Читать книгу The Slip - Mark Sampson - Страница 7

I hope you’ll indulge me, dear reader, if I backtrack now and provide some context around my chthonic journey into the hive of Canada’s finance sector. Yes, for three months in the fall of 2012 I joined the workaday masses that streamed through St. Andrew Station in downtown Toronto and up into the charcoal towers at King and York, into commerce’s everlasting orgasm at the low end of Bay Street. This was not, as certain faculty colleagues accused me of, some shallow act of anthropology on my part. I took this sabbatical not to specimen-ize a society, but to bear witness to the practical application of ideas I’d been grappling with since my Oxford days, ideas that culminated into my successfully defended D.Phil. dissertation in 1993 and its subsequent publication as my first book (Decanting Kant: The Categorical Imperative in the Age of Neo-liberalism, OUP, 1995). What to say: I was and still am an unapologetic deontologist; and I wanted to see how Bay Street’s increasingly unfettered cupidity affected real people at the level of their morals, their sense of duty to themselves and each other. ODS’s chicanery had been making headlines for half a decade by 2012, and the company seemed a fitting target for my experiment. But perhaps Cheryl Sneed was right: when I showed up for the first day of my entry-level position on their national Comms team, I was fully expecting a cruel, cutthroat environment.

So I was thrown for a loop when they gave us all laptops in the first ten minutes of orientation. The HR manager leading our pan-departmental training session handed the machines out as if they were bento boxes, while we, a cohort of about fifteen, sat in rows of tables in the classroom-style meeting room. I was parked between two young women hired as financial analysts — both of whom, I recall, having vaguely pornographic names: Tiina Cherry (spelt with two phallic i’s) and Regina Wetmore. The laptops we were assigned were the slickest I’d ever seen — putting to shame the dud I used for my work at U of T’s Philosophy department — but the girls barely blinked at the handout.

Orientation revealed that ODS was in Year Three of its latest corporate piatiletka: The ODS Way (2010–2014), the goal for which was to re-establish billion-dollar revenues by the end of “Fiscal 14.” The HR rep, using a Microsoft PowerPoint presentation full of Microsoft Visio diagrams, walked us through how this overarching mission statement was to control our behaviours in every interaction while on company time. This was more like it, I thought. A downright fascistic approach to human manipulation: the relentless sloganeering, the buzzword indoctrinations, the pressure not to use any independent judgment that wasn’t “laser-focused” on the company’s profitability. I raised several reflexively comic protests during this presentation, but my jokes fell flat. Yet despite these subversive queries, I did not achieve the pariah status I assumed I would. In fact, Tiina and Regina — who seemed to have become BFFs during the mid-morning coffee break — invited me to join them for lunch.

In the afternoon, I settled into my assigned cubicle, which was right outside the office of the communications manager who hired me. “Orientation go okay?” he asked, coming out when he spotted my arrival. He was a tall, breezy technocrat named Stuart, with thick curly hair and a meticulously trimmed soul patch, so unlike the red mass of fur that engulfed my face. He took me around to meet the rest of the team, an ensemble of marketing types and quondam journalists and social media specialists. Everyone knew who I was and why I was there — someone even claimed to have read my one confirmed bestseller, The Movable Apocalypse (Bibliophilia, 1998) — and everyone was friendly. But it was a friendliness singed by stress, by worries over looming deadlines and relentless project plans, by evening GO Train schedules forever present in the back of their minds.

Stuart and I reviewed the complex nondisclosure documents I had signed — outlining all of the proprietary elements of ODS’s business that I’d agreed would not make it into my new book — and then he set me upon the task for which I’d been hired. The company’s enormous, labyrinthine website had been written in a kind of business pidgin, and it was my job to rewrite a large section of it into lucid English. The firm was happy for the free labour, and this was exactly the kind of work I wanted during this operation, since it would put me in contact with multiple divisions of the company — its fund managers, its corporate advisors, its legal team, its various ancillary offshoots — and give me a view into their world. The job itself was a simple simulacrum of journalism: do a bit of research, go interview the relevant experts, cobble together the web copy, et cetera. Stuart even suggested I could do much of it from home, and I was tempted by the prospect: to be in my own book-lined office, a Bloody Joseph to sip, Grace beyond the closed door doing her thing with the kids. But no. My true subject matter was ODS’s corporate culture, and I needed to be in the thick of it.

