“To lose this war with the Palestinians, to cede ground, to raise the white flag of surrender—it is the only way for us to win. History will prove it. Only now, the history for which I fight is, as yet, the future unknown.”
And when writing to the man responsible for his erasure, Prisoner Z very well understands he should act erased. A writer must know his audience, is his position. And so on all these letters to the General, he always signs, as he signs right now,
Most Sincerely Yours,
Prisoner Z
2002, Berlin
The wind on the lake picks up, and the boat rocks beneath the Glienicke Bridge. Farid, who sometimes drinks on the water, his one exception, is having a beer plucked from the cornucopia that is the picnic basket sent along by Joshua’s household staff.
They’d dropped anchor and drifted until the line went taut, yet Joshua sits frozen on the deck, his knuckles white around the tiller, as if he’s still steering. Farid thinks his friend looks a little green.
“You know, you can’t get seasick on a lake. It’s almost impossible. Or, maybe it’s completely so.”
Joshua smiles a weak smile.
“Sorry. That’s what my girlfriend calls my misery face. I don’t have much of a filter,” Joshua says, very obviously attempting to perk up. “Do I really look seasick?”
Farid tells him that he does.
“Just suffering,” Joshua says. “But not from the water. It’s more a personal sort of queasiness.”
“Is it trouble with that girlfriend?”
“I should be so lucky. It’s work. And it’s exactly what I came out here to forget. Look at this nice bridge! So distracting and full of history.”
Farid laughs at that.
“That’s why I sail,” Farid says. “These lakes are the only place I calm down.”
“Sadly, it seems my problems also float.”
“Well?” Farid says, offering the opening his companion clearly seeks.
“I don’t want to complain.”
Farid opens another beer and, before passing it, reaches over and physically removes Joshua’s hand from the bar.
“You’re complaining already. What you’re not doing is being specific about why.”
“Fair enough,” Joshua says, raising his beer in a half-hearted toast. “One of our big deals is going sour. I’ve basically been printing money since I started this company, and now I think maybe I’m in over my head. I never should have switched to computers.”
Farid takes a perfect apple from the basket and sits on the deck opposite, stretching his feet out into the cockpit.
“What were you doing before?”
“It’s what you said at dinner, about your father and boring business? I may have made the single dullest fortune in the world. I got rich off sand.”
“Seriously?”
“Very much so. Construction aggregate. Industrial and recreational. Pretty sand to rebuild the dunes and beaches everyone pretends aren’t washing away. Sand for playgrounds and horse arenas. In L.A., we supplied to movies and TV. We sold mountains of the stuff for mixing into concrete. Fascinating, I know.”
“So how do you get from sand to computers?”
“I didn’t. I went to metals. Aluminum, and then nickel, which took me to Russia, where it became very obvious, very quickly, that I really was in way over my head. And here I am, working in computers, and ready to crash again.”
“It’s too late for that. Everyone underwater with computers already drowned last year. Myself included.”
Some schoolchildren up by the foot of the bridge wave and scream until Joshua and Farid pay them mind. When the two men wave back, the kids erupt and fairly burst from ecstasy.
“You’re talking dot-com stuff,” Joshua says. “It’s the sexy side of the industry that tanked. As I told you, I don’t do sexy. I sell refurbished hardware.”
“You must sell a lot of it then.”
The comment seems to cheer Joshua, as if reminding him of the savvy part of what he does.
“Do you know how many machines a single large company turns over in a year? They flip about a third of their inventory. Desktops, laptops. For someplace with fifty or sixty thousand employees, that’s twenty thousand computers. Obviously, those are the dream contracts. So divide that by ten. If you find a business with six thousand people, of which there are endless in North America, that’s two thousand units, and the companies are happy to have someone haul it all away. To pay them for the privilege, they take as a boon. I fix everything up, good as new, then ship it abroad.”
Farid stares out over the water. He is already running the idea through his businessman’s head.
“How much of it is salvageable?”
“You wouldn’t believe the mismanagement at these places. Some of it has never come out of the boxes. And of what does, I’d say upwards of forty percent of what we get is A-grade. Another twenty is a solid B. The rest, I strip for parts.”
“And it’s all corporate?”
“I won’t touch the universities. They use everything to death. I do have a guy in New Jersey who gets me the old U.S. government computers. They come without the hard drives, which makes the margins worse, though people are tickled to have them. Where I do enormous volume is in cell phones. There’s maybe five years left before they’ll be so cheap, people will just toss them. But now, they’re gold.”
“Can I ask the numbers? How does a regular deal break down?”
“Don’t be shy!” Joshua says.
“I live like a German, but I think Palestinian. We are not a reserved people.”
“With the laptops, I can fit a thousand in a container. My markup?” Joshua says, and signals to Farid that he’d better hold on to something so he doesn’t fall out of the boat. “Embarrassing as it is to admit, I net between five and seven hundred percent, depending.”
“What does that translate to?”
“With laptops, or flat-screen monitors, I pocket two hundred thousand.” Joshua tips his bottle back to his mouth and drains his beer. Farid thinks it’s to hide his obvious pride.
“That is a tremendous profit, for what sounds like not too much work.”
“Yes, at this point it’s basically a couple of e-mails on each end. When things were running smoothly, that came out to a hundred thousand dollars every time I hit send.”
“So what’s the problem with the most perfect business model I’ve ever heard?”
“The more I ship to a place, the more I eat into the profits of the folk getting rich off new machines. My model works no matter what, theirs doesn’t if all those teenagers aren’t crying for the new phone, the new computer, the new everything every season. They don’t want ‘refurbished’ to become too attractive a term. People need to believe their electronics are all outdated after six months.”
“So how do they stop you?”