Elvia, Incorporated

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This essay contains some true events and other facsimiles thereof and any resemblance to actual laws, bureaucratic processes, conversations, and persons living, dead, or incorporated is purely coincidental.

•

On December first, I dislocated my shoulder. Actually, I didn’t do anything—I wasn’t even there when it happened. The shoulder dislocated itself while I was sleeping.    

When I woke up, I was lying on my right side and couldn’t seem to hoist myself upright. The arm wouldn’t cooperate. I rolled onto my back and struggled out of bed.

I had been ignoring a burning feeling down the inside of my right arm for weeks—too busy, most pain resolves on its own, bowl of ibuprofen on my desk—but the burning had spread everywhere, radiating from shoulder to fingertips. I tried to lift the arm, but it just waggled at my side. The fingers tingled. 

It was only when I got to the desk and the hand refused to peck out an email that I gave in and called the doctor. If it had been my left hand I would have held out longer.  

Dr. Louis gave me a strange look when she walked into the exam room. She asked me why my shoulder was subluxed, a word I didn’t know, but when she asked me to take off my shirt and stand in front of the mirror, I understood what she meant. The whole ball of the shoulder was rolled disturbingly forward, round bone protruding, skin taut and shiny, and, as if following its lead, the whole right half of my body had sunk two inches below the left. I thought of avalanches, quicksand. A part of me submerging slowly into the mud. 

While I lay back on the white paper covering the table and she slowly rolled the humerus back into its socket, she demanded I tell her what had happened. An accident? A fall? A shock? Shoulders don’t just leap out of sockets overnight. There was a suspicious tone to her voice. 

Oh. Hm. I cast about for an explanation. No, nothing had happened to me. I couldn’t think of a single big event. Just a stream of tiny events in my inbox. Work—work was happening to me, all the time. Avalanches, quicksand. I had a new job, I said. Dr. Louis shook her head, as if she knew I was lying to her. I didn’t think I was lying. I felt the bone shudder and click into place. 

When I sat up, the shoulder still hurt and two fingers were numb, but I could move the limb again, which meant it was employable. How do I make sure the bone stays in there? I asked, anxious, because I needed to use the hand to answer emails right away. 

There’s not much you can do, she said. She placed her hand on the horrible shoulder and I flinched. Your muscles are torn as if you were in a car crash. Are you sure you haven’t been in a car crash? She seemed to really want me to have been in a car crash. For a moment I worried I’d actually forgotten one. I shrugged, but could only lift my left shoulder. 

Okay, then. Stress. For now we would chalk it up to stress. In which case I needed to calm down. Sleep, healthy diet, rest, rest, rest. She showed me how to breathe by expanding my rib cage. How to blow raspberries with my lips. These things would calm my vagus nerve. 

She said I should continue to swallow handfuls of ibuprofen as needed and wait for the inflammation to die down to give the muscles a chance to mend themselves. If it subluxed again, I should come back and she would give me some steroids and an arm sling. 

•

After the doctor, feeling that odd euphoria that sometimes results from a lessening of pain, I walked around the corner to the bank. Once I got this over with, I told myself, I would take some time to calm my vagus nerve. 

I had made an appointment at the bank because I needed to open a business account to finish creating something called an “S corporation,” which my accountant had recommended I do. The previous month, I had gotten a job working for a big corporation, the type called a “C corporation,” doing lucrative tasks involving spreadsheets, and the accountant said that it would be advantageous, financially speaking, for me to become a corporation, too. It would be less, hmm, taxing, to interface with the big corp if I had my own corp.

Corps can talk to each other in a different language than humans. Intellectual property. Liability. Clawback. The kind of words that wake a financially illiterate freelancer in the middle of the night. 

In the process of creating my “S corp,” I had done a lot of internet searching, and discovered that the concept of the freelancer dates to the middle ages, when free-lance knights would hire out their lances to fight for different lords. The S corp was going to be my new suit of armor as I rode around lancing for a powerful lord. The S corp was going to protect me—my body, flesh, meat-suit, corpus—from harm, in mysterious but important ways. However, according to the laws of my nation, I only had until the end of this calendar year to get the armor in place.