And what to say of that culture? ODS believed in competition, believed it in its bloodstream. Saw it as the one agora that everyone was obligated to participate in. The next sale, the next business relationship, how one chaired a meeting or approved a business plan — it all became about beating somebody else. This created an air of antagonism that hummed like white noise throughout the organization. These men and women, caught up in a kind of radicalized individualism, battled one another not only for the pre-eminence of their effort and ideas, but for the chance to vanquish the effort and ideas of others. Everyone I spoke to seemed cast in a sarcophagus of anxiety. And where did this feeling spring from? One word summed it up: change. Change was the siren call of liberalized markets; it was the only constant these people could count on. A failure to adapt to this kind of mindless dynamism would spell their downfall, and it bred a particular strain of human fear that brought out the worst in these people’s natures. Their only relief came, it seemed, from ducking down to the Path beneath Bay Street, that enormous mazelike shopping mall, to partake in some retail therapy as a reminder of why they had signed up for this life in the first place. I myself went down there for lunch sometimes, and would even run into Tiina and Regina in one of the Path’s countless food courts. The girls were always kind to me — smiling sprites who welcomed me and my tray of tasteless pad Thai to their table. Yet some simple probing revealed that they were already overwhelmed by their workloads, as if they had been with the firm for years rather than just a few weeks. And as I looked around the food court, everyone seemed to be in the same boat, shackled by years of compounded stress that may have come on in just the last four hours. What kind of life was this? I thought. How could these people not form a pitchfork-wielding jacquerie to overthrow their taskmasters? But this was Bay Street’s monopoly on their reality. It was all they knew.

My “official” interviews with members of the C-suite provided some insight into the fons et origo of this so-called culture. I got twenty minutes with each of them, including the reclusive Viktor Grozni himself. I was frustrated (though impressed) by the way they were all able to stay unflaggingly on message, as if the firm’s business models and mission statements were as finely engineered as a Lamborghini. They all pleasantly dismissed any notion that their company was in trouble.

Only Grozni, that acne-scarred oligarch, got openly hostile with me. “You’re not wearing a tie,” he smiled as he extended his hand over his desk when I entered his surprisingly spare office. “Most men wear a tie when they come see me.”

“Oh, Viktor, what is a tie anyway?” I smiled back, accepting his hand. “It’s just an arrow that points to your penis.” The interview went downhill from there. I questioned him — politely at first, then more sternly — about the cutthroat nature of ODS’s business culture, and he retorted with buzz phrases like “excellence” and “competition” and “high-performing environment.” When I suggested that his brand of competition forced employees to engage in some rather predatory practices, he welcomed me to name the regulations they were violating. When I suggested the federal government had created the very landscape that made such behaviour possible, he said, “Yes, isn’t it great that Canada finally has a government interested in growing the economy after so many decades of suffocating socialism?” And when I suggested that he had a moral obligation to good cor­por­ate governance — considering how many Canadians had their pensions wrapped up in this racket — Grozni looked at me as if I had spoken Martian. As our exchange grew more heated, I began to see him as the embodiment of that great Greek term pleonexia, which John Stuart Mill — enlightened man that he was — had written so eloquently about. Grozni’s was not your garden-variety greed, but rather “the desire to engross more than one’s share of advantages … the pride which derives gratification from the abasement of others; the ego which thinks self and its concerns more important than everything else …” The impression Grozni left me with was that my viewpoints were outdated at best and dangerous at worst. He even said to me, near the end of the interview, “The Canada you knew, Mr. Sharpe, is long gone.” “It’s Dr. Sharpe,” I corrected him, “and I think you’re wrong.” He just chuckled once, as if to say I can’t fathom a world where someone like you could prove someone like me wrong.

Back in the CBC studio during the commercial break, I was tremu­lous. As a stagehand came by to re-powder my brow — I was tacky with sweat by this point — my imagination began to corkscrew out of control over how my gaffe might be reverberating around the country. My heart raced as I looked over at Sal and Cheryl, who sat cool as breezes at the other end of the desk. Their poppies hovered over their breasts like beacons of respectability, while mine was probably fluttering somewhere among the eaves or gutters of Parliament Street.

