Jacob Wren - Rich and Poor

2.

Since I set myself upon my clear and vicious goal, I have been living as frugally as possible. There is a simple rule for making one’s economic life viable. It’s never a question of how much you earn, only of how much you spend. I eat two meals a day and both are small. A ten-pound bag of rice will easily last me six months. For protein, a few slivers of meat or fish, lentils, steamed dark green vegetables. I eat nothing outside of the house, nothing I don’t prepare myself. And, strangely, I never get bored with this relatively monotone diet, instead finding it steady and comforting. The less food you eat the less food you need, the less hungry you are, perhaps displacing the hunger towards other matters. I want nothing around me that might get in the way, nothing that could distract. This simpler life has benefits I hadn’t predicted. I feel calmer, more focused, more precise. A billionaire is just a man like any other. I am also just a man. One man kills another in the name of justice. It’s symbolic of the fact that all of us, in matters of life and death, are equal. No one is superior and no one is above the law.

The third interview was by far the worst. I’m still turning it over in my mind, trying to recover. They had phoned every single reference on my resumé and easily ferreted out the lies. Nonetheless, I believe I handled the situation well, explaining that I had fallen on hard times, desperately needed the work, and was therefore resorting to tactics that in other circumstances I very much deplore. They seemed sympathetic, but it was difficult to tell how sympathetic they actually were. I remained relaxed, commending them for their thorough detective work, explaining that other organizations had been considerably more negligent, adding that if I were ever to hire a security firm, which seemed unlikely considering my current poverty, they would be my first choice. I found their reply sobering, as they informed me that other companies most likely did the exact same diligent research, but simply didn’t see any point in confronting me with their findings. After all, I didn’t get any of the other jobs either. I kindly thanked them for their honesty and felt devastated.

Leaving that interview was the first time I seriously questioned my ability to fulfill my stated goal. It seemed I was in over my head before having made even the first step towards it. And then I began to wonder: if they had discovered my lies, if they had found my resumé so full of holes, why had they even bothered to interview me in the first place, then wondered the same thing about the first two companies, if in fact they had also followed up on my fallacious references. I came up with a strange, unverifiable theory. Maybe these organizations require, from time to time, someone who is completely expendable. And hiring someone unqualified, someone who lied on their resumé, might fulfill this necessity, so later they can say it was the liar’s fault, he fooled us with his lies, and pack the scapegoat off to jail while the rest of the company remains unscathed. Maybe it was only this scapegoat position I was being interviewed for.

But becoming paranoid gets you nowhere. And now, even though I suspected there was some clear next step I could take, that all was not lost, I was at a complete loss for what kind of next step it might be. I called in sick for my dishwashing shift, and lay down on my small bed, almost unable to move or think. The more untenable one’s position, the more tenaciously one clings to it. Absentmindedly, I picked up the book nearest to the bed — his book, the first one I stole, the mangled copy — and flipped through it at random, eventually landing on a chapter about shareholder meetings. I remembered this chapter, since it was the one in which he gloated most pompously, each sentence inserting new, red-hot embers into the fire of my anger. How proud he was of smoothly deflecting shareholder concerns about the financial health of the company, which I suspected was experiencing difficulty only because he was putting the money in his pocket. All the facts and figures he could so easily memorize, recite back to the crowd and distort. How he could use his mastery of these facts and figures almost like a force field, or like a talisman to mesmerize the crowd.

I knew he was a fake, an imposter, since I also knew a little something about showmanship from my days in front of an audience. The way one walks out to the piano, with confidence or hesitation, clearly influences the judges’ assessment of your performance. One learns this and, if you want to win, adjusts one’s gait accordingly, until your natural walk is no longer your own. If, when you speak, you think not of what you are saying but of what effect it will have on those in front of you, on the crowd, then your words are also no longer your own. You don’t know who you are since everything you say or do is designed to have a specific impact. Sometimes, by hesitating slightly as you walk on, you can lower expectations, therefore creating a moment of surprise by opening the recital with a confident first few notes. But this is a dangerous game, since a negative first impression is difficult to overcome.

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.)