I walked through the bank’s glass doors, swinging an enormous folder of paperwork with my newly functional arm, and I smiled at life’s small joke: my limb had been reattached to my body just in time for me to form a new person in the eyes of the law. 

I was ushered into a windowless cubicle, where I shook hands with the bank manager, Shauna. Shauna was excited for me. My very own corp with its very own account! I must have made some good choices and had some good luck to arrive here. I was caught off guard by her enthusiasm. In my regular life, I was supposed to be a human writer, not a corporation. Becoming a corp had become the only way I could continue to be a writer—a paradox that felt as much like a concession as a success. Yet here was Shauna, assuring me that this indicated prosperity and progress. 

She asked me questions and clicked through boxes on her screen, linking my name with my corp’s name, my address with my corp’s address, my age with its age. I was thirty-three, she pointed out, but my corp was just a baby! My corp’s birthday was today, December first! When Shauna got to the last page, she asked: What do you predict your business’s annual revenue will be? 

My shoulder twinged and I winced. This question seemed to agitate my vagus nerve. I didn’t really know how much my revenue would be. It depended on whether I did a good job working at the big corp, and I wasn’t sure what doing a good job entailed. With abandon, I said: Let’s put a million dollars!

She swiveled away from the big monitor. She looked me in the eyes. She said: I absolutely believe in the power of manifesting. Manifesting will change your life. 

Her left eye was larger than the right, which gave her a zealous look. I hadn’t expected her to take the million dollars seriously, but she typed seven figures demonstratively into the computer, glancing over at me with a conspiratorial smile. 

At the end of the meeting I signed my name all over the documents and Shauna gave me a last word of advice. Do not sell your soul, she said. Oh, good, I said. I had been worried I had already done that, so the warning was encouraging. It meant that my soul was still intact. 

I left the bank fully and completely realized as ELVIA INC, annual projected revenue: one million dollars. 

•

The next day I got an email from my accountant, Andrea, saying that my trip to the bank was only the first step in becoming ELVIA INC. Now that I had the bank account, I had to tell the city, state, and country what I had done. 

Andrea sent volleys of faxes on my behalf, and these faxes triggered an avalanche of letters and phone calls. I started getting envelopes from agencies with acronyms I had never heard of, each one full of baffling requests. Some had strings of codes inside; I entered these codes into an arcane online system; the codes didn’t work, so I spent five hours on hold until I could ask someone about the codes; that person, Melissa, said there was a glitch in the system and I should wait for another round of codes. I tried to endear myself to Melissa by asking whether she believed in the power of manifesting, but she hung up.  

Robots called and asked me to verify my corp by answering security questions. Have you ever been associated with this California address? Have you ever owned a Honda Civic? I was afraid of answering incorrectly. Had I owned a Honda Civic? I couldn’t remember. I was very tired. The scalding pain from my shoulder made it hard to sleep and hard to concentrate. I set an alarm on my phone to remind me to do the raspberry breathing. 

Part of the problem was that I’d started the corporate job without quitting any of my “real” jobs. While ELVIA INC was deftly filling spreadsheets and filing reports from 9 am to 5 pm, Elvia the body was revising a book, writing reviews for a magazine, and teaching a graduate writing class. My demented hope was that once I became a corp, ELVIA INC would take some of this weight off my barely-located shoulders. 

I was on increasingly intimate terms with Andrea, whom I called in a panic every time I got a mysterious envelope from the IRS. She seemed alternately bemused and annoyed by my ignorance of corps. Perhaps she grasped that there was a willful element to my ignorance, a stubborn refusal to accept the logic at play. Because there was no logic at play. We were acting like what we were making was real, but my corp was imaginary. It consisted entirely of phone calls and account numbers. ELVIA INC was a disorganized (auto)fiction.

The formation of the corp was, to me, the equivalent of the supreme mystery of transubstantiation, where God is both immanent and ineffable. It’s so impossible you just have to believe, and in believing, you make it possible. I wanted to believe. Andrea was my priest of conversion.   

