John Mills, our spokesman who had passed out suddenly one day after lunch, eventually returned to the office with a new look and an entirely different personality. The doctors had found a tumor in his brain the size of an orange and had cut open his skull to remove it. As a result, John returned to us with no hair on the left side of his head and a new tendency to speak the truth in all circumstances, without regard for decorum. The New John Mills helped me make my last decisions as a UN employee.
“This is the worst place I’ve worked in my whole career,” he would say. It was not such an original statement. Every one of my directors had said the same thing, except they said it in private, not walking through the corridors. When outside visitors would appear, John would greet them with a “Welcome to the sinking ship!”
He would be out of the office for extended periods of time because of his operations. When he’d return, I would try to bring him up to speed on new developments. But he couldn’t really focus anymore. In the middle of a briefing, he interrupted me with a question.
“What are you still doing here, Michael?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “But how about you? You’re still here.”
“Forget about me,” he said. “You’re still young. You’re wasting your energy here.”
“I guess we all are.”
“You know, Pasha has been doing some things he shouldn’t be doing.”
“I know that,” I said. John looked at me quizzically. So I pursued. “I mean, some of his management decisions make no—”
“I’m not talking about management decisions, Michael.”
“Well what… what are you talking about?”
“I’m saying you’d be smart to get the hell out of here. Sooner the better.”
I had written a nuclear letter of resignation a few weeks back, right after meeting with the young job seeker. It was a long letter, full of criticisms and grand declarations. I walked around with a copy of it in my pocket, waiting for something, or someone, to make me mad enough, and thus courageous enough, to sign it and slam it down on Pasha’s desk.
“Here,” I said to John. “Read this.”
John took a token look at it and laughed.
“What’s funny?” I asked.
“Do you know how many of these letters I’ve written in my career?” he said. “The longer the letter, the less likely you are to sign it. If you really want to go, it’s two lines, and you’re out.”
“I guess you’re right,” I said. “I just need some kind of plan.”
“John Lennon said it best,” said John. “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.”
“Funny you should say that,” I said. “Boo used to say the same thing. But I don’t agree. I believe in making plans.”
“Well,” said John, “take it from a dying man.…”
“What?”
“Look at me, Michael. I’m dying.”
“John, you’re not dying.…”
“Shut up, Michael. I am dying.”
I held his gaze for a beat, then looked down, repressing an urge to leap over the desk and hug him as tight as I could.
“I can tell by the look in the doctors’ eyes,” said John. “The second operation didn’t solve anything. Chances are this is it for me.”
I was at a complete loss for words. My eyes filled with tears.
“Anyway,” he said, as uncomfortable as I was, “get the hell out of here. You might not get another chance, you know. If you stay now, you’ll probably stay your whole life. You’ll get married, have kids, and you’ll be stuck. So go. Get out of here while you’re still young.”
At twenty-eight, I was still young—but not quite as young as I had been when I started. I now had a secretary who called me old-fashioned when I tried to dissuade her from getting a tongue ring. I now had kids in the office calling me sir. I had a chiropractor telling me to avoid crossing my legs at meetings. I no longer watched MTV and had no clue what artists sang the hits I whistled along to in the shower.
Three and a half years had gone by, yet I felt ten years older. But something was bugging me. Before leaving John’s office, I turned around.
“I really thought this was my calling.”
“What?”
“You know, working for the UN.”
John smiled. “And do you still think so now?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, let me put it this way, Michael. There are many things you don’t know. There are even things going on right here in this office that you don’t know about.”
“Like what?”
“Like some people are doing things they shouldn’t be doing.”
“What are you saying, John?”
“I’m saying you won’t regret leaving. Now get out of here. I need to pretend to be working.”
I took John’s advice and drafted my two-line letter of resignation.
At first, nobody took it seriously. People at the UN write up letters of resignation all the time, as John had said, but few people actually act on them. Pasha didn’t reply, hoping I would change my mind. But when it came time for my “goodbye drink,” I think everybody realized it was for real. It was December 2000. I had worked for the UN for more than three years.
“You’ve done it!” said Spooky. “You’ve actually done it.”
“How about you?” I asked. “Are you planning to stick around?”
“The game is not over,” said Spooky. “Besides, I kind of enjoy the air of Greek tragedy that surrounds this whole operation.”
“Cheers on that,” I said.
“To Michael leaving the sinking ship!” said Spooky, raising his glass for a general toast. John Mills had started a trend. Everybody was calling the operation a sinking ship now.
We were having cocktails at an Italian bistro close to the United Nations when a mustached man showed up, sat alone in a corner, and ordered an orange juice. I hadn’t noticed him until Spooky came to whisper in my ear that I had the “honor” of being “watched by the Iraqis.”
Spooky pointed his eyebrow in the direction of the man. I raised my own eyebrow in disbelief, but Spooky frowned to confirm his claim. So I decided to check out the man for myself. Ignoring Spooky’s advice, I turned my gaze directly at the supposed Iraqi operative.
I caught him by surprise, and he immediately looked away. I waited until he did a double take to confirm that I was indeed staring at him. At this point, I smiled and raised my glass to him. He immediately looked away again. Come on, a little toast.… I kept looking at him provocatively, but he was able to resist the temptation to look back. A normal New Yorker would have asked me what the hell my problem was. Instead, the man glanced around for a bit, then settled firmly on his glass of orange juice, as if he had noticed something truly fascinating about it.
Two options. Either he was indeed an Iraqi operative or he was a freaked-out Middle Eastern tourist who took me for a gay man on the prowl. I settled on the former. Spooky said he knew the man’s face from previous occasions. Eventually, before the Iraq War, the man with the orange juice, who worked at the Iraqi Mission, was expelled from the United States for “activities inconsistent” with his diplomatic duties. This was UN-ese for spying.
I felt somewhat proud that the Iraqi regime would be so eager for me to leave that it would send an agent to observe my farewell drinks. I still hadn’t resolved the question of whether Pasha had been pressured to sideline me after the Iraqis saw my memo to von Sponeck. But I decided to give him the benefit of the doubt. It was not only I who had been sidelined; it was my whole division. And at that time Cindy remained the person who had the greatest to gain from sidelining the Program Division.
Pasha had never been a role model to me, but as an elder and someone who had, after all, provided quite a bit of entertainment to me, I felt I should say something nice to him before leaving. So I wrote him an e-mail in which I called him a “good soldier with a good heart.” There was no way I could call him a great manager with an inspiring vision, but still, my words touched him enough that he invited me to lunch.
At the lunch, he tried to persuade me to come back after a few months. My master plan at the time was to spend all of my savings on a semester of film studies at NYU, the assumption being that I would immediately break into Hollywood and make millions, of course.
“Well,” said Pasha, “if you change your mind, give me a call.”
I nodded, satisfied that I had managed to leave without burning any bridges.
“When I was your age,” said Pasha, with an unusual smile on his face, “I considered going into the theater. But my family told me it was an occupation for homosexuals. So I ended up here, at the theater of the absurd.”