by Max Barry
“Maybe it's a fire,” Holly says in the gloom.
“Who said that?” Megan calls. “Did someone say there's a fire?”
“Fire!” Roger shouts from West Berlin. “Get to the elevators!”
“I didn't say there was a fire!” Holly shouts, but her voice is lost in an argument over whether it's safe to use the elevators during a fire. It is a loud argument, because everyone is sure it's not except Roger, and he is insistent. A chair is knocked over. Megan, trying to get out, bumps her desk and hears bears spill to the floor, just before something crunches underfoot. The lights flicker as the backup generator kicks in, long enough for Megan to see that she has crushed a mother-and-daughter bear set. Tears well in her eyes. Darkness descends again.
“Don't take the elevators!” Elizabeth shouts. She gropes along the wall until she reaches the door to the stairwell and tugs at the handle. But it won't move. For one insane second she thinks Infrastructure Management has locked the stairwell door. Then she realizes she must simply be lost in the darkness. Then she realizes she's not. This is the stairwell door, it is locked, and they are all trapped. “There's no way out!”
People panic, bumping into things and stepping on Megan's bears. Megan gets on her hands and knees, hysterical, trying to save them all; the bears, that is. Jones grabs Holly's buttocks in the dark but doesn't realize it: they're so well toned that he mistakes them for the back of an office chair. Holly is too shocked to say anything. Freddy becomes disoriented and, thinking a sliver of light is a corridor, runs into Sydney's office wall and rebounds from the glass.
Sydney's door pops open. Daylight streams into the department, dazzling them. Sydney's tiny body is framed in the doorway, like some kind of angel. “What the hell are you doing?”
When the power is back and the phones are working—neither of which happen quickly—recriminations begin to fly. During the blackout, numerous departments discovered their stairwell doors were locked, and this has generated a certain amount of antagonism toward Infrastructure Management. People want the department to be reported to the police, or even outsourced. An emergency conference call between Senior Management and all departmental managers is arranged.
Infrastructure Management protests that it locks the stairwells for safety reasons—a few years earlier, a PA tripped and Legal went into conniptions, has everyone forgotten that? They installed a sophisticated system (at great expense) to automatically unlock the doors in case of emergency, but because of the blackout, it didn't work. And whose fault is that? Information Technology.
Senior Management's focus swings onto IT. Indeed, what kind of department allows a telephone call to shut down the building? Information Technology hastens to explain exactly what kind. They have half the staff they did six months ago and keep getting lumped with new systems, like Infrastructure Management's emergency door opener, that require supervision, maintenance, and integration with everything else. It has twenty-four increasingly harried and sleep-deprived technical staff fighting to maintain digital life support to Zephyr's body, in between taking calls from senior executives who are sure they sent an e-mail to somebody last week but now the guy is saying he never got it. In this environment, less critical tasks, like simulating what would happen in the event of a PABX meltdown, have had to be postponed.
Less critical? Less critical? Senior Management hopes Information Technology is joking. The building shut down! What Senior Management wants to hear, right now, is that IT understands exactly what went wrong and can promise it will never happen again. You can say this for Senior Management: it knows how to articulate a goal. The strategy may be fuzzy, the execution nonexistent, but Senior Management knows what it wants.
IT does know what went wrong, down to the line number of the offending piece of code. It begins to explain several possible solutions. But these involve confusing phrases like “automatic fail-over switching,” and Senior Management gets irritable. It skips ahead to the logical conclusion: Information Technology is a bunch of idiots who locked the stairwells. They put the wheels in motion: IT will be outsourced by the end of the week.
Jones flips through The Omega Management System over a microwaved TV dinner. Jones lives in a four-floor walk-up with crumbling plaster walls and life-threatening wiring. Until quite recently, he did so with Tim and Emily, classmates from Washington U—Tim was an incredible cook and Emily incredible all over, as far as Jones was concerned. One night he confessed his feelings to her in the hallway outside the bathroom, and she said he was sweet and she liked him a lot but they couldn't; how unfair would that be to Tim? This was four months ago, and Jones began to focus, laser-like, on the end of his student days, which would likewise terminate their three-way living arrangement. The day of his final exam, he came home to find Tim and Emily waiting for him on the sofa, holding hands. “We didn't tell you sooner,” Tim said, “because we didn't think it would be fair on you.” Now Jones lives alone and eats microwaved dinners.
He flips to the section on retrenchment. A sacking, the book says, is one of the most harrowing and stressful events you may ever experience—Jones assumes “you” means the person being sacked until he realizes it's talking about the manager. According to the book, sackings can be highly destabilizing: workers stop thinking about doing their jobs and start thinking about whether they'll still have them. It then describes a range of strategies managers can use to harness that fear and uncertainty and jujitsu-throw it into a motivating factor.
