A Hero of Our Time Read online

  Advance Praise for

  A HERO OF OUR TIME

  “Ruthnum’s language is graceful and hysterical—often in the same breath. His deft hand makes this sharp, propulsive skewering of corporate hypocrisy a rich read.”

  —Mayukh Sen, author, Taste Makers: Seven Immigrant Women Who Revolutionized Food in America

  “Naben Ruthnum captures a side of modern employment and work culture that is so funny, so accurate and so specific—but somehow makes it feel incredibly universal. A Hero of Our Time made me laugh out loud and cringe, all while holding a mirror up to my own workplace experiences.”

  —Sarah Hagi, writer

  “A shot across the bow and a major literary achievement, A Hero of Our Time is the most relevant work of satire this country has produced in years. In Ruthnum’s hands, the state of political discourse and the value of the education sector has never looked so etiolated or more deserving of a life preserver.”

  —Jean Marc Ah-Sen, author of In the Beggarly Style of Imitation

  “Savage as A Hero of Our Time is, I’m not sure it can fairly be called satire. Naben Ruthnum’s assessment of corporate culture—and the academy, contemporary religion, the politics of identity, and so much more—is withering but honest. The novel nails so much about 21st century life; what can you do but laugh?”

  —Rumaan Alam, author of Leave the World Behind

  ALSO BY THE AUTHOR

  Curry

  Find You in the Dark (as Nathan Ripley)

  Your Life Is Mine (as Nathan Ripley)

  Copyright © 2022 by Naben Ruthnum

  First edition published 2022

  McClelland & Stewart and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House Canada Limited.

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher—or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency—is an infringement of the copyright law.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication data is available upon request.

  ISBN 9780771096501

  Ebook ISBN 9780771096518

  Book and cover design by Kate Sinclair

  Cover art: (man) stocknroll / E+ / Getty Images, Dean Mitchell / E+ / Getty Images

  (building) Marco Di Stefano / EyeEm / Getty Images

  McClelland & Stewart,

  a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited,

  a Penguin Random House Company

  www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

  a_prh_6.0_138917749_c0_r0

  Contents

  Cover

  Praise for A Hero of Our Time

  Also by the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Part Two

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Acknowledgments

  For

  Kris Bertin

  Part One

  1

  Certain stories are for wielding, not telling. I used to have one before it was taken away.

  It was more of a joke, a few lines of generic airport experience and television borrowings honed into a minor weapon for use in business situations. But I counted on it. The final time I used it was at the AAP Conference in October 2018. Seven listeners and I were on a sickle-shaped couch in the lobby of a generic hotel implanted into the superstructure of a retired castle in Montreal. The couch was upholstered in washable light gold fabric that rasped against pants and skirts and felt like Kevlar against my palm as I pushed myself deeper into the cushion, hoping to discover a secret angle or groove free of the rigid springs that were pressing into my tailbone.

  “I don’t blame them, I’d pat me down too. I am always, no exception, late to the airport, sweated up when I get there. The air conditioning freezes it on my face and gives me that hospital or strapped-with-plastique sheen. Then there’s the whole ‘this’ thing.”

  I added, as I did every time, to the invitation of my smile with an up-down displaying wave of hand over face. The downstroke acknowledged the skin that caused the airport situation and the unease of my listeners. The upstroke, a toss like I was flinging salt or a spell, dismissed any tragic significance, sent race into the ether, let my listeners join in a laugh if they were brave enough to start it.

  Anyone who takes pleasure in rendering even brief power from goodwill and fear is shit. When I used this story, I was no exception. I want to make it clear that I understand this, and that it doesn’t prevent me from discerning that Olivia Robinson was and is much worse than I am. She’s also, in the sense that matters to her and to our world, much greater.

  The six listeners who weren’t Olivia reacted exactly as I wanted them to. Mouths balanced between self-evaluating smile and moue of concern, quickly hidden by a mug or glass held up like a quivering masquerade visor, eyes shy to meet mine and saturated with a compassion begging for transmutation into accepting, accepted laughter. The features of these people have vanished now, from AAP’s offices and from my memory. Eye colour, ruddiness, dental details—all gone. Enough of them were white for me to have deployed the story, remarkable considering the company’s diverse employee pool, which Nena Zadeh-Brot called a “rainbow whirlpool of mediocrity blending into a calming diarrhea tone when stirred with the correct human resources stick.” I only remember that they were watching me correctly, that they were doing what I wanted them to do.

  But Olivia Robinson just looked like me. Her expression. She looked like the person telling, not the person listening. Her appearance, classed by Nena as “tolerable Aryan prettiness,” has nothing in common with my aging Indian softness, other than the strip of upper gum we now both reveal when we speak. I say “now” because this first meeting took place during Olivia’s closed-mouth speaking period, when her lips only allowed the occasionally flickering sight of tongue against darkness, never a gap or archwire or elastic or point of enamel. And now that she’s speaking with her new mouth, with its perfect teeth, I’m in recession. If I still spoke to people and cared about how I presented, I’d have to reprogram myself to talk through the same flat pucker she mastered. As my gums retreat and blacken, the teeth look like they’re growing into my head, as though they mean to bite my brain, also shrinking and darkening in its nervy membrane pouch.

