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narcasse3049 words. 18+/pr0n. Post-film. Robert Fischer’s POV. I didn't even like this film.
"The seed that we plant in this man's mind will grow into an idea. This idea will define him. It may come to change...well, it may come to change everything about him."
Inception
Disclaimer: Inception belongs to Christopher Nolan, Legendary Pictures/Syncopy Films and others.
++++++++++
There are really only two ways to go about this sort of thing: prove that you’re ‘your own man’ or prove that you’re not an idiot. Understandably I chose the latter. I don’t need my ego stoked by the promise of future poverty or at least poverty as someone in my position would understand it. I’m no fan of dream therapy but it was obvious that the idea of a will dissolving the entire corporation was the notion of being able to do exactly what I wanted to with my assets. I could even, if I so disliked living in the style to which I’d become accustomed, break up the entire enterprise leaving myself with dwindling returns that wouldn’t measure up to what I wanted to do with them. Because that would have been the obvious outcome if I was trying to prove a point. But if I’d been so desperate to cut off my nose to spite my face I could have just started taking cocaine. It’s not as fashionable as it use to be, not as exclusive more to the point, but it’s still an approved method of destroying your life. Not mild use of course, not the way it’s used by old men who still play golf as a cover for clandestine business meetings and think that they’re being discreet. I couldn’t do that: I don’t play golf if I can at all help it. I’d need to start taking it by the bucket load and then eventually they’d find me clammy and cold in an expensive hotel room across the Atlantic with a half finished bottle of single malt and a terrified prostitute handcuffed to the bed. My death certificate would say heart failure and at the viewing everybody would make sympathetic comments about how I looked so terribly thin.
If I wanted to do something stupid that would be the socially acceptable way to do it. It’s expected of someone in my position to die in excess just as I’ve lived. I drink good scotch, am accustomed to fine tailoring and probably use very expensive product in my hair. I say ‘probably’ because I never actually look at the label. It’s not as if I buy any of it myself. But I could, if I was trying to make a point, engage myself in that sort of chore, if I felt the need to, which I don’t. I don’t want to have to buy my own toiletries any more than I want to play golf. I can do both: I choose not to. I wouldn’t call it sloth but I prefer to use my time more advantageously. My father for all his flaws spent his life building up a business empire that ensures that I’ll never want for anything, financially after all. I could dissolve it just to prove that I could make my own way in life but I don’t really see any need for that. I like the life I’ve inherited. I’ve no intention of attempting to become my father but I’m not going to start throwing away his legacy, not when it’s being best employed by keeping me in the style to which I am accustomed.
Of course there are some negatives that come with holding such a position. They don’t outweigh the positive but they’re present all the same. I do have to be careful of my public conduct because my reputation will in many ways affect the business. Nobody wants to do business with a criminal or a drunk. I can’t be particularly rude in public or too pleased at unexpected social connections. I have to be moderate in my praise of my father’s advisors, careful in my assessments of my peers, downright suspicious of any romantic invitations. If I praise any one of those old men, men who are more or less running the business for me, then it’s dangerous favouritism, if I spend too much time in the company of any one of them then I’m being manipulated and if I linger with any of them socially sooner or later someone is going to announce that I have a ‘daddy complex’. It works in the reverse as well. Any one of them praising my leadership too loudly is obviously attempting to curry favour, any one of them spending a fair amount of time with me wants me only to hear their opinion and any one of them seeking me out a little too socially either wants to play on my apparent complex or fuck me.
Of course most of my father’s advisors, if not all, aren’t interested in me anyway. They’re interested in the business. They want the business to be profitable, their bonuses to rise, their children to go to nice private schools and so on. They don’t care about Robert Fischer; they cared about Maurice Fischer because he was one of their own. They understood him and he understood them, they were cut from the same cloth. The children of entrepreneurs on the other hand are always lazy according to their predecessors, they sit idle, content to reap the rewards that their parents have worked for. Filled with ingratitude and expectation they do nothing to enrich society, only serving to provide entertainment for the masses with their absurd, wasteful antics. My father was an energy magnate: I’ve heard all the accusations right down to the ones about the size of my carbon footprint. Wasteful, wanton, worthless Robert Fischer: the son of a great man, insignificant other than by association. But I can’t help that. Short of giving everything away to charity and dedicating myself to a life of aid work in a suitably publicised third world country I’ll always be useless in the eyes of some. It doesn’t matter. My father, in all his failings, was worried about me to the last, afraid that I’d attempt to follow in his footsteps and find myself wanting. Uncle Peter is just as bad. Both of them were so similar in that respect: scared that I’d try to be something I wasn’t and that my failure would destroy me. They were such arrogant old men believing that I’d want desperately to emulate them.
