A wry comic novel with an acerbic wit, A Hero of Our Time is a vicious takedown of superficial diversity initiatives and tech culture, with a beating heart of broken sincerity.
Osman Shah is a pitstop on his white colleague Olivia Robinson’s quest for corporate domination at AAP, an edutech startup determined to automate higher education. Osman, obsessed by Olivia’s ability to successfully disguise ambition and self-interest as collectivist diversity politics, is bent on exposing her. Aided by his colleague turned comrade-in-arms Nena, who loathes and tolerates him in equal measure, Osman delves into Olivia's twisted past. But at every turn, he's stymied by his unfailing gift for cruel observation, which he turns with most ferocity on himself, without ever noticing what it is that stops him from connecting to anyone in his past or present. As Osman loses his grip on his family, Nena, and everything he thought was essential to his identity, he confronts an enemy who may simply be too good at her job to be defeated.
A Hero of Our Time cracks the veneer of well-intentioned race conversations in the West, dismantles cheery narratives of progress through tech and “streamlined” education, and exposes the venomous self-congratulation and devouring lust for wealth, power, and property that lurks beneath.
Release date:
January 11, 2022
Publisher:
McClelland & Stewart
Print pages:
304
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Much of fiction is asking ourselves what happened in the woods. When we were children, or when we vanished, or when the people we cared about most left our lives only to haunt, to be remembered, to return as altered beings who have grown beyond the control we have over them. Things had happened to us among The Gentlemen Of the Pines. Our presence had manifested a speech by Mr. Robinson. Nena had called her patience with me into question, perhaps terminally. And we had passed into Olivia Robinson’s life in a deeper way than I would have thought possible, accessing the photo-negative of her politics, the authentic, pure racism that illuminated her progressiveness, the philosophy she hadn’t rejected so much as reshaped. Oliver Robinson’s rejigged white imperialism, his gentle missionary quest to shut us all up and help us all out.
Olivia appeared over my left shoulder, holding a square-cut glass with a heavy base. I saw her without turning, in the slanted mirror that encircled the bar. She was wearing a vintage suit, pinstriped and belted. Her eyes, the gentle blue of a screen saver sky, communicated no information, contained nothing but my reflected fear when they met mine in the mirror.
I once licked a broken nine-volt battery when I was a child, drinking the shock as I stared unfocused at the spume of crusted acid leaking from the shell. My pores were producing this same sensation and substance now, adrenalized sweat pushing through a melting aluminum barrier of antiperspirant. I moved on my stool, my clothes crackling like foil, my elbow twitching like a malleted knee when Olivia touched it.
“I was so hoping to catch both of you guys, but I guess Nena’s being her usual responsible super-efficient self and sleeping or something totally dull like that, right? Sorry to just jack-in-the-box here but your company phone’s off and I thought it would be less invasive to ask Amy where you’d booked in than to peel your private cell off your personnel file. You should really just use your business as your personal. It’s very early-aughts not to, Osman. Not an order but I think it’s a good idea, personally. And I hope you don’t feel, like, intruded on.”
Olivia sat next to me, and we both looked up at the mirror for a moment, as though checking to see there was no one behind us, that the rest of the room had indeed vanished.
“Nena has a place in town,” I said. Or really, found myself saying, as they do in books, when the words precede thought, when the interrogator’s needle quill through the tear duct has prodded just the right area of brain to elicit confession. “A couple. So no hotel for her.”
“We used to talk investments when we were at HQ together,” Olivia said. The liquid in her glass didn’t bubble, or act with any of the viscous cling of booze. It was water playing liquor. “I always admired that, how she could focus on all these projects she had going while still conscientiously doing her job. Which she does, obviously. I mean, how about that shit today? We have Parnell locked. It’s over. Mockton and I had cocktails after that marathon admin meeting—God, I promise to forever forbid AAP from getting that bloated—and I really put a pin in the Beagle interest, showed him a couple of texts with Brody and maybe if I’m being honest accidentally scrolled past a couple of photos of Brody and me in Mexico City and he was so sold he sent six key emails from the fucking table.”
I smiled. I felt beer calories settle into my tits. Sweat formed and simmered in the crease just below them. Olivia tried to swirl her ice cubes, but there wasn’t enough water left in the glass. She shook her head and laughed, at herself, toward me.
