Jacob Wren - Rich and Poor

When I think of the night of the heart attack, the night that changed everything, there is always something else I wonder, that haunts me. What if we hadn’t fought so hard? What if I had let the company go, headed off to do something else, starting from scratch, starting again. Was I still tough enough to build a new company, up from the ground and into a global player? There is nothing I like more than a challenge. Saving my company was one kind of challenge. But perhaps, in doing so, I avoided another, considerably more difficult one.

2.

Then it was back to the phone. He would call once a week to go over my reports. Some weeks he wouldn’t phone at all. Before he had phoned more often, so the brainstorm session did change something, maybe for the worse. Nonetheless, once I actually had him on the line, I continued to feel an increase in our connection.

— So there’s the farmer movie and the missile movie. We’ll start with the farm one.

— Haven’t seen it yet.

— But you approved the script. You did read that?

— Yeah, I read it. About three years ago.

— First the reviews. Most reviewers found the scientist characters credible.

— That’s a good thing, right?

— If you say so. The farmer characters received more mixed reactions. Some reviewers thought they were too naive for taking the seeds in the first place.

— Perfect. Scientists credible. Farmers naive. What about the missile one?

I was listening to the recording at home. Listening to it over and over, wanting to understand. We were talking about movies. The people who watched the movies were looking for entertainment or distraction, but we weren’t talking about entertainment, only about something else, about implicit perspectives, hidden meanings. Most of the people who worked to get the movie made probably didn’t give such perspectives a second thought: the actors thought only about their characters, the director only about making the story convincing or compelling. But someone within our organization had apparently given notes to someone at the division, letting them know what was expected. Or maybe no notes were given, everyone hired for their respective jobs simply understanding the unspoken rules, the need to emphasize certain aspects over others.

— Not many critics liked the missile movie.

— But it’s making money?

— Number two for the third week in a row. Lots of money.

— What irked the critics?

— On the whole I think they just found it a bit flat, dull.

— So building a better missile is dull, business as usual?

— They found the moral universe dull. The rush to get the new weapon ready for battle was only noble. Anyone who objected was ridiculous or pathetic. And one thing they all commented is way too many shots of missiles leaving planes, of missiles sailing through the air, etc.

— As long as war is routine we’ll always be able to fight it.

— True.

I said true, but it was spin I hadn’t actually thought of before. I wasn’t sure he had either. He was just talking off the top of his head, saying anything that came to mind, but I wondered if anyone had a thought along these lines that led to the film being made in the precise way it was. I rolled back and listened to the tape again, listened to the way he said ‘as long as war is routine.’ Was it a new thought or something he’d already had a thousand times? His voice gave nothing away.

— Anything in the editorials? Did anyone use either film as an example?

— A few. A right-wing paper compared the bad general to the current administration. His conclusion was that those who are against innovation are also against efficiency.

— Left-wing editorials?

— A few in-betweeners. The farm movie was used only as a negative example in the two editorials that mention it. Do you know who Lysenko is?

— Russian scientist. Didn’t work out so well for him, right?

— Exactly. One editorial says the film, and the world, have invented another Lysenko, and because the field is now global, the results will be even more tragic.

— An article that mentions some obscure Russian scientist isn’t going to get a lot of traction.

— The other in-betweener was more positive. Said science is a process of trial and error, both in the laboratory and out in the world, and there is no mistake so drastic it doesn’t teach us something profound. It sounds negative in capsule but the overall feel was pro-science.

I wondered what kind of strange game I was playing, pretending to stand behind my report, pretending to agree with this man I had dedicated my life to wanting to kill. What did I really believe and to what degree did it differ from the things I listened to myself saying over and over again on these recordings? Did I care what some asshole working for a substandard right-wing broadsheet in the middle of nowhere said about a mediocre pseudo-fascist war movie? There were a million opinions in the world, and if you searched hard enough you could find someone willing to take up every single slot along the spectrum of possible positions. With money you could spread the mania of your particular view, and in spreading it also make it seem more true. But anyone with open eyes can look at the world and see what is what. What movies are garbage and whose agenda they are not so subtly pushing.

However, in any circumstances it would most likely feel strange to perpetually express the opposite of what one thinks and feels, week after week, and this fact must have been at the root of my growing anxiety that over time my thoughts were falling in line with my words.

— Did anyone connect the movie with the civilian bombings?

— I didn’t find much. That’s actually strange, isn’t it? The movie came out the same week the bombings were front-page news.

— The studio wanted to postpone the release, but I thought it would be okay. Sometimes these things are so obvious everyone just misses them. If the movie was released a few weeks later it might have given a few astute journalists enough time to figure it out.

— If you find a few astute journalists let me know.

— There must still be a few out there somewhere.

— So I guess timing is everything?

— Money is everything. Timing is just a bit of good luck when you need it most.

1.

The other thing about poetry is I lead an extremely busy life. It only takes a few minutes to read a poem. I read one or two a night just before falling asleep. Often they put me to sleep, which during stressful periods can be extremely useful. Just as often they stimulate my dreams. Dreams are important in business. All clichés are important in business, but for me personally my dreams have, on many occasions, shown me the way forward in particularly knotty or difficult situations. After the night of the heart attack, there was one such situation along with a corresponding dream. One of the many tactics the other side unleashed upon us was a government investigation. In confiscating Emmett’s cell phone, a manoeuvre the legality of which still feels suspect to me, one particularly clever government official was able to discover Emmett’s ruse, that he did not in fact phone any members of the board that night, that he only phoned me as I aimlessly drove, and therefore we had been bargaining in bad faith. Whether or not our spontaneous play-acting was factually illegal is beside the point. We were under investigation and they were working hard to make any charge stick.

The night before I went to give my statement, I had the following dream. I had not read any poems before going to bed, which the next morning only added to my conviction that the dream had begun in some deep place within me. Emmett and I were at war with each other, fighting for separate armies, separate countries. We were not generals — often I’m a general or president in my dreams — but foot soldiers, nobodies. Strangely, in the dream I did not know Emmett, had never met him, had no idea who he was. The battlefield was a barely discernable mix of history and fiction, of two World Wars, guerrilla wars, wars from movies, books and comics. I was running and shooting but had somehow gotten turned around, there was smoke or maybe poisonous gas filling the landscape, I wasn’t sure which way to run, which way was toward enemy lines and whether I wanted to charge towards them or retreat. I tripped, rolled headfirst, and when I managed to find my feet I was in some sort of trench, up to my waist in freezing water, pushing through it, not sure if I would be physically able to climb back out. It was difficult to see even a few feet ahead, and when my face hit something, it wasn’t clear what it was, my eyes still adjusting to the cinematic light. Because it was a dream, one moment I had no idea what was in front of me and the next moment realized it was Emmett, a complete stranger, an enemy, that I had stumbled directly into the barrel of his loaded rifle. I looked straight at him. I wanted my eyes to convey that I could take him, that we were evenly matched. I wanted my eyes to strike fear into him even though he had the clear, even overwhelming, advantage. And then we were both under attack. The charge came from the other side. He was the only thing standing between me and the advancing soldiers. He took the bullets first as I awoke.