But of course, because he wanted to set me straight, I also wanted to set him straight, show him which of us was the voice of expertise and experience. Did he have any idea how many different jobs I’d had in my storied life, how many different kinds of businesses I had expertly run to get where I was today? Did he think his was the first generation to display flexibility? Because every generation thinks they’re different, unique, have reinvented everything that came before. My generation also thought we had reinvented the wheel and were creating something unprecedented. But things don’t change so much. In the end, his generation, much like my own, would realize they were repeating so many of the patterns that had come before. And he would realize it much like I was realizing it now, when someday someone much younger than him presented things he already knew all too well, and yet presented them as the brand new, exciting wave of the future. Then I told him that what was even a little tragic about what he was telling me is that it might be another twenty, thirty, forty years before he fully realizes, fully feels, how what he is saying now is genuinely not the full historical truth of his situation.
After my rant he took a long pause, as if he was carefully thinking over what I had said, which pleased me in spite of myself, and when he began speaking again he chose his words with much greater care. The difference, he explained, between his generation and mine is that his generation would use their virtuosity to undo business, the way businesses are run, and then put them back together using a far more collaborative model, with a more equal distribution of profits. They were virtuosos of collaboration and therefore had the skills to do so. It was like he thought he and his friends had invented Marx, and I wondered if maybe they could use their virtuosity to invent the Bible while they were at it. Then he told me that possibly I thought business, in its current form, would last forever, but I should look at my historical knowledge, since it would teach me that nothing lasts forever, everything changes, and while most often things change for the worse, if we work hard maybe sometimes things might also change for the better. And then he said something that really landed with me. He told me that he used the word ‘we’ on purpose, because he didn’t know me yet and therefore didn’t want to assume anything, didn’t want to assume I was the enemy. It seemed unlikely to him, but maybe if we talked, if he explained things to me as we drove from the airport to the hotel, I too might begin to think about the world differently and become part of the ‘we’ that is working, utilizing my own brand of virtuosity, towards something better. He wasn’t naive, but for him being too cynical was a kind of death, so he would prefer to see some sliver of possibility in every situation that presents itself, no matter how unlikely, which is why he volunteered to pick me up at the airport in the first place.
As I was unpacking my suitcase, hanging my suits one by one in the closet, I thought about how much harder the future would be than the immediate past. I wasn’t born rich — I struggled and improbably made it — but in the future, more and more, people would be rich only because they were born into it. It did not seem to me that my story was a template that would continue to repeat. They, the virtuosos of the future, were virtuosos with considerably less opportunity. Opportunities are short-lived. They last a few generations and then, victims of their own success, shut down again, as assholes like me close rank. So I understood why that young man wanted to reinvent business. The way it was currently organized would not serve his interests towards the same glory that it had once served mine. And then for a brief moment, in a different way than I had understood it before, I thought I understood why someone might want to attack me, why someone from the next generation might want me dead.
2.
Then one day, without knowing quite how it happened, I was on a bus, on my way to harvest tomatoes. So many days I had watched others pile onto the buses and not gotten on myself. Perhaps it was only that I was starting to feel like a tourist, but also my new friends were teasing me more and more mercilessly. I was the loser who never managed to make it onto a bus, the comical one who never managed to make a cent. I tried to take their jibes with good humour, because of course I knew what they did not, that I hadn’t come here to work and my money had not yet run out. But I didn’t like being teased. I wanted their respect.
But again that’s not precisely how it happened. There was a rush towards a bus and moments later I was seated inside as the bus pulled away. It was early, some time around dawn, and I’d been up all night talking and laughing. I really did like these people, and now I was going to see for myself what a day of work consisted of for them. The bus ride lasted just less than an hour. We were herded off the bus and suddenly everyone was running, rushing to get the best spots. For some reason I don’t rush, and end up with a spot furthest away from where the bus drops us off. As I start to work, carefully observing those around me to see how it is done, it becomes clear why mine is a spot no one else wants. It’s in the shade, where the tomatoes are noticeably less ripe, smaller. I have to search to find ones ready to pick. But what’s worse is I am farthest away from the bins, have to drag my cart across the entirety of the field to have it weighed and receive a token. The cart can barely roll and frequently gets stuck in the mud. I manage to fill it only a few times, and on each of these occasions the time I lose dragging it would have been enough for a more experienced worker to fill it over and over again. At the end of the day you turn in the tokens for cash. Before they give you the cash they deduct the cost of the bus ride, the water you drunk while working in the heat, the meagre lunch I wolfed down in half a minute between trips out to the far side of the field. For most of the others here they’re also deducting the cost of being smuggled over the border, deducting it in daily instalments that seem exorbitant, ridiculous. When we’re done I have only a few tokens and, after the deductions, there’s nothing left. If I was hoping to earn the respect of my fellow workers, I have failed. Even the worst of them managed to pick ten times as much as me. My eyes, hands, mouth, teeth and throat are all irritated from the pesticides. My arms and shoulders ache from picking. My back aches from dragging the cart through the dirt. I am so exhausted I can barely stand.
Back at the encampment, as we pass around a bottle of homemade stuff I should recognize from my teenage years back home but for some reason don’t, the others laugh at me as I tell them about my first day. Some are laughing so hard they can barely remain upright. I realize the story is funnier because I still don’t speak properly. So much of the language has come back but I still miss words, expressing myself awkwardly, getting the expressions wrong. I feel frustrated I can’t put things right, place my words correctly, but even though I’m embarrassed and don’t particularly enjoy being the object of ridicule, I’m nonetheless happy to be entertaining my new friends. Maybe I’m wrong, but it feels they’re laughing at me in a way that only friends can laugh at each other. Then one of them suddenly stops laughing. He’s had a thought, a new question, struck by how obvious this new thought now seems to him. He wants to know why, if I don’t farm, if I’ve never harvested, I mean, what the fuck am I doing here? It makes no sense. No one comes to a place like this just to hang out. Or to make new friends.