I gestured to Sal to lean back in his chair with me, and spoke to him sotto voce when he did, even though Cheryl was sitting right between us. “Look, when we come back, can I have a chance to clarify what I just said?”

“Sorry, buddy,” he replied, “but that segment went way over. We only have about five minutes left, and I have several other points I want to cover.”

He sat back up and I reluctantly followed. The three of us waited in silence for the commercial break to run its course. Cheryl’s face held a patina of diplomacy, but I knew what she was thinking: that she had bested me, that by hijacking Sal’s role as interviewer she was able to cast me as the extremist and herself as the voice of moderation. With less than five minutes left, I would need all of my intellectual heft to turn things around. In the seconds before we came back, I looked up once more at Raj standing in the booth. His head was now bowed over his phone, his brow furrowed. Oh God — he was probably on Facebook or Twitter right then, watching the obloquy and snark over my blunder flood in. Was Grace there, too, gingerly defending my moment of indiscretion? Or was she still steaming over my fecklessness as a father (Philip, your daughter scalded herself), my bedroom shortcomings (I’m getting pretty used to your inability to satisfy me), or, worst of all, my complete ineptitude at keeping track of our social calendar? Oh Jesus, why couldn’t I remember what we’re doing on Sunday?

A countdown proceeded, and then the electric guitars and synthesized trumpets returned. “And we’re back,” Sal said when they stopped. “We’re talking about Friday’s collapse of ODS Financial Group with Cheryl Sneed and Philip Sharpe. Now Cheryl, you’ve taken some heat over your coverage of ODS. Even in the last few weeks, as the company entered its death spiral, you’ve remained ultimately optimistic. Can you explain why?”

“Well, of course the foreclosure of the firm is by no means good news. I know this has put undo stress on both individuals and the market. But I just don’t buy that this is some kind of apoca­lypse brought on by corporate malice. The truth is, ODS made some big gambles that didn’t pay off. But the Canadian economy is strong; it’s resilient. And so, too, are the people who worked for the firm. The good ones will find a way; they always do. I mean, just anecdotally, I heard from several of my sources who said that people were on their cellphones Friday afternoon, reaching out to contacts and finding other work. Some had secured new jobs before they left the building.”

“And you’re also convinced,” Sal went on, “that the pension funds that the company managed are still secure? That this hasn’t left a big gaping hole in —”

“So you feel the company has no obligation whatsoever,” I said to Cheryl, cutting Sal off, “that this is a morally neutral situation as far as the business is concerned. You don’t see what ODS did as categorically wrong.”

“You’re not exactly in a position to talk about right and wrong, Philip,” she replied without looking at me, “considering you just argued that ODS’s executive team should be arrested for crimes that don’t yet exist.”

“That’s not what I said.”

“It is what you said.”

“It’s not what I meant. Look. I think what you’re doing is obfuscating the bigger issue here. The reality is, last Friday represents the culmination of what Canada has become after nearly ten years of Stephen Harper: this kind of neo-Thatcherism; this normalization of greed and dog-eat-dogism; this complete disregard for the community at large. What we’ve witnessed is our country giving neo-liberal economics a monopoly on all things moral.”

“Oh my God,” Cheryl said, rolling her eyes. “Again with the melodrama.”

“It’s not melodrama.”

“It is. Why don’t you just admit what this is really about for you, Philip? You didn’t like ODS’s C-suite as people. You found them smug; you found them indifferent to your abstract ideas about duty; and you found them ruthless when it came to the tough decisions needed to keep the business afloat. And now you just wish someone would come along and arrest them.”

“That is not true.” I nodded toward the camera in front of us. “Canadians need to understand what is really going on here. Friday represented a failure of the social contract we’re supposed to have with our leaders. And not just with our corporate leaders, whom we’ve given the right — apparently — to make as much money as they want. But our civic leaders, our government, whom we’ve given the right to protect the general will, to have a bird’s-eye view on how the actions of a few can harm the lives of many.”

