“Gee, I hope so,” I say, meaning it, meaning: wanting her to know I mean it. “They’re really good guys. They’ll land on their feet.”
She gives me another one of those looks. “Sometimes I wonder.”
“You wonder if they’re good guys? They’re awesome guys!” I say. I know that’s not what she was wondering about but I just don’t want to go down any kind of quasi-moralizing or regret or second-thoughts path or anything like that with her.
“No, I mean I wonder sometimes about what we’re doing. About, you know, all the pain we’re causing. Do you believe in karma?”
The moment she says the word I picture her going all Namaste, up near the front of the yoga class, with her prayer hands, trying to get the eye of a male instructor, the one ten years younger and with a topknot. A topknot on a guy is like a sign on his forehead saying “I’ll go down on you for a really long time and make it seem totally unselfish but really I’m kind of worried that I’m gay.” So I try to look at her as if she is being overly sensitive, I get that, and I appreciate it, but.
“We’re ensuring the survival of the agency,” I say, repeating the rote justification speech that she herself handed me when we started this whole firing thing months ago. “Over four hundred people work here and if we don’t cut back significantly due to the ongoing economic situation they’ll all be out on the street, every one of them.”
She sighs again and gives me that look, which I now interpret as a look of pride mixed with shame, pride at her power in this whole thing, pride at being entrusted with so much responsibility, but all of it mitigated by pride’s shadow side. That’s a human being for you. I had neither pride nor shame in what we were doing. It was just my job. I was saving the agency and conducting a thought experiment at the same time, one that could have far-reaching implications for corporate culture. I had carefully and painstakingly created a very specific milieu, a culture of fear and paranoia, and we were watching it unfurl and grow, like something in a large and fetid petri dish, our own Milgramesque biosphere of doom. I suppose one might be justified in being proud of such a creation but that would be self-serving, and shame equally so; I was doing it for larger reasons, and I was giving it away like you would a vaccine that saves millions of lives.
She still sits there and doesn’t move, or won’t. I want her out of my office. If I am being completely honest I would say her body language means she wants me to hold her and cuddle her and tell her everything is going to be fine. A week ago I might have entertained the thought of such things, cuddling or at least making out, but I feel nothing for HR Lady today, not a shred of interest even as she crosses her legs and fails to readjust her skirt. They really are great legs, and it isn’t that she’s unattractive, as I have said, it’s just that for the past several days, whenever I catch a glimpse of a thigh or a breast the only thing I can think of is Intern’s fecund, glowing lips, her shining eyes, her breasts. It’s driving me nuts and I don’t know what to do about it but jerk off into the trash basket for the second time today, only I can’t do that at the moment without a certain degree of embarrassment because there’s someone in my office.
When she finally leaves (was that a backward angry jealous glance she gave me on the way out? yes) I check my stocks as a means of killing a few minutes and then I go up to eight.
1.7
The eighth floor houses our production department. At any given time, the New York office of Tate Worldwide (New York being the largest of our fifty-six offices around the world) will be in the midst of producing eight or ten commercials for our various clients. The way advertising works is simple: we charge huge companies millions and millions of dollars a year to come up with the big ideas that will help them to grow their businesses, to define for themselves an expandable niche in their market, to give them something to stand on, a mission to purport, a flag to wave. Ad agencies exist for the same reason that mercenaries do. An oil company can’t be in the business of, say, executing the popular leader of a left-wing opposition group in some Central American democracy, that just isn’t a job description that they can put up on their LinkedIn page. So they have to hire a consultant who hires a global risk-management firm who hires a mercenary unit who hires a local criminal gang to get the job done. It’s the same with what we do. XXX Pharmaceuticals wants to believe that it is in the business of making the world a better place, not of convincing people to take overpriced drugs they don’t need (and that can’t be proven to be much more effective than a placebo). So they outsource their lying to us. We then pretend to help them make the world a better place. All we really do is enable their fantasies about themselves by holding their hand through the difficult years-long process of bringing a drug to market. In the course of that, it’s our job to pretend to be coming up with ideas when really all we are doing is taking the ideas that they have already given us in their PowerPoint documents and making them look like they were ours in the first place and therefore worth the many millions they are paying us. It’s useless but in the end what human endeavor isn’t? We have meeting after meeting and write draft after draft of a single fifteen-second commercial, exposing these scripts to real people to get their feedback, in what is known as qualitative or “qual” testing, before gauging the spot’s real-world CPI—Consumer Persuasion Index—in quantitative or “quant” testing, in which each commercial is assigned a numerical value supposedly indicating its true effectiveness, the entire process meant to ultimately determine whether it would be more effective to frighten people into buying a drug because without it their children might die or frightening them into buying a drug because if they don’t their peers will ostracize them for being terrible parents. Once real moms and dads have signed off on our concept, we hand these so-called ideas to a director and a production company and ask them to “add value,” which means, “Can you try to take this mind-numbingly boring piece of machine-made bullshit and force-fit a modicum of humanity into it?” Normally this is done via casting, trying to find human-looking people to stand in front of the camera and smile and give the thumbs-up to life. That usually works. Then when the commercial is finished, we celebrate ourselves and our achievements at an awards banquet from which we take home prizes in categories such as “Best Editing for a Fifteen-Second Unbranded Direct-to-Consumer Web-Based Pharmaceutical Campaign” and so on.
I always get confused on the eighth floor. When you get off the elevators you can go one of two ways: toward the bathrooms or toward the receptionist. Having made that decision you can then go either right or left, ultimately giving you the option of the four compass directions. I can never remember where anyone’s office is and so I always end up just walking around the perimeter of the building until I find who I am looking for. Today I get off the elevators and decide to go toward the receptionist, who is on her break apparently, as there’s a temp sitting in her spot and he looks like a young Paul Rudd with facial hair, obviously an actor who doesn’t have a trust fund; i.e., hopeless. From the receptionist’s desk I randomly choose left, and I walk toward the Twenty-ninth Street side of the building. When I get to the row of offices that rings the floor I randomly choose to turn right and I start walking. Everyone sees me and looks up from their desks and waves or grins; this isn’t something they would do for anyone who walked down the hall, but one of the consequences of creating a dynamic of fear is a high degree of sycophancy resulting in a good deal of performative smiling. Our poor wannabe-actor temp thinks that by sitting there stone-faced and not participating in these corporate rituals he will save his soul; what he doesn’t understand is that all of the phoniness required of his soulless peers takes far more acting skill, courage, and devotion to craft than he will ever see on any not-for-profit stage in his entire life.
If asked I will say I am looking for Tom Bridge, but I happen to know that Tom is in Prague shooting a series of spots for a tire company. I get to the corner of the building and turn right (the only way I can go unless I want to retrace my steps) and then I see Tom’s assistant, a hipster clown named Jake. I call him a clown because he is one; he works on weekends at a children’s hospital in Westchester. Apparently he was a drug addict and then he became a clown as a part of his recovery program; we even honored him with our Actually Good Person We Mean It of the Month Award.
Jake