Ink - Hari Kunzru

Hari Kunzru Born in London, Hari Kunzru is the author of the novels The Impressionist (2002), Transmission (2004), My Revolutions (2007), and Gods Without Men (2011) as well as a short story collection, Noise (2006) and a novella, Memory Palace (2013). In 2003 Granta named him one of its twenty best young British novelists. His short stories and essays have appeared in diverse publications including The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Guardian, the London Review of Books, Granta, Bookforum and Frieze. He was a 2008 Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library and is a 2014 Guggenheim Fellow. He lives in New York City. www.harikunzru.com

ALSO BY HARI KUNZRU The Impressionist Transmission Noise My Revolutions Gods Without Men Memory Palace

Ink Hari Kunzru A Vintage Short Vintage Books A Division of Penguin Random House LLC New York

Copyright © 2015 by Hari Kunzru All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House of Canada Ltd., Toronto. Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The Cataloging-in-Publication Data for “Ink” is available from the Library of Congress. Vintage eShort ISBN 9781101970447 eBook ISBN 9781101970447 Series cover design by Joan Wong www.vintagebooks.com v4.1_r2 ep+a

Contents Cover About the Author Also by Hari Kunzru Title Page Copyright Ink

I was exhausted. I’d had to get up brutally early to make it to the airport and the only effect of the scalded coffee in the lounge was to add a high white note of anxiety to my mood. For three months I’d been working twelve-hour days. If I closed my eyes, I could see columns of figures. Whatever you say about business when you’re at dinner with friends, how you’re in it for this or that reason—because you’re passionate about x or committed to making a difference to y—in the end it comes down to a number, to that box at the bottom of the spreadsheet where it states the total value of your passion in dollars or pounds sterling or whatever other currency you think in when you’re lying awake at night quantifying your sense of self-worth. Naturally, you hope it’s a high number. There’s nothing wrong with that—if you didn’t care about money, you’d be doing something else, teaching yoga or knitting solar panels or whatnot. But if your idea of passion and commitment is building a business, then however elevated your motivations, whatever pressing social need you feel you’re fulfilling, deep down you know you wouldn’t be there if you couldn’t make a profit. Unlike me, however, you probably don’t admit it. I am of the unpopular opinion that money clarifies human relations. If something is framed as a transaction, for good or ill, I know where I am. I accept that’s not very touchy-feely, but I’ve got no patience for people who prefer to swim in muddy water. Good to have that off one’s chest. So, to recap. I was on my way to a meeting, and I knew what I thought I was worth. This was the meeting where they’d tell me what they thought I was worth. Possible disparity, hence nerves. Lack of sleep, not eating properly et cetera. It’s probably a sufficient explanation for what happened. I am, I suppose, a national type. The English cynic, heir to a thousand-year heritage of sneering at anyone who believes in anything at all. But even the ancient scorn of my mercenary,

calculating, swivel-eyed people has a limit and in my case that limit is my shameful and poorly disguised need for positive reinforcement. Everyone comes up against their failings and this is mine. Mea maxima culpa. As I wheeled my suitcase to the gate, I was doing the exercises, visualizing my goals. You are the captain of your—be the change you want to—Yes, I read those books. Sue me, as I have lately learned to say. Sue me, because I read self-help books. It is where the rubber duckie of my cynicism bumps up against the edge of the tub. So I walked to my gate, wheeling my suitcase, repeating my list of goals. I visualized myself being picked up from the airport in San Francisco, driving to the meeting, and leaving a wealthy man. I moved from London to New York after my divorce and somehow instead of doing what the English are expected to do here—auction house, finance, or one of those non-jobs that allow you to be a fortyfive-year-old who arrives at his office on a skateboard—I’d ended up backing a couple of physics PhDs who were looking to sell their souls but weren’t vicious enough for Wall Street; together we built a software company. I should clarify that I don’t mean some social media handjobbery where children sit about on primary-colored spheres and get free smoothies from the chiller by the Ping Pong table—no, I mean a place where adult men who are frequently wearing ties and cuff links and black Oxford brogues build something almost unimaginably recondite and tedious that works ever so slightly better than the competition. Now we were about to sell our useful and boring company to one of the tech giants, a vast global tumor of an organization that wanted to kill our product and absorb its remains into the bloated suite of “tools” they foist on their customers. That sounded perfect to me. On paper I was rich. Not in any other way. During my New York odyssey I had somehow acquired a second wife (the fragrant Brianna), an apartment in a building where the common charges rivaled the GDP of a medium-sized country, and two small children who required a never-ending tap-dancing conga line of service professionals—nannies and tutors and test coaches

