the inmate's journal : the corporation xx : hr & the law iii

Maeby Might was from a long line of matriarchs, not the strident kind destined for high-decibel battles against the raucous superciliousness of cocks, but the subtle, I’m-going-to-make-you-think-I’m-a-bimbo-but-I’m-not, what’s-this-hiding-behind-my-smile, keen-students-of-testosterone kind—who breathe testosterone and study it and, with the aid of expensive products from France, ponder in the bathtub what its nature is … its strategic weak points … its manifestations and subterfuges … and how to get as much as possible from it for the least possible cost.

 

But what obstacles existed for a woman as she rowed down testosterone’s river in a small boat!  Sharp rocks of power, torrid rapids of lust, bleak shallows of truculent bureaucracy, biting birds of bitterness, missiles of misogyny, shipwrecks of the truthful … what did she have as survival tools?  She had her breasts—the possibility of their exposure and eruption a weapon more formidable than any man has ever invented, perhaps even the impetus for his inventions.  Not just these mighty mammories and that hot lower patience, but a competent mask collection and a cool embrace of imperfection’s endless march.

 

She was New Bank’s Chief Policy Officer (CPO) and worked for Erikk Richard Michael Haze, who had trained at the School of Crocodiles near a clump of Kola trees at a crook in the Lualaba River.  He hadn’t fully opened his eyes since he had been promoted to Chief Reptilian Officer (CRO) eight years prior, relying primarily on his sense of smell to make decisions.  The laws of New Bank—its gargantuan tenets and commandments, its voluminous policies and infinite procedures, its Kafkaesque labyrinths and Borgesian mirrors—were his domain.  He never left them; not only did he not want to, but he didn’t know how.

 

He was a lawyer, horrible and patient and hard, full of stone and smoke.  He had read the 10 Commandments and found them wanting, the Sermon on the Mount, and laughed.  He counseled Mr. Blood on all manner of great and necessary matters—of making obscurity seem touching and touching seem ethical and ethical seem profitable and profitable seem beneficent and beneficent seem powerful and powerful seem truthful and truthful seem obscure … and the law is a circle and it’s paved with words. 

 

I had had two encounters with him prior to my meeting Maeby.  The first was in a two-hour meeting to discuss a proposal from a California consultant on segmenting New Bank’s customers according to whether they were “mother,” “father,” “baby,” or “alien” customers.  Polite debate raged among the 20 attendees for an hour and fifty-five minutes while Erikk Haze was in his usual repose, seeming to sleep, his long legs stretched out from his chair, his flowing grey hair rustling in the breeze of the conversation, his body angled and relaxed, his eyebrows a gush of Mephistophelean insights.  As the meeting’s facilitator was about to wrap things up with an incomprehensible conclusion, Erikk Haze opened his eyes to a slit and said, Could someone explain to me the meaning of all this.

 

The second was when I was granted five minutes with him to discuss Project Lazarus and New Bank’s evolution to a world of talk.  He let me talk for four minutes and fifty-five seconds, stretched on his senior executive chair like a hirsute mannequin, then said with eyes still closed, Talk is the law, Jude. Talk is my domain, and dismissed me.