White Matter

Employed

The West, four months earlier

Would you hire an out-of-work, one-time artist to write corporate propaganda for your high-tech startup company? The correct answer – if common sense be as wise as commonly assumed – would be no. Not without an ulterior motive.

I first met Graeme Williams at a job interview, a mere four months ago, not in Japan but back home, and not in the heat and humidity of summer but in a cooler, more clear-headed early spring. The job interview was a memorable one; the meeting itself was not. In fact, I barely noticed him at the time. I can, however, give a precise date: it was March 23. Prior to that I had never heard of Spurious Developments, nor their plans to open up to public scrutiny the most intimate reaches of the human condition. From this ignorance you can safely deduce that I did not spend my spare moments frequenting the political and counter-culture blogospheres.

Not that I was short of spare moments, back then. What I was short of was cash, and an income that might replenish my meagre and depleted fortune.

News of the job opening came from my friend Kohei. It feels good to call him that now. He used to insist, only half jokingly, that I call him my 'man at the gallery'. Flamboyantly gay, his official title was Senior Marketing Consultant, but an agent as good as he was I would happily call whatever he liked. I once suggested I could call him my 'pimp' instead, but that only made him titter, hand over mouth. I would joke with him that he was overacting his role and get the same reaction. Nothing delighted him more than something conforming with its stereotype. He was very post-modern in that way. Or it could be something to do with his being Japanese.

I once lived in Japan full-time, teaching English, back when I was saving up to become a struggling artist. Come to think of it, that was the last real job I had. This connection of mine with the land of Kohei's birth was a bond of sorts between us; that and my one-time ability to produce works that sell, and his ability to sell them. One could debate whose task required the greater skill.

I've heard it said that the keys to success in any field are talent, charm, uncompromising ambition, and luck. Somehow, I got where I did in the art world on the first and last of these alone. It wasn't that drive, passion and hard work hadn't been required, merely that they had been provided by other people, Kohei not least among them. He happened to be very, very good at what he did. My art may have been my own, but I'd hitchhiked my way to notoriety.

My demise, on the other hand, had been all my own work – but that's another story, and now is not the time.

Since my fall from grace with the world of art, I had been in a state of self-imposed exile, doing little and seeing no one. But misery, like happiness, carries only so much momentum, and mine was running out of puff. It wasn't any longer sadness or anger that dominated, but lethargy – far from restoring me to vigour, my holiday from the world was now wearing me out. I'd reached the point where I needed something new, some excuse to climb up out of my despond – and once more it was Kohei giving me a leg up.

He tried to explain what the job would entail. His English tended to deteriorate when discussing matters outside the realm of art, communicating mainly by dismissive gestures of the hand. The details were rather vague, something about mind-reading machines and "corporate communications", though he assured me I was perfect for what they wanted. What mattered to me was that it was a job and therefore it carried an income. Now I was no longer an artist I needed to find some new means of support, not to mention a pathway to redemption that my current idleness and seclusion were doing nothing to bring about. Aware of my occasional scribblings in the art press, Kohei had been kind enough to think of me when news of this job emerged from somewhere within his vast tentacular web of connections. Very generous of him given I was no longer one of his 'boys and girls' on the gallery register. His vote of confidence only made me more resolved to have a proper go at it, if only to avoid making a mess of things for a second time.