I wonder if I should tell them the whole story: pianos, shareholder reports, bonfires, billionaires, elevators and gauze. I do want to tell someone. Having this story inside of me, that no one knows except Emmett, and not even he knows the entire thing, is like acid in my stomach. I feel that telling someone, telling my new friends, would be good for me, like the right kind of medicine, like a cold wind that would clean out my insides. So I think I’ve decided to tell them, open my mouth, wondering how to start at the beginning, which beginning I should choose, but instead find myself explaining that I’ve come to start a union, that their working conditions and pay are abhorrent, anyone can see that things here aren’t right, and if we can organize, if we can all band together, if we can link arms and then hold our ground, I am sure there’s a way for both pay and working conditions to improve. I’m talking and talking and don’t know how to stop, not even sure where this idea came from, or how it replaced my desire to explain what happened before I arrived. But I’ve never been so interested in the past, always much more concerned with the future, and as I talk I find myself wondering if once again I have some feeling that the future exists, if I’ve discovered a new obsession, a new goal, that might replace the overwhelming destruction of past defeats. If I might be coming back to life.
I look around the circle at my new friends. They’re not giving anything away, I can’t tell if or how they’re responding, if I’m in any way convincing, if they think I’m crazy or instead they’re intrigued. We are speaking more quietly now, since so many of those in the field that surrounds us have gone or are going to sleep for the night. I look around, and for the first time I notice just how many tents have been set up, tents that are barely tents, pieces of cheap fabric held in place with a couple of sticks. So many of those here have nowhere else to go. I’m a bit drunk, or more, and so have no difficulty throwing my impasse into the circle — time to be direct, asking everyone, if they’re still listening, what they think. A union is hard work to build and easy to break, one of them says, mainly sounding sad, most of us here don’t have papers, if we fight they can round us up in a second, send us straight home. I’m listening, wanting to temper my response, but I can’t, I’m too excited. They can’t round up all of us, I find myself saying, almost thinking aloud, they need workers. They can’t just let the fruit rot on the vine. Even if we manage to stop work for one day, or half a day, they would lose so much cash. It would be a reality. They would have to deal with us. Plus, they’re not expecting it. We have the element of surprise. I have no idea if what I’m saying is true, if it makes any sense, and for a moment I worry that it’s too much like before. I made a bad plan and followed it through until the end, had the piano wire in my pocket while the entire time it made no sense, hurtling towards such dismal results. But then I cheer myself up, thinking that before I had acted alone, had no help, and now I have my new friends, we can discuss, figure things out together, try to find some way.
1.
I am thinking about scapegoats, wondering if I’m in the process of becoming one. Back when I felt more firmly in charge, there were games I could play, moving the blame around. Now I hesitate, worrying it is too risky, could too easily backfire. Piano-idiot did this to me, making me second-guess myself at every turn, no longer pushing forward with impunity as I once did and have always done. It was only a simple physical attack, I don’t understand how it undermined me so deeply, if that is in fact what is happening, or if it’s instead something else I don’t yet understand. Today there was a memo sent out to only a handful of top-level employees. I don’t know if I was meant to be included in this memo, or if my inclusion was simply accidental, but I read it on the plane to Switzerland and, when I finally got to the hotel at midnight, lay awake thinking about what it said, lay awake practically all night instead of getting the sleep I would desperately need to get me through a series of carefully navigated meetings and lunches that had been scheduled for some time. The meetings would be difficult for many reasons, my exhaustion wouldn’t help matters, and having the memo on my mind would make everything even worse.
It was basically a memo that had nothing to do with me, concerning certain protocols for what to do when things go wrong, more specifically for when things go wrong in one division and a completely different division experiences the most drastic, negative results, often in another part of the world. In the memo a single example is given: A manager allows a strike to escalate in a factory in China. This slows down production, and the roll-out date for a new product in France must be delayed. The product has already been announced, and bad publicity occurs, as well as understandably frustrated consumers. The product therefore does not meet its preliminary sales targets. The head of the division in France feels he is not to blame, he did everything right. He would like the blame to be placed where it is rightfully deserved, and the manager in China be forced to take responsibility for the delay. This memo suggests another solution, a solution that is overwhelmingly familiar to me, that a third party take the blame, someone who has little to do with the situation and who is clearly expendable. This is nothing if not the scapegoat department that I spent a certain period of my life developing, before finally deciding it was more trouble than it was worth.
The memo went on to explain that if either the manager in China or the manager in France were to be blamed, it would create unnecessary tensions between the divisions, divisions that will need to continue to work together, and work together quite closely, well into the undefined future. Any tensions starting now would most likely escalate, creating unforeseen problems, while reprimanding, or even firing, someone unimportant would create considerably less long-term collateral damage. And yet I couldn’t read the memo without wondering, all night in this case, whether its logic might some day be applied to me, whether some day I would be the unimportant individual who gets the axe, and more specifically, if there were to be some future, large-scale crisis within the organization, whether firing me might be the most efficiently symbolic solution. As a notable, one could even say popular, figurehead, firing me would be a clear sign to the public that serious changes were being made within the organization, while at the same time leaving those actually responsible in the clear.
But why the fuck do I even care? Let them fire me. They were not my equals. I could eat a dozen of them for breakfast, and still, even at my age, whip up the energy to found another organization, from scratch, at least twice this size, all before noon. Or at least that is how I would have felt only a few years ago, and I still believe it, to a certain extent, still to this day. But I was also lying to myself if I didn’t admit that something had changed. That first meeting in Zurich, already strained from my night of self-lacerating insomnia, began with a fight. My opponent claimed he had received little support from the head office, and used as his first example the fact that they sent me for this meeting, instead of sending someone more important. I don’t know why he chose to begin the meeting with this slap to my face, and I was about to tear into him, annihilate him, leaving behind nothing but ashes, when, for some reason, even though it is rarely my style, I decided to attempt a few rounds of diplomacy to get the ball rolling. He was young — the youngest CEO the division ever had — and I wondered if he suffered from generational anxieties, fears that he wasn’t at the same level as the founders, as my generation, and therefore needed to prove himself by knocking me down a few rungs. Or if his tactic was simply a sign of inexperience. Or maybe he only thought I was no longer particularly important and therefore he could take me.