Not that I resent it: my father’s odd belief in my supposed hero worship. I do wish he’d been better at parenting, at realising that I was a child not an employee. But if I’d been an employee he might have actually known what to say. If I’d been an employee he wouldn’t have been disappointed that I’d tried to emulate him and both of us could probably have managed quite well with his fantasy of my aspirations wedged squarely between us like a wall. He’d never have noticed that I didn’t want to be one of those old men anyway, one of the men who spent their days clutching at profit margins and share prices. I have something of an interest in it because those are my profit margins and share prices but I don’t need to watch over them like a hawk. I’m quite happy to enjoy my unearned gains and let someone else manage them for me. Like golf, I can but I just don’t want to. Not that my disinclination to engage myself means much to my father’s business rivals. I’m still my father’s heir, in fact I’m the head of the company now and we’re still doing what Fischer Morrow does best: building a monopoly. Technically I’m not personally doing anything of the sort but I’m not stopping the company from growing and exploiting legal loopholes as necessary. I should have studied law instead of economics; my father should have made me study law instead of economics if he wanted me to be of any use to the company. We’re not applying Adam Smith’s theories anymore: we’re tearing them apart. Nobody cares about the financial theory of random walks or carefully monitoring market demand. Industry expansion isn’t limited by physical borders, the demand is always high, our competitors are priced out of the market, the sunk costs to even begin are more than the GDP of several nations. We don’t need economists, we need lawyers and accountants: people to count my money for me and people to make sure I keep making more of it.
I wasn’t always like this. I wasn’t like this even after my father died but when he did something changed. Towards the end I gave up caring, about the business, about my future, about the possibility that he’d tear me apart in his will. I just waited. I knew I was waiting for him to die, knew that it was inevitable but, for all his failings, I didn’t want to let go. I wanted his approval perhaps, his love. I would have taken anything even an instruction to start breaking international laws to increase our profit margin. I just needed something, some acknowledgement, some positive appraisal of my worth. Instead he died and I was left with a cryptic half whispered breath that took me at least a week to work out. My father, the great Maurice Fischer was worried about his little boy, and he’d left behind a godfather who’d carry on worrying for him. After that, knowing that he’d been invested in his own fantasy of a son rather than me personally it made even less sense to entertain the stupid notion of spiting him after death. I didn’t need to do anything for him or for anyone who watched me as a shadow of him. My gains and my losses, my waste and gluttony are all my own. He left me with a perfectly functional business empire: I’d be a fool not to indulge in its acquisition.
All I need to do is sit back and enjoy it all, and occasionally bewail my sorry lot, my self-indulgent sorrows. Daddy didn’t love me enough: he never did buy me a yacht. Uncle Peter has no taste: he thinks I drink too much. The only women who’d ever sleep with me due to attraction are always the ones who never approach me. The only women who do approach me want to sleep with Fischer Morrow instead. Even the most convincing ones always give themselves away. There’s always that look just when they think I’m not watching, that look that’s more about property gains and commerce than attraction and the hand that’s reaching for my wallet instead of anything else. I turn them all down now. I never use to but then I never knew what to look for before. So, no more anonymous women in bars or clubs, no more conveniently engaging women whose smiles are just a little too wide, a little too white. I can’t even think of it as a waste, a shame that I can’t consider enjoying some insubstantial company anymore. Somehow I don’t quite care enough. If the women who approached me weren’t always the same artificial ones, if they were the ones who look at me appraisingly, the ones who look like they’d simply ask for a quick fuck and then gather up their clothes and go to their next business meeting, then I wouldn’t refuse. I wouldn’t have to. There’s socioeconomics behind it, gendered socialisation, the conditioning of trade and a whole host of other things that I can’t blame them for but it does mean that these days women are off the list, they never bear considering. Men don’t really either but there isn’t as much social conditioning behind that sort of approach, enough so that I can almost convince myself that the majority of those offers are genuine. The open approach, the quick accessing glance, even the occasional familiar pat on the behind when I turn them down are always more honest. Honest enough that sometimes I tell myself that if they were daring, if that hand wasn’t removed quite so quickly I might just change my mind.