“Wow,” Cheryl said, her voice sodden with sarcasm. “Straight from the pen of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.”

“Okay, we only have a couple minutes left,” Sal interjected. “Let’s talk about severance packages. We know the senior leader­ship walked off with huge payouts, but as for the average employee —”

“In the end, Cheryl, what I’m talking about here is magnanimity. About graciousness.” The two of them just stared at me, as if they weren’t sure where I was going with this. Truth be told, I wasn’t so sure myself. “We’ve watched as freedom of the markets has trumped all other freedoms — not the least of which being our moral freedoms. We’ve all but abandoned civic virtue and good governance in favour of a rigid ideology — the ideology of economic liberty, of wealth as an end in itself. And when that ideology crashes and burns so spectacularly, as it did on Friday, the system itself should be magnanimous enough to punish those responsible. To allow us to punish them. That’s what I meant earlier.”

“Okay, guys, let’s get back on track with —”

“I assure you, Philip,” Cheryl sneered, “that I have no idea what you’re talking about. And I’m beginning to think that you don’t either.”

“You don’t see how it’s all connected?” I asked. From the corner of my eye I could see Lori giving Sal a desperate signal to wrap things up. “This monopoly of market thinking?” I pushed on. “This fetishizing of the self? This abandoning of duty to the mentality of acquisition, to this belief that economic value is the only value? This is nothing more than a bastardization of the liberal traditions this country was founded on.”

“I just don’t see it that way,” Cheryl said. “I think you’re taking a bunch of vague notions and just extending them onto a situation that, while dire, is relatively straightforward. I think you’re saying these things to grind a political axe against the business community.”

“That’s because you’re cynical,” I said. “I mean, Sal called you ‘ultimately optimistic’ earlier, but the exact opposite is true. I think you’re deeply pessimistic about how human beings can exist with one another. If you thought about these concepts for half a second, you’d know just how harmful Friday’s events are to the fabric of what Canada is supposed to stand for.”

“Well, Philip,” Cheryl said, “I don’t believe these ideas are as penetrating as you think they are.”

“Well, Cheryl, I would love nothing more than to penetrate you with these ideas,” I retorted, “but I worry you wouldn’t enjoy it enough.”

There was a collective gasp in the studio, which I confess I didn’t hear at the time. Cheryl’s face puckered and Sal sort of gaped at me.

“Okay, we gotta go,” he said, turning back to his audience. “The foreign affairs minister is up next. When we come back.”

“And we’re out!” Lori yelled over the cameras.

Within a second, a duo of stagehands climbed onto the riser and began helping Cheryl out of her microphone. As soon as they finished, she was up and out of her chair, fuming off toward the green room without even saying goodbye to us. Neither of these handmaidens turned to assist me then, but just clomped back off the stage without acknowledging my existence. So I unclipped my own microphone, leaned forward to dig its battery out of my pants, then set the whole tangled mess on the desk. Lori came by quickly to collect it. I tried to make eye contact with her before she, too, departed, but her face was just one inscrutable scowl.

I looked at Sal and he looked at me.

“That could have gone better,” he said.

I threw my hands up, as if to indicate: This is the world we live in now. I got out of the chair and left the stage myself. By the time I reached the corridor beyond the studio wall baffles, Raj was standing there waiting for me.

“What the hell was that?” he asked.

“I know, I fucked up big time.” We began to make our way down the corridor as I searched for something to wipe the makeup off my face. “Can you believe I said that — on national TV?”

“A lot of people are gonna be pissed at you.”

“Tell me about it. You don’t just undermine centuries of judicial principle like that and expect to get away with it.”

“Dude, what?” Raj said. “No, no, I meant —”

But then I spotted it — a men’s room. I rushed over and pushed through its swinging door, heading for the paper towels and sinks while Raj waited for me in the hall.

“Look, I need to get out of here,” I told him when I came back, all fresh-faced and flushed. “What are you doing right now? Are you allowed to leave?”

