This poor kid from the secondary division downstairs used to come up to my office all the time and ask me what it was all about. What the hell was I supposed to tell him?
He thought he was going places. He thought he was doing something; he thought we all were. So I was supposed to burst the greenhorn’s bubble? Come on, Jesus, I’d been in his shoes once upon a time. I’d been downstairs pushing paper around and scrutinizing nonsense that made no sense to me. I was going to tell him it didn’t make a lick of fucking sense to anyone else either? That if he hung around long enough and gained enough weight he’d eventually get bumped upstairs to sit on his ass behind a desk staring at a painting of some vaguely European street scene and trying to fashion handlebar mustaches out of paper clips?
I was supposed to tell the kid it wasn’t about anything, that none of it added up to nothing, and that the business of America was business and we were in that business? That after thirty-five years I still couldn’t drag my ass home at night and give my kids any kind of straight answer about what I did for a living? That every day I rode upstairs in the elevator with the same glum, vaguely familiar faces I’d been seeing around that place forever, and I didn’t have the slightest idea what any of them did for a living either?
We work for someone; I suppose I could have told the kid that, and I suppose it would have been some version of the truth. I didn’t have the heart to tell the kid any of that, though. Whatever the hell they were paying me to do, I knew for damn sure they weren’t paying me to tell the kid the truth.
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