They always do let go. The women walk away and so do the men. And I go back to my hotel room with a bottle of scotch for company and the use of my hands. It wouldn’t pay to hire company either; it’s not the company I want so much as the fantasy anyway. Maybe I am just like my father. I have a fantasy constructed in my head, a dream that plays out just the way I want it to. There’s a man at a bar, confident, maybe a little cocky. He’s not too tall, not too overtly muscular. He looks like a businessman, the sort I’d normally see across a boardroom table and no closer. It’s the hair that gives him away first, brown but catching the light in sun bleached streaks. No serious executive looks like that even if he does holiday in the Bahamas. My gut says sales and I already know I really don’t want to talk to a salesman but he comes right up to the bar, right beside me to order his drink and when his hand wraps around the glass I take a second look. Large hands. I like that sort of thing in the same way I like backsides I can hold in women. His palm is broad, solid and sales or otherwise I start to wonder what it would feel like. Then, almost as if on cue, we’re talking. Perhaps he shakes my hand because I know that his grip is firm and his palms a little rough. I don’t even know what we’re talking about but he leans in, close, too close and then I’m leaving the bar with him. It’s extraordinarily indiscreet of me but somehow nobody seems to notice or perhaps they just don’t care.
We don’t even make it to a room, the restroom’s closer. He pushes me into a stall, the one furthest from the entrance so there’s cold tile at my back instead of a partition. He won’t let me touch him, pinning my wrists against the wall but he’s pressed against me, hot breath on my skin. He’s hard by that point but takes the time to tell me that he knows I want this, crudely, telling me that he knows I like to be fucked, that I need it, that it’s so obvious that he’s sure there are plenty of other men just lining up to do it. I don’t have to say anything: he does all the talking, feeding back all my deepest, darkest fears to me. I like the thrill of terror when he tells me I don’t have a choice, when he gloats at my helplessness. As close as we are, as often as his lips move towards mine, deliberately, tauntingly, he doesn’t kiss me. That isn’t how he operates. This isn’t a seduction. He’s going to fuck me in the men’s room and I simply don’t get a choice. I’m not even given the consolation of seeing his face when he does it: my cheek pressed to the tile, my pants round my ankles and his cock a sore, burning heat thrusting relentlessly. He tells me I like it while he fucks me, tells me to touch myself, somehow manages to laugh in between rough animal grunts when I do. It lasts longer than it should and he’s still fucking me when I sag against the wall panting. He keeps going, hard and rough, until my strangled gasps turn into helpless pleading for him to stop. It carries on a bit longer anyway, long enough for me to realise that I really do have absolutely no control over what he does to me. Then he finishes: panting against my back, cock still inside me, and with his mouth against my ear he whispers that it was good. Then he pulls out, I hear the sound of a zipper and he walks away. Just like that he leaves me there. He’s taken what he wanted. And I’m left sore and weak, half dressed, humiliated, cum leaking out of my ass.
I can never decide if ‘sick’ or ‘twisted’ would be the better word to describe it. Probably a combination of both. Something along the lines of “Robert Fischer: you are sick and twisted man”. You could even throw in a “what would your father say” on the end there. I don’t know what he would have said but it doesn’t matter. Daddy’s dead and it’s not as if I’m going to sit uncle Peter down to hear the details. It doesn’t change anything, one sick fantasy in my head isn’t going to make a difference to the way I live. I’m not stupid enough to put myself that situation, not while I’m awake anyway. My dreams, my fantasies are an entirely different matter. Don’t they say that dreams allow you to go quietly and safely insane? I can’t even say that I’ve never dreamed like this before because most people don’t really remember their dreams and I’m no exception. Maybe it was there all along, buried under conscious layers of telling myself that I was trying to be a good son. Maybe that was the trigger: with no father to please anymore there wasn’t a reason to pretend. All those thoughts of social conscience, of levelling the field, of playing at a free market were all pointless, silly fantasies.
I did think about breaking up the entire company: we have an entirely unfair market share, the sort of almost monopoly that brings the free market grinding to a halt. The idea of it terrified me but I was so convinced that it was the only way to bring about some good, not for me but for the classical process of self-interest competition. I use to believe that the state of the free market was more important than any single company’s gains but that was before I realised how much I had to lose, before losing it mattered. I can’t remember when that started to change, when greed became more important than morality, when I stopped being ashamed of having too much. There’s no key moment I can think of as the point where it all began but I do have the strangest feeling that it was around about the time I started dreaming of Mr Charles.
++++++++++
"Dreams permit each and every one of us to be quietly and safely insane every night of our lives."
