He found that the best way to go about it was to be very casual, post on Craigslist.
With an entourage of 20, there was always the possibility that someone would have to be replaced.
Each member of the entourage was a native speaker of the language in which books in the accompanied suitcase were written. When he wanted to know how a passage should be pronounced, when he wanted to get the sound of the words in his head, he could have a recording made in GarageBand on the spot. One can’t find this kind of thing on the Internet. So one could not have a single pinch hitter, one needed the full complement of languages accounted for in the second string. At some point he realized that he needed to hire someone to manage the entourage, to keep understudies ready.
Ideally one would have an understudy waiting in each city. There is never any telling when a member of the entourage will simply up stakes.
It wasn’t the sort of thing he should be doing for himself. He tried to hand it over to his lawyer. His lawyer handed it over to someone young and stupid who made careless mistakes, the work was not important enough to merit competence.
“Look,” he said. “It’s perfectly straightforward. One simply wants a carrier to match the suitcase. When you buy a suitcase you don’t walk in off the street and pick the first thing you see, you select it for aesthetic properties superfluous to the task of transporting possessions. The name of the carrier is an aesthetic property. The language spoken by the carrier, on the other hand, must match that of the books contained in the suitcase for strictly utilitarian reasons, as he or she may be required at any time to record material from one of the books in question. It’s necessary, therefore, to recruit, in each case, a substitute who both speaks the language and bears an appropriate name.”
The young, stupid lawyer said he was not sure he would recognize an appropriate name.
He pointed out that a simple expedient would be to recruit replacements bearing names identical to those of the current incumbents, a solution one might have expected a graduate of Harvard Law School to work out independently.
An inconclusive exchange of compliments ensued.
His lawyer charged $450 an hour, $200 for the services of the halfwit. Money that would mean a lot to the sort of person who worked in the entourage. The sort of person who worked in the entourage might in fact be the best sort of person to recruit for the entourage.
It was necessary to return to New York for reasons we need not discuss. He put an ad on Craigslist and conducted interviews at Circa Tabac, where it was permitted to smoke.
Between interviews he talked to Siobhan behind the bar, explaining the ins and outs of the entourage. For a putative tip of $10–$25 an Irish bartender will offer quiet sympathy, not to say Gaelic charm, in a way that not only a hot shot $450-per-horam lawyer but also the hot shot’s $200-per-horam entry-level wannabes will emphatically not throw in with the billable hour.
A woman at the bar said her husband had won a sushi restaurant in a poker game. It had been closed down for violations of fish-related hygiene issues; the proprietor had shortsightedly complied with the letter of the law, neglecting the spirit of law enforcement. She had commented. Her husband had walked out, leaving her with two small children to raise.
“You wouldn’t happen to be looking for a sushi restaurant,” she said. “They tell me the sushi train alone is worth fifteen grand.”
A girl at the bar, a fiery redhead, told him he should be ashamed of himself. He should do something for his fellow man.
He was about to protest when he saw suddenly that something could be done with the sushi bar. As a child he had loved Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
The mother-of-two had left. He darted to the door, scanned the street to left and right, descried the wretch in the middle distance, dashed in breathless pursuit.
Twenty children could be placed round the perimeter of the conveyor belt! Color-coded tasks could be assigned! The child would have the chance to amass points! Points would entitle the child to select a plate with a cake, cookie, chocolate, or other delight from the moving belt!
Skipping up and down, he wears a bow tie.
Studies have shown that a talent for delaying gratification is integral to success in our complex society. In the abovementioned studies the child is presented with a marshmallow, told it may eat at once; if it waits it may have a second marshmallow. It’s absurd. What sort of incentive is a marshmallow?
What one wants, surely, is to encourage industry by tapping into the longing for immediate rewards. One wants to offer the child the opportunity to win one chocolate after another. One wants, perhaps, to determine which sorts of chocolate are most efficacious.
One might install a sushi belt in every school, allowing access to only the hardest working students.
Prancing bow-tied on the pavement he explains his vision.
Money being no particular object he was soon in possession of the fabled sushi belt, with accompanying restaurant.
The peerless Siobhan found him an entourage manager, in whose capable hands he left the task of recruiting 20 children.
He had more money than he knew what to do with.
Presently he had more children than he knew what to do with.
Competition for a place was soon fierce.
Being perforce an autodidact he had read Barbara Godwin’s Justice by Lottery and been entranced. It is inarguable that, in a hereditary monarchy, the position of head of state is distributed, in effect, by lottery, the lottery of birth, and that the occupant is then trained for the position, and arguable that such a system might work better for any number of occupations than the present system in which, at every stage, purely educational aims are often subsidiary to the requirement to signal ability. The lottery need not, of course, be the lottery of birth. There is likewise no need, of course, for its allocation to be final; a five-year stint, if memory serves, was the recommendation of Godwin, though one could no doubt make a case for others.
With only 20 places to work with he did not want to wade through a flood of applications (he was sure to be flooded with applications once word of the excellence of the system got around). How much simpler simply to give a place to the first 20 children with attractive names. (Being an autodidact he had read extensively on the subject of fast and frugal heuristics as outlined by Gerd Gigerenzer of the Max Planck Institute.)
The names of the first 20 hopefuls were not as interesting as the names of his entourage. Many applicants had names like Matthew and Josh. The names of the first 10 members of the entourage, just to give an idea, were Þorvarður, Øyvin, Øllegård, Jäärda, Håkan, Ferenc, Franzyska, Knut, Xulio, Txomin. (He had agreed with the manager that the names of the entourage should remain fixed, though temperamental bearers might come and go; it was simple enough to advertise for the desired denominations.) He managed to come up with Niamdh, Cesangari, Amartya, Zygmunt, and Dzsó before retreating to a least worst selection. (A spirit of mischief, honesty compels us to confess, led him to arrange a separate session peopled entirely by bearers of the name of Josh.)
He had all sorts of ingenious schemes. Schemes for mastering the Cyrillic alphabet. (He had been entranced to discover that the Russian for Protopope was Протопоп.) Schemes for mastering logarithms, trigonometric identities, simple differentiation. There were all sorts of exercises; upon correct completion, the child might select a cake from the traveling belt.