Getting Stoned With Savages - J. Maarten Troost [2]
As I settled into my office, I noticed another note on top of my keyboard, scrawled by the office assistant: IFC MEETING IN WBIGF CONFERENCE ROOM. WHERE ARE YOU??? 8:21 A.M. The message light on my phone blinked ominously. Sighing, I loped toward the conference room, pausing briefly to catch sight of my reflection in the window, and I noted with some interest that I looked like sodden vermin. It was not going to be a good day, I knew. The conference room itself was transparent, because the World Bank values transparency, and as I approached I wondered, Is that a Bank vice president sitting there? Why, yes, it was. Is that another one? Indeed so. And look, there’s our division chief. Does he ever look pissed off. I entered, and as I mumbled my apologies, my boss cut me off. “Finally,” he said. “Now we can begin. Do you have the PowerPoint slides?”
“Er…the PowerPoint slides…was that me?…I thought…Wasn’t Sergio…?”
Sergio looked upon me with serene blankness. I dampened a little further as the perspiration commingled with the rain, and as I studied the multitude of agitated faces, I thought to myself, Six months ago…
Inexplicably, six months turned into a year, and then two. Yet, that strange sense of dislocation never left me. Where am I? I’d ask myself with alarming frequency. How did I get here? What events in time and space have brought me to this moment? Glancing out my office window, I’d see limousines depositing presidents and prime ministers, Nobel laureates and eminent thinkers, even Bono himself, and I’d remember that not so long ago I had lived in a place that could not possibly be further removed from the global stage. In Kiribati, I would gladly have given up a finger or two for a newspaper, and now here I was, surrounded by newsworthy personalities. Even my friends thought my change in circumstances odd.
“The World Bank? You? You’re a hoity-toity consultant to the World Bank?” asked one.
“Yes.”
“You were unemployed for two years, and now you’ve got this glam job at the World Bank?”
“I wasn’t unemployed,” I countered, pleased to hear someone describe my job as glamorous.
“I see. And what was it you did for two years?”
“I was writing.”
“Writing.” Long pause here. “And how much, if you don’t mind my asking, did your writing—and I’m sure it was sublime—how much money, would you say, did your writing earn you?”
“Net?”
“Yes, net.
“Three hundred and fifty dollars.”
“Three hundred and fifty dollars.” This was savored for a moment. “Two years. Three hundred and fifty dollars.”
“Three hundred and fifty American dollars.”
“Three hundred and fifty American dollars, then. And now you advise countries, entire countries, on what they should do with their money.”
“Actually, my boss does that.”
“And so what do you do?”
“I help him.”
“You help him. And for this help, you are no doubt handsomely remunerated.”
“I can’t complain.”
I couldn’t, really. For the first time in my life I had more money than I knew what to do with. This, like so much else, was a startling change in circumstances. For years I had lived the easy poverty of the vagabond. And just as everyone else was boarding the Internet money train, I disappeared to the far side of the world, where I lived as a financial parasite while hacking away at a novel that meandered into failure. Money—the possession thereof—should have made me giddy with joy. And it did. For a day. The day I saw my bank account surge into the four figures, which seemed a stratospheric sum. But then, what to do with it? I mean, after the restaurant splurges. And your need for Paris has been sated. Where do you put it? In stocks? Bonds? That’s what I did. And here’s the funny thing. Then you begin to worry about money. To my everlasting disappointment, I discovered that it’s true what they say. Money doesn’t buy you happiness.
Damn it.
It was all so very baffling to me. I had money. I had a respectable job. If I tried just a little bit harder and played my