My first months at Pale Advertising were marked most notably by my having created the Go Anywhere, Be Anything campaign for an airline owned by a bald billionaire named Lucien Vega who claimed to have abandoned all material attachments. Aside from the rejection of desire, he was now convinced that the key to enlightenment was flight, which is to say, the key to selling tickets was the promise of enlightenment. It came to him in a dream.
Vega spent a week at Pale HQ interviewing the greatest minds the company had to offer, but no one, not even the celebrated car guy or the legendary orange juice woman could woo him. Then at the end of a long week of mind-murdering meetings, his famous blue eyes found me at the back of the great conference hall. I was the only one there who hadn’t spoken. He rolled his chair down to my end of the table.
He said, “Nirvana by aircraft.”
I nodded.
He said, “You understand.”
I did not.
He peered into my eyes the way the soulless pretend to be soulful and said, “We will provide everything to our first-class passengers so that there will be nothing left to desire. For the duration of a flight, they should come to understand what I understand always. Wanting is foolish. Desire is deadly. I am happy because I no longer want.”
It took some restraint not to slap him.
He said, “Give me your line.”
All week long our very best had been lobbing slogans at him and he’d been batting them back with disgust. There was a palpable fear in the office that he would jump ship and take his billions as he went.
“Go anywhere, be anything,” I said.
“Yes,” he said. Then he was out the door and I never saw him again.
A few hours later the celebrated car guy found me at my desk.
“We’re going with yours,” he said, none too pleased.
The campaign was an enormous success. My star rose rapidly.
Those years at Pale changed me in many ways. First, they made me richer than anyone in my family had been since Hitler rose to power. Second, they changed my relationship to language. I was trained at the Pale black ops boot camp to write in alliterative sentences, ever seeking the clever and the wry. I learned to communicate in the flat language of conformity and commerce, of self-actualization and self-esteem. A language that descended precipitously from Esalen to advertising to journalism to politics, pooling and cooling in the common American lexicon, where it rests now, stagnant and stinking.
“Someday,” Capo promised me, “the poets will speak like bankers and the bankers will speak like poets and we will all think like children.”
The man was a visionary.
“I love you, Solomon rabbit, but you’re being a jerk,” my grandmother said. “You’re squandering your gifts, to say nothing of my gifts, to say nothing of your life. Which, in a manner of speaking, is also my gift. The point is that these are years you will not have back. Do you understand me? Never. Have. Back.”
“I’m happy.”
“You are not happy.”
“I am.”
“What are you working on now?”
“Watches.”
“What kind of watches?”
“Swiss.”
“You’re happy devoting your life to convincing rich people they’ll be happier if they buy more jewelry?”
I laughed.
“And for the Swiss? They’ve not been much help to us, have they?”
“Baba—”
“You’re wasting your life.”
She hung up.
“You could do anything at all,” my mother said. “And this is how you choose to help our people?”
If nothing else, the selling of my soul gave Charlotte and Lina Klein something to agree upon.