and sleep trainers and, for all I know, turd-wranglers and methodburp coaches—plus a lavish provision of camps and theme parties and other opportunities for personal development-slash-orgiastic consumption. There was a dog which cost almost as much as the kids; there was a so-called summer house, a treacherous pile of woodworm and silverfish in a dank Catskills valley that made me think of serial killers. I suppose I was suffering from culture shock. My own childhood had been a rather stark affair. Knocking on Father’s study door, keeping your elbows off the table, that sort of thing. Cross-country running had featured heavily. Lately I had begun to feel a strange sense of disconnection from my American life, as if I were watching it late at night on television. Lurid colors, canned laughter, frequent commercial breaks. It was governed by rules I didn’t understand. My wife and son and daughter (Casey, seven, and Carey, four—I’ll thank you for not asking about the names) seemed like natives of this city, accustomed to the strange logic by which one stood six hours in line for a pastry or voluntarily went to the Hamptons. As I saw it, my only chance of survival, financially or emotionally, was a large sum of money. So on the way to my meeting I was visualizing that large sum. I was bringing it into being. If you had bumped into me just then and interrupted my visualization, I would have beaten you to the floor with my two fists. The stewardess did her little emergency exit semaphore; an animated figure on the seat-back screen showed me how to fasten and unfasten my seat belt. I found myself drifting off into that unrestful half-sleep associated with sitting upright in a poorly designed aircraft seat, sleep that’s barely sleep at all, more a sort of semiconscious nausea. I tried to wake up, but the concentration needed to read was beyond me and I’d promised myself not to look at my notes until I was in the limo at the other end. I shut my eyes again, opened them. Every surface seemed to be covered with signs and symbols, graphical insects swarming over the tray tables, skittering under the seats where the life jackets were stored.

Again, I shut my eyes and without warning—or indeed any sense that I was falling into a dream—I found myself standing in my prep school classroom. Bare floorboards, ground and polished by generations of scuffed shoes, a blackboard with a dusty rubber (a perfectly decent word for eraser) and a debris of chalk stubs on the bottom ledge. Rows of desks, the old-fashioned kind with a hard benchlike wooden seat bolted on by a curved iron bracket and a hinged lid that opened to reveal a drawer. I was dimly aware that I wasn’t supposed to be there, but the depth and texture of the place overtook my confusion, persuading me that it was real. On the wall there was—what?—it was hard to fix with my eyes. A periodic table? A world map? A map of the Commonwealth? Any of them would be possible—perhaps even the Empire map, though I was at school at a time when the Empire was just a memory. In front of me, a pudgy specter, hovered Babcock. Of all the boys, him. I hadn’t thought about Babcock in forty years, but there he was, two feet off the ground, his cruelly scuffed shoes drooping forlornly down toward the floorboards. He looked as if someone had hung him on a coat hook. It was a familiar position; that used to happen to him at least once a week. Babcock’s face had never been distinguished. Something about the dream rendered it even less so: he had vague and cloudy features—small round eyes like currants, a shapeless nose, rubbery lips. Worm Lips, we used to call him, along with every change that could be rung out of his Anglo-Saxon millstone of a surname. Bad Cock. Cock Lips. That one stuck for a while. I could even have been the boy who made it up. I had a streak of cruelty, even then. This Babcock, this version of him, was effectively faceless, his head a miasmal smear floating above the grubby collar and skewed tie of our prep school uniform. It wasn’t like it so often is in dreams, when things are sketched in or seen only indirectly. Though Babcock’s terrible facelessness was vague, I saw its vagueness with perfect clarity and it made me ashamed, for I knew I was partly responsible. Somehow—by some unknown mechanism or logic—I had caused him to be so afflicted. I repeated my mantra. I am committed to

