I watched him go. The restaurant was full of men like Beales, hunched over talking business, getting today’s angle, the buzz, the advantage. Men in their late thirties or early forties who now carried a wife and several kids, the house. Strapped in for the long ride, boys. And at this level to stop moving was to die. Those not promoted carried a certain malignancy that sooner or later assured their professional death. You have to be promoted or be given a new project every year or two or else everybody knows you’ve run aground, turned to stone—I’d already seen men and women who were finished at forty-three, forty-five. They got that look, that worry playing across their faces. Meanwhile legions of other smart people crowded to take your place, pushing from behind like you did, from underneath, clawing at your feet. Once you’re above a certain level, nobody will ever feel sorry for you if you falter, they will trample your corpse into the sand as they run past. If you were a Beales with a wife and three kids, the tuition payments would be murder, the mortgage was five thousand a month, and he was probably looking around for a decent beach place on Long Island, somewhere to dump the family for a month in the summer (renting was a pain, no mortgage deduction on the income tax), and if you had a place on the beach, you needed a boat to show you weren’t cheap, and that was another seventy-five grand, easy. I knew Beales; he understood that all he had to do with the V-S deal was hang around the picnic blanket and that would prove he had the real corporate stuff, that he hadn’t needed the eighties, not like the others had—the deadbeats and smilers all lifted by the big tide. He knew his time was now. The big money wasn’t too far away. Everybody was out to get theirs. Beales was going to get his. And I, greedy Jack Whitman, was going to get mine.
But what you get is often different than what you want. When I returned, Helen told me I was due to go listen to the systems consultants that afternoon. Even at the high levels, one is forced to waste time now and then.
“I can’t go,” I told her. “These things kill me.”
“You’re scheduled,” she said.
“Everyone else go back to the Plaza?” I asked.
“I think so, yes.”
“So I could skip this meeting and no one would know.”
“God would know.”
“He already knows everything, Helen. What has happened, what will happen. He knows my sins, too, and they depress him. He thought I had a shot at the big cloudy show—you know, angels and harp music and conversations with Mother Teresa. But now it’s out of the question.”
“Get out of here,” Helen said in mock sternness. “You’re late.”
I elevatored down three floors to a maze of offices where the carpeting is older and the corners of the hallways are smudged and damaged by the mail carts that go around each day. A merger agreement with V-S would mean linked computer systems. I found the meeting room. The door was closed—I was late. The conference room was too dark for me to see who else was there and I slid in just as the presentation began. In the front, facing the group, stood the information systems consultant, a young black guy in a stiff suit, one of the new high priests of accounting technology who had been brought in to discuss the logistical problems of hooking up the Corporation’s computers with those of a theoretical corporation the size and complexity of V-S. The consultant blinked almost constantly, as if to accommodate the speed of thought within his own head: “. . . and before I get to the prepared diagrams that demonstrate the particular macro network that you may wish to consider, I thought I’d quickly run through—” Useless information, which the consultant could always just pass out in ring-binders if he wanted. But his outfit was probably getting about sixteen hundred dollars per billed “team hour” and so they’d give us the whole show. “. . . in order to integrate a far-flung decentralized network typically composed of DOS PC’s, OS/2’s and Digital VAX minis and maybe a Hitachi AS/EX-80 mainframe in Germany and convert to GAAP standards for use over here and to get all the baud rates to match, my friends, we would propose a KAP accounting system designed by Roma Grupo S.p.A. in Italy that runs on the IBM S/370 architecture, because it performs in eight languages and will incorporate Swedish umlauts or double-byte Japanese Kanji characters or even those incredibly long German nouns.”
The consultant gave a soundless little laugh and then smiled patiently, a holy man waiting for his message to reach the pews.
“Can it handle South Americanfigures?” I asked dutifully from my chair in the dark. “You’ve got to figure those as a possibility. Brazil’s inflation is something like five hundred percent a year.”
“Yes,” the consultant responded, no doubt pleased by a further complication. “A point considerably well taken. You’ve got to have accounting packages that will deflate and revalue those crazy Argentinian and Brazilian hyperinflation numbers. That means very large currency blocks in the software so that numbers in the hundreds of billions in the local currency can be processed. But how would such a system be configured? Well, friends, we must remember that two marginally compatible systems are being networked here, so the Roma Grupo KAP would sit on top of those two. Let’s call the two systems A and B. Both are stand alone systems and of comparable current technology, maybe system B is a bit bigger, but A is thirty percent faster. The data can travel from B to A or from A to B. The question, essentially, is one of control. Who controls the information? Is system A a stop for the division financial data on the way to . . .”
And so on, interminably, an invisible freight train of information. The consultant’s blinking became worse with the effort—he was brilliant in his ability to project the complexity of an enormous computer system within his own imagination—one of those people who could have been happy in another age carving endless, unbroken meanders on endless palace doors for the endless glory of the Medicis. Then came the computer-generated graphs and charts and diagrams with catchy graphics and pull-down menus on a large-screen TV and he stood in the darkened room of the silhouetted heads. The colored high-resolution screen flickered from one image to the next, switching into deeper levels of detail, and it all seemed like a kind of sickness that people would spend their time on these things.