- William C. Dement
"The seed that we plant in this man's mind will grow into an idea. This idea will define him. It may come to change...well, it may come to change everything about him."
Inception
Disclaimer: Inception belongs to Christopher Nolan, Legendary Pictures/Syncopy Films and others.
++++++++++
There are really only two ways to go about this sort of thing: prove that you’re ‘your own man’ or prove that you’re not an idiot. Understandably I chose the latter. I don’t need my ego stoked by the promise of future poverty or at least poverty as someone in my position would understand it. I’m no fan of dream therapy but it was obvious that the idea of a will dissolving the entire corporation was the notion of being able to do exactly what I wanted to with my assets. I could even, if I so disliked living in the style to which I’d become accustomed, break up the entire enterprise leaving myself with dwindling returns that wouldn’t measure up to what I wanted to do with them. Because that would have been the obvious outcome if I was trying to prove a point. But if I’d been so desperate to cut off my nose to spite my face I could have just started taking cocaine. It’s not as fashionable as it use to be, not as exclusive more to the point, but it’s still an approved method of destroying your life. Not mild use of course, not the way it’s used by old men who still play golf as a cover for clandestine business meetings and think that they’re being discreet. I couldn’t do that: I don’t play golf if I can at all help it. I’d need to start taking it by the bucket load and then eventually they’d find me clammy and cold in an expensive hotel room across the Atlantic with a half finished bottle of single malt and a terrified prostitute handcuffed to the bed. My death certificate would say heart failure and at the viewing everybody would make sympathetic comments about how I looked so terribly thin.
If I wanted to do something stupid that would be the socially acceptable way to do it. It’s expected of someone in my position to die in excess just as I’ve lived. I drink good scotch, am accustomed to fine tailoring and probably use very expensive product in my hair. I say ‘probably’ because I never actually look at the label. It’s not as if I buy any of it myself. But I could, if I was trying to make a point, engage myself in that sort of chore, if I felt the need to, which I don’t. I don’t want to have to buy my own toiletries any more than I want to play golf. I can do both: I choose not to. I wouldn’t call it sloth but I prefer to use my time more advantageously. My father for all his flaws spent his life building up a business empire that ensures that I’ll never want for anything, financially after all. I could dissolve it just to prove that I could make my own way in life but I don’t really see any need for that. I like the life I’ve inherited. I’ve no intention of attempting to become my father but I’m not going to start throwing away his legacy, not when it’s being best employed by keeping me in the style to which I am accustomed.
Of course there are some negatives that come with holding such a position. They don’t outweigh the positive but they’re present all the same. I do have to be careful of my public conduct because my reputation will in many ways affect the business. Nobody wants to do business with a criminal or a drunk. I can’t be particularly rude in public or too pleased at unexpected social connections. I have to be moderate in my praise of my father’s advisors, careful in my assessments of my peers, downright suspicious of any romantic invitations. If I praise any one of those old men, men who are more or less running the business for me, then it’s dangerous favouritism, if I spend too much time in the company of any one of them then I’m being manipulated and if I linger with any of them socially sooner or later someone is going to announce that I have a ‘daddy complex’. It works in the reverse as well. Any one of them praising my leadership too loudly is obviously attempting to curry favour, any one of them spending a fair amount of time with me wants me only to hear their opinion and any one of them seeking me out a little too socially either wants to play on my apparent complex or fuck me.
Of course most of my father’s advisors, if not all, aren’t interested in me anyway. They’re interested in the business. They want the business to be profitable, their bonuses to rise, their children to go to nice private schools and so on. They don’t care about Robert Fischer; they cared about Maurice Fischer because he was one of their own. They understood him and he understood them, they were cut from the same cloth. The children of entrepreneurs on the other hand are always lazy according to their predecessors, they sit idle, content to reap the rewards that their parents have worked for. Filled with ingratitude and expectation they do nothing to enrich society, only serving to provide entertainment for the masses with their absurd, wasteful antics. My father was an energy magnate: I’ve heard all the accusations right down to the ones about the size of my carbon footprint. Wasteful, wanton, worthless Robert Fischer: the son of a great man, insignificant other than by association. But I can’t help that. Short of giving everything away to charity and dedicating myself to a life of aid work in a suitably publicised third world country I’ll always be useless in the eyes of some. It doesn’t matter. My father, in all his failings, was worried about me to the last, afraid that I’d attempt to follow in his footsteps and find myself wanting. Uncle Peter is just as bad. Both of them were so similar in that respect: scared that I’d try to be something I wasn’t and that my failure would destroy me. They were such arrogant old men believing that I’d want desperately to emulate them.