“I always forget who I’m talking to. After a day of hustles like this. I forget what company I’m in, that I can drop the sales talk and boardroom bro terms and just really be. Talk, really talk. Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“So forget all that. Let’s leave it behind at Parnell. Let’s just speak. I want you to know, Osman, that I trust you. I don’t think Nena quite gets me, and that’s cool. She was a total terminator in the right role, and the company is well aware of that. But she has defences in her that I just cannot ever see her letting go, and for a woman in business those defences are dead necessary but at a certain point all that steel turns you into your own anchor, you know?” Olivia paused, either because this was a line she had perfected earlier and wanted to make sure it stuck, or because it was a spontaneous one good enough that she was banking it to use again. She continued. “Nena doesn’t trust, and as a result, she’ll never believe that she is truly trusted, that the faith we all have in her is unshakeable. You’re not like that, Osman. You have softness in you. Nena’s guard makes her more vulnerable than she could ever believe. I sense that, and I take on the pain of it myself. I know how humiliating it is to be looked at as less-than, as other, as foreign and despicable. What I didn’t learn from being a woman, I learned from being sick. From what my illness triggered in others, I mean: I could accept pity, I could understand that. But so many people looked at me with fear, Osman. Not of what I could do, but what I represented.”
I recognized the evolution of her conference speech, how she had now integrated the genuine reaction she’d had to my joke—that fear created power. Olivia had found a way to acknowledge that this was still true, but when you are feared because of a tumour instead of a possible concealed AR-15 or dynamite vest, the tumour gets the credit and the fear-power. She watched me think, and pivoted.
“That’s part of being an empath, accessing all this pain that others are going through, and feeling it nest into you, without totally overtaking your ability to function. You’re not quite an empath, Osman. I would know. We recognize it in others. But what you are is vulnerable, exposed. And I want you to know, please don’t let that go. It’s specifically that quality that means there’s a place for you in AAP leadership. I really do see a rising future for you. Getting this face time is half the reason I came up here. I knew that Nena could totally close Mockton on her own. Sold him that brilliant little package that she came up with. But I wanted to see you. I was afraid that when I promoted Vikram Chandra, I gave you the wrong idea of how much you’re valued. You’ve seen Vikram. You know him. He glows, Osman, even from a screen, and we can’t let that quality go. His value to us is unique. Have you ever talked to him?”
“No. A bit.”
“He’s not a linear thinker. I don’t know if he’s a lateral thinker, we haven’t figured that out, but he’s just entirely himself. You know? Like, he doesn’t need to shift modes. He’s just there, present, Vikram. And that’s what I wanted to talk to you about.”
I couldn’t tell if she was redefining the stupidity I’d always seen in Vikram as invaluable omnidirectional thinking, or letting me know that she thought he was stupid, too.
“I think Vikram was a perfect choice, Olivia.”
“I want it out of the way that he wasn’t promoted in your place. That title, that role, it’s for Vikram. He’ll fit with the team around him. But we haven’t created a place for you at the top that can truly channel what makes you great, Osman. We need to create that position for you.”
“That’s kind.”
“That’s kind means ‘that’s bullshit,’ right?” Olivia laughed, this one almost as much for her as for me, clutching the rail under the bar and tipping back slightly on her stool, barking and hiccupping.
“That’s totally a part of why we need you, Osman. Someone who isn’t afraid to bring up an almost-school-shooting to tie up a sales pitch. That’s some of what makes you great. But we need the rest. We can’t create a leadership role for you at AAP because you’re not letting us know who you really are. Osman.”
“You’re saying my name a lot,” I said. For a moment, annoyance overwhelmed fear just enough to make me forget who I was talking to.
“It’s a clue.”
“What?”
“Osman, are you Muslim? That question isn’t for answering—I would never make a demand like that—but it’s just one that I want you to know is being asked in some very important rooms. Ever since the last AAPC, where I accidentally ushered in your coming-out moment, which I still sometimes doubt I had any right to do.”
My right nostril was as dry as a callus, and my thumbnail would be just long enough to give it a deep, satisfying scratch. I tried not to twitch like a rabbit.
