This domino didn’t last long, but was enough to buy some time, to get us out of a particularly tight spot. And the ease with which Emmett steered us from one position to the next was breathtaking, joking again and again about our own incompetence, how it was we who had made the drunken mistake, how he would check every drawer for the telltale hidden flask, displacing the difficultly from the spill itself to a clerical error in which we somehow managed to think that the first assistant was the captain himself. For anyone watching carefully, it would have been easy to spot the trick but, in such moments of news-frenzy-chaos, it is often the case that no one is watching closely enough. Or at least no one with enough power to break the story. Because, at the end of the day, for everyone involved, the oil must continue to flow. Emmett stayed strong for the entire crisis, working behind the scenes, spinning one clean-up fiasco into the next new brilliant strategy for how to separate crude from water. Of course, we had every intention of cleaning things up to the absolute best of our ability. We only needed to buy ourselves as much time as possible.
As this example illustrates, a limited hangout or positive domino is never an end in itself, only ever a means, in this case to buy us time to figure out how to thoroughly clean up the spill. But time is a precious commodity, perhaps the most precious, and therefore every domino counts.
2.
Afterwards I found myself standing in the parking lot. I don’t know why I was standing in the parking lot. I didn’t know what else to do. I was so angry and lost. I wanted to process everything I had seen and heard but couldn’t. I watched the cars of the shareholders drive away, one after another, back to their houses and their lives. Logic tells me that he won’t walk out into the parking lot, that he has some other way out, a back or side door, but perhaps secretly I am hoping that any moment he will walk by on the way to his car. I have the piano wire in my jacket pocket. I could approach him, shake his hand, congratulate him on another masterful performance. He will be surrounded by bodyguards but maybe there would still be some way for me to get in there. I know this is not a good plan. I will need to come up with something better, more skilful, with careful planning and a touch of strategic genius. But what could that possibly be?
I look up and realize there is another man standing in the parking lot. He is far away from me, right on the other side, as far away from me as possible. And then I have a completely insane thought: if he is standing around in the parking lot, perhaps he is here for the same reasons. Perhaps he also wants to kill that asshole, and then we could work together. When I have insane ideas sometimes I feel I am losing my grip on reality, that my anger has twisted my brain one twist too far, but I suppose there is no harm in having strange thoughts from time to time. And I desperately want to talk to someone. It seems to me like it’s been a hundred years since I’ve had a real conversation. I can barely even remember the last time. I think to myself: already we have one thing in common, we are both eerily stalking the parking lot long after the shareholder meeting has ended. This gives me a way to start. I can ask him why he is standing around. If his answer sounds honest, and if he asks me the same question in return, I realize I might answer honestly as well, how desperately I suddenly want to tell someone of my plan. It’s terrible to have a secret.
I start to walk slowly towards him. As I do so another possibility, far more reasonable, occurs to me: that he is a private security guard paid to watch the parking lot, in fact paid to stop people exactly like me. Then what I might be about to do seems even more insane: admit to a security guard that I am planning to kill the man he’s being paid to protect. As I get closer it is like a hallucination, in that I actually recognize him. There was a section of glossy photos in the middle of the book, many of the photos including a broadly smiling Emmett, and this, the man at the other end of the parking lot, is Emmett. Ten or twenty years older but definitely him. Now he is not smiling and, from reading the book, or at least reading between the lines, I believe I know why. I think: this is my one chance to meet someone completely sympathetic to my goal, someone who also has a reason to want the billionaire dead. Here was a capitalist who knows, from personal experience, that everyone is expendable.
I think about what my first line should be, how I should introduce myself. I already know so much about him and he knows absolutely nothing about me. But I wonder if the things I know about him are actually true, since, the more I think about it, the more I realize that so much in that book must be lies, cover-ups and exaggerations. Of course in every lie there is a grain of truth. I decide to test the waters slowly, feel him out. He must also be filled with anger but that does not mean the anger is on the surface, does not mean it can easily be reached. And then the strangeness of the situation strikes me anew. What the fuck is he doing standing out here in a parking lot? It makes no sense. Even if he is no longer working, he must have money coming out of his ears. He doesn’t need to stand around out here alone.
I reach him and ask for a cigarette. I don’t smoke and fortunately he doesn’t either. I just wanted to say something normal to get the conversation rolling. I ask if he was in there, at the meeting, and he says that he was. I ask him what he thought and he’s non-committal, doesn’t say much. I’m hoping he’ll ask me what I thought but he doesn’t. Maybe it’s good he doesn’t, because if he had I’m not quite sure what I might have said. Then, at a loss for where else to go, I tell him that I recognize him from the book, from the pictures inside the book. It takes a moment for him to realize which book I’m referring to, but when he does his expression rapidly sours. I’m about to say something critical about the book, to win him over a bit, but stop myself, not sure how critical, or even vicious, to be. Instead I decide to wait, see if he says anything more. He looks around, perhaps waiting for me to go away. I let it sit for a long time, hoping that if I stay there long enough he’ll get used to me. After a while I tell him that, though I don’t know the details, I’m pretty sure he got a raw deal, and I’ve certainly gotten a raw deal once or twice in my life so I know how much it sucks. Again a long silence. I think he might say nothing else for as long as I stand there, but nonetheless I wait.
After a while he looks at me and starts to talk. He says that the book was unfair, it was unfair how it portrayed him and, if the settlement hadn’t forced him to remain silent, he would write his own book to set the record straight. He now regrets even agreeing to the settlement, but at the time it felt like he had no choice. Still, every time he thinks back to how he had been paid off, it almost kills him. For a few million he must live in disgrace for the rest of his life, unable to speak honestly about the things that have mattered most to him. He tells me he can’t believe how bitter he has become, how sour, that all his life he had been one of the most fun, one of the happiest, one of the most joyous people anyone knew, and now he was like a crumpled piece of steel covered in rust. The way he describes himself, a ‘crumpled piece of steel covered in rust,’ I don’t think I’ll ever forget those precise words or his voice as he said them. This was a man who, back when he had a job, had done so many corrupt and awful things, ruined so many lives, stockpiled so much cash and turned every dirty trick to get it. There was no reason for me to feel sympathetic towards him. But I was glad I felt sympathy because I needed his help, and it’s much easier to ask for help when some sympathy is present.