What Jones doesn't find in the book—and he doesn't notice this at first; he has to flick back and forth—is any mention of the retrenched employees. How they might feel, for example, or what might happen to them afterward. It's kind of creepy. It's almost as if once they are sacked, they cease to exist.
Q3/3: SEPTEMBER
JONES ARRIVES to find Freddy loitering outside the glass lobby doors, smoking. “Hey, Freddy. How come no one smokes out here but you?”
Freddy shrugs. “I like it here. Most people go out the back, or the side. Sometimes I do, too.”
Jones peers in through the tinted glass. Neither Gretel nor Eve has arrived yet, but on Eve's desk is a towering stack of flowers. Jones looks at Freddy.
“What?”
“Are you sending the receptionist flowers?”
Freddy jumps. “Why do you say that?”
Jones snickers.
“What?”
“That's a yes. That's what guilty people say; they don't want to lie, so they say, ‘Why do you say that?'”
“I . . .” Freddy waits for a janitor, an older man with a shock of silver hair and blue overalls, to pass. Jones classifies the man in his head: Infrastructure Maintenance department—Clean Teams division, one of Jones's potential customers. Freddy leans close, bathing Jones in his smoky cigarette breath. “Don't you dare tell her.”
“You send them anonymously?”
“Of course! Have you seen her? She won't talk to me.”
“I dunno, she seems nice enough.”
Freddy shakes his head emphatically. “She can never know.”
“If you're not going to tell her who they're from, why send them?”
“Because she's beautiful.”
“Well, that's nice, but I bet she'd like to know who sent her those flowers. They must have cost you fifty bucks.”
“Forty.” He shrugs. “A week.”
“A week?”
“I've been doing this for a while.” He shifts his feet. “What?”
“Freddy, you have to tell her.”
“She'll probably be disappointed. She probably thinks it's from someone else.”
“No, look, we'll come up with a plan. Trust me. She'll be thrilled to find out you've been sending her flowers.”
“Hmm.” His eyes flick hopefully at Jones, then away. “I don't know about that.”
Jones looks at his watch. “I'd better get inside. I want to catch someone from Senior Management before they start work.”
Freddy takes a step back
ward in shock. “Senior Management?”
“Yeah. I want to know what this company actually does.”
“Didn't you listen to the chimp story? It doesn't matter.”
“But the company could be doing anything. What if it's unethical?”
Freddy looks at him blankly.
“I'd feel better knowing,” Jones says. “So I'm going to talk to Senior Management.”
Freddy shakes his head slowly. “You're so different, Jones.”
On level 17—which is to say, not far above ground level—morning sunshine pours through the gym's floor-to-ceiling windows. Holly, entwined in a machine that facilitates bicep crunches, has struck up a conversation with a communications manager from Corporate Marketing. The communications manager is about twenty-five and has a jaunty ponytail that swings from side to side as she power walks on a treadmill. Holly is enjoying talking to the communications manager, but she is becoming jealous of that ponytail.
“First we had to cut out above-the-line advertising,” the communications manager says. “Then we cut advertising altogether. After that we were down to market research and PR. But lately we don't even do those.”
“Then what do you do?”
“Nothing. We don't have the budget.”
“Nothing at all?”
“Not since June.” The communications manager winks. “Don't tell anybody. So far, no one's noticed.”
“Huh,” Holly says.
“Before then, we were really under the gun. We got warned on expenses three times in a month. But now everyone's feeling really positive. Morale is way up.”
“But what do you do all day?”
“Oh, we're still working. We're working harder than ever. Every day we identify new ways to lower expenses. Just yesterday, we boarded up our office windows.”
“You have windows?” Holly cries.
“Had. Now they're covered in cardboard.”
“Why would you do that?”
“Infrastructure Management bills for windows. Covering them up cut our overhead by 8 percent. But we're just getting started. Today we're getting rid of our desks and chairs. We figure we don't really need them anymore, since we're not doing any marketing. And it's way better feng shui. We'll put the computers on the carpet.”
“What do you use the computers for?”
The communications manager's eyes widen. “Hey hey. That's the kind of thinking we could use in marketing. That's a great idea.”
Holly stops crunching. “If you're not actually doing any marketing, aren't you worried they'll cut you?”
“With expenses this low? Which company do you work for?” She laughs. Her ponytail swishes.
Jones swipes his ID card through the elevator's reader and pushes 2, which is SENIOR MANAGEMENT. This is only Jones's fourth week at Zephyr Holdings, but he's heard about level 2. Nobody claims to have been there personally, but everyone knows somebody who has