The Red Men (3 page)

Raymond’s name flashed up on my phone, I wearily accepted him with a press of my thumb.

‘What does it mean if they keep me waiting? Are they trying to discover how I react? What should I do?’

‘Nothing. Just wait. Take pleasure in it.’

‘But if I idle, I look like I have nowhere better to be. Appearing impatient, busy, will imply higher status.’

‘The job doesn’t require high social status.’

‘You’re saying that I should just take this, sit here, behave. Ignore the insult.’

‘Don’t take it personally. They’re just busy.’

‘I don’t know how you can work under these conditions.’

‘What conditions?’

‘I refuse to hand over the keys to my ego.’

He contemplated the biomass of the corporate forest.

‘I am indifferent to either their approval or disapproval. I just wanted you to know that.’

I had helped him prepare his curriculum vitae, omitting his brief career in amateur pornography (hundred quid a video, doing some bloke’s missus while he films it, then being served
sandwiches by her afterwards), his court cautions for violent conduct (‘I pulled a knife on him. Well it was a penknife. The geezer goes, “You couldn’t even cut my pubes off with
that.” I realized the error of my ways and called the police myself’) and his touring one-man show of performance poetry (‘It was called “My Friend, the Jailer” and it
was about you’). After an evening quizzing him on his past, I compiled a catalogue of diverting but useless information concerning Raymond Chase. I didn’t even get his qualifications.
He was proud of my failure. ‘You can’t pin me down like that. I don’t have a CV. I have a legend.’ Nonetheless he accepted the story I concocted for him and he submitted it
to Monad.

Eventually, a female PA came down to escort Raymond to the elevator. He stared at her skin, its radiant milk-fed blush, the way she had tried to age herself with a bob and a formal suit. She was
an intoxicating mix of severity and young flesh. He was grateful just to share oxygen with her. When the elevator doors opened, Raymond got his first look at an office full of beautiful people.
Women walked by, their stockings abrading in iambic pentameter. The movement from face to breast to hips to thighs was a soliloquy of flesh. The young men wore tight denim jodhpurs. The serenity
was more akin to the headquarters of a cult, and the air was zestful with citrus. The walls and desks were covered with screens which responded to every tap, whisper and caress. Pliant and organic,
the screens could be stretched to any size or format, and when left unattended, their surface broke out in wide pores which exhaled negative ions to cleanse the air. Overhead, immense screens
displayed live aerial footage of the Himalayas, the Sahara, the Scottish highlands overlain with a ticker of information concerning Monad’s current orders, the feedback from its subscribers
and hourly encouragements from the management. The vital signs of the body corporate drifted over the natural wonders of the world.

His guide deposited him in a glass office for further waiting. He felt like he was being put through a series of airlocks, either for decontamination or decompression. The interviewer soon
ambled in holding a mug of vended latte. The first thing Raymond noticed were the man’s nipples, little dugs of fat pressing against his tight sweater. With his round shoulders and recessed
chin, Morton Eakins looked like he was still being breastfed. His comfy jumpers gave off a sour milky odour. In Monad, ugliness was a perk confined to management.

Morton unrolled a screen upon the desk and tapped out a spreadsheet. The computer was a thin sheet of grey transparent film, which Morton flapped in front of Raymond as if it was something
he’d caught in the sea.

‘Do you like our tech? This is none of your Chinese crap. This is high Cambridge biotech. The screens are formed from a genetically engineered virus left to dry on a substrate. Under the
right conditions, viruses can be encouraged to behave like the molecules in a polymer. We line them up to form a three-dimensional grid of quantum dots, replacing strands of the virus here and
there with conductive filament. The user interface combines standard haptic gestures with the screen’s ability to extrapolate user intent. Organic light-emitting diodes provide images and the
battery is charged wirelessly.’

Raymond laughed. ‘I don’t know what you are talking about. Does that mean I’ve already failed the interview?’

‘I’ve looked at the result of your personality tests.’

‘Did I pass or fail?’

Morton sneered, as if Raymond’s joke only confirmed his suspicions.