[7:20am] 

Good morning Andrea!! 
Hi ELVIA
The IRS wants me to provide my job title at ELVIA INC 
Put your title. 
Writer? 
Most people put President
I’m my own president? 
You could also put Owner or CEO. Anything is fine.  
Anything?
Whatever you want.
King? Jester? Peasant? Overlord? 
Just put President. 
I thought I was an employee at ELVIA INC?
You are also an employee. 
I am the President and the Employee
Yes.
Do I have more employees? 
Are you planning on hiring more people?
No 
You have one employee.
So I am two people 
You are one person. 
How can one person be both the capitalist and the worker? 
[no reply]
Ok so I can write Feudal Lord as my title? 
Just write President. 
Should I sign my own name under President or should I sign ELVIA INC? 
Sign your legal name.
Which is ELVIA INC?
No, your legal name is your name.
But I thought I was now legally the inc. 
Your company is named ELVIA Inc. 
Oh is it Inc. with or without a period?
Punctuation doesn’t matter. 

The question of whether I titled myself CEO or Dungeon Master of ELVIA INC, with or without a period, seemed like a huge, enormous deal, both hilarious and laden with gravitas, but nobody laughed and nobody cared. Not the accountant, not Melissa at the IRS, not Shauna at the bank. Just try not to “raise eyebrows,” Shauna said when I emailed her asking how she thought I should punctuate the name of my corp. 

Halfway through December, my shoulder hurt so much that I heard myself grinding my teeth at the desk. I bought a mouth guard online. My right hand—my write hand—stopped working on a Friday afternoon, pulling a Bartleby. 

Melville’s Bartleby is an office clerical worker who one day simply stops his job copying legal documents. I could understand perfectly well why my right arm likewise “preferred not to.” My right half refused to lance for this new master. I began using my left hand to peck out emails.

To incorporate: from the fourteenth-century Latin to unite into a single body through absorption or eating. To eat something until it becomes part of your body. By the fifteenth century, the word had evolved to mean many people joining together to form a new legal entity, which could also mean many bodies becoming one big body. 

Today a corp is like a person in some ways and not like a person in others. ELVIA INC, said the internet, had the first-amendment right of free speech, but not the fifth-amendment right against self-incrimination. ELVIA INC was not allowed to pay politicians, but she/it could pay for political advertising. ELVIA INC did not have citizenship, but in every practical way she/it belonged in and to the United States.  

Andrea told ELVIA INC to open a 401k because corps can save more money for retirement than human people can. Corps get all these nice things. It had never occurred to me that I would retire, much less hide money from myself for later, which Andrea reprimanded me for. You don’t think you’ll live past sixty-five? Hm, I said. That’s a very personal question. 

The retirement account presented a host of exciting questions. When I retire, will my corp keep working for me? When I die, will my corp stay alive? If I decide to de-corporate ELVIA INC (Kill her? Abort her? Dematerialize her?), where does my corp’s corpse go? If I de-corporate, can I then later re-corporate as the same ELVIA INC or will I have to re-name her? Like how The Simpsons cat, Snowball, keeps dying, and each new cat is named Snowball I, II, III, IV, V…  

[11:59pm]

Who should be paying my heating bill? Me or ELVIA INC?

•

I could have chosen any name, but I chose the idiotic name ELVIA INC for my corp because I thought it was funny. Slapping INC or CO or LTD after your first name is something a child would do, as if calling yourself a business is enough to pantomime adulthood—as if to become an adult is to become a business. When I told my mother the name of my corp, she sent me a link to the trailer for the animated movie The Boss Baby. 

As the days passed I started to regret my new name. I decided that I needed a powerful name for my corp. The corp was supposed to protect me, not punish me—but the truth was that Elvia the body was suffering, and the incorporation process no longer felt like a simple clerical task or a joke. The process of incorporating itself had doubled my workload and taken on a life of its own. I needed to take the process seriously. I needed to take myself seriously. 

