the inmate's journal : the corporation xxiv : mr. blood

A few weeks after Maeby got promoted, my phone rang.

 

Hello. 

 

Is this Jude Peer?

 

Speaking.

 

Mr. Peer, this is Anastasia Mapplethup, Second Executive Assistant to The Chairman, how are you today?

 

I’m well thank you, how are you?

 

I’m well.  Mr. Peer, The Chairman would like to meet with you.

 

Of course.

 

How’s next Tuesday at 11:00am in The Chairman’s office?

 

Let me just check my calendar … yes, that’s fine.  May I ask what it’s about?

 

The Chairman has some particular issues that have arisen.

 

Very good then.  I’ll be there next Tuesday.

 

Have a good day.

 

Thanks, you too, byebye.

 

***

 

While one could—and did—call Mr. Blood anything behind his back (to the right people, in the right way, at the right moment, even feeling little surges of heretical power by doing so), one had to be scrupulously careful how one referred to him in official circles.  Not Mr. Blood.  Certainly not Hal.  No one had called him Hal since his mother when he was 3 and he replied, Mother, my name is Mr. Blood.  Don’t you ever call me that again.  To his face, everyone—his wife and children, even his mother now—called him Mr. Chairman.  This was on his passport, stenciled on his underwear, tattooed on his administrative assistants’ buttocks, carved on monuments at the center of Jupiter.  People had called him Mr. Chairman for so long even he had forgotten he’d had a regular name, and when he dreamt one night of a giant Doberman chasing him through outer space, salivating and woofing Hal, Hal … he woke up in a cold sweat and wasn’t quite himself that day.

 

His office was reputed to be on the sixth floor of the main tower of the NBOD Center.  It was reputed to be the sixth floor.  The floors below and above—four and eight respectively, numbered strangely so as to throw off terrorists—were populated by the extensive entourage that attended to his needs and ensured that only the most monitored, faithful, and approved entered his orbit.  Reputed to be on the sixth floor because rumors had circulated on NBOD’s Intranet that the sixth floor was a decoy … and that Mr. Chairman actually resided in a palatial bunker 400 meters below the earth’s surface, where global nuclear war could proceed and he would be able to continue to direct New Bank’s operations, undisturbed.

 

How does one prepare to meet the incarnate center and apex of a great and potent institution?  One whose symbolic value exceeded his net worth, whose his net worth exceeded his symbolic value.  One had difficulty imagining Mr. Chairman performing the functions most of us routinely perform.  It was difficult, for example, picturing him on the toilet in an act of expulsion.  Chopping a tomato, changing a tire, waiting for the subway.  Even more problematic was considering him engaged in the act of love.  Did he do it in the manner of the rest of us?  Was his member gold-plated?  Did it have a news ticker circling its magnificent head?  Did his wife have to wear special goggles when the member appeared so as not to blind herself?  Did it speak in 50 languages and comfort the distressed?

 

One of the most disturbing stories that had been circulating at New Bank was said to have originated with a Muhammad ibn Abdul Muttalib, vice-president of fraud, who, while on a business trip in Houston, went to relieve himself during the third course at a fine restaurant … and who should be urinating beside him but Mr. Chairman!  The version of the story I heard was that Muhammad said he wasn’t as impressed with Mr. Chairman’s member—its length, girth, or coloration—the force and duration of its flow, or the method of his tuck and zip, as he thought he should have been.  But whether this was due to a kind of one-upmanship on Mr. ibn Abdul Muttalib’s part, alcohol-induced inattentiveness, mistaken identity, or some other force designed to denigrate the great … who can say?

 

I prepared for my meeting by watching Straw Dogs and getting drunk and high, those delightfully easy descents into an alternative existence.  For what’s better preparation for the unknown than alcohol, pot, and a violent movie?  Where are there better mediators of stress?  I couldn’t go back to Jesus—once you’ve left something, you’ve left it—I hadn’t yet tried on the steadied rationality of the academy.  I was using the drugs of business:  legal, illegal, virtual, addictive, available, requiring the one thing the corporation excelled at, the one thing that defined it:  money.

The next morning, having switched to caffeine and ASA, I tumbled to the place Anastasia had told me to go, at the end of an unmarked brightly lit corridor that led from Section H17 on Level P8 of New Bank’s underground parking.

 

I pressed the button on the left, the elevator fingerprinted me, asked me a few identifying questions, took a blood sample, read my irises, and whisked me to the eighth floor, where I was cross-examined, strip-searched, coached on the proper things to say, how to say them, asked to recite New Bank’s values and give examples of how I had exemplified each, tested for contaminants, sniffed by dogs and secretaries, x-rayed, and finally shown through 117 bullet-proof doors to another elevator—

 

Anastasia and her staff wished me well, I pressed the button to the right and was whisked downward for three or four minutes, then released into a large room.  In the distance, a man sat writing at a desk; behind him, a brightly glowing unmarked cube, smooth, white, and large, emitted a low and comfortable hum.  I approached and sat in one of the vacant chairs.  After some time the man lay down his pen and began speaking.