‘We don’t have anyone corresponding to your type on our team.’

‘Is that a good thing?’

‘I could be persuaded. Tell me, who is your best friend?’

Raymond winced. ‘I don’t know.’

‘I do,’ said Morton, tapping the screen. ‘This test tells me that
you
are your best friend. You are a performer. Empathy is not your strong point. Other people are
merely your audience.’

Raymond bridled at these presumptions.

‘That is merely the aspect my personality acquires when I answer questionnaires. The questions encouraged me to perform.’

‘It is a yes or no test, Raymond. Yet you have added caveats to most of your answers. Take the question, “Do you enjoy solitary walks?”’

Morton waved and the screen flip-flopped across the desk so that Raymond could read out the answer he had given.

‘“It depends on where they are.” Which is a fair point I think. Are we talking about a solitary walk during crack hour in the dark zone, or a solitary walk with Wordsworth up
Scafell? Very different experiences.’

‘Next to the question, “You value justice higher than mercy?” you seem to have written a small essay.’

‘I didn’t want to you to come to imprecise judgements about me.’

Morton beckoned and the screen flip-flopped back to him, then he strummed out more information upon its surface.

‘Raymond, let me tell you what I think. You have immature concerns about being classified. You are thirty years old, yet you still feel that your identity is in a state of becoming. You
feel that you are a potential person. If you were really as experienced as the fiction of a CV suggests, you would not think of yourself as being in such an unformed state.’

Raymond often held imaginary conversations with himself; his lips moving soundlessly as he barrelled down the street, practising the anecdotes which impressed men and seduced women. But he had
never prepared answers to this kind of questioning. He began to wonder if Morton had called him for interview just for the pleasure of putting him down.

Morton pressed his fingertips into the pliant yielding screen and when he released them, the screen shimmied upright and showed Raymond’s CV. With his index finger and little finger
extended, the other two tucked into his palm, Morton made the horned symbol and laid it against his left arm.

‘Do you know what this symbol means?’ he asked, nodding at his horned fingers. ‘It’s the universal sign of bullshit.’

He blew at the screen and the image of the CV took flight. Morton was enjoying himself.

‘I have one last question,’ said Morton, ‘and then it will be your turn.’

‘Ask me anything,’ said Raymond, heavy-lidded with rising fury.

‘The question is not for you,’ said Morton, ‘it is for my screen.’ He took the screen in his arms as if it was a cat, and then whispered down to it:

‘What do you know about Raymond Chase?’

Raymond’s life flashed before his very eyes, for the screen quickly cycled through every photograph of Raymond tagged online, his spats on social media, through various videos of which he
had previously been unaware – his face in the crowd at gigs, in the background of other people’s holiday snaps, his name cited in divorce papers, audio recordings of coffee shop
performances of his poetry readings, dozens of them, all running at once into an angry chorus of Raymonds.

The cycle of media artefacts slowed then was replaced by a rotating three-dimensional spherical chart. Morton pinched out a livid red segment.

‘Tell me, Raymond, why are you so angry?’

Raymond fastened his coat. ‘I’m angry because of who you are, and who I am. I’m angry because I was not born into a position of advantage and I can never overcome that.
I’m angry because I’m short and wiry and have to scrap for the things other people have handed to them on a plate. I’m angry because I need stimulation and anger gees up the world
and makes it more interesting. I’m angry because most people aren’t.’

He went to leave and was halfway out the door when Morton Eakins, adhering to best practice, asked if he had any questions of his own. Although it seemed pointless to prolong the interview any
further, Raymond was curious. Looking across the office at the beautiful people and their screens – no wires, no fat, everyone as lithe as information itself – he asked the question
that we were too afraid to ask.

‘What does Monad actually do?’

‘Didn’t you do a search on us?’

‘Consumer modelling in mirrorworlds? Use of artificial intelligence in marketing scenarios? I am none the wiser.’

‘Good. The likes of you should not be able to understand Monad. Monad is the new new thing. We don’t define ourselves by what we do because next week we will be doing something
entirely different.’

