Nadja,
Well, here we are, you and me, like the old days, that noxious little office on the corner of Zambak and Istiklal. How did we get anything done? The relentless street hustle, the fossilized plumbing, dust motes streaming through the blinds. All those goddamn cats. Good times, good times.
So we’ve escaped the “layoffs” once again. Who would have thought it would be us, the last men standing? Would you ever have given odds for such a development? It speaks, I guess, to the soft power of keeping your head down and saying nothing and contradicting no one. The Board has once again invoked the Peter Principle; we have risen to our level of incompetence, like the suckers before us and the dipshits before them. Life is a continuum. And while I’m grateful to be able to make my mortgage payments, it also means that every single moment of my workweek is an affliction.
Here are those interviews you wanted, all the civilian assets we burned in Operation Fear and Trembling, compiled for your convenience in one slim blue binder. I’ve had a chance to listen to some of the tapes, and from what I can tell, these transcripts are solid product. Someone said once that life can only be understood backwards, but must be lived forwards. So it is with these accounts. You’ll notice that I’ve arranged them out of chronological order, and also out of the order in which they were filed, but, I hope you’ll find, to some poetic effect. Pay close attention, therefore, to the date on each transcript.
Like everything else related to the operation, this binder has been a nightmare to assemble. The interviews were conducted over a two-year period, with the last one, incredibly, taking place a little over five weeks ago. Why, you ask? Because we lost that particular contractor. No, I’m not shitting you. One of the asset coordinators lost her contact details, and no one in the department could remember where she’d been placed, or if she’d even existed. I am deeply embarrassed for us, Nadja. You know my thoughts on this.
There were too many points of failure. Whoever designed the operation — Berger and his sycophants? this stinks of them — failed to account for the unaccountable. Just read the transcripts; even our assets understood it, and they knew screw all about what was going down. Humans are little whirlwinds of chaos. We who have transcended humanity can laugh at them all we want, but we depend upon their labours and must respect their fearful power.
Here’s a story for you. A few years ago, I decided to go back and visit the city I grew up in. It’s not close to here, took some doing, connecting flights, et cetera et cetera. I’d had a happy childhood there, and a rowdy but good-natured young adulthood. My parents were solid and kind and they let me Be, in the Platonic sense. They let me become the person I was destined to be, for better or — actually, just for worse. In my teenage years I had fine girlfriends and a cohort of chums who I understood and who understood me. I was something of a bohemian, I’m not ashamed to say; I took psychedelics and listened to dissonant music. I had drunken dalliances in the alleyways outside of rock clubs, I aspired to become a painter in the mould of the great Basquiat. The city was burnished in my mind, a peaceful beginning to an otherwise somewhat brutish life. And particularly in later years, as I progressed in my career, and saw and did the things I saw and did, this place and the person I was inside it took on an outsize importance. I longed to return to it. So, a few years ago, in the wake of some professional embarrassment or another, I went back, what the hell, and strolled the streets and sidewalks of a city that still felt so unresolved to me. I walked past the downtown movie theatres that I’d snuck into when I was a kid, where I’d seen Red Dawn and Cheech and Chong and Superman II — I forget all the pictures I saw, there were so many — but the point is that those flickering palaces in which I’d whiled away all those afternoons were long gone, demolished, or else turned into “event spaces” or internet cafés. I walked past the old library, a handsome limestone edifice that would soon be gutted so that a tower of condominia could rise from its innards like a great glass dildo. Eventually I worked up the nerve to undertake a pilgrimage to my old neighbourhood, to the house where I’d grown up, those endless summer days riding my bike through the parks and trails, the winters spent sledding down the slopes of a disused quarry. But I found, after I got there, that my childhood home had been torn down, erased, replaced with a weed-strewn metered parking lot. The blue spruce in the front yard, gone. My dad had planted it the day I was born.
We long to return to a prior state, Nadja, one of innocence — but that state is forever gone, if ever it existed, and if we wish to press on, we must radically accept the new reality: of grand Victorian houses razed for parking lots, of toy stores turned into strip clubs, of golf courses cutting through endangered Carolinian forests. The world is on fire, Nadja, and humanity has gone insane. We must find a way to be good with that.