“You have to understand I did that for a reason, Osman. Channelling what you said to me. It’s why we give each other facts, stories, emotions—we need other people to show ourselves to ourselves. And you did that for me. You fucking locked into place everything I was thinking about when I was sick, when I was in this half-world that no one who hasn’t done chemo drugs or been dead half the day and incredibly, painfully alive all night could understand. The only way to see another person is to see yourself. And the only way you can see yourself is to force people to be uncomfortable, to beam an image of yourself back to you. You create this image, this burdened good-humoured brown barely-man being downtrodden by authority, by circumstance, by his body, by his mind, by his inability to exceed what is being forced onto him. You present it to anyone listening, and you wait for them to define you aside from that, against that, to make you more than your joke. I don’t joke about serious things, so I never unlocked the exact way it’s done until I watched you trying to impress all of us at the conference. Trying to borrow a moment for yourself that everyone would remember. It was beautiful. That’s what you lit up in me with your little joke, Osman. I understood that everything in our HR docs was something that should be in AAP’s vending approach. And the way you did it, just getting completely ethnic with those uncomfortable white people while inviting them in for a laugh—that is pressure. That is sales. You showed me something that day, Osman. But you didn’t show me yourself. Getting up there on that stage and calling out to you—I was trying to show you yourself, but yes, I admit it, sweetheart, I was calling you out too.” She couldn’t decide if she wanted to give this last a Bogart dip or a John Wayne twang, so she did both and looked like the frenulum beneath her lower lip had been cut out. “Just for optional fun, can you answer my question, Osman? Are you Muslim? I ask because of your name, sure, and because people have been wondering about you, about our company culture, about what we’ve done to invisibly force assimilation on people and what we can do to reverse that process. I’ve been trying to work up the courage to talk to you about this directly, but I knew it had to be offsite. This can’t be a formal conversation.”
“I’ve never practised anything. My parents wouldn’t have let me if I wanted to.”
“That.” Olivia pointed at me, her fingernail close enough to brush a pill on my woollen blazer sleeve. My shirt was too wet to take the jacket off now, and I was too hot to live with the jacket on for more than a few more minutes. “You can use exactly that, what you just said, because it’s the truth. We need more of you at AAP, Osman. That’s all we’re asking for—to get all of you, not just the parts you think are presentable. We need you to be real so we can be real with you, understand?”
The simple answer hunted me, tried to arrest my thoughts, stop them, prevent any complexity from being possible: that what Olivia was saying wasn’t a reversal but an extension of the white supremacy she had absorbed in earliest childhood, at the feet of her unhinged father. But this wasn’t the case. I’d seen Mr. Robinson’s varietal of racism that evening, and it felt personal, his own, something precious to him and deeply religious, something he’d made as the rest of his life disappointed him, beginning with the flight of his daughter, or perhaps before, with his wife, who even now I can only remember as a slender grey animated wax dripping next to him on the curved modern wooden pew, listening with equal attentiveness to the pastor’s hedgings and her husband’s ravings, not humbled but hollowed, edged out of her own mind and body by years of failed combat with the people around her. Mom did not look much like Olivia. And Olivia didn’t sound like her father any more than I sounded like mine.
“I am explicitly giving you all the grace and permission you refuse to give yourself: you can stop assimilating,” Olivia said.
“I haven’t.”
Olivia stared at me, summoning sympathy which emerged as a head tilt and a minor tremble in the lower eyelids. “It’s something we don’t even know we’re doing, Osman. Believe me. Ask yourself again. Not for me, but for yourself. Please. Can’t you feel it when people have been talking about you, maybe in a way that could threaten your future, behind your back? I really can. I developed a sense for it while I was raised in the church. Everyone with their eyes on you. I came to find it soothing when I just assumed I was being monitored, though. That’s what I think one of the main appeals of God is, this sense that someone is watching in helpful judgment, allowing you to be better at being you, at finding yourself in the world. People just talk so fucking much, Osman. They research, they talk, they invent things, they talk, they do everything they can but ask you a direct question, which is why I’m speaking to you tonight. I just want to be direct. I want to keep you among us, and I want to know what that takes. What I can offer to retain your value at AAP. I need you to feel needed.”
“I have to go to the bathroom.”
In the stall I took off my blazer, my soaked shirt. I hung the jacket from the hook and laid the shirt on the toilet tank. I wiped myself down with toilet paper, rolled threads of it coming off in my chest and arm hair as I rubbed too hard and fast, until I was as dry and pilled as my hanging jacket. My shirt was dirtier than the toilet it was resting on. This was a hobo situation with a third-world twist, exactly the life people would judge someone who looks like me to live.