‘Your words make sense right up to the point at which you arrange them into sentences. Look. Those people out there, what are
they
doing now?’

‘They are preparing a narrative for a product. The story will have to be plotted over two years, anticipating crisis points to take into account different eventualities. We employ a lot of
writers. If you are successful in your application, I’ll tell you more.’

Morton clicked his fingers and the screen balled up so that he could put it in his pocket. He came around the desk, and escorted Raymond from his office, his breath sour from a milky latte.

‘We’ll let you know within the week’

The PA returned to lead Raymond to the elevator, her smile set in neutral just in case they ended up working together.

After Morton Eakins rang him to tell him that he had got the job Raymond worried if he should accept it: wouldn’t paid employment distract from his poetry? Compromises get
out of hand and it’s easy to lose track of who you are further down the line. Yet, he was excited at the changes employment would bring. Earning a salary would mean no more squats. Raymond
had a terrible history when it came to squats. How many times had his female housemates had to lock themselves in their bedrooms while he wept at their door and begged for forgiveness? There was
the Stratford incident, when he settled an argument about the volume of his stereo by launching fireworks at the bedroom windows of his fellow squatters. His last housemate terrified him, an
advertising creative in freefall, spending his redundancy payment on Red Bull, vodka and LSD. ‘Are you joining me tonight, Raymond?’ this loon would ask, standing in the bath and
recreating the Battle of River Plate with his Airfix models, still wearing his best shirt and tie but no trousers, which is always a bad sign. Realizing that his housemate’s psychological
decline was more florid than his own, Raymond spent his evenings in sullen silence watching The Cancer Channel, specifically the
Joni Fantasmo Show
. The eponymous host was in remission. Her
guests came on with chemotherapy anecdotes and jars of excised tumours. The conflation of medical advice and entertainment chat show format gave the impression that each guest’s cancer was a
malign product which they were promoting.

Claiming incapacity benefit made him sicker and more incapable. Its fearsome bureaucratic assault tweaked latent mental problems. The hours spent stuck in the queue with lads sucking their teeth
at his second-hand suits, fingering their diamond earrings and threatening to stab him with a borer didn’t help either. Going to work for Monad was a way out of the poverty-and mental-illness
loop.

‘I’ll do it.’ Raymond and Florence clinked their glasses. ‘But only for six months. To get some money behind me and pay off my debts. Besides, there may be artistic
benefits. Conformity will allow me to explore more mainstream material.’

Monad’s office was a new development in Canary Wharf. On the slow approach by robot train, there was plenty of time to admire the skyscraper of One Canada Square, Canary
Wharf tower, an obelisk of glass and steel capped with a pyramid. His father had brought him on a day trip from Essex to watch it being built, a beacon to capitalism designed to lure the money men
from the City downriver to these reclaimed docklands. Flanked by its vice-presidents, the HSBC tower and the Citibank tower, the steel panels of pyramid were alive in the sunlight.

On his first day at work, Raymond rode into an office the size of a town. It was hard to tell where the no-smoking zones ended and outdoors began. Getting off at South Quay station, he had a
furtive roll-up beside some loading cranes. Two yellow-jacketed security guards gave him a suspicious look, so he re-joined the pedestrian rush-hour on the cobbled walkway. Positioning himself
downwind of the shower-fresh hair of three young women, Raymond concentrated on matching the pace of this high velocity crowd. There were no beggars, no food vendors, no tourists, no confused old
men, no old women pulling trolleys, no madmen berating the pavement, to slow them down; he walked in step with a demographically engineered London, a hand-picked public.

Am I one of
them
? Raymond considered the taste and texture of this thought. Having fought an asymmetrical war against
them
his entire life, he had expected to feel guilt on the
first day of his betrayal. He didn’t.

He walked down Marsh Wall and reached the Meridian bridge, one of two arcing walkways connecting the wharf to the colossal structure that rose out of the water of the West India dock: the Wave
Building. Its steel crest sloped down and ran underwater, only to rise up again a few hundred yards downriver: the west wing was in bedrock of the Thames.