I texted Andrea [5:25am] asking to discuss a change of course. Was it too late to re-incorporate as LEVIATHAN, INC. (all caps with a comma and a period)? I sent her a screenshot of the frontispiece of Hobbes’s Leviathan for reference. Perhaps I could use this as my corporate logo? 

While I waited for Andrea to text me back, I stared at this image, zooming in and out. In his 1651 treatise Leviathan, Hobbes argues that absolute monarchy is the only logical solution for governance. The drawing that opens the book, made by the French artist Abraham Bosse (bosse baby?) shows an enormous king presiding over a landscape, his king-dom, holding a sword in one hand and a monk’s staff in the other. He’s not free-lancing with those weapons. He’s the one hiring freelancers. 

The king appears to be wearing scaled armor or have a horrible skin affliction. In fact, his torso and arms are made of the bodies of three hundred people. These are his subjects. It’s like one of those Arcimboldo paintings where a man’s face is made of vegetables or fruits. Here the body is made of other bodies. 

Hobbes believed that people are, by nature, violent and chaotic, which is why they need a ruler with absolute power. In his terminology, human beings are “Natural Persons,” while rulers are “Artificial Persons” who represent the “collective will.” The Artificial Person acts in the best interest of his populace of Natural Persons because they are parts of his body; any harm to them is harm to him. If there is discord—say, an arm tries to pull a Bartleby and refuses to work—the ruler will know. He will even cut off the arm if necessary.   

Ha, ha, Andrea texted back at 9 am. This isn’t an art project. Also it’s way too late to change the name. 

Right. The corp was not a creative project. The corp was not a metaphor. Money is real, or at least the realest fiction there is. I had been trying to extract meaning from this experience through literature, philosophy, etymology, hoping to learn something profound about the world and my body through this new type of engagement with capitalism, but in reality I was just a Natural Person free-lancing for a corporation made up of countless others like me, and the name I chose to give my corp had no significance at all.  

•

When I gave up trying to forge meaning and detect irony (which is to say, when I paused being a writer), I found it was easier to grasp the situation. 

Until December, I had a body with a name and a passport, and these were what made me a person, conceptually and legally. 

I did work for other people, and I got paid for that work. 

Once I had formed a corp, the corp would technically be the one doing the work. 

I was to own the corp. But the corp was to own me. 

When I worked, my corp would get paid.  

Then my corp would pay me a salary.

The corp would pay my salary by moving money from the corp’s bank account to my own bank account. 

From then on, I would owe the government two separate types of taxes: taxes on the corp’s money and taxes on my own money. 

If the corp didn’t pay me very much of its money, I would not get taxed much, because I would not be earning much. 

If the money stayed in the corp’s bank account, what it spent could be written off as a corporate expense and what was left could be taxed at a lower rate. 

Once my corp paid me and we both paid our taxes, I could use the remaining money to pay for the physical consequences of sitting at the computer all day, such as steroids to treat my dislocated shoulder, which Dr. Louis agreed to prescribe me over the phone but which my insurance wouldn’t pay for. Despite being the President and the Employee, my corp couldn’t offer me insurance. That’s something only big corps can do, for people they absorb fully into their own bodies. 

•

New York State called: there had been a glitch, and I needed to re-enter that second round of codes into the online system. My mother called: I had never replied to her text about the Boss Baby. My student called: I had forgotten to cancel class and I had not shown up. Shauna from the bank called: how would I rate her service? Sorry. Everyone but New York State was going to have to wait until the end of Q4.

The month of creating my corp started to remind me of the type of associative mania I sometimes got while writing a novel, where everything starts to fit together and nothing feels like a coincidence and you’re constantly glimpsing patterns in the noise. But instead of that fertile, generative connectivity, this was a different, bad kind. The deeply paranoid kind. The corp was making me paranoid. 

On my last day teaching class, I was driving down the highway on my way to the college, when my body jolted and then started to shake. My first thought was that my stomach was grumbling loudly. But it was a far more exaggerated shaking than that—maybe I was having a panic attack? I did not think I was panicking. And I could not figure out where the vibration originated. I wondered if I was experiencing an earthquake, a tectonic shift below the Taconic Highway. Was it coming from inside or outside? Was something doing this to me, or was I doing it to myself?

