Babayaga

some character not to talk. Whatever their ideology, their resistance had shown a rare kind of integrity. Will thought about all the other people who had, over the ages, gone the other way, turning in people they actually knew were innocent: the ones who dodged suspicion by passing it on. The Nazis and Stalin were the most recent examples, interrogating and torturing innocent citizens until, finally, desperate to mollify their tormentors, the accused denounced their equally innocent neighbors. In the end, how many scapegoats were herded up? And when did this nightmare of evil arithmetic stop? Crystalizing within Will was the realization that what he was being asked to participate in now was in a way no different, it was the awful conveyor belt of history, a butcher’s carnival where ultimately no one innocent escaped, they lost their jobs and homes, or their throats were cut and they were dumped in bloody piles. The only ones who ever seemed to get away were the guilty.
    At that moment, as if punctuating his resolution, there was the loud cheerful ping of the elevator arriving and around the corner came Guizot, with outstretched arms and tears rolling down his cheeks. “Will! Will!” he cried out, oblivious to the stares of Mitchell, White, and the other employees in the office. “We are the destroyers of the world!” Guizot cried out. Will almost had to smile.
    “You’ll have to excuse me for a moment,” he said, getting up and leaving the two men there.
    A half hour later, Will was still sitting with his inconsolable client. Between sobbing and loudly blowing his nose, Guizot told him his saga, about how, after the terrible argument over the Surrealist painting, his wife had packed her bags (“So many shoes, Will, when did she buy them all!”) and stormed out of their flat, leaving him shocked, appalled, galled, and completely brokenhearted. After a few days of suffering from inconsolable grief, he had rushed out to her art dealer and purchased every Surrealist painting he could lay his hands on, de Chiricos and Ernsts, Klees, and Mirós, along with countless others that the dealer, sensing a vulnerable moment, pawned off on him. Then he drove to the hotel suite where his wife was staying and begged her to come home.
    “I was on my knees,” Guizot said. “I pleaded. ‘You are the most important person to me!’ I groveled. ‘You are the best part of my soul!’ I kissed her ankles over and over like a desperate supplicant at the feet of a great princess, crying, ‘You are the first woman, the only woman, I have ever loved in this way!’ And you know what she did, Will? She looked down at me—oh, those eyes, so cold they could turn a mountain into ice, and she sneered at me, Will, she sneered. ‘Oh, Guizot, listen to yourself, “most,” “best,” “first , ” how pathetic, you sound like one of your cheap little advertisements.’ I am telling you, I crawled out of there a destroyed man.”
    Since then, Guizot said, he had been holed up alone in his apartment, with the nightmarish shapes of Surrealism’s asymmetrical jungles and melting timepieces looming over him as his wife’s bitter words burned inside his head, quickly driving him mad. “Then in an instant, it hit me! I saw it! She was right! She was absolutely correct! Listen to the language we pepper people with, Will, listen to how our advertisements are ripping all the meaning from the world, tearing it out! How can a sacred word like ‘adore’ mean anything between a man and a woman when we say ‘You will adore this creamy butter! You will adore this smelly fragrance! You will adore this fruity, delicious cherry cream soda!’ What is adoration when our advertisements are done with it, Will? What are we destroying with our absurd and exaggerated creations? We are monsters, and we are sucking out the marrow from the world!”
    With that, Guizot collapsed into a flood of tears on the desk and, in between sobs, fired the agency. Will could hardly believe it. Guizot vowed that from that day forward he was only going to sell his product personally to retailers, one to one, with no television, radio, newspaper, or outdoor advertisements. “All I need is a handshake, the handshake of a man, eye to eye, that is how I will sell! That is all!” He pulled himself together, wiped his eyes, and, giving Will a warm embrace, excused himself. “My friend, you should get out of this racket too,” he said. “While you still have a