“I can leave,” he said. “I’ve been here since, like, six this mor­ning. But Sharpe, listen, don’t you want to …” He was maybe going to say, Don’t you want to talk about what just happened? But I could tell that he could tell that, no, I didn’t want to talk about it. I didn’t want to listen. I felt covered in the cold mud of shame over saying something so horrifying about those ODS executives, so philosophically inconsistent, on live TV. To talk about it right now would be to relive the whole thing.

Just then two CBC interns, a couple of skirted go-getters, walked by in the hall. They must have caught my bumbling performance on a monitor somewhere, because they both turned and tossed me a glare of appalled incredulity as they passed. One of the girls even made to stop, perhaps to say something rude to me, but her friend pulled her away. “Okay,” Raj said. “Let’s … let’s just get you out of here.”

“Great,” I replied. “I say we head to Cabbagetown. I need to be on my own turf. I’ll take you to my local for a drink or six.”

“Sounds good to me.”

Out on Front Street, the afternoon had turned to evening. We had rolled our clocks back over the weekend, and the abrupt onset of twilight was still jarring, seeming to swallow the entire city like an ominous premonition. We hailed a Beck. I told the cabbie, “Parliament and Carlton,” and we soon joined the rush-hour traffic battling to get out of downtown. The Beck felt less like an escape pod and more like a tumbrel, and I imagined impoverished serfs pelting me with fruit as I was taken away to a final, grisly end.

Raj and I sat in silence as we made our glacial progression. I leaned back against the seat with closed eyes and pinched my nose, my mind churning with a thousand regrets. To break the quiet, Raj opted for idle chit-chat.

“Say, Sharpe.”

I looked at him. “Yeah?”

“Do you still make that killer cocktail of yours?”

“What, the Bloody Joseph?”

“Yeah.”

“I do. I had three of them earlier today.”

He laughed. “That drink is off the chain, man. You gotta make me one of those again.”

“I meant to have a fourth, but ran out of time.” I harrumphed. “Maybe that’s why I was so off my game today.” Of course, I knew that wasn’t true. One final Collins’ worth of that fierce concoction — infused with brawny Jameson as a substitute for effeminate vodka — would not have put me in a better frame of mind. I knew damn well what had lay at the root of my distraction. A vision of her, holding up our daughter and speaking those words to me — you don’t really seem all that plugged in to what’s happening in your own house — flooded my mind.

“I’ll have to have you over,” I said to Raj. “Just not for a little while.”

We arrived in Cabbagetown and the cab deposited us at an Irish pub called Stout. This early in the evening we were able to nab a spot near the enormous fireplace, finding leather club chairs to sink into and a low table in front of us. Raj seemed impressed by the aura of the place: the tastefully exposed brick; the warm mahogany woodwork; the beige piano in the corner; the separate menu for craft beer. I borrowed his cellphone — I don’t do cellphones — and he helped me send a text to Grace: Hi, it’s Philip. At Stout with friend Raj. Back later. Soon, a young, attractive waitress came by — “Hello, Professor, great to see you again,” she said with authentic enthusiasm — and we ordered a couple of pints from the cask. When they came, Raj and I cheered each other and then I downed nearly half of mine in a single gulp, dribbling a bit onto the top of my Payless when I returned the glass to the table. The waitress was right on it, coming by with a napkin so I could wipe up, then took it away with a sunny “No problem” when I finished.

“You know,” I said after she was out of earshot, “that was the first time today a woman has been kind to me.”

Raj laughed. “Oh really?”

“Yeah.” I squeezed the bridge of my nose once more. “I had a terrible fight with Grace before I left the house today.”

“Dude.”

“That’s why I was such a mess on camera.”

“Dude, look.” And he gave my knee a manly shake. “Try not to worry about it, okay? Maybe it’s not as bad as you think.”

I looked at him. “Are you kidding? Raj, this is a huge blow to me intellectually. I mean, I’m supposed to be a leading expert on Immanuel Kant. I’m supposed to know what it means to talk about the categorical imperative, about universal law — law that applies to everyone in every circumstance. What I said was the worst example of the hypothetical imperative I can imagine. This idea that we would imprison certain people and then think up a reason why, and do it out of spite. Do you know what I mean?” He didn’t seem to, but he let me continue. So I talked about these ideas as we ordered food and more pints. Talked about them as we ate and drank. Was still talking about them long after the waitress had cleared away our plates and we ordered yet more pints.