Not that I resent it: my father’s odd belief in my supposed hero worship. I do wish he’d been better at parenting, at realising that I was a child not an employee. But if I’d been an employee he might have actually known what to say. If I’d been an employee he wouldn’t have been disappointed that I’d tried to emulate him and both of us could probably have managed quite well with his fantasy of my aspirations wedged squarely between us like a wall. He’d never have noticed that I didn’t want to be one of those old men anyway, one of the men who spent their days clutching at profit margins and share prices. I have something of an interest in it because those are my profit margins and share prices but I don’t need to watch over them like a hawk. I’m quite happy to enjoy my unearned gains and let someone else manage them for me. Like golf, I can but I just don’t want to. Not that my disinclination to engage myself means much to my father’s business rivals. I’m still my father’s heir, in fact I’m the head of the company now and we’re still doing what Fischer Morrow does best: building a monopoly. Technically I’m not personally doing anything of the sort but I’m not stopping the company from growing and exploiting legal loopholes as necessary. I should have studied law instead of economics; my father should have made me study law instead of economics if he wanted me to be of any use to the company. We’re not applying Adam Smith’s theories anymore: we’re tearing them apart. Nobody cares about the financial theory of random walks or carefully monitoring market demand. Industry expansion isn’t limited by physical borders, the demand is always high, our competitors are priced out of the market, the sunk costs to even begin are more than the GDP of several nations. We don’t need economists, we need lawyers and accountants: people to count my money for me and people to make sure I keep making more of it.
I wasn’t always like this. I wasn’t like this even after my father died but when he did something changed. Towards the end I gave up caring, about the business, about my future, about the possibility that he’d tear me apart in his will. I just waited. I knew I was waiting for him to die, knew that it was inevitable but, for all his failings, I didn’t want to let go. I wanted his approval perhaps, his love. I would have taken anything even an instruction to start breaking international laws to increase our profit margin. I just needed something, some acknowledgement, some positive appraisal of my worth. Instead he died and I was left with a cryptic half whispered breath that took me at least a week to work out. My father, the great Maurice Fischer was worried about his little boy, and he’d left behind a godfather who’d carry on worrying for him. After that, knowing that he’d been invested in his own fantasy of a son rather than me personally it made even less sense to entertain the stupid notion of spiting him after death. I didn’t need to do anything for him or for anyone who watched me as a shadow of him. My gains and my losses, my waste and gluttony are all my own. He left me with a perfectly functional business empire: I’d be a fool not to indulge in its acquisition.
All I need to do is sit back and enjoy it all, and occasionally bewail my sorry lot, my self-indulgent sorrows. Daddy didn’t love me enough: he never did buy me a yacht. Uncle Peter has no taste: he thinks I drink too much. The only women who’d ever sleep with me due to attraction are always the ones who never approach me. The only women who do approach me want to sleep with Fischer Morrow instead. Even the most convincing ones always give themselves away. There’s always that look just when they think I’m not watching, that look that’s more about property gains and commerce than attraction and the hand that’s reaching for my wallet instead of anything else. I turn them all down now. I never use to but then I never knew what to look for before. So, no more anonymous women in bars or clubs, no more conveniently engaging women whose smiles are just a little too wide, a little too white. I can’t even think of it as a waste, a shame that I can’t consider enjoying some insubstantial company anymore. Somehow I don’t quite care enough. If the women who approached me weren’t always the same artificial ones, if they were the ones who look at me appraisingly, the ones who look like they’d simply ask for a quick fuck and then gather up their clothes and go to their next business meeting, then I wouldn’t refuse. I wouldn’t have to. There’s socioeconomics behind it, gendered socialisation, the conditioning of trade and a whole host of other things that I can’t blame them for but it does mean that these days women are off the list, they never bear considering. Men don’t really either but there isn’t as much social conditioning behind that sort of approach, enough so that I can almost convince myself that the majority of those offers are genuine. The open approach, the quick accessing glance, even the occasional familiar pat on the behind when I turn them down are always more honest. Honest enough that sometimes I tell myself that if they were daring, if that hand wasn’t removed quite so quickly I might just change my mind.
