Excerpt from Parable of the Rich Man
The following is the initial portion of Chapter One of Parable of the Rich Man, by Kirk Beasley.
14 May 20__
Dear Will,
To begin. I was on another of seemingly indistinguishable assignments overseas. I think that I had been gone from your shores so long and so often that many counted me dead, or lost in the present international confusion. Of course, I stayed in contact with the office but I must admit to a certain childish refusal to respond promptly to mundane communication here in the wired-or-fired era. And I did all I could not to set foot in the ancestral home and its environs. Not that my lack of attendance stunted the social season. And I sincerely doubt that the mythic dangers to which I was exposed in both personal and professional spheres were cause for hand-wringing amidst our inner circle. My sister, Marie, wrote me. I read and replied as mood and circumstance allowed, but I truly believe that she was my only contact with home and hearth in the past few months. So resolute was I in my far-flung pursuits that any impediment to my headlong race for success, such as a letter from home, I curtly dismissed as mere nostalgia.
As well as anyone, you know of the singular intensity and focus required by the work. It is no exaggeration to say that such must be multiplied by a factor of ten when traveling among our most troubled neighbors. Details come to dominate periods of inactivity. Checklists are to be avoided as they breed anxiety and I am by nature a list-making man. Sleep becomes a meditation on the antiquated tic and toc of Grandfather’s time- piece on the bedside table. Every train, every jet overhead, is a harbinger of inevitability; just as every sunrise becomes cause for celebration by all of nature, including myself. Breakfast becomes an opportunity to repair the damage done by the administration of toxic anesthesia, glass by glass, the night before. And I, the iconoclast, yet maintained the doping traditions of our forebears: finely distilled grains, aged in wood of conspicuous virtue, if virtue lies in charred endurance in lonely cellars. The wine of youth? Not so: the beer of fatuous immaturity. How I digress.
I recognized early in our professional lives that you and I are rather like bookmakers: whatever the turn of events, we take our cut first. Still, one must survive in order to collect, and then live, even more so, in order to spend such winnings and then risk one’s self again. I think the cycle monotone in my darkest nights, but I am, above all, habitual in all things. So with the light of a new day and some physical restoration, I set off again into the known and unknown, matters done and left undone.
One seldom forgets that as such it is a dangerous world and that a normal life is the exception. One tries to believe that the “best” places are less dangerous than the worst; but after all it is only a different sort of danger. The big questions of survival, ethics, and so on are as keen as a knife’s blade when the big fear runs up one’s back. But at home in Excess or at a fine hotel, the big questions fade among the comforts. The dangers there are probably as great or greater, but the fine point is lost. In the obviously dangerous world, matters of ethics and integrity can become so finely pointed that often I have abandoned them as luxuries. So without losing the point again, I shall return to my epistle.
About a month ago, I returned to London, the traditional halfway house of my recoveries from the darker world. I was certainly punishing my system as much and as often as possible. Since the Old Fox’s wake I had been drinking too much. My digestion had grown tired of the rigors of travel, the cornucopia of stressful bacteria, and the rare, but well-educated amoebas that found their way up the Third World food chain to my superior physiology and then burrowed down, deep into tissues beyond the reach of modern science. I found relief and further damage in that ubiquitous sour mash whiskey we drank so well at school. Of course, I arrived in London several pounds lighter in physiology and many pounds richer in the pocket. Anne Montgomery, our marvelous lass, and freshly minted foreign policy advisor to the new PM, said I looked like Bogart at the end of The African Queen, feverish and overtaken by leeches. I told her that a new suit from Savile Row and a week at the Savoy would conquer all.
In truth, I had been drinking to disadvantage for some months. I thought it was simply my paean to Father’s passing, but the passing of the mantle continued to weigh heavily. In success I felt defeated. After the incident in Central Asia in which I escaped, but the hired Mercedes did not, I began to feel an inexplicable elation mixed with a constant buzzing in my head, which was most egregious when I tried to sleep. I thought some obscure virus had latched on to me, but one doctor after another quickly and persistently confirmed that I was healthy but exhausted. And no, it wasn’t tinnitus. There was no ringing in my ears but rather a noise in my brain. I would have been happy to be distracted by a million half-thoughts of some deal gone astray or another lost love, but this was far more insidious.
All my senses were engaged in denying sleep to me. My nostrils itched with the stench of ashtrays filled with nights of nightclubs far away. My eyelids burned as if I had stood in the tropical sun all day without shades, frying my corneas. Nothing tasted like I thought it should. At first, I made the mistake of complaining to various waiters and bartenders, but I soon realized I was becoming a crank of the worst sort. At night, when sleep would not come, my hands and my feet would itch or tingle; it remains so difficult to describe, yet the touch of anything might feel like sandpaper, or worse. So, I quit the alcohol altogether.
That didn’t work either. So I returned to the bottle like a chastened lover.
Did I mention the elation, or giddiness? I began to laugh nervously at the slightest provocation. Events or circumstances that once had made me angry now seemed comic and also frightening. I managed to control my responses in meetings and around others, but alone at night I succumbed to the worst of it.