In an act of faith, I removed my hands from the wheel. Miraculously, the car kept driving steadily in its lane. I was shaking; the whole car was shaking; but still we were driving. Time slowed. I wanted to laugh. 

Then, I leaned out the window and looked behind me. A semi-truck had come up behind my car and its fender had wedged under my rear bumper. The truck had scooped me up and was pushing me forward. I was being driven. I tried to wave, but the truck driver’s seat was so far above mine that we couldn’t even see each other.  

I remembered to be afraid, shoved my foot on the gas pedal, and the car revved and juddered and fell off the truck fender with a dramatic clunk. I swerved out of the lane and onto the highway shoulder. The car sagged heavily to the right as two tires deflated. I tried to reach around for my phone to call someone, but my shoulder had, of course, dislodged again from its socket. The arm was limp. Pain flooded forward. I was in awe: Dr. Louis had successfully manifested a car crash for me.   

When he arrived on the scene, the tow truck man, John, told me that the rear end of my car was destroyed. I clambered into the truck beside him so he could drive me to his auto body shop. He was smoking a huge blunt, and while he drove with one hand and smoked with the other, he gave me an estimate for the cost of repair. 

According to his stoned estimation, the repair was going to cost the exact amount, to the dollar, as the first paycheck from the big corp that I was expecting to receive in my S corp’s bank account as soon as ELVIA INC was finalized and ready to receive. 

The next morning, Shauna from the bank called to tell me that unfortunately there had been a hiccup, and my corporate bank account was not approved to receive payments yet. Damn, I said, I hope I’m still on track to make that million dollars. Well, that’s actually the problem, she said coldly, as if she had not been in on the joke. Your account was flagged. The million-dollar revenue was deemed unrealistic. 

While on the phone with Shauna, I received an email from my editor at the magazine. The editor claimed that I had missed my most recent deadline by several weeks and that the magazine would not be publishing my reviews anymore. I was indignant—this couldn’t be right. I checked the calendar. It was true. Apparently, I had not met any of my writing deadlines in December. I had forgotten about any deadline but my corp’s.  

Why had I forgotten to write? Was it simply that I had no time? Was I too distracted by the mind-altering pain from my shoulder? Was it that I had written President as my role at ELVIA INC instead of Esteemed Writer of Great Potential? Or was it that I had become so involved—addicted—to the bureaucratic process itself? 

Cause and effect were scrambled. I wasn’t sure I was participating in my life decisions. My shoulder had dislocated itself and then my car was crashed upon and I was no longer writing without having chosen to quit.

December 26 rolled around and I got a letter in the mail saying there had been an error in my corporate verification process. It said SEND NEW YORK STATE $7,000 TODAY OR ELVIA INC IS GONE. I dialed Andrea. No, it’s not a scam, she told me calmly. Just send them the money and you’ll be fine. I had no idea that my corp could hold me ransom.

When I finally returned to Dr. Louis, contorted in pain, I decided not to tell her about the real car crash, pretending that the dislocation remained spontaneous—a mystery. She said, still suspicious: I wonder which straw broke the camel’s back. The body keeps the straw, I said. One million annual pieces of straw.

•

For the last class of the semester, which I missed due to the accident, I had assigned Enrique Vila-Matas’s novel Bartleby & Co. Narrated by an isolated man on “sick leave” from his office job, the book is a catalog of literary dropouts—a story of writing told through silences and absences. It’s constructed as a series of footnotes, as if the narrator can’t quite admit that he’s writing a book himself and could only do so through formal subterfuge. Each footnote tells the story of a writer who stopped writing. Most of the writers are real people, but some are fictionalized or imaginary. 

Their stories cover just about every reason to quit. Boredom. Sickness. Grief. Impostor syndrome. A sense of inadequacy. Fear of fame. Running out of money. Lust for a lover. A sublime encounter with nature or God that cannot be captured in words and renders language useless for the rest of your life. Getting tired and giving up. Preferring not to. 