Dad didn’t feel guilt when he made judgments. “Judgment is the essence of any decision,” he would say. My father’s increasing inability to tolerate me came from the purity and completeness of his success, from my resemblance to his nightmare self. In that unlived existence Ajit inhabited a subcontinental English crammer where he was Mr. Professor Sir. Trapped eternally with his original surname, smelling of the spices he later banned from making contact with hot oil in his home. I made the idea of Dad’s own avoided failure real again, through the force of his shame.
Oliver Robinson was, according to the reality that Nena had managed to reconstruct in her documentary research, an addict married to an addict who lost his child to a wealthy sister, then cleaned up and reconstructed himself in the American religious rehab model, eschewing substances for a gospel modified by an intensified apocalyptic vision and his personal recommitment to white purity and power. But the Oliver I’d seen in that church possessed elements of the father in the story that Olivia had told Nena during her job interview, of the ambitious dad who wanted to take his scripture-memorizing daughter on the national circuit as a celeb-in-training before meeting resistance from his insistent wife, who was a clear fiction compared to the half-straightened paper clip with hair we had seen at the Evergreen Advent. Oliver had been changed by his daughter’s story, by what he must have heard of it, by what he could have absorbed from it to rebuild himself as a man worthy of his daughter’s outright rejection, even as he continued to worship at the pulpit of the pastor she’d replaced her father with as a teenager. The racism hadn’t been passed on to Olivia, it had been constructed in opposition to the woman he imagined his daughter to be. Oliver Robinson was trying to stick as closely as he could to Olivia’s story of what kind of man he had been by building that character into a future he now inhabited, absorbing traits and opinions and deep-seated beliefs that resonated entirely with the invented Dad that Olivia had cleaved out of her life. She had gotten to her father in a way that I had never reached mine.
I picked up the shirt and knew I wouldn’t be dry if I put it on again. It looked and smelled as though it had been my only garment on a week-long jungle hike. Ringed with sweat craters that reached the bottom of my rib cage, wafting my odours and those of the animals I’d ingested before the beer.
But I did put it back on, along with the jacket, and headed to the elevator bank instead of the bar. Nena’s roped towels still snaked across the bathroom floor in my hotel room, minimal amounts of her sweat and come still in the rumpled sheets of the bed. When Olivia was finished with me, I could contemplate screaming at housekeeping on the phone and reject the idea after a brief, perfectly worded fantasy of control.
I came back to the bar in a shirt that was almost the same blue as my discarded one, without a jacket. Olivia had a real drink in front of her this time, something dark and iced in a collins glass. She was talking to herself without moving her mouth, just tilting her hands slightly, raising her thumbs as she did in her video presentations.
“I scared you off,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
“No. It’s important. I want you to go on.”
“That is so good to hear, because—you know, it’s a lot. I actively think about you, Osman. With Vikram, I don’t. He’s great, and he does everything right, but you’re the kind of AAP pillar who could expand our definition of what ‘everything’ is. And that involves building on—you know, what we were talking about before. Come on. Pakistan. What a fascinating place of—and I acknowledge I know nothing—of extremes. Enlightenment and corruption sharing space in the same nation-state like that. There must be so much you could let out, Osman.”
“I really don’t know much more than you do. I’m not ahistorical but I’ve—it’s more of an England and Europe and America thing for me. My family lived in Canada and came from India, not Pakistan, but I know almost nothing about it.”
“You’re the second generation of melting-potters in your family.” Olivia said. “I’ve read about your father. I’ve even read your father, all eighty pages of one of his books that I found on Google. It was Wordsworth and countryside and wars that had nothing to do with his history. Sidebar, you’ve been on my mind that much, you’ve even got me reading way-above-my-head academic stuff on flights. And I guess I should have understood that the man who wrote that book was a man who wouldn’t let his son access his own real past. I’m going to overstep again, Osman. I think Nena is critical to this phase in your progress. Both in a great way and in the slightest negative way. You sought her out—and I’m not making any assumptions about what is between you, other than that you’re clearly close—when in the past I think you would have pursued someone who maybe looked and sounded less like her, and maybe looked and sounded more non-threatening.”
“Nena isn’t threatening,” I said, and wondered if there was anyone in the world who had met her and could say and believe this. Anyone she wasn’t selling to.
