.”
“Bzzzt. Phatic.”
“Damn! Checkmate, really. What else is there to say?”
“It’s OK. I didn’t k
now him very well, my parents divorced and he travelled a lot.”
“And you thought: that’s the life for me?”
I laughed. “Yeah, kind of.”
When I met Adam, before he founded Convex, I worked for a firm of cost consultants in the construction industry. They specialized in “value engineering”: professional corner-cutting, driving down the expense of projects by simplifying designs and substituting cheaper materials. When a building is completed and only barely resembles the promotional images revealed by the architects years before—more plain, more clunky, more drab; graceful curves turned into awkward corners; shining titanium and crystalline glass replaced with dull panels of indeterminate plasticky material—then my old firm, or one like it, has been wielding its shabby art.
Ugly work, literally. I preferred not to reflect on it, and I focused hard on my particular minor role, which was to scour trade fairs for those cheaper materials. What could stand in for stone, what would do in place of copper, what was the bargain-basement equivalent of hardwood? All my life I have been interested in what the world was truly made from; if not all my life, then at least from the very early age when—looking at the chipped edge of a table at home, a wood-grain veneer over a crumbling, splintery inner substance—I discovered that surfaces were often lies.
“Fake walnut interior,” my father once said to someone over the phone, winking merrily to me as he did so, letting me in on a joke I did not understand. “Better than the real thing.” It was years before I connected this remark to cars, years spent wondering why someone would fake the interior of a walnut, and how the results could possibly improve on an actual walnut. Years of imagining tiny fabulous jewelled sculptures in walnut shells, not inexpensive automobiles. Then years of suspicion in cars. Real or fake? Suspicion everywhere, which eventually gave way to fascination.
I trawled the fairs, learning the trade names of all the different kinds of composite panels, all of which looked alike and inscrutable—cheap façade materials having gone from fiction to encryption, no longer pretending to be something else and instead trying to be unidentifiable. At one of the fairs I met Adam. He worked for a trend-forecasting company, in the normal course of things a world away from builders’ merchants and anodized zinc cladding. This company built meticulous indexes of every last shoe and shawl shown by every label at every fashion week, databases you could subscribe to and see exactly who had launched what and not have to sit through endless catwalk shows. The company had dreams—wild and hopeless dreams—of doing the same for construction materials, and Adam was part of the team building this library of Babel for uPVC drainpipes.
It was a tedious waste of time, and he knew it; but it had given him the idea for conference surrogacy. “One man representing thirty, forty executives—imagine the savings! All this sentimental bullshit that gets dished out about face-to-face, firm handshakes, eye to eye . . . all these body parts that are supposedly so important . . . it’s all just so . . .” He reached for an insult. “. . . So fucking analog.”
When he quit the trend analysts to set up Convex, I joined him. The thirty thousand pounds I inherited from my father, that joined, too, invested in the business. It was all I had and, with a value-engineered salary mostly paying for a one-bedroom flat, and none of the clubability that men like Laing have, it was all I had been likely to have, ever.
Once the discussion started, Laing stopped staring at me to join in. I was too distracted by his presence on the stage to listen to what was being said. Graham was a false name; Graham was Laing; and Laing was the man behind Meetex, the man who had found exhibitors for the fair and set the program for the conference. Why would he want to know about conference surrogacy? He had to be here; it was his gig. If anyone loved fairs and conferences, it was him. I knew where I had seen him before now: not from personal acquaintance, but in photographs—photographs in the welcome pack, photographs in Summit, photographs everywhere. Laing shaking hands, Laing cutting ribbons. He was a true believer, and I had told him about Convex. It was unnerving.
The panel were discussing intellectual property. Businesses in the Far East were sending people to trade fairs to photograph the products and fill wheelbarrows with brochures, so they could manufacture knockoff products based on the information. Furniture and consumer goods manufacturers were worried—could anything be done to protect them from the copycats? Laing had not made a contribution for a while. Then he leaned in and spoke.
“It’s not just our exhibitors who should be concerned about piracy,” he said. “We should as well. Conference pirates exist. They exist, and they’re here now.”
A murmur of uneasy amusement passed through the audience. Maurice flipped his notebook over to a fresh page.
“I’m quite serious,” Laing said, addressing the hall. “Conference pirates. I met one earlier today.” He had been scanning the audience, and as he said this his eyes fixed on me.
