I wrote this about ten years ago when I was working at Goldman Sachs in the "multimedia" department.
Wall Street is where I work, but I am an impostor there. I go to work every day disguised as a willing cog in the investment banking machine, but I am a dreamer and a poet. They pay me to keep the machine running, but I spend my time daydreaming about ways to destroy the system that keeps me alive.
I have a high-paid, non-finance-related, technical job, which gives me ample free time and constant exposure to people who work in the world of finance. I am not one of them. I hate what they stand for. There may be decent individuals among them, but after three years of working among them, I can honestly say that I despise their lifestyle and their arrogant worldview. I stay there because working for them gives me freedom to dream and write, and also to travel. I have traveled to many interesting places on the payroll of the bank. I consider myself a field researcher on the intricacies of human greed.
Every morning I either take the bus or ride my bike from my apartment in Chinatown to the gleaming edifices of the financial district. It is a short distance physically, but the psychological transformation one must undergo to “belong” on Wall Street is huge. I get up every morning, take a shower, comb my hair, shave, put on deodorant, put on nice, pleated pants, a good shirt, and the obligatory tie. After all of this I look like a guy who works on Wall Street. When I ride the elevator to the 31st floor in the Goldman Sachs building at 180 Maiden Lane, I look like any one of the young investment bankers there. But I’m not one of them. I’m different. I’m an imposter. I have not made the necessary psychological transformation to become a banker on the inside. I will never make that transformation.
Usually my day at the office involves sitting through any number of soul-crushing meetings about meetings about meetings. My only respite comes from the Dream. I often lapse into the Dream. In the Dream, I am always a big brown bear, and something wonderful and violent always happens. Today, as I settle in to the first of many meetings designed to drain the lifeblood and crush the will of the participant, I feel myself dozing. I am sleepy, and maybe if I relax, just maybe I will go there, I will drift, I will be, I will…
Now I’m a big brown bear, and I am striding down the hallways feeling warm and sleepy. I fall to all fours; it’s more comfortable this way. No one notices my transformation. I go into the cafeteria and I eat one of the waitresses, clothes and all. She screams a little but no one notices. I go into one of the closets and it is lined in animal furs, soft and downy. It is dark and smells like honey and smoke, like a campfire. I curl up in a soft fluffy corner. I have a big window in front of me. The lights of Brooklyn shine from across the East River. I am sooo sleeepy. My big meal sits comfortably in my stomach. I am a big sleepy, ferocious, lazy predator. I want to savor this feeling, but I drift into sleep.
In my dream, I dream I am flying. I am a dream bear dreaming I am a flying bear. I fly out over the city, looking into windows. I fly gracefully, pawing the air with my giant arms. It feels like swimming in warm, liquid air. I see naked women, people fighting, people cooking, lots of people watching TV. Some see me and run to the window, call their husbands, call the police, scream. I take no notice, for I am warm and sleepy and free. I fly up up up, high above the buildings. An airplane whooshes past me, about fifty feet away. Close call, better go back down. Back down to the buildings and lights and cars. Back into my window, into my safe downy fur nest, back to sleep. When I wake up, I will be asleep. Reality doesn’t exist. This is it. I am exempt. I am sentenced to perpetual comfort, rest, flight and freedom. I guess I died and went to flying bear heaven.
My pager vibrates at my hip. I am back at Goldman Sachs. I have to go help a client plug in a computer. I see my reflection in the window. I am no longer a bear. I am a clean-cut, professional, businesslike human male, about thirty years old. No one will suspect that I am sometimes a flying bear. I meet the client. She is a middle-aged woman, yet it seems she has been dead for most of her life. She exudes no life force whatsoever. Her professional demeanor has left her dead. I plug in her laptop. Her body language lets me know she wants me to leave. She mouths “thanks” as she looks past me. I walk out, back to my cubicle.
It occurs to me that “cubicle” rhymes with “testicle.” If a cubicle is a testicle and I live in a cubicle, does that make me a spermatozoa? If so, into what womb am I being prepared to shoot? Most likely I am one of the hundreds of billions that will die in a condom or die of exposure on a pair of breasts, or sizzle in stomach juice, or perish in an esophagus or in a colon. Of course I don’t mean I will literally die in a digestive tract, but if I stay in my cubicle, I will most certainly not reach the proverbial egg. I have to venture out, wiggle my tail and swim.
Sometimes rage overtakes me and I just want to shake everyone. I want to take my co-workers by the shoulders and shout: “When did you die? Was it when you left your parents’ house in New Jersey, when you realized you had to marry your father or your mother to keep that child-like security alive?” Mostly I just wait until the fur grows and I become the bear again.
Now it’s time for another meeting. The speaker is discussing yesterday’s meeting and fielding comments about this morning’s meeting. I’m feeling sleepy again, very sleepy, so so sleeeeepy…
Now I am skulking through the corridors again. It is warm. I swing to the right, crash a spindly door down with my great, brawny bear arm. Inside are the stacks of computers and servers. This is the LAN room, where the information nests. I lumber in and lean against one of the towers and it crashes to the ground. Cables rip and glass breaks. Millions of gigabytes of information are lost forever. Who owes what money to whom, what company is sucking the blood out of what individuals? Gone. It feels good, and I go from tower to tower, slashing and crushing and tumbling the plastic and metal like so much kindling. Two skinny men with glasses rush into the room. It is John and Felix from the I.T. department. I rip out John’s trachea with my sharp claws. He falls gurgling to the ground, spurting a thick river of brownish blood. Felix makes the mistake of jumping onto my furry back. He digs into my flesh with a pencil that feels like a mosquito bite. His other fist is clutching my fur. I rise up on my feet and back toward the large double-thick, bulletproof window. It shatters as I slam into it and Felix plunges, screaming into the cold Wall Street air, 31 floors to his long-awaited death.
No comments:
Post a Comment