by Evan Dara
—Auran drove him down Clark Street through the Loop and South Loop, and right before Chinatown she hooked left towards Prairie Avenue. In a gap in the rain, she steered over to a building just past Cullerton Medical Plaza and pulled into gutter water. It was an attention-repelling office complex, four stories tall, eighteen levels ugly, with ’50s bricks and window rooflets striated with silt. Graffiti whirled with urgent but incomprehensible messages between two of the three ground-floor windows. The entrance door, mucked white, was up a step.
—As they entered the small, olive-walled office, Auran introduced Lincoln to a gentleman called Ernesto Luis de Catamarca, who, Auran had said, also went by the name of El Rubio. He rose from behind his gray metal desk and shook hands with a warm, bright, unforced smile, and offered tea. When that was declined, he proposed a maté of yerba, though that would take a few minutes to prepare. When his guests again declined, Catamarca smiled once more, nodded, opened his arms in a comprehending gesture, and sat back down …
Catamarca must have been about 45, with a small frame, mocha skin, and sweetbutter hair. He wore powder-blue shirtsleeves, with gold cufflinks and a dark tie. A hard, high wind, bitter and dry, sometimes blows in from the Andes, he said. And the port people, walking busily, Paris-dressed, hunch their collars, or wrap their thin, floral-patterned scarves around their faces, in an attempt to take refuge from it. As a young man, I felt my own Zonda, this invisible wind that makes one flinch, and spin around, believing you are turning away …
By age 28, I was still unmarried, and working as a bookkeeper for a small company that provided concrete to construction sites, and for sidewalk-laying. I lived in two rooms, small but clean, and uncluttered, near the docklands of Puerto Madero, hundreds of kilometers from my family. Evenings, I would stroll the shopfronts of Lavalle, or take coffee at the Ideal, on Suipacha, and watch the spectacle, Buenos Aires at full gallop, continuous movement with continuous posturing somehow coexisting.
—Did you know that there are more psychoanalysts, per capita, in Buenos Aires than even Manhattan?, he continued. I was not, to be sure, among those numbers. But I sensed their truth. The low sting of my Zonda, permanent and dark, abraded the backs of my very-upper arms, or the frail rims of my ears, as I walked the fanfare boulevards, or sat retiring the spectacle-pages of El Cronista in my rooms. This buffeting sense of misapplication, of unrightfulness. Of disjuncture … But perhaps you know, too …
I had comforts, on paper, I had friends, in my agenda, but all were now in the column of questions, not of answers. When the sun was rising I doubted its value, as it set I lamented its loss. Through my work, bookkeeping the concrete, I had helped thousands to live, hundreds of thousands to go. But what were they living, to what were they going … ? ¡Que quilombo! How my Zonda could howl … !
I had led myself to an unfavored place. Somehow, I was gloved in a life that had become, to me, no life at all. How had this happened? What had brought me here? I could see no obligations, no constraints, no conditions. I could find, not at all, imperatives, beyond basic survival. Rather, it was by blindness, by unreflection, that I had delivered myself thus. By giving my guidebook to instinct, assuming it a beneficent master.
—But what if it was not?, Catamarca continued. What if the prompter was off, providing lines from an ill-chosen, or ill-intended, script? Or if, somehow, the script had been written for some other player? What if, in fact, my inner government, the activist oligarchy in my fore-mind, was laying down laws and penalties that were somehow serving other interests, other expediencies? Could it not be that some miscreant agency had taken hold, and hidden behind the smile-mask of egoism … ?
Frightful thoughts.