In the darkness I began to fall asleep. Perhaps I actually dozed off, for when the hand came down on my shoulder from behind I jumped. I sensed a presence next to me, a smoker’s breath, a drift of after-shave cologne. Then came the words whispered close to my ear: “You have an exasperating habit of saying interesting things, my friend, and so this old man would like to have one more discussion with you.” The hand remained firm. “Two days from now. But this time you have to come up with something better, something new.” The hand patted my shoulder twice. “I’ll do my best to stay alive until then.”
Then, as the consultant droned on, before I had quite understood what had happened, the figure moved silently through the flickering gloom and slipped out the door. The Chairman.
He was in the game.
At home that night, I turned on the news while Dolores cooked dinner for the three of us. First Peter Jennings—the subtly sardonic tilt to his head. Then I channel-hopped to Rather on CBS—a cigar-store Indian with a moving mouth. I’d once seen him walking outside Black Rock, the CBS headquarters, looking lost, wearing thick glasses that made his eyes into huge liquid oysters. When you see him on TV, you don’t realize how stout the man is.
Maria came and jumped in my lap, taking the remote unit.
“I’m going to change the channel,” she said.
“Maria, this is the news, and I—”
She flicked. A car skidded across a dusty horizon in slow motion, all poetry and color and money. I wanted to drive it, even though I had a car already, kept in a nearby garage, rarely used. Maria flicked again. A beer commercial, everybody twenty-three years old, having the best time of their lives. I wanted to be there with them. The advertisers know me so well. In America, if no one knows you, at least the advertisers do.
“I want to watch Bambi,” Maria said.
“You can’t,” I
explained. “You have to put in the tape and the VCR is hooked up to the TV downstairs.”
“Why?”
“Why is the VCR downstairs?”
“Yes.”
“Because I just have one and I had to put it with one TV or the other.”
“Oh.” She looked at the screen. “I want to watch it here!” she shrieked, testing me.
Maria saw no reason why she could not control what she saw and where. If what she wanted to watch could be played on the side of a soap bubble or on the surface of the milk in her cup, she’d be momentarily enthralled and then accept it as reality. She was young enough to have that happen. The magic of technology did not intimidate her, not yet, at least.
“Maria, let me ask you something, okay?”
“No!”
“Just one question.”
“All right.” She wriggled impatiently.
“Why do you like looking at Bambi shows and TV and things?”
“ ’Cause it’s fun.”
“Suppose the TV was on a computer?” I asked Maria.
“Could you still get Bambi?”
“Sure.”
“It might be fun.”
“Supposing you could watch it and tell Bambi what to do?”
“I like it. Let me do it!” She grabbed the remote control and flicked it through the channels. Then she called up the small alternative channel box in the screen and looked at the other shows with that too. When I was a kid, all we had that was unusual was cartoons on the local UHF channel—no cable, no VCR, no big-screen TV. Yet here was Maria; not quite four years old, and the new technology was part of her understanding of reality.
“How did you learn to do that?” I asked.
She bounced in my lap. “I don’t know! It’s fun.”
I knew then, suddenly, what I would do with the Chairman. That night, while Dolores was giving Maria a bath, I called our NewMedia subgroup head in L.A. and asked him if he could send their latest prototype to New York. He panicked. It wasn’t ready for formal presentation yet, he said. There were bugs that had to be worked out and the whole project was nine people in seven rooms and they were all working on separate pieces of software.
“It’s informal,” I told him.
“You looking for next month, or what?”
“Day after tomorrow. Get the software, the box it runs on, and the technician on the plane tomorrow.”
“That’s an impossible request.”
“No it’s not,” I said. “Get your people on a jet. I don’t care how you get here as long as you’re here tomorrow to set up.”
“Impossible. Really. And it’s an outrageous request.”
“It’s merely a pain in the ass.”
“No, it’s impossible.”
I said nothing and let his words linger in the space between us, the faraway buzzing and popping and murmurings of the dead, the hum of continental space—just a few seconds.
“Who’s the audience?” he finally asked. “A bunch of analysts or something? Wall Street guys?”
“Just one person.”
“One?”
I said the Chairman’s name.
“Come on.”
“It will be me, him, and a technician that you would send to hook it up and make sure it runs. But primarily him.”
He was considering.
“It’s all icon and menu-driven, and has the best new voice-synthesis stuff, right?” I asked.
“Yes, all that’s very good now.”
“Voice synth usually takes a couple of hours to adjust to the individual?”
“No, no. We’re down to fifteen minutes, tops.”
“And the image and motion encyclopedia we were talking about a few months ago?”
“We’ve scanned in . . . let me remember the figure—we’ve got a guy who’s been doing it—it’s about four hundred million, something like four or five hundred million discrete frames. Stock footage, all kinds of stuff.”
