1.
Often, as the weeks roll on, I get bored. I have always been a restless soul, searching for the next new adventure, the next frontier, and when business settles into business-as-usual, I feel a kind of itch. Then the question is always the same: how can I use it, avoid making the impulsive decisions that have occasionally marred my progress in the past. Every impulse is like an animal, an animal inside that you cannot fully control. How one manages with this inner zoo is the true test of character. And yet it was during one of these itches, these periods of great tedium, that I stumbled upon the first seeds of a particularly inspiring breakthrough.
All of this occurred against another backdrop, an unrelated crisis, preparing for one of the most challenging shareholder meetings in our storied history. A number of misunderstandings had already reached the press, matters that have since been clarified. Yet at that moment it seemed we were being accused of everything from embezzlement to grand larceny. I always spend weeks preparing for each shareholder gathering — I take great pride in the detail with which I am able to respond to any question asked, no matter how difficult — but this time I was really on a tear, researching, memorizing and researching again. I had never prepared for anything so savagely. How, one might ask, could I become bored in the midst of such precarious chaos? It seems I am being slightly loose with the chronology, since it is likely the boredom arrived shortly after the shareholders meeting had already come and gone. And if I consider it further, boredom might not be the right world: more like the hangover after a party. Yet it so resembled my habitual periods of boredom as to be virtually indistinguishable.
The ‘hangover after the party’ is also a kind of Freudian slip, since it was at an actual party, in fact one of Emmett’s many birthday blowouts, that my mind began to wander. While the pretext for the party was the anniversary of my close friend’s birth, at the same time we were celebrating our recent victory in court. (I believe I also had some desire to celebrate my own performance at the above-mentioned shareholder’s gathering.) But I was bored, bored with continuously being held accountable, continuously forced up against the constraints of pedestrian reality. How could we arrive at a situation where the ball was always in our court?
I was drinking heavily, trying to drink my boredom away, drunkenly riffing on a few of the above-mentioned topics. A guy from accounting joked that we could form a department of employees happy to take the fall, people hired specifically to take the blame if sticky situations were to arise in the future. Such a department would have to be spread out evenly across all other departments in order to be credible, more like a secret society within the organization, the existence of which would only be known to a few, possibly only to me. Now here was a task, the setting up of such a shadow department, that could fully occupy my itch, since such an operation would need to be executed with absolute guile and craft. And while it is true this idea never came into being — I believe the cold reason of sobriety scuttled it, possibly as soon as the next morning — it was nonetheless the beginning of a long period of speculations that, several years later, did lead to concrete results. (There have been occasions in the past when employees were mortified that I’d taken their black jokes seriously enough to make into reality, but this was not one of them.)
There is one other anecdote I recall from that particular birthday (there were so many parties around that time, all the excesses of those years) and I’m not sure how it happened that the judge who had presided over our recent victory-against-the-odds was in attendance. “This wouldn’t look good if certain individuals were to see us right now,” he said to me in passing. I wasn’t sure what he was referring to; I was refilling his champagne glass so perhaps it was only that, but I remember replying that “actually, I think it would look fantastic.” Later that night, during a quiet moment when the party was dying down, he pulled me aside and chided me, told me I shouldn’t be so glib, we had gotten off this time, by the skin of our teeth, but next time we might not be so lucky, the usual sort of thing, a friend telling a friend what was or was not in his future best interest. But I was having none of it. “What good is life if you can’t make a few carefree jokes?” I remember patiently explaining, possibly raising my voice as I did so. The world was full of dangers, full of journalists who wouldn’t mind making a quick buck at anyone’s expense, but when it was time to laugh, time to enjoy, we shouldn’t let anyone stop us. What was the use of victory if you couldn’t turn it into pure pleasure when the need arose to let off a bit of steam? I could tell he didn’t agree, but I was drunk and he humoured me the best he could. And what’s more I didn’t mean a word of it. I was bored. Glib jokes, my own or from others, were boring. Making drunk judges unnecessarily nervous was boring. And I had no idea what adventures still lay in store.
2.
I had bought precisely one share, and was therefore a shareholder, well within my right to attend the annual meeting. I was nervous they would turn me away at the door, that my limited credentials would prevent me from making it in, but soon realized whoever was at the door couldn’t have cared less as he passively waved me through. I sat in the large auditorium with hundreds of others. It would be the first time I would see him in person. I wondered how I might react, if my body would tense as he walked on stage, if I would cry out in anger at some particularly obnoxious statement.
But first a series of boring speeches, starting with one that outlined each of the divisions and their relative financial health. Much like I had felt back when I was filling my small apartment with annual reports, now, as I listened, every figure, every profit, every explanatory clause, hit my ears soaked in blood. I wondered whose lives had been ruined in these profits — through long years of barely paid labour, through environmental illness, through families torn apart, through stolen resources that could have easily been put to better use.
Many divisions had to be accounted for and, as I suppose they claimed every year, all of them had achieved record profits, all the usual bullshit. Yet the room warmly received each statement, whitewashed history of the recent past, experiencing every figure as another dollar in their disembodied pockets, politely applauding. If I listened closely it was only vague numbers and vaguer facts, completely detached from how such business transactions took place in the actual world, how they struck people’s lives, how they cut into the earth. If I understood correctly, the divisions were entertainment, food and biotechnology, natural resources, banking and investment, communications and what seemed to be some sort of private military, though no one directly said so. The various euphemisms for killing were not particularly ingenious. He ran through it all so quickly, like he was running through the world with his words and slides, like the world was running out.