—But not novel ones, por supuesto. Like many others, I was in search of propriety, of self-generativeness. And so I decided to pursue a new course, one intended to purge the power-wielders who had come to sit in permanent session in my psyche. Here, the votes for liberation would come in the form of decisions, summary decisions against the ruling elite. I would stage my own coup, and it would play out as follows: Whenever an option, passion, or plurality of possibilities would present itself to me, I would choose and do exactly the opposite of what my first inclination told me. Far from following my instincts, I would now refute them. First thought, worst thought, and that unto terminus. My instincts had led me to gravel and ashes. Maybe this would bring me to rosewater. At a minimum, this course represented the sort of deliberateness, fevered and keen, I had never known before. And that, in itself, was liberative. For the first time, already, I was tasting a kind of genuinidad …
And so I set up a contra fund of the mind. Whatever I was, I was against. Work to implement went as follows: I set out to inventory my truths, to wash my pillars with soap. What had time taught me? What were the deep themes of my being? Could I set out the alpha-essence of my experience … ?
Here was what I thought and knew: …
I was in favor of happiness …
I sought same …
I wanted my days to be as pleasant and productive as possible …
I wanted to live in love …
I wanted to pass my minutes in social structures that comforted and consoled, and provided company …
I did not want to spend time in social structures that incite people, whenever they have the slightest advantage or differential over other people, to exert this advantage or differential maximally, continually, maniacally …
I wanted warmth …
I sought to know, at least once, a minimum purity of conscience …
Indeed, I wanted even a moment of pureheartedness …
I wanted my behavior unjudged …
I did not want my behavior molded, or pressured, or supervised …
Or evaluated or normalized, openly or covertly, singly, intermittently or continuously …
I wanted to forever wear comfortable shoes …
I wanted to avoid clinging, colorless dress …
I did not like waxy cups for holding drinking water …
I wanted not ever to concern myself with transportation patterns, traffic patterns, parking spaces or seating scarcities, or with calculations regarding people who were calculating same …
I preferred kindness …
I did not really want to shave every day …
I had little affection for pushbutton camaraderie …
I wanted to sense time as a friend …
I wanted my time to flow, freely, ungridded …
I wanted to rise lyrically, without alarm clock …
I loved a leisurely lunch.
—These were my truths. And these I explicitly, and pointedly, turned away from. All of them, without exception. I did exactly the opposite of what they advised. And in four years, I was Senior Vice-President for Internal Affairs of the Mazorca Insurance Co., a robust concern that holds offices in seventeen cities throughout Argentina …
I had four hundred eighty-two agents within my dossier …
And misery as my diligent assistant …
Evidentemente, something had gone awry …
The Zonda struck a new note now, low-pitched and dour, cresting to keening. It pinched, not stung, me as I unsheathed the keys to my flat, now three bedrooms big. It blew, even snorted, with madhorse fury after I’d closed the doors of the rumble-up cabs that, all during those days, ferried me about the microcentro. And what it said, it said to me: there was not one particle of the unspurious in my lived existence …
¡Dios Mío! I had gone against my grain, ripples, whorls and all, but still had nothing of substance, of nutrition and view. I had denied what had led me astray, but still saw no road signs home. The program, decidedly, had not worked …
And then the thought came, while sitting drinking already-cold coffee in a gray, newsscrap-strewn, nearly nameless confitería on the av. Santa Fe. Not the program, the programmer. There was virtue in a program of negation, of contrariness, as the method of extraction. I had simply not carried the pro
gram far enough. There had been one thing I had not negated, and that was negation itself. One thing I had not run contrary to, and that the contrarian posture. I raced from my gray café, leaving a generous tip, and sprinted to the central Mazorca administrative offices, just off av. Córdoba, and immediately tendered my resignation. I said not a word why. I refused multiple-person entreaty. I refused tea. I walked away from generations of benefits …
All so I could start afresh. This time, I would push the program to where it should have gone, to its necessary conclusion, thrilling with possibility. I would negate negation. I would love, and trust, and accept all. In doing so, I realized, I would be inaugurating a new mode of grand approbation, one closer to a declaration of faith. It would be a statement for the benevolence of the creation, the integrity of its ways. I would tap into the larger order that had arranged the cosmos, and crafted our world, unsere grosse Welt, bearing a greater intelligence than any lone psychostructure could command. Universal wisdom, what are our petty discriminations in comparison? And to this I would faithfully submit. In so doing, I would avail myself of a world’s worth of potentialities, and not merely the coded proclivities of individual fashioning, so limited and dim. Openness, unforeseeableness, these were my horizons. Ausgezeichnet! An intoxicating thing.