In the midst of the aforementioned exhaustion, sleep would not come easily. So I read or listened to the radio. The BBC World Service was so reassuring in the night. But my body was not getting the message. I felt as if an enervating electric current was coursing, unbidden, through my frame. I tried to attend to business correspondence during this insomnia, but I quickly discovered that I could not muster memory, specificity, or creativity. Desperate beyond measure some evenings, I descended to yet another low: I tried to reply to my sister’s letters, but the mania would permit only a sentence or two to leak beyond my pen before coherent thought gave way to gibberish or circular nonsense. So I began drinking again, hard, to dull the tickling sensation of impending nothingness.
Naturally, I excused my continuing deterioration on the stress of work. Someday we should write a book about the unsavory characters who populate our most lucrative dealings. This latest batch, I told my assistant on the phone, were emissaries of Old Scratch himself. The stench of brimstone clung to their fatigues when they walked into our first negotiations. Remember the old man in Brazzaville, the recent ascendant to the 400, and how you remarked on his eyes and their lack of depth? These gentlemen, if I might be allowed to expand the term in infinite latitude, had the eyes of the abysmal dark; there was little of the human therein remaining. Sure, they wore their sunglasses indoors for the effect, but I was much more disconcerted once they removed the shades. Yet, they accepted me immediately as one of the lads, and the negotiations and funds transfer went off without a hitch, honor among thieves and all that. In spite of this unpredictable and expeditious success, sleep continued to elude me all the way back to civilization.
Part of this was due in no small part to the nature of my dreams. Jung would have had a field day! Or maybe Freud. I digress again. Like most of my fellow human beings, I have often had disconcerting dreams at one time or another, but I must grant these the ignoble prize. They were always about school or home or the village, but that dream world was decaying and falling apart. It would be imprecise to say that the dreams lacked color, but the colors I remember were made of a palette of blacks and grays. In all of the dreams, I wandered aimlessly about among the living and the dead, often waking with a terrible chill and an ominous foreboding. The dead were alive and the living were dead. A deep stillness underlay the entire motif of each dream until some terror would arise and flush me from the mordant atrophy of whatever scene I was in. Whenever the terror was great enough to wake me, I would turn on the lights and reach for another drink after reassuring myself that the doors were locked and that no one was at the windows. Once I boarded the final leg to London, I began to hope that the worst was all behind me.
The cloud of fear and wear began to lift as I recognized the familiar environs of the Strand and pulled into the Savoy. It would not be fair to say that the bell captain recognized me. To further convict me as an outsider to his jaundiced eye, I had returned to London with a near-criminal luggage deficit and a week-old beard. I was summarily and immediately discredited and disqualified. But the old Swiss (Herr Wecht, “Swiss, Swiss, not German!”) night manager at the desk checked me in with little outward attention to my bedraggled state, except to ask if I would be requiring laundry services that night, as he could still guarantee service by morning. I failed to tell him of my plan to discard my suit tout de suite. The usual and perfunctory rites of initiation having been completed decently and in good order, I collected the various faxes and messages and retired to my room in my usual and perfunctory way, decently and in good order. Once alone in my room, I opened the bar, decently and in good order.
I thought to call the witty and entertaining Ms. Montgomery to alert her to my arrival, but since what I had in mind for her would be neither decent nor orderly, I refrained. Further, I realized that such a call so early in my visit would undermine the casual dynamic of our relationship that we had so delicately twisted over all these years. Again, I refrained. Thus, after two refrains and a chorus of cheer, I called upon the remote control to summon wit and entertainment from the telly. In short order, I discovered a paucity of said wit and entertainment and settled on a replay of a hurling match played in the gloom of Irish weather (is that redundant?). On the way from the airport I had taken scant notice of the weather, but seeing a match played across the Irish Sea on a television screen somehow made it more real. I resolved to make an appointment with my tailor ASAP and fell asleep with the Irish still hurling at each other.
As I have so often commented, I have never been a fan of the “English breakfast.” Therefore, upon waking and abluting I snuck out of my gilded confines to a small restaurant three blocks away, owned by an expatriate American. There I indulged my most working-class impulses and sent my cholesterol into orbit. But what a grand time it was: reading the Herald-Tribune, drinking real juice from Florida oranges, and consuming griddle cakes far stouter than their anemic French cousins. I returned to the room, e-mailed the office, dispatched the week’s accumulated nonsense, and called for a fitting, only to be pushed into the queue two days later. Quelle horreur! What could I do in the meanwhile? Eureka! I had stored some clothes with the valet during my last visit. Money was exchanged, the clothes appeared, and I could see that I would need more egregious breakfasts to in order to compensate for the recent weight loss.
A tray was brought for lunch and I worked a bit before striking out to visit the bandits euphemistically referred to as bankers that serve us so well. Matters of inconsequence dominated the financial session, and suddenly I began to feel the old “Angola Anxiety.” The portents were ominous and the air became too stale to breathe. I excused myself as quickly as possible and made my way outside.
Do you remember Upchurch, the lad from Andover who died in the Jag on the Fourth? Well, I swear as I stood outside the bank that he was standing across the street watching me. When I looked again, he had vanished. I peered helplessly into the afternoon mob of shoppers, but he was gone, school tie and camel’s hair coat.
I returned to the Savoy and called Anne for dinner, which she accepted for the next evening as she had meetings that day well into the night. Affairs of state must come before . . . whatever. I decided that drinking alone was a mistake so I headed to the bar, where the usual crowd of infidels perched and preened and sulked under the all-knowing eye of the bartender. At last I was back in my element. …
To continue reading Parable of the Rich Man, by Kirk Beasley, go to the DWM Store to purchase.