Free Toby by Todd Babiak Page B

sue anyone who distributes the video. It’s been halted on the sharing sites, but it did spread quickly. The damage has been done. I can’t afford to piss off the Conservatives right now.”
    “But—”
    “But nothing. Nothing, Tobias. What you are in that video is the one thing we cannot be. The station is dead to you, like my wife and my robot.”
    “He’s sleeping with Alicia. He wants to destroy me.”
    “Sentimentality.”
    “I’d been up all night, with my dad. He was burned in a fire, and I was on a lot of NyQuil.”
    Mr. Demsky walked to a tall wooden bookshelf stained a deep burgundy. He pulled down a leather-bound volume with gold-embossed pages and placed it open in Toby’s hands. It was a long poem, in English on the left side and Latin on the right, “On the Nature of Things,” by Lucretius. Toby read the first few lines in English without really concentrating.
    “Wow. That’s really pretty.”
    “Out loud, for Christ’s sake.”
    Toby put on his broadcaster voice and read slowly. “‘Therefore death to us / Is nothing, nor concerns us in the least, / Since nature of mind is mortal evermore.’”
    “Lucretius was a brilliant old atheist. Whenever I’m tempted into sentimentality, I like to read him. You can borrow that if you like.”
    “Mr. Demsky, I’m—”
    “You’re serious about this business.”
    “I am.”
    “You made a mistake and you want to make it go away.”
    “Yes.”
    “Well, you can’t. But starting right now, you have to see the lesson in this. It’s time to grow up, yes? To forget about your mother and father, your friends, your girlfriend, your wife, strangers who can do shit for you. If it isn’t sleep they’re taking, it’s your centre of gravity. Your calm. Your gift, Tobias. Everything you’ve earned. You don’t have to be an asshole, but you do have to be discerning with your time and energy. Ruthless. Dwayne succeeds, you see, because he genuinely does not care about displeasing his wife and breaking his children’s tiny little hearts. He never cultivates friends who cannot help him. It all comes naturally to Dwayne, as it comes naturally to me.”
    “That goes against pretty much everything I’ve ever taught my viewers, Mr. Demsky. What about the breakdown of morality? The spiritual crisis in America? What is etiquette, if it isn’t—”
    “It’s irrelevant. It’s an effect, and men like us, we have to be in the business of causes. There is success, Tobias, and there is nothing else. It’s very, very simple. You and I canshare a bottle of wine and talk about making every man on the East Coast a gentleman, but there is only one reason, one, to do it. To create wealth for ourselves, and honour.”
    Mr. Demsky sat down across from him again. They remained silent as Toby went through a mental roll call of great men and women.
    “This is why we are here, why the universe was created for us.” Mr. Demsky butted out his cigarette. “At first it’s difficult, but slowly, as with everything else, you develop your muscles. It becomes routine, and you begin to notice the people around you responding submissively. Because they sense a beast is among them, a beast of ambition.”
    “A beast.”
    “Of ambition, Tobias.”
    “I’m not young anymore. This is serious. I could be unhappy for the rest of my life, all because—”
    “You’re not sounding beastly.”
    “What should I do?”
    “That’s for you to decide.”
    “This isn’t fair.”
    Mr. Demsky sighed and spun his chair away from Toby—toward his desk.
    “You can’t help me?”
    “Not now.”
    Toby said goodbye to Mr. Demsky and thanked the woman downstairs. She was frying a steak. On the counter beside her, as she spiced the meat, sat a photograph of Mr. Demsky on a beach somewhere, smiling, a beast of ambition in a cheap black frame.

Four
    In the car, Toby completed a mental calculation of his financial health. With the mortgage on his condominium and the lease payments on the