  “What about the power of it, though?”

  “Of what?” I scratched my thumbnail against the cushion just in front of my crotch, then turned the motion into a brush at the immovable pills on the knees of my suit pants, in case anyone thought I’d been subtly gesturing toward my dick. Olivia saw the gesture, and beyond it. I am myself when I’m inside a doubt.

  “In the airport. Instead of feeling abject, targeted—which, totally, I understand you are—what about feeling how scared of you people are? Isn’t it powerful that there are spaces in this world where you’re not you, but a menace? No one’s ever scared of me.”

  None of the others saw how much smarter she was than me, and I hadn’t yet understood, either. But I did feel it. Olivia played it perfectly to look like she had no sense of humour, which people are always ready to believe about a person like her. Perhaps it is true in her case, but she at least has a sense of senses of humour, or she wouldn’t know when people hope she will laugh, and that would be too great a tactical weakness.

  I couldn’t see how this exchange benefitted Olivia until the next day, when she allowed me to know. But I did understand that it had been fair to rob me of my pathetic charge of control. The drinks in our group’s hands were appropriate to an early afternoon with two conference sessions left before dinner—coffees, club sodas. Olivia had a lemonade. She was younger than me, perhaps twenty-seven to my thirty-eight. I chewed ice. My story died, not because Olivia had exposed it, but because she had begun to consume it, at the outset of a long game that began when she indicated a pretend path to power on that acrylic couch.

  I’m going to try to avoid making these pronouncements with the false sense of distance and ironic knowingness I want to slip into. The truth is that my airport story’s morsel of leverage was meaningful to me, and I was sad to lose it. I’m still sad about it. Sad that I am a person who wants a tool like this, sad that I no longer have it.

  As I mentioned, no one else in my audience for this impromptu conference-adjacent seminar on race and terror still works for AAP. In pursuit of the ideal of efficiency that our leadership requires, and with any of the many who have attempted to form a union paid off or terminated long before their organizing can come to term, there is a lot of churn. It’s painful, because AAPers are hired for
their devotion, their programmability, their willingness to pronounce their liberal arts degrees both useless and crucial, their servitude to the ideal of technology making knowledge masterable and advancing education beyond the cave. When AAP leaves these employees behind, they are so completely indoctrinated that they are cut off from their pasts. They can only move on to one of AAP’s lesser competitors, begin doomed start-ups, or fling themselves into the pensioned, shutting maw of university administration.

  After Olivia routed me, I left the lobby and skipped the afternoon session. This was still possible before the enforced scans that were instituted at the January 2019 AAP Edu-Jam. A point of AAP structure that we present to clients as proof-of-efficiency is that there are only ever 100 upper-level employees. Thus, there should be exactly 100 people in the room at every central AAPC presentation. When we talk up this streamlined aspect of our business to schools, we’re very careful not to let them think we’re critical of their own inflating administrative position numbers. The more people clustered at the broadening top over there, the better chance that one of them will subscribe to AAP. The suggestion is that we stay lean so they don’t have to.

  I went to four used bookstores and one bar. There, I laid out the books I’d bought on the artificially distressed but genuinely beer-stained table in front of me and took a photo to post in the near future, when none of HR’s freelance social media hawks could make the connection between my browsing time and absence from Dr. Bobby Merchant’s “Your New Paperless Memorybank: A Digital Communications Action Intensive” seminar. My co-workers would be repeating to Dr. Bobby, who had been an early champion of AAP at our crucial first two Ivy League scores, that his product wasn’t a shockingly obsolete rehash of the Palm Pilot and that the stylus was indeed an essential and neglected connectivity tool. Dr. Bobby had retained enough money and influence for his irrelevance to be denied in every zone of his life except the market. He constantly mistook me for an AAP programmer named Amandeep who’d been deported months earlier, two days after the FBI came to our offices for his hard drive. Amandeep wasn’t deported, really: he flew home with a cousin’s passport to avoid prison or ICE detention. The cousin was then deported. My superiors didn’t tell me to accept Dr. Bobby’s ongoing error, but it was made clear that I should prevent him from feeling embarrassed, or worse, asking what had become of Amandeep. Dr. Bobby presented with that tech mogul eyebrowless squint and isosceles lip-purse that suggested an unattackably itchy anal contusion caused by excessive scratching. I wanted to spend my afternoon looking for modern firsts, for J.G. Farrell and V.S. Naipaul, and so I did. I would post the photo and the prices I’d paid two weeks after the conference and a fellow collector in Devon would call me a lucky cunt in genuine rage, and I would feel happy. I drank three beers, ate two dinners, and waited until midnight to come back to the hotel with my books and bottles. Nena was only a couple of floors away, but hadn’t messaged me all day, which wasn’t unusual when we were about to see each other.