And there are so many methods of quitting. Burning your manuscripts. Disappearing into the wilderness. Disowning your work. Going on television and saying terrible things in order to discredit yourself. Changing your name. Killing someone else. Killing yourself. 

Can quitting itself be a creative act—the supreme creative act? This is the question at the heart of Vila-Matas’s book, and it’s the question I would have posed to my students, had I taught the class.  

Vila-Matas makes a distinction between writers who stop writing and writers who fail to write. The former is the noblest creature, the “writer of the no.” The writer of the no, who used to write and now actively not-writes, is the truest writer of all. On the other hand: “There is no merit in being a writer of the no because you have failed.” 

What’s the difference between failing to write and writing no? From the outside, there is no clear difference between can’t and won’t. Both look like quitting. Only the writer knows which kind she is. 

I always found it funny that Vila-Matas gathers all these solitary Bartlebys into a “Bartleby & Co.,” as if they had a corporate shell uniting them into a collective of non-writers, as if they were an army of knights courageously non-lancing alongside one another. But the nature of being a Bartleby is that you do it alone. You can only do it alone, because only you can know if you are a writer of the no, and for this reason is the most private and truest art. 

While preparing my notes for the Bartleby class I never taught, I felt a grim satisfaction in joining the worldwide community of real and fictional and autofictional quitters. I was not yet sure whether I was a failure or a true writer of the no. I was not even sure whether I had properly quit. But at least I was proud of having discovered a new method for quitting that Vila-Matas had not covered in his taxonomy: becoming a corp. 

When the semester was over, I received an email from a student about how angry Bartleby & Co. had made her. She hated, she said, that Vila-Matas’s narrator seems to make no distinction between writing and publishing your writing. Why all this drama about whether to quit? Shut up and keep a diary if you don’t want to publish. For all we know, these Bartlebys are writing in secret. 

Fuck yes! I wrote back. Exactly! They could be writing in secret! We’ll never know if a Bartleby “really” stops writing. The impossible tension between doing and not-doing, knowing and not-knowing, is the point! It’s true that making and offering to the world are separate acts, but they aren’t separable. Any writer, even the most secret diarist, the most multiply-pseudonymous Pessoa out there, writes to be read. Even if the reader is imaginary, hypothetical, unborn, there is someone on the other side of the words, and it’s disingenuous to pretend otherwise. That’s what it means to be a writer versus someone who writes. 

•

When my mother visited for the holidays, she brought me a little Ziploc bag of memorabilia that she had saved from my childhood. Inside were several drawings that I had made in kindergarten, some Valentines from school friends, and a collage celebrating Y2K. 

I also found several little books that I had made in elementary school. I had no memory of handwriting these stories on lined paper, which were carefully folded and stapled together. My young self had been scrupulous about making these pamphlets look like “real” books. I’d illustrated the covers, given them front and back matter, and even prices.  

Rifling through the plastic bag, I selected one of my books called “The Cat That Died Nine Times.” On the back, I had copied a New York Times review describing the book as “an eminently readable debut from a major new talent.” On the inside flap I found the name of the publisher. At the bottom, where one might find Scribner or Penguin: ELVIA INC. Below was a fake barcode and PRICE: 50 ¢. 

I stared aghast and amazed at the name of my corp written in my own elementary handwriting. How had I not remembered this? The extent of my self-forgetting was shocking—as was the extent of my self-construction. Once again, I felt cause and effect crashing into each other. ELVIA INC was a prophecy foretold. I had been a Boss Baby all along. I carefully put the book back in the bag without reading it. Even at ten years old, some part of me had understood that to be a writer was to be a peddler and that there is no art free from compromise.  

My first corporate paycheck arrived on December 30, and on December 31, by the grace of an unknowable corporate god, the Leviathan of the State of New York pronounced ELVIA INC an official entity and me its President and Employee in the eyes of the law, fulfilling my childhood destiny, which I had written and then forgotten, but which, via the power of backwards positive manifestation, had come true, just like a car crash, and I entered the new year alongside the Co. of Bartlebys who have come before me and all the corps still to come.