celebrating the person I am, I said. I also said, several times, you have done nothing wrong. Babcock slowly shook his faceless head. If he had had a mouth, it would have been hanging open. In business manuals, in magazines, in the entrepreneurship seminars that always seem to be held in grim hotel function rooms smelling of carpet cleaner and those chemistry experiments Americans call “Danishes”—in every venue where the so-called art of starting a company is taught and learned, positive thinking lurks. It is a sort of yeast infection upon capitalism. In those airless conference rooms, as we masticate our carcinogenic sugar-frosted breakfast items, mesmerized by the phosphorescent yellow of the socalled “jam,” we start to feel peculiar. Perhaps, we decide, we really are actualizing ourselves. Then, all of a sudden, we start to believe in the power of our own minds. Just by thinking about things, we can make them so. This was not how I was brought up. Named after an obscure saint, located outside a small market town, my prep school was a doggedly old-fashioned place. Gray stone buildings, a pervasive smell of cabbage and camphor rub. I remember reading school stories written generations previously— Billy Bunter, St. Austin’s—and finding them utterly contemporary. We played conkers. There was a tuck shop. “Quis?” we used to call out, to which the answer was “ego!” We were all proud uniformed dirty-kneed supporters of England: not the country beyond the school gates, sneered at by my house master as “a nation of shoplifters,” but a nostalgic confection whipped up out of the Armada and Spitfires and the 1966 World Cup. Hunched in my uncomfortable airline seat, I could see with hallucinatory clarity the chipped green frames of the classroom windows, the view out over muddy playing fields. Babcock hung on his invisible hook at the front, by the little platform on which stood the master’s desk, a platform which had always given us the opportunity to play small tricks, like positioning the desk at its very edge in the hope that he would push it off as he sat down. I wanted to speak to Babcock, but something prevented me. Clearly he couldn’t speak to me, as he

didn’t have a mouth. Once we put an upturned tack on the master’s chair—was it there or somewhere else? I remember that prank in semi-lit gloom, in a classroom we occupied a year or two later, when we were beginning to think about the Common Entrance exam and the schools to which our parents would send us next. By then Babcock had gone from my life, never to reappear. Babcock turned and wrote on the board in his graceless effortful hand: Caesar adsum jam forte Brutus aderat Caesar sic in Omnibus Brutus inis at It was pathetic. He didn’t even know why it was funny. He was just copying what another boy had done the previous week. I jeered at him. We all jeered at him. Behind me, though I couldn’t see them, were the others, my friends, the pack. On the classroom wall—God, now I could see it—was the mark order, a typed league table on which our grades for each test and exercise were added up. It was a school which believed in the right to be acknowledged for winning, and the character-building quality of being publicly shamed. I moved closer. There was Babcock’s name, at the very bottom of the class, as usual. We boys had no patience for failure. We knew the healthy sporting competition invoked by the speakers on Founder’s Day was just a form of camouflage. There was bound to be a war, and we’d be in the middle of it, taking charge and showing our mettle. I read violent comics about commandos who knifed German sentries and yelled “Go to hell, Fritz!” as they hurled grenades into pillboxes. When I impaled my imaginary enemies on the point of my bayonet, it was an untroubling experience, like slicing a sponge cake. Their eyes would widen as I ran them through.

That school must have been hell for a boy like Babcock. Slow, shy, physically awkward. He didn’t walk so much as shamble. When goaded by a games master or cadet corps sergeant he would lurch into an ineffectual trot. He smelled. As that thought arose—he smelled—I chided myself. How could I think that? It was just one of those things children say about people they don’t like. But to my horror I realized I could smell it once again, a curdled reek rising up off him, sharp, thick, and abject. I wasn’t one of the boys who hit Babcock, who kicked and slapped him and shut him in a metal locker and padlocked the door. I don’t remember doing things like that. I don’t remember punching him. Sometimes I watched. You couldn’t help that. I wanted to think about none of it. I wanted to leave it behind. Somehow I struggled to the surface, toward the engine roar and the oxygen-depleted air of the plane. For a while I stared blearily at the seat-back TV, but I couldn’t make head nor tail of the movie, which involved some thirtysomething American men running away from their wives and girlfriends. The stewardess came around with a meal. Nauseated by the reek of microwaved vegetables, I waved her away and shut my eyes. At once I began to sink back down. It was break time. To my relief, I was alone. Through the window, I could see the rugby pitches, churned brown at the goal lines. I walked around the classroom, looking at the desks. Their scarred, pitted surfaces, scrawled on, excavated with compasses, initials scratched, rubbed smooth by grubby fingers. Contents: Hall Kennedy’s Shorter Latin Primer, its gray-green cover invariably altered to read “Eating Primer” or “Shortbread Eating Primer”; The Public School Elementary French Grammar, a History of England in a pink jacket, a protractor set, exercise books with doodles and games of hangman at the back; pens, pencils, ink…ravaged, battlescarred desks, every one crusted under the seat with a braille of snot and gum. Where was Babcock’s desk? Somewhere in the middle? Never at the back of the class. He always sat at the front, not because he was disruptive, quite the opposite—he was a shy, withdrawn boy—but for