They always do let go. The women walk away and so do the men. And I go back to my hotel room with a bottle of scotch for company and the use of my hands. It wouldn’t pay to hire company either; it’s not the company I want so much as the fantasy anyway. Maybe I am just like my father. I have a fantasy constructed in my head, a dream that plays out just the way I want it to. There’s a man at a bar, confident, maybe a little cocky. He’s not too tall, not too overtly muscular. He looks like a businessman, the sort I’d normally see across a boardroom table and no closer. It’s the hair that gives him away first, brown but catching the light in sun bleached streaks. No serious executive looks like that even if he does holiday in the Bahamas. My gut says sales and I already know I really don’t want to talk to a salesman but he comes right up to the bar, right beside me to order his drink and when his hand wraps around the glass I take a second look. Large hands. I like that sort of thing in the same way I like backsides I can hold in women. His palm is broad, solid and sales or otherwise I start to wonder what it would feel like. Then, almost as if on cue, we’re talking. Perhaps he shakes my hand because I know that his grip is firm and his palms a little rough. I don’t even know what we’re talking about but he leans in, close, too close and then I’m leaving the bar with him. It’s extraordinarily indiscreet of me but somehow nobody seems to notice or perhaps they just don’t care.
We don’t even make it to a room, the restroom’s closer. He pushes me into a stall, the one furthest from the entrance so there’s cold tile at my back instead of a partition. He won’t let me touch him, pinning my wrists against the wall but he’s pressed against me, hot breath on my skin. He’s hard by that point but takes the time to tell me that he knows I want this, crudely, telling me that he knows I like to be fucked, that I need it, that it’s so obvious that he’s sure there are plenty of other men just lining up to do it. I don’t have to say anything: he does all the talking, feeding back all my deepest, darkest fears to me. I like the thrill of terror when he tells me I don’t have a choice, when he gloats at my helplessness. As close as we are, as often as his lips move towards mine, deliberately, tauntingly, he doesn’t kiss me. That isn’t how he operates. This isn’t a seduction. He’s going to fuck me in the men’s room and I simply don’t get a choice. I’m not even given the consolation of seeing his face when he does it: my cheek pressed to the tile, my pants round my ankles and his cock a sore, burning heat thrusting relentlessly. He tells me I like it while he fucks me, tells me to touch myself, somehow manages to laugh in between rough animal grunts when I do. It lasts longer than it should and he’s still fucking me when I sag against the wall panting. He keeps going, hard and rough, until my strangled gasps turn into helpless pleading for him to stop. It carries on a bit longer anyway, long enough for me to realise that I really do have absolutely no control over what he does to me. Then he finishes: panting against my back, cock still inside me, and with his mouth against my ear he whispers that it was good. Then he pulls out, I hear the sound of a zipper and he walks away. Just like that he leaves me there. He’s taken what he wanted. And I’m left sore and weak, half dressed, humiliated, cum leaking out of my ass.
I can never decide if ‘sick’ or ‘twisted’ would be the better word to describe it. Probably a combination of both. Something along the lines of “Robert Fischer: you are sick and twisted man”. You could even throw in a “what would your father say” on the end there. I don’t know what he would have said but it doesn’t matter. Daddy’s dead and it’s not as if I’m going to sit uncle Peter down to hear the details. It doesn’t change anything, one sick fantasy in my head isn’t going to make a difference to the way I live. I’m not stupid enough to put myself that situation, not while I’m awake anyway. My dreams, my fantasies are an entirely different matter. Don’t they say that dreams allow you to go quietly and safely insane? I can’t even say that I’ve never dreamed like this before because most people don’t really remember their dreams and I’m no exception. Maybe it was there all along, buried under conscious layers of telling myself that I was trying to be a good son. Maybe that was the trigger: with no father to please anymore there wasn’t a reason to pretend. All those thoughts of social conscience, of levelling the field, of playing at a free market were all pointless, silly fantasies.
I did think about breaking up the entire company: we have an entirely unfair market share, the sort of almost monopoly that brings the free market grinding to a halt. The idea of it terrified me but I was so convinced that it was the only way to bring about some good, not for me but for the classical process of self-interest competition. I use to believe that the state of the free market was more important than any single company’s gains but that was before I realised how much I had to lose, before losing it mattered. I can’t remember when that started to change, when greed became more important than morality, when I stopped being ashamed of having too much. There’s no key moment I can think of as the point where it all began but I do have the strangest feeling that it was around about the time I started dreaming of Mr Charles.
++++++++++
"Dreams permit each and every one of us to be quietly and safely insane every night of our lives."
- William C. Dement