My first instinct was to laugh. Pirate—it was absurd. The modern meanings of the term—downloaders and desperate Somalians and Swedish political parties—were well known to me. But all the event director’s invocation of it generated for me was a burst of kitsch imagery: peg legs, parrots, rum, X marks the spot. Not me at all.
“He works for a company called Convex,” Laing continued. “They say they can give their customers the benefit of attending a conference without actually having to attend. They send someone in your place—a double, let’s say. And it costs less than attending the conference because this . . . double . . . can represent several people. You get a report. Meanwhile we only sell one ticket where we might have sold ten or twenty—it’s our customers being skimmed off. And they denigrate the conference industry, say that conferences are a waste of everyone’s time, while selling a substandard product in our name.”
All this time, Laing had stared me, and I began to fear that others in the hall might be figuring out who he was talking about. One other pair of eyes was certainly on me: Maurice was rapt.
Laing’s attention flicked away from me. He was warming to his theme, wallowing in his own righteousness, letting his oration build to a courtroom climax. “Lawful or not,” he said, high color apparent in his cheeks, “this practice, this so-called conference surrogacy, is piggybacking on the hard work of others in order to make a quick profit—which is on a natural moral level dubious, unhealthy, unethical and simply wrong!”
I was being prosecuted. Unable to respond, I wriggled in my seat and felt my own color rise to match Laing’s. How dare he! Flinging slurs around without giving me a space to reply, naming our company in particular—it was unbearable. I imagined springing to my feet, challenging Laing, giving him the cold, hard, facts right between the eyes. We identified a need and we are supplying a service that fulfills it. That’s the free market. If Laing’s events were more interesting, more useful, less time-consuming and less expensive, there would be no need for us. Conferences and trade fairs are almost always tedious in the extreme. People would pay good money to avoid going to them. They do pay good money—to me. All this moral outrage was just a smoke screen for the basic failure of his product. The muscles in my legs primed themselves. I was ready.
“I’ve got to run,” I whispered to Maurice. And with that I scuttled from the room. I have no idea if anyone other than Laing and Maurice even noticed.
From the lecture hall, I marched down one of the concourses of the MetaCenter conference wing, passing many people strolling between venues or talking in small groups, that damned yellow bag seemingly on every other shoulder. I felt extremely hot in the hands and face. I was moving without a destination clearly in mind, moving forward to keep the unsteadiness from stealing into my muscles. All I wanted was to clear the area of Emerging Threats before the hall emptied out; then, all I wanted was to be off the concourse, away from the other conference-goers, the sight of whom filled me with hatred. Laing had tricked me, and trapped me, and it was hard not to implicate everyone at Meetex in the deed.
When I
saw the sign for some restrooms, I stopped. In the frosty fluorescent light of the toilets, I splashed cold water on my face, trying to get my surface temperature back down and gather myself together. A couple of other men were using the urinals and the other sinks—I ignored them, trying to weaponize the normal mutual invisibility pact that pertains at urinals so that they would literally disappear. There was no way they could have been in the same hall as me, no way they could have seen what just happened to me, but I still didn’t want them looking at me, the pirate gnawing away at their livelihoods. I looked at myself in the mirror above the sink, pale though not red-faced as I had feared, skin wet, a drop of water clinging to my chin. Tired, maybe. The tube lights flickered and stuttered—an item on a contractor’s to-do list, one of the hundreds of glitches that infest new buildings. Plasma rolled in the tubes. Sometimes it’s new buildings that have ghosts, not old ones; new buildings are not yet obedient. New buildings are not yet ready for us. I wanted to be back in my room at the Way Inn, and I realized that it was already that time. Leaving now was no kind of retreat; it was what I always planned to do.
In something like a trance I left the MetaCenter, its fire-minded evacuation conduits directing me without fuss to the departure point for the shuttle buses. Between the canopied assembly area outside the conference center and the bus, there was the briefest moment of weather, something the planners of the site had made every effort to minimize but which still had to be momentarily sampled. It came as a shock after hours in the climate-controlled halls. The dead white sky was marbled with ugly gray, and in the coach the heater was running. Barely half a dozen other passengers accompanied me; the late-afternoon rush back to the hotels had yet to truly begin, and we got moving almost immediately. I sat slumping in my seat as my memories of what had just taken place flexed and froze. It was all malformed in my mind: instances running together with no clear impression of what had been said or what it meant. We passed through acres of empty car parks, like fields razed black after harvesting.