his own protection, so that some of the bad things—the slaps, the peashooter pellets, the filth slipped down the back of his collar— would stop. With a terrible sense of déjà vu, I opened the lid of Babcock’s desk and started going through his things, most of which were versions of the things in my own desk, disgusting Babcockian versions. The textbooks were grubby and dog-eared, the pencils chewed to soggy stubs. I found the ring binder holding his project— the history project the class had been working on for weeks, that would push the winners farther up the mark order and crush the losers underfoot. Mine was a forty-page epic with the pompous title “Introduction to the World of the Ancient Greeks,” painstakingly illustrated with drawings of hoplites and discoboli copied from a book my father had given me for Christmas. In fact, most of the project was copied from this book, which didn’t stop me from believing that it was destined to be recognized as an important achievement. Babcock’s project was pathetic, two pages of chicken scratchings on the topic of “The Three Field System.” There was one measly diagram, badly traced from our textbook: a field planted with wheat, one with green vegetables, one lying fallow. There was a wobbly picture of a plow. It was ridiculous. It actually made me angry. He should have been able to do better than that. He just wasn’t trying. Also in the desk was a full bottle of ink. His books were already covered with spots and spatters. What difference would it make? I unscrewed the top and poured a little over one of his textbooks, then over his pencil case. Then, giving up any pretense of restraint, I poured ink over his project, his exercise books, and whatever other small personal possessions he had in there. Then I tried to wake up. I really tried. I could hear the roar of the engine as I shut the desk lid and sat down to wait for the master to come back and begin the lesson. What did happen when Babcock found out what I’d done? How had he reacted? I couldn’t remember. Possibly he didn’t show much response at all. He was always fuzzy, muddy, muted. He shuffled

around inside himself, as if he were wearing his pudgy flesh as an overcoat. Nowadays he’d probably be diagnosed as depressed. Why couldn’t I remember? I felt it reflected badly on me that I couldn’t. I felt it was my duty. He would have opened up his desk and closed it again, out of despair or resignation. He’d have put his hand up and asked permission from Brearley to go and get toilet paper to clean up the mess. Or he’d have taken his handkerchief and tried to blot the spreading stains, transferring ink onto his hands, his white school shirt. I remember him with ink on his shirt. He was clumsy. That was another of Babcock’s attributes. He could bugger up the simplest manual task. It meant he was hopeless at sports, picked last for cricket and rugby. His ungainly cloak body wasn’t built to shin up the ropes in the gym or jump the vaulting horse or do handstands on the mat. There was a game we’d play at break time, a game he made up himself—this was Babcock’s terrible abjection—called Babcock Chase. He was It. He was always It. The game consisted, selfevidently, of chasing Babcock, then pushing him to the floor and inflicting whatever play punishments or dominations we took it into our heads to make him suffer. The problem was that he wasn’t entertaining to chase. He was slow and lumbering. He took the rugby tackles and pinches and punches passively, phlegmatically. So we never played it for long. A couple of times and then we’d go off to do something else. And if he felt that by allowing himself to be roughed up he’d earned entry into the next game, he was always disappointed. Once again he’d be left on the sidelines, trailing along in our wake until someone told him to go away. Maybe he felt amorphous to himself. That was how he felt to us. Not quite there, not quite a person. An ectoplasm, a jelly, a fog. Why couldn’t I remember him blotting the stains with his handkerchief or a wad of toilet paper? Why couldn’t I remember his expression—of sorrow or resignation or despair, probably not anger, almost certainly not anger—as he opened the scarred wooden lid of his desk?