“Jesus.”
“Yeah.” He laughed. “It’s pretty good. We’re pretty fucking proud of that.”
“The whole bucket of bolts actually hangs together and works, right?”
“It’s not production standardized, but—”
“But it works, we have one copy that actually works?”
“Yes. But don’t I have to clear this with what’s-his-name, vice president for—”
“Forget that,” I told him. “It’s on my head. Really. That’s not going to be a problem. We’re playing at a whole different level.”
The line was silent.
“You’ll get it here? Floor thirty-nine. Expense everything through this office. Not a division expense. Pad the expense, too, if you could use it in your budget.”
“You’re talking maybe a hundred and fifty thousand easily, to fly the stuff in. Commercial carriers won’t take what they call level-nine technology without special flight insurance. There’s excessive vibration insurance, there’s accidental mishandling insurance—I mean, it’s really a pain. We’ve run into this with trade shows. It had to be loaded and unloaded specially on originating flights, not connecting flights. And there’s special packing and overtime for the technicians . . .”
“No problem. I’ll sign off on everything.”
“Who should I ask for?”
“Me. Ask only for me.”
An hour later Maria was asleep and I was at my desk with papers strewn around my chair. Dolores came into my office. “I was looking for an extra pillow upstairs in the closet,” she said. “You have all of your wife’s clothes.”
I hadn’t been able to throw them out. The walk-in closet on the top floor of the house was full of dresses, blouses, skirts, pants, a few maternity clothes. Even all the socks and underwear and bras were packed away up there. I’d meant to give it all away to a local church, but sometimes late at night when I was unable to sleep, I’d drift upstairs and stand in the closet, perhaps succeeding at catching some faint, fleeting smell of Liz. It was sick and stupid and yet I hadn’t been able to get rid of the clothes.
“You want to try them on?” I said.
Dolores stared at me. “I’m not your dead wife.”
“Of course not,” I said. “I know that.”
“I don’t even know if they’d fit me.”
“Then don’t bother,” I told her.
But ten minutes later Dolores came in wearing one of Liz’s old business suits. The fit was pretty good; whereas Liz had been a little taller, Dolores’s wide shoulders and heavier chest filled out the blouse. She was in her stocking feet.
“The shoes didn’t fit,” she said at the bottom of the staircase. “How do I look?”
I couldn’t tell her, of course, that Liz had worn that very suit on the day she came home from the ob/gyn office to tell me she was pregnant. “You look great,” I said finally. “You could go to work tomorrow in it.”
“Of course it’s not really me.” Dolores smiled. “And I’m not her.”
“Very different,” I said, “in most respects.”
“How?” Dolores teased.
“She’s dead and gone. You’re alive and kicking.”
Dolores took off the suit.
“You’re here,” I said.
“But you remember her.”
“Yes, of course.”
“How well?” She stepped into the clothes she’d had on previously.
“Everything.”
“Everything?”
“Yes, honestly.”
“She as good in bed as me?”
“I thought only men were hung up on that.”
“You going to answer my question?”
This was only half in fun. Dolores could not reach into the grave and bring Liz before her in order to make a woman’s private comparison. So she humbled herself by asking. In a certain respect, it was similar to my wanting to find out who Hector was, except that I had the advantage that he was alive. “You really want to know, don’t you?”
“Y
es.” She nodded. “Tell me.”
All those teenage summers Liz had packed lobsters by day, she had run wild on the beach by night. Cars and beer and a couple of boys each summer. She’d known a few things.
“It’s a tie,” I said. “You’re just as good. Different but just as good.”
Dolores seemed satisfied by this answer, as if it elevated Liz to her level. My answer meant, in her understanding of things, that I had been married to a real woman, not some uptight princess who was photogenic and had nice clothes. She pulled open my file cabinet.
“You mind?” she asked.
“Just don’t misplace stuff.” All my financial records were in order in the file cabinet in my study, the usual stuff: bank statements, canceled checks, mortgage agreements, insurance papers, health records, a record of home improvements, Liz’s death certificate and autopsy report. Dolores idly picked up a sales spreadsheet for one of the divisions with break-outs of monthly sales figures.
“You like being a businessman?” she asked.
“Not these days.”
“Mmmn.” She pulled another paper out of a file and then looked at me accusingly. “Hey, wait a minute.”
“What?”
“This house cost five hundred and nineteen thousand dollars?”
“Yes.”
“That’s a lot.”
“Not in New York City.”
“You paid all that?”
“Well, I’ve got a mortgage for a lot of it.”
“Yeah, but—”
“You’re right, it’s a lot.”
She spied another piece of paper and yanked it up to her eyes. “You have something like seventeen thousand dollars in your checking account?”
“Yes.”
“Your checking account!” Her voice held a shrill edge. “How much do you make? Like a hundred thousand dollars or something?”
“What are you saying to me, Dolores?”
“How much!”
“More than that.”
“How much?”
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