“I’m sorry,” I finally said to him, “to go on like this.”

“It’s okay.”

“Tell me what’s new in your world. Where are you living these days?”

“I’m back on the Danforth,” he grinned. “Rented myself a sweet little place out near Donlands. Big kitchen; open porch at ground level out front. You should come out and see it sometime.”

“I’d like that. And will you be at the CBC long term, do you think?”

He chortled. “Fuck no. Is anyone? More budget cuts are coming and I’ll be gone. I’ll go freelance for a while until I can figure out what to do next.”

Ah, the peripatetic life of a confirmed free spirit. I marvelled again at how Raj’s unbridled existence seemed to infuse him with a youthfulness that had long abandoned me. Over the next two pints he told me about various “gigs” he’d had prior to taking this latest contract with our alleged public broadcaster: the trip to Asia to film a documentary about Japanese whiskey-making; a sojourn to Alabama for some corporate videos and the after-hours run-in with bona fide members of the KKK; the Guelph start-up that paid him obscene amounts of money to film some CollegeHumor knock-offs, only to fold a month later. Through it all, Raj seemed fearless in the face of not knowing where his next paycheque would come from. And as I vicariously lived through his adventures, I felt the slightest pang of remorse that I was now safely institutionalized — institutionalized, perhaps, in more ways than one.

“And have you seen Henry around much?” I asked him during a lull.

Raj gave a derisive snort. “No. That guy got married. Now I never see him. Kind of like you.”

“Hey now!”

“Just kidding. It pisses me off, is all. Henry used to be such a good journalist, you know. One of the best in the city. I mean, he did that killer interview with you for the Star when your book on Islam came out.”

“This is true.”

“And now what’s he doing? Nothing. Fucking corporate communications. What can I say about that guy? Henry got fat and boring and, now, fucking married. I don’t even recognize him anymore. He’s well on his way to moving to the suburbs and becoming one of these lobotomized Stepford husbands who, like, helps his wife around the house and talks to his kids and shit. I mean, I can’t relate to someone like that.”

“No, obviously,” I said with shifty eyes. I chuckled at his clever term, since I knew the type well. Grace was always inviting her friends over — a cheery cabal of cocksure feminists with their affably dull Stepford husbands in tow — for brunch. I remained engaged in their table banter only because these men found so many interesting ways to be uninteresting. Thankfully, Grace did not insist I comport to their behaviour. She was just grateful if I still blew below the legal limit by the cantaloupe course.

Wait.

That was it.

Brunch. Brunch! Brunch! Brunch! That’s what we were doing on Sunday. We were hosting yet another brunch, and had invited my literary agent over in the hopes that she might look at Grace’s new children’s book. Of course. This fact re-emerged in my mind, as solid as a cinder block.

Raj looked at me queerly. “You’re having a whole conversation over there, aren’t you — all by yourself.”

“Sorry, I have to go,” I said. “Let’s get the bill. I have to go.”

Out on Parliament Street, Raj and I hugged and then parted company — he walking northward to Castle Frank Station, and me hoofing my way home. I didn’t know then that he had pulled out his phone to check Facebook as he went, and, when he did, saw something there that twisted his face into a rictus of panic. He told me later that he had thought of doubling back to find me, or at least calling out my name down the street. I probably wouldn’t have heard him anyway, caught up as I was in the mental airstreams of my triumph, a parallax of pure, sweet recollection.

I got back to 4 Metcalfe Street to find it dark, the little stained-glass window above our door like an extinguished lamp, the eaves above it pregnant with shadows. Grace and the girls had clearly gone to bed. What hour was it, anyway? I wandered into the kitchen, opened the fridge absently. Moved to the dining-room table, took a quick flip through the day’s papers. Then I staggered upstairs to our bedroom, ready to face my fate. But stepping in to the faint light of a street lamp coming through our curtained window, I could see Grace was asleep on her side of the bed, her back turned to me. I was suddenly awash in guilt. As penance, I didn’t even bother to go brush my teeth in the ensuite. Just stripped my clothes off and onto the floor, then crawled in next to her.