Babcock’s doughy body floated in front of me, wearing its indistinct lens smear of a face. I could hear Brearley scolding him: it was all his fault, he was “thick-headed,” a “dolt” a “clot,” silly oldfashioned Anglo-Saxon epithets that made us boys scream with laughter. Brearley was playing to the gallery. He was an insecure man. I was thinking about Brearley, about his sleeve garters and the sharp-edged metal ruler he carried in his jacket pocket, when the stewardess touched my arm and told me we were about to land at SFO. I walked through the terminal in a daze. At baggage claim a driver was waiting with an anagrammatized version of my name on a sign. He wheeled my suitcase through the parking lot and locked it in the trunk of a vast black town car. I settled myself in the back and checked my phone. My partners had been on the West Coast for a couple of days. They confirmed that they’d be meeting me at the campus, no other issues. My floridly venal bastard of a lawyer had sent a long billable voice mail about nothing. That was it. No firefighting on my way to the meeting. Everything seemed to be going according to plan. As we merged onto the freeway I ought to have been going over my notes, reminding myself of the bastard lawyer’s list: positions to take and not to take, promises to avoid making. Instead, I sat back, feeling the diagonal pull as we crossed streams of traffic and accelerated toward the car-pool lane. Traveling on that white salt-flat ribbon felt like purgatory. I might as well have been trudging forward pushing a handcart. As a trick to get my head back in the game, I tried to focus on money, the buffer it would provide between me and the world, the soothing balm it would rub into the sore joints of my marriage. Instead, all I could think about was Babcock. How could he have been such a dolt, such an ox? All those things Brearley called him were true. Why would he never show any spark, any glimmer of wit or rebellion or even anger at his terrible situation? He did nothing to deserve the abuse he got. He never swore or called people names. He never provoked anyone, unless he was trying to start a game of Babcock Chase. But there

were some evil bastards in our class. They needed a human toy and Babcock fit the bill. One little animal—Grayling or Grayson—would spit in his lunch, whatever plate of silvery liver or indeterminate pie we’d been served in the grim school refectory. He’d spit phlegm in Babcock’s food—a “gob,” a “greenie”—and he’d force Babcock to eat it, under the gold-leafed names of the prize winners and war dead, the sepia eyes of a hundred years of first elevens and fifteens. All of history’s great ones, present to witness Babcock’s humiliation. We drove south, billboards and tract housing spooling past the tinted window. At length we turned onto a huge corporate campus, discreet glass blocks set among rolling landscaped lawns. Employees rode about in golf carts, dressed in chinos and button-down shirts. They wore dark glasses and carried brightly colored reusable flasks of drinking water. It was a brave new pantone-colored world, where nothing was more than ten years old and everyone had agreed to standardize certain basic protocols of dress and manner so as to be maximally compatible. A sort of cultural ISO was in operation. It was probably how everyone would behave in eight or ten years’ time. I’d been there before, of course, many times. It felt like nowhere. After a day or two of meetings, one always had the suspicion of having slipped into some highly regulated afterlife. My partners and our lawyer were waiting for me in the lobby, accompanied by a couple of polo-shirted grinners who I presumed were our hosts. I tried hard to wrench myself away from my memories, but it was as if I were drowning. As I was introduced I barely caught their names. Babcock never courted the anger of the masters by playing pranks or humming under his breath or giggling in chapel or any of the nonsense the rest of us got up to—but somehow he would attract it all the same. Brearley, in particular, hated him. That sour old bastard, despite his gray hair and his old-fashioned affectations—the springlike metal garters he wore on his shirtsleeves, his dandyish mustache—was a thug. Brearley had a bad temper, and in those days —and that place—where corporal punishment was routine and it was not considered out of order for masters to strike the boys—he was

fully able to express it. I once saw him drag a boy to the door by his hair. Another time, when the class had infuriated him by the old trick of shuffling our desks forward every time he turned to write on the blackboard, he picked someone at random for retaliation. That someone was Babcock. Go to the headmaster, he said. Going to the headmaster meant the cane—six strokes with shorts on or off depending on the offense and the headmaster’s degree of arousal. I know from bitter experience the sensation of waiting for a punishment whose dimensions grow like some great black amoeba as one stands there in a dark corridor outside a study door. I saw the CEO step out of the lift, a man whose broad, blunt face was familiar to half the world from magazine covers and clips from his famous presentations at product launches. He acquired my hand in a double-alpha death grip, his left hand clasped over, in case I escaped the viselike clutches of the right. Onstage he would work himself into a revivalist frenzy, yelling at the crowd, sheened in sweat. He said something to me that I didn’t catch. Babcock refused to go. It wasn’t fair, he said. And he was right, of course. He was no more responsible for the prank than anyone else. Brearley had just chosen him because he thought he’d go quietly. An easy wicket for the masters XI in the match against the boys. Doubly outraged at this unexpected insubordination, Brearley grabbed the lapels of his jacket and tried to remove him physically. Babcock resisted and as they struggled, he slipped down and down, until he was clinging to Brearley’s legs like a shipwreck survivor to a spar. Brearley, his face contorted with anger, started to flail at him with his ruler, so he let go and made a grab for the door frame. Brearley tugged at his legs for a while, without success. Then, completely unable to control himself, he slammed the door on Babcock’s hands. The crunch was sickening. Babcock screamed, a high-pitched sound like a fox or a cat. That sound. One day I hope I shall forget that sound. For a long time I have been trying to let go of the past. I am committed to celebrating the person I am today. You may scoff at such greeting card banalities. I don’t care. You have to think of it like

