The camera zooms in on the reception committee. That’s the Chief Risk Officer. And the woman beside him? She bristles at the thought that it’s the corporate poet, summoned to deliver an occasional poem, but it’s Duduzile, the PA to the Operations Manager: Facilities Management & Maintenance. Almost as bad. The very woman who processed her request for a higher office. Her skirt flutters like a frantic bird in the downdraught of the rotor. Or it may just be the wind. It’s always blustery up there, according to Simonetta, a sudden gust once blew the lettuce out of her salad. The edge is alarming too. She expected a barrier more imposing than this waist-high parapet and flimsy handrail. It shouldn’t be so easy to step off into the void.
The climber can go no further. He pauses on the ledge of the 21st floor, holding on by his fingertips, and leans back to consider his final move. A policeman on the rooftop leans over to talk to him. Spiderman has a problem, she sees now. The channels in the window frames that he’s been scaling end here. Above is a concrete overhang, wider than the ledge on which he’s standing, and then nothing but the smooth face of the parapet. It looks unassailable. They could open a window and let him climb into one of the boardrooms — if the windows opened, that is. Surely he considered all this before he started his ascent?
No matter what his plans are, she knows this is the most dangerous part. She watched a documentary once on high-wire walkers and learnt that the truly risky moments in any act are stepping off and arriving back. Out in the middle of the wire, when the spectators’ hearts are in their mouths, the artist is in perfect control. It cannot be otherwise. Balanced over the void, depending only on himself to defy the laws of gravity, his concentration must be pure. Every distraction is tuned out. But when he comes back to the grounded end of the wire, and must pass from his ethereal element into our earthbound one, he is most at risk of falling. The people who wait there, the assistants and seconds, even the most seasoned ones, have to stop themselves from reaching out to seize a hand or an arm. It’s a natural instinct, this urge to drag someone to safety, but it must be resisted. The artist, who has put his life in peril, must be left alone to save it.
It’s the same for this daredevil, she thinks. Here within reach of the summit, he is most likely to fall. There is no art to it either. It’s physics. He must have an exit strategy. Perhaps he and the policeman are discussing this very thing, as now both of them are shooing the helicopter away like a scavenging gull.
She sees a cameraman there, hanging out of the door of the craft in a harness, and realises that he cannot be generating the pictures she’s watching on the screen, as she supposed. There are cameras elsewhere. Everywhere.
The pilot misunderstands the signals, he thinks they’re summoning him, and the helicopter’s nose dips and comes in closer. The climber clings to the glass with his little cape flickering. Any moment now he’ll be peeled from the surface like a leaf and flung into space. On the rooftop people are waving and shouting into handsets. At last, the helicopter lifts up into the blue. The camera sees it off to a distance, and then turns back to the rooftop to show the main characters in close-up: the policeman at the railing, looking down, the climber on the ledge, looking up, and the Chief Risk Officer, looking ahead. The people in the square below, who are no longer the audience, have been forgotten.
The climber reaches into his resin bag with one hand and then the other, and rubs his thumbs over his fingertips as if he’s thinking about money. Bracing his feet against the frame on either side, he scuttles up the glass to the top of the window. Then he reaches with his right hand for the ledge above.
The storyteller is back at her post. Ten minutes have passed while she waited for the man to fall past her window. Still nothing. The blades go on churning the air outside, but in here it is silent.
She jiggles the mouse to waken the monitor. Then she deletes the title and first line of her story and types: The Exit Strategy.
She considers the phrase. Every storyteller she knows has spun a tale out of it. Once it was a platitude in business and politics, now it’s become a principle, a philosophy — one she should apply in her own life and work. You must know when to get out, when to disinvest, to sell, to liquidate, to terminate, to retrench and fire, to decommission, cut your losses, save your bacon.
It’s beyond her job description to shut the computer down, but there’s a power button on the monitor. She presses it and it collapses to black.
There are pens and pencils in her briefcase, clasped in elasticised loops like cartridges in a bandolier. She chooses a 3B pencil, opens her notebook to the first page and writes: Exit Strategy.
If everyone now requires an exit strategy — relationship counsellors, rugby coaches, foreign-policy makers, urban gardening experts, marketing managers, military commanders, surgeons — it’s because the concept is crucial. The crux. Going in is nothing: pulling out is the hard part. You have to know how, why and when to put an end to things. To stop, cease, desist from.
What in God’s name is that?
She goes quickly to the window. It’s a handprint on the outside of the glass, a powdery impression of a palm, four fingers and a thumb. A left hand, she thinks, inverting the print in her mind. She sees him there again, crawling over her window. The good man. She raises her own left hand, thinking as she does so that it will not match, she’s done this before or has seen it done, a failure of logic or imagination that led to disappointment. And it does not match. So she raises her right hand instead and presses it against the print, which it matches perfectly, and this consoling symmetry lifts her feet from the floor, she feels herself rising, going up.
Mountain Landscape
Dear Ms Williams,
re: Pierneef
Thank you for your letter of the 5th. I appreciate very much your ongoing involvement with the Company’s collection, and especially your proposal for the redeployment of my Pierneef.
I read Prof. Keyser’s article, which you kindly attached, with interest. It was thoughtful of you to highlight specific passages for my attention, and those were well chosen indeed, but I took it upon myself to study the entire paper. As you know, I have no particular knowledge of art, but Claudia Fischhoff, whom you might have come across in your dealings, is always encouraging me to educate myself. Claudia advises me on my modest private collection and has given me some valuable tips in the last few years. My only regret is that I started so late.
Your view that my Pierneef does not send the right sort of message about the Company is persuasively argued. However, I must take issue with certain of your conclusions. I hope you will humour me — and forgive the shortage of footnotes!
It may interest you to know that the painting in question was not hanging in the boardroom when I took over as CEO five years ago. Then the wall was graced by a photograph of Tokyo Sexwale and the lads of Free State Stars hoisting the league trophy. It was an appropriate choice for the boardroom — the Company’s logo is all over the stadium — and I would have kept it, even though it doesn’t quite measure up to the picture of Madiba in his springbok jersey at Ellis Park. But one day, not long after my appointment, I was browsing through our annual reports, familiarising myself with the corporate history, when I came across a photograph of my predecessor, Janus van Huyssteen, in front of a painting. And naturally I became curious as to its whereabouts.