—With distrust behind me, I would now let world-force lead me where it would, in receptivity and optimism, oriented, then guided, by its gentle hand. Thus I proceeded forth, re-entering man-culture’s heave and strum, presenting my cup to what kind nature proffered. And in three-and-a-half years, I was Vice-President of North American Development for Sarmiento Properties, SA …
This, I note, is what brought me here to Chicago, just under three years ago. But, need I say, it, alas, followed. The Zonda. My Zonda. Pawed sod and followed. And seemed to gain gale force as it crossed your ciliate plains …
I had a fine home when I first arrived, and cars, and click-shoe assistants, and incomparably more. No matter! I had been delivered to circumstances as absent of self-rightfulness, of echtheit, as the smile of any pin-sniffing salesclerk. Once again, plans had been pillagers. I came to wan account as, unshirting one nighttime Tuesday, I caught myself lurching to preserve good crease, then ran straight out and eventually landed in the restaurant Automat, on your Lumber Street. There I sat for the most of two days, drinking water coffee, and eating would-be burgundy beef, and lemon pie. Emerging, I resigned by cell-phone. Then left the device, once my lifeline, in a streetside planter …
Again my plan had failed. Again it had led to me the opposite of its intention, back, cruelly, to the very point I had sought to quit. Refuting had not worked, refuting refuting had not worked, and there seemed little argument for moving on to refuting refuting refuting. Lieber Gott! I was beginning to feel like some desperate kin to the strange neutral B meson, the sub-atomic particle that flips back and forth between being itself and its own antiparticle three trillion times per second. Ach, was nun? Grief and heartroil. I sat and hissed in my living room. I hissed at my living room. And then, in a corner of my true living room, there lit a glimmer …
In both my willed attempts, though opposite, it occurred to me, I had hunted the cougar of genuineness through pursuing a course that I had believed wise, and effective, and good, both for myself and for self’s overtones. Such is normal. But in so doing, I then understood, I had chosen steps that, in goal and orientation, all other persons would have chosen. In fact, they choose so, in their own endeavors, continually, every day. Suddenly, this perturbed. How could genuineness, the full, wind-fresh propriety for which I thirsted, arise from this, I wondered, from taking the same train as all other travelers from my station? Wouldn’t this, so commonplace, so predictable, forfeit just the sort of self-generativeness I was most hankering for? In fact, hadn’t something close to this course, assumed, blindly, long ago, been a signal part of what had led me from genuineness to begin with … ?
So I started to think. How might I find what would indestructibly be the most individual of methods? Claro, certainly, only by making the worst, most counterintuitive choice imagination could muster. Then step two: What would represent this worst? What, I wondered, would be the most irrational and counterproductive thing one might do, outside the bounds of destructiveness, of course, the pinnacle act of perversion to reason, to goodness, to responsibility? What should anyone most not want in the world, what result or process that, under any conditions, any reasonable being would refuse to be part of? What might be the greatest affront to the common sense, the common dignity, of the species, those qualities that, all said, are the reasons for granting value to the Adamite enterprise … ?
