Nick Harkaway: The Gone-Away World

In order to keep the company alive, safeguard his family’s happiness and his employees’ jobs, Alf Montrose Fingermuffin (that’s you) has turned into a monster. The only way he can deal with that is to separate himself into two people—Kindly Old Alf, who does the living, and Stern Mr. Fingermuffin, factory boss. His managers do the same. So when you talk to Alf Fingermuffin’s managers, you’re actually not talking to a person at all. You’re talking to a part in the machine that is Fingermuffin Ltd., and (just like the workers in the factory itself ) the ones who are best at being a part are the ones who function least like a person and most like a machine. At the factory this means doing everything at a perfect tempo, the same way each time, over and over and over. In management it means living profit, market share and graphs. The managers ditch the part of themselves which thinks, and just get on with running the programme in their heads.

So this almost certainly wasn’t going to be easy. But unless there was an earthquake or another war, Gonzo was going, which meant I was going, and if we were going, the chances were the crew would come with us to make sure we were okay, and incidentally to make sure we didn’t do something amazingly cool which we could then rag them about, and finally to make sure we didn’t come back zillionaires and rub their noses in it before setting them up for life. Gonzo Lubitsch is addicted to playing the lead. I work for a living, I take my bonus home to my wife, and we get drunk and naked and we act like teenagers and feed each other pizza.

Back to the bar: Sally had Dick Washburn penned up in a farmhouse with the entire Mexican army coming down on him. He’d come in rock ’n’ roll, thought he’d wrap the truckjocks by five and get his aerobicised backside back to the city and sink a few martinis and My God, Vivian, the place was a hellhole! But Sally has negotiator gong fu of the first order. In the small world of civil freebooting companies, she is the go-to girl, the top cat, the queen bee and the wakasensei, and her eyes undress the fine print and her fingers trace its outlines and she knows it, owns it, makes it sit up and beg for her touch like a happy gimp. The pencilneck was watching his Christmas bonus shrink like a white truffle in January, and the reckless testosterone feeling he had come in with was fading with it. Vivian’s body in its Lycra workout gear was vanishing and being replaced by the possibility that Sally was handing him his head. So Dick Washburn dug deep and dark into his management-school magic set and tried an end-run, a wicked, one-pill-for-all-ills solution, which is maybe what he intended to do all along: isolate Sally and get us to make the deal for him. A type D pencilneck has vestigial humanity, which is the kind you can fit in a cigarette case and offer people at parties.

“The trucks,” Dick Washburn said.

“What about them?” asked Sally.

“At the end of the run,” the pencilneck said, “you can keep the trucks. They’re amazing trucks.” He hit the word “truck” just a little harder each time, and when he said it the third time, everyone in the room heard it above the ambient bustle. Jim looked up and Sally looked back at him like she knew there was a thing happening, but she didn’t know how to stop it.

“Really amazing, ” the pencilneck repeated.

Sally pointed out that we had trucks; that our possession of and facility in the handling of trucks was central to our professed identity as truckers, which in turn was key in regard to the pencilneck’s presence in our midst, that presence being a consequence of his desire to deploy those talents in the service of the populace and the enterprise for which he was plenipotentiary spokesperson, ambassador and man on the ground, and in whose short-term interest he now sought to bilk, cheat, con and bamboozle us out of due legal and contractual protections in line with industry practice and good solid common sense, but whose shareholders would, like the aforementioned wider population, unquestionably look with disfavour and consequent litigiousness upon the inevitable wranglings and disputations resulting from said rooking, hornswoggling, grifting and humbuggery, should any ill befall in the due exercise of our discretion and judgement in the course of whatever hare-brained adventure the party of the first part (the pencilneck) chose to inflict upon the soft skin and girlish charms of the party of the second part (the naive and open-hearted drivers of the toughest and most competent civil freebooting company in the world).

“We can fix all that,” the pencilneck said. “You have to come,” he leered, “and see the trucks. ” And that time he made it sound like your first orgasm, or maybe your last.

So we did. Sally reluctantly, Jim calmly, Gonzo eagerly, Tobemory Trent sidewise like a crab and all the rest of us according to our lights, we went out of the Nameless Bar and into the Nameless Parking Lot. The pencilneck waved his arms, and forward they came with a grumble and a clatter, with a great white light and the smell of fresh rubber and vinyl and engine, and lo, there were trucks indeed.

But not trucks as we knew them. These were the trucks of legend, the trucks every vehicle with more than six wheels dreams of being. They were black and chrome and they stank of raunchy fuel consumption and throbbing power. If these trucks could have sung, they’d have sung base, deep and slow and full of the Delta. They had leather seats and positioning systems and armoured glass. They were factory new and they had our number plates already on ’em, and there was a hula girl on the dashboard of Baptiste Vasille’s, and a stack of pornographic images in Samuel P.’s, and Gonzo’s truck had flames on the side and Sally Culpepper’s had a red suede dash. Someone out there understood us, our needs, our mad little schticks, the things without which we weren’t the Haulage & HazMat Emergency Civil Freebooting Company of Exmoor County (CEO Sally J. Culpepper, presiding), we were just guys and girls in pound shop clothes.

In other words, this was a honey trap. If you’re giving guys like us kit like that to do a gig like this, it’s because either 1) you’re going to make a ton of profit or 2) you don’t think we have a rat’s chance of coming back alive. Most like, it’s both.

But then again that was hardly news. If they could have done it themselves—if they hadn’t been too damned scared to take on what needed to be done, for fear of their silk-socked lives—they never would have come to us. The Free Company was on the clock and there were only three commandments: look after your friends; do the job; come out richer. To these the pencilneck was adding an apocrypha of penalties for excessive damage and materials overspend which we fully intended to ignore, because he was the tool of a litigation-wary softass outfit and they were afraid not only of death but also of flesh-eating lawyers and class actions and angry investors and antitrust and whatall, and the first and second commandments forbid stinting during a run. Thus we gazed upon his many provisos and codicils, and we said “bah.”

Basic plan:

1. go to place A (depot) and pick up item X (big box go boomboom)

2. take it to place B (the pumping station), which is undergoing state Q (on fire, v. v. bad )

3. introduce item X to place B (big box go boomboom, burning pumping station; burning pumping station, big box go boomboom. Shake hands. Didn’t we meet once over at van Kottler’s place? Gosh, darn, I believe we did! ) and instigate reaction P (boomboom, bang bang-a-diddly, BOOM) and hence state R (oxygen deprival, pseudo-vacuum, schlurrrrrp !) thus extinguishing B (~Q, ~P, so sorry, dear old thing, have to go, children have school tomorrow, ciao-ciao mwah-mwah ), thus