Catholicism or the religion of what men of my father’s generation used to call “the benighted Hindoo.” All the smells and bells—the garish colors and blood and so forth—are only for the great unwashed. The point is what lies beneath. Have faith. Don’t look back. “If you spend your whole time looking into the rearview mirror, you’ll find yourself under a truck.” I forget where that one is from but I’ve often found it useful and at that moment I said it, possibly out loud. I was suddenly enveloped in silence. The various courtiers were looking to their Visionary Founder and CEO for guidance. The man had evidently asked me a question and I had not replied. Instead I had muttered something about a truck. The CEO was still holding my hand. I mumbled a few words, which may or may not have been apposite. Something about traffic on the freeway. The truck theme. It was supposed to be a save. One of my partners shot me a worried look. The CEO squeezed my shoulder in a manner suggestive of both twelve-step mentorship and training in some kind of obscure energycirculation massage practice. Our little group made its way down a bright corridor which did not smell of mud or floor polish or muscle rub or rugby kit. We were shown into a conference room with a view of sprinklers and green lawn. Around me, people made small talk, mostly about the specifications of their devices. I don’t remember that we were shocked, particularly, at the injuries Brearley inflicted on Babcock. We probably found it funny. Babcock was sent to matron, and sat in class for a couple of days with bandaged hands. After that, he vanished. His parents must have taken him out of school. On what terms, I never knew. Perhaps there was a lawsuit. Perhaps not: Brearley was still around, yelling, lashing out at us with the metal ruler he carried in his jacket pocket. The point of positive thinking is it works. How does it work? You can’t ask that. You have to think positively. If you ask questions, it doesn’t work. That should come as no surprise, because asking questions is not thinking positively. It is asking questions. Two totally different things. In the conference room I was digging deep, trying to stay “in the moment.” I visualized some damn thing or other and was suddenly drenched in sweat, my damp shirt chilling

on my back. I peered down at the central air vents in the floor; I half expected them to be exuding some kind of narcotic green gas; the Joker playing a trick on Batman. If someone had poured me a ginand-tonic right then I would have kissed him, but there was no gin to be had in that overcooled Californian tomb. Gin was not part of our buyer’s corporate culture. There was a fridge full of some kind of bottled fruit-and-seaweed slop. There was, for some reason I did not comprehend, a bowl of memory sticks on the table, like some terrible parody of snacks. I suppressed a powerful desire to lean over to one of my young partners, who were sitting on either side of me, to put my forehead close to Rajiv’s or Jared’s shoulder and whisper, “I’m scared.” But neither of them were what you might call “tuned in” to the nuances of human emotion, and all I would have bought with my meltdown was some kind of in-flight checklist conversation about the absence of determinate threats in the room, and the guess that perhaps it was earthquakes I was scared of, was I scared of earthquakes? Not a hug. Not that. I had a powerful need to be hugged right then. I was hearing a loop of that crunch, the sound of Babcock’s fingers breaking. Across the conference table was a man about my age, one of a dozen or so people the CEO had brought to the meeting. There was nothing distinctive about him. He was dressed like everyone else, his bland, doughy features registering no particular emotion or intensity. At first I thought it was impossible. Then my body was flooded with elation, a physical flush of joy which almost lifted me out of my seat. All the lives he could have lived, all the things that could have happened as a result of his torment—the despair, the lonely rooms—and here he was in sunny California, in a high-level meeting at a billion-dollar company. He was here. That meant he was safe. “Babcock!” Someone else had been speaking. The Visionary CEO. My appalled partners were staring at me. I reached out a hand across the table. “Babcock, is that really you? Brearley put the fear of God into us all right!”

Babcock looked confused. “Excuse me?” And in that moment I realized I couldn’t remember his first name. I must have known it at one point, but we’d never used it. He was always just Babcock, just those two spat-out syllables. “Pulaski,” said the man. “My name is David Pulaski.” The awfulness of it. Not to know his first name. The shame. “Oh God, I’m sorry,” I told him. “I’m so sorry.” I could feel the tears welling up in my eyes. I waited for the CEO to carry on.

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