It was far-fetched, surely. But for me, snarled and shorn, persuasive. And with this clarified, the course of action was easy. I did a few seconds of research, and made a list. Then I took out my checkbook, Bank of America, of course, tagged with the bold red-blue flag, and, over the spread of just a few days, in leisurely rhythm, I wrote and mailed out bank drafts, here mostly known as checks. With a light hand, I sent a check for two dollars and fifty-eight cents to Mr. Ballmer, and a check for one seventy-five to Mr. Strong. A check for two twenty-seven went out to Mr. Bloomberg, and one for two fifteen to Mr. Buffet. And with each, I put a small note: Thanks for your little boost when I needed it!, or Told you I wouldn’t forget!, or similar. Tender things. And every one, every one of the checks returned to me cashed …
Finally, then. Ardor, parasols, savor, release. Here was my honor state. It became my dandelion, my delight. I sent a check for two thirty-five to Mr. Ellison, another for one twelve to Mr. Jagger, street-fighting man. By this time, I had discontinued including my little handwritten notes, evidently unnecessary. These gentlemen do not too closely monitor funds coming in …
And so, at last, I could know rest. I had traveled to the nadir of thought, to the vile bottom of human freedom and cerebration, to the opposite of all sense, to find something that no one, ever, under any earthly circumstance, could conceivably want to do, to an act so cruel and absurd that it would drive any person, every person, to rise up and cry out: Who would do such a thing? Who?? – give money to rich people …
And there, only there, miraculously there, I finally drank genuineness. Yes, genuineness, forceful and restorative, tonic and sweet. Rightness, treasure, sensed and sampled, exactly so. Maravilloso!
—It was an ongoing glee. And I continued with this, and developed it, over a happy time, nearly half a year. I extended my range, sending gifts where I knew they’d be welcome, to Messrs. Traoré, Mobutu, Abacha, Schwarzenegger. And all my offerings, lovingly, made the great circle back. Once a month, the great and good benefactors at the Bank of America graced my mailslot with an inky bouquet. I lived for the day …
One Sunday, seeking to celebrate, or, rather, to add confetti to my constant celebration, I went to a barbecue restaurant here on 24th Street, name of Jake’s. There, the oxtail is good, also the brisket, despite thin napkins that shred at moistened touch. In the middle of enjoying my side of coleslaw, I was approached by a fellow whom I eventually learned is called Marquesta. He was looking for a seat. I welcomed him to my table, and we talked. A friendly Mexican man. In time, the conversation turned to my blessedness, and I showed him, newly received by post, and so not easily surrendered from my person, a few checks, until then snugly carried in my jacket inner pocket. You cannot imagine the beacons that were his eyes as he fingered the traveled rectangles. Smiles like refrigerator doors opening in the midnight. Soul-loft immeasurable. Overthrill and delight. He looked through the storied names, and, finally, after minutes, and more, though I could see it coming, he asked, hesitantly, if he might have one – as a gift, he said, for a friend who took meaning from Mr. Coombs. Though I saw through this pretense as if it were glass …
Yes, I did give it. I twinged, ciertamente, but I wanted to express gratitude for this Marquesta’s innocent insight …
The lesson was significant. I had known, surely, fully, that genuineness,
like all worthful states, is its own reward. But I hadn’t realized just how much. That night, I sat down with my archives, and began to pore. To collate and see. And then I saw possibility. Substantial possibility. So the next day, a rainy afternoon, I pinned an advertisement, just one, a halfsheet of handwritten paper, on the tack-, staple-, and Scotch-crusted wall behind the entrance door in Rodney’s SportsCards and Collectibles, on East Washington Street …
Overwhelming is a word perhaps overused in this country. But within three weeks, I recount quietly, my Mr. Jobs brought me eighty dollars, my Ms. Diaz one hundred ten. It was stunning, stammer-inducing. Quick and clear and no complaints. My Mr. Branson grabbed fifty dollars, and, while Mr. Cheney was only valued for five, my first Ms. Fonda brought in sixty greenbacks, while numbers two through eight brought eighty-five each. And all were realized on initial investments of no more than two dollars twenty – my considered ceiling – apiece …
And, my good sir! They do not even have to be signed! …
So, Mr. Selwyn. By now, a man such as yourself has understood. Already, I am sure, you have seen. I have created, for lack of a better phrase, perpetual economic motion. My system has bested the Second Law, commercial subdivision. I have manufactured a neo-Malthusian miracle. Mr. Selwyn, the only hidden cost is postage. One might ride this horse over the farthest horizon …
Clearly, this is a situation worth exploring, worth developing. Fully, that is, to the scale it merits. Already, its ground floor, Mr. Selwyn, is spacious, and richly appointed. One might flood out thousands of envelopes per day. So I was wondering, Mr. Selwyn, the idea came to me that—