My budget was in a small surplus the other day: I could have gotten myself a new shirt, or an album on iTunes. I could have saved up to repair my bicycle, or helped end world hunger. I could have blown it all on sin and vice. But why would I do any of those things when I could have smoked salmon for tea?
Well, anyway, there are no more excuses to not be writing. Essays are done, and what is more, after much lingering awkwardly at the door, twiddling on the balls of her feet, Spring has come to Scotland! The sun spills light on sandstone and slate; buds blossom brightly in the Botanics; alliteration adds appeal. The lines of hills beyond Glasgow have gone from iron-grey to cautiously green; even the moss and creepers on the bare trees seem to have a richer colour.
It is just as well that my essays are indeed done: so that I can take time to go outside and write things using a pen and paper as my ancestors did in ancient days, yes; but also because Winter is a much more suitable season for the stern Marxist finger-wagging of which my essays invariably consist. Some residue of revolutionary fervour is left, however, and under the touch of the sun it has taken on a rather whimsical character.
During the long lead-up to the opening of the preliminaries of the preparation for the first round of the contest that precedes the American presidential election, we heard from various mouths that Corporations are People and they (as distinct from the people who own them and whom they employ) have all the rights of Americans. I wait keenly for the state of Texas to execute one. The whole idea seems to me an eloquently stupid example of how we have been accustomed to viewing society in late decades: as a mechanism for defending us, by tributes of treasure and the periodic sacrifice of a virgin welfare-state, against the dragon Economy. Nobody can predict the continent-shaking stirrings of this beast - who is certainly not just people making things and doing things whose relations might be re-organised to the general good. No, it is something beyond mere mortal kenning, with breath like the desert wind and a mouth like the pit of damnation.
But rather than just get pissed off, I decided to follow on with the idea of 'corporate personhood'. There follows part 1 of, hopefully, a recurring series.
Jonathan Bracejaw turned. He tossed. He turned again. He tossed again. All to no avail: sleep eluded him. He was tired, more tired than he had felt in a long time; but tonight... it was almost as if some alien presence were lying there in the darkness, forbidding sleep, watching him.
In point of fact of course there was a presence in the bed beside him, that of Marmalade. Marmalade, I should clarify, was a young woman (the bed had been stained with a great many things literal and metaphorical but never orange-flavoured jam) whose real name was Marya Sergeevna Bondaruka, or had been, long ago and far away; her pseudonym arose from a misunderstanding. But she was not really alien: she, or somebody physically very much like her (by surgical means, if necessary) had become something of a fixture.
Still, Jonathan could have done without her. She snored like a soprano sawmill, which cut across his ideas of how blonde amply-breasted young women to whom the adjective 'lithe' might be applied if anybody could tell me what it meant were supposed to behave, at any rate on the job. And he found it particularly distressing now: he felt, as he so seldom did, a need to think in the quiet and the dark.
After several attempts - the covers were all over the place - he kicked her.
"How much do I owe you?"
"Yeet's thriy o'clawk yeen the mauwrneeng," she said indistinctly. She could actually speak English with a cut-glass Home Counties accent, but she had learned not to: like the snoring, about which nothing could be done, it for some reason upset people.
"What, 'nothing', did you say?"
"Oh, peeez awf. Fawr-hahndred."
Jonathan clambered out of the bed and shivered. He disliked being naked as a rule (why he was willing to pay four-hundred dollars for a procedure to which nakedness was more-or-less essential is a question for the sociologists): it turned his imposing height into gangliness. "It wasn't worth it," he said as he fumbled for the money kept on his desk for this purpose.
"I know the feeling," said Marmalade irritably, neglecting her accent.
"Clear out." He tossed a wad at her with vehemence.
"I have to get dressed!"
"Do it in the toilet."
She sighed, got out of the bed, and switched on the lights. For all that her naked body, besides being the sort to which the poets and rock-and-roll stars of the human race have devoted too many fine words to justify me any adding some more, was entirely natural and just went to show what comes of a healthy diet and frequent exercise, the sight of it did not arose Jonathan so much as a fully-clothed and icy secretary of even moderate beauty would have: some mixture of gnawing guilt, distractedness, and excessive familiarity was the reason. He occupied himself in gathering up his own clothes from the floor.
"This is disgusting!," said a voice from the bathroom as he wrestled with his underwear.
"Fuck off back to Russia!"
"Ukraine!"
"Fuck off!"
He slumped on the bed, stared at the ceiling of his office, and listened to the receding sound of some exceedingly high heels. He was alone, for a little while at least. When he was alone, he felt less profoundly lonely.
But now it was no good. The ceiling was too large and bright, so he turned over, and found the pillow too dark and mysterious. A nagging voice - like his own, but not quite his own, belonging to his younger, better self, or to his conscience, or possibly to his mother - kept asking him how long it had been since he'd talked to someone he didn't, in one way or another, employ. He urged silence on the voice, but it took no heed: it wondered aloud where Marmalade had gone, and whether she was sparing him a thought; it speculated about these distant countries which he had never visited even though their citizens had almost certainly contributed to his fortune, Russia and Ukraine and - where had that other girl come from? Morocco! He hadn't been able to remember until now, and now he was assailed with memories. He remembered New England: the green fields, and stone walls, and the thundering green field of the Atlantic walled in by the little towns where he had spent his childhood. He had visions - wildly inaccurate, the dutiful narrator must record - of Russian, Ukrainian, Moroccan childhoods, and the hopes they nurtured, and the memories they left to torment their exiled children years later, in other countries, their hopes betrayed. And had he, who had ended up on top of them in the same soiled bed, done any better?
This was not the first such episode, though it was the most intense to date, and it would have ended as they all did - drowned in an artisan vodka that was, with an irony Jonathan might have appreciated had he ever noticed, Ukrainian - had it not been for one of those inexplicable farts of the vast digestive system of the universe.
It is necessary here to draw back the all-seeing narrative eye from Jonathan's office on the 567th floor of the LifeSunTechGrowLife Industries Building and cast it a short distance into the past. There we can view a sum of money orders of magnitude than that paid to the long-suffering Marmalade as it is transferred from the accounts of LifeSunTechGrowLife Industries to a gentleman with the rather absurd name of Athanasius McGill, an utterly trustworthy person, who pools it with even more money and distributes the whole to representatives and senators of the great United States.
As a result of all this, reality was altered in a small but important respect. After all, the United States government is certainly the most powerful institution ever constructed by humans, and if they can't alter the universe, who the hell can, I ask you? They have the power to legislate that green is blue and so it shall be. This explains a great deal. And if, a mere author of frivolous fiction, can cause such a person as Jonathan Bracejaw to exist, then the United States government can by the same means as me create whole categories of person.
The United States government declared that LifeSunTechGrowth Industries was as much a person as Athanasius McGill and Jonathan Bracejaw and Marmalade - possibly moreso than her, in fact. And so it was.
Now, we skip ahead again, to where we left Jonathan deep in introspection, guilt, and self-confrontation. By an astonishing coincidence, it was just as he made a heartfelt appeal to whatever higher power his battered soul believed in for company that the bill which he had a part in creating was passed into law, and caused his cry to be heeded in a highly - even an excessively - literal fashion.
There was a brisk knock at the door.
'Mr. Bracejaw, sir?'
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