  The next morning, Olivia apologized for being insensitive.

  She was ponytailed and her clear eyes spoke of at least a decade of sobriety, disciplined sleep and exercise. I was sure she’d spent the morning in the hotel’s gym or pool, while I roiled the sheets and coughed into consciousness. Perhaps forty other AAPC attendees could hear me forgiving her repeatedly, in a voice I had to drag from hungover glottals into the precise, gracious speech that Olivia knew I was capable of if only I tried. Nena Zadeh-Brot was across the lobby, speaking to two AAP board members and pointing at an iPad, but also watching me. We wouldn’t speak until after the sessions were over, but her glance pulled me out of the final lingerings of sleep, forcing me entirely into conversation with Olivia Robinson, to witness the creation of repentance as product, to contain the apology that was being forced into me.

  “It’s totally okay. I feel embarrassed you’ve even been thinking about this, truly.” The lobby smelled of fresh tile adhesive, except when a guest disobeyed the signs to use the revolving doors and let in a gust of October wind cool enough to have an immediate freshening effect, even if it was polluted. But I stayed lodged in the smell of my own head, its plaque and necrotic mucous and trapped air. From Olivia came an insistent scent of pennies and mint.

  “No. Osman, I know nothing of your past, of you, except what I can see and imagine. And that I—that I just interrogated you like that, told you how to process your own experience like I had any conception of what it is to live even a moment in your skin—it would be like, oh, Jesus, it would be like you telling me how I should fucking deal with PMS.”

  “It would not—I didn’t see it that way at all. We were two grown-ups talking about ideas, which is always okay.” It is not okay, especially at AAPC, but I was too disoriented to figure out how to claw this remark back. Olivia didn’t lean in, but her right forefinger, a questing E.T. digit with a bumblebee-yellow manicure, landed at the apex of my shoulder, the place where the hollow between muscles would be if I had a proper body.

  “I’m sorry. Please feel that,” Olivia said. Her expression hadn’t changed, but the eyes were clearer, wider, the pupils refracting with dark sincerity. The crowd of forty was quiet. Even the people who were speaking left pauses long enough to take in what Olivia was saying. And while I understood exactly what she was doing, finally, while I knew that she was speaking past me to an audience, that she always would be, she still made me want to try to live up to her earnestness in that moment.

  How the fuck does that work?

  That exchange is only remembered by Olivia and me, except in the subconscious of every man and woman who’d seen me dominated with such ease. It is generally forgotten because Olivia made herself unforgettable moments later by hijacking AAPC’s keynote presentation, dominating a stage she wasn’t even standing on, and reducing the speaker and anointed next leader of our organization, Elodie Chan, to just another audience member.

  Planted questions are part of the house style of an AAPC presentation. Every session has to come in at under twenty-five minutes, including Q & A. This time-efficiency is also part of AAP’s public face. Part of what we offer to colleges and universities is a guarantee to increase potential enrolment by packaging their existing lecture and seminar offerings as compressed online-delivered courses with an optional in-class supplement, an offering that we assured the schools was “just as beneficial to end-users,” leaving out the statistic that somewhere under 17 per cent of enrolled students actually viewed and completed the entire online package. But the profit stats and test cases were undeniable. Tuition income rose by the millions at each of our four pilot schools, and AAP’s earnings swelled on our 5 per cent ask in return for upfront-costless implementation and administration of the program. The inescapable five-year contract for sign up had been conceived of and written by Nena Zadeh-Brot in conjunction with two long-vanished members of the legal department; Nena had taken an enormous bonus instead of a promotion after its successful implementation. That’s when the board knew she planned to leave AAP, someday, and she was never offered a promotion again. 2019 was Nena’s planned final year, in fact, but only our end-to-end encrypted chat knew that. I wasn’t ready to escape so soon, but was naturally unremarkable enough to avoid offers of promotion.

  That same quality kept me safe from being asked to be a question-plant at AAPC. Olivia Robinson was assigned to raise her hand in minute seven of Elodie Chan’s keynote, which would end up being her last as VP, two months before her total release from the company. A particular trick of Elodie’s was to avoid cramming in prepared questions at the end. She had them peppered throughout, so she could hit minute twenty-five with a judicious wrap-up that included everything that the audience had brought to the idea. It was a reusable innovation: simulated dialectic fit the AAP tradition. It was an organized display that we could replicate and use in sales pitches out in the field.

  During Elodie’s wireless-mic-and-chin-thrusting speech, her arms ran through a sequence of four postures—summoning, inquiring, pensive, embracing—that she had memorized because her instinct was to leave them hanging apelike at her sides. Her set-up to the fatal question was: “What can we tell these institutions of higher learning that they’re all, from Sunnydale Polytechnic to fucking Cambridge,”—Elodie paused for the laugh here, as the top reaches of AAP were expected to display frankness and practicality by swearing in their presentations—“what can we tell them that they’re, without exception, doing wrong?”