“Let’s just say that’s my mistaken assumption, then. But I will tell you that I’ve seen your interests fade away, just from looking at your socials. You haven’t posted one of those old book covers in months, and I bet you’re not even quite aware that you’ve dropped the hobby. You’re not even drinking at interesting places, Osman. I find you in the hotel bar? Look at this carpet. Look how bright it is in here. You don’t care about things anymore. You’re moulting. You’re becoming. It’s beautiful and it’s painful. I think you’re currently seeking out permission to step out of the identity your parents designed for you by reaching out to someone of a similar-different background, but you picked someone who is so entirely whited-out herself that you’re only compounding your own shame. But I think drawing closer to her speaks to an instinct that you have to go back, to access the real stuff, the person you were never allowed to be. And that’s a wonderful thing. A perfect thing.”
I believed her. I believed those things about myself for a few moments. Olivia hadn’t come close to being right but she had pointed out the truest inheritance I had from my father, whose genes had nothing to do with the shape of my face or body, but were embedded in my disguises. Ajit was from India, but he frequently pretended to be from Pakistan, floating across the Line of Control of the border in campus conversations eight thousand miles from his discarded home, advocating for whichever cause he felt would benefit him most with his interlocutor, whether it was a donor, a student, a student’s father, or a woman he was whispering to in the living room while his son and Sameen slept upstairs. Father was the family’s first man from no-place, and it suited him exactly, as it suits me.
“I screamed at my dad about this,” I said to Olivia, who closed her eyes in a moment of pure ecstasy, like an actress in a commercial for European chocolates. It was triumph that she was trying to convert into sympathy. She looked down and put a hand on my shoulder, which had cooled slightly when I lied about Nena, and was getting even closer to the temperature of a correct body as I continued to lie.
“We were fighting about my work for AAP. Dad and me. It was our last fight, and I didn’t know how to make it penetrate that the world changing meant my aims, my loves, were changing, and that was a good thing. He wanted me to be him. Wool-jacketed, tenured, in a teaching and research position for decades. But I wanted to do what we do at AAP, and he just couldn’t believe I was being sincere. If it was just the money, he could have accepted it. But he couldn’t accept that I was interested in the work, and that’s when it got personal. I told him that I was tired of him lying about himself. I don’t want to go into detail—I don’t quite feel—”
“Of course. As much or as little as you want to.”
“But I told him that he hadn’t allowed me to have a foundation, so it was only natural that I wouldn’t become what he thought I should. That it was his inability to be himself that had made our distance. We never spoke again. No one’s ever come close to guessing this until you.”
I was careful with every sentence. I was aware that to reveal any actual truth about myself to Olivia Robinson before I had a chance to tell Nena, or really any human, would be an unfixable error, a fracture in my ability to relate to myself or any other person for the rest of my life.
“I’m ready to become myself, and I want you and AAP to be part of that process.” I looked thoughtfully at the warm pint of beer that I had just picked up, and put it down again. Realizing this was a bit much, I immediately ordered a cold one and started on that.
“I’m so grateful to you, Osman. For what you’ve just said, for today, for everything. I can’t wait to get right back into this when we hit L.A. soil.”
Then she did something—nothing sinister or vampiric, not a lizard flash of monstrous eyes, not a coquettish film noir flourish, none of that shit. Olivia relaxed, just as Nena had in the car when my dullness finally penetrated her. Her jaw jutted, the underbite lengthening her face, while two small lines appeared in her forehead as she focused on a sip of her drink and on what she was going to say to me in her true voice, which was both higher-pitched and more conventionally adult.
“I know what you’ve been trying to do to me up until now, Osman. It’s more important that I know why you felt you had to investigate me, make your little attempt. I get it. I just want to make it clear that I admire you, and I know where you’ve been coming from. It’s not my place to say I understand what it is to be you. But I do understand what being someone like you around someone like me would do to a person, Osman. I’ve watched it happen so many times. I watched you understanding what I was doing in Mockton’s office, and how you couldn’t help giving me that perfect assist even while you thought I wasn’t exactly the kind of person you wanted to be onside with. And I respect that. Know that. I respect you. Oh—Brody!”
Olivia swivelled her stool and boosted herself off with the heel of her right hand, as though she were dismounting a novelty horse. The movement was for the benefit of Brody Beagle, who I’d been avoiding pictures of after Nena’s meeting and the obsessive thoughts I’d been having since. He looked as I remembered him from the candid snaps of his vacation with Gwen Geffen in Calabria: a muscular Nordic Zuckerberg with a dick the size of Facebook, which was currently outlined against the inner right thigh of a pair of striding slim-cut slate-coloured chinos. I left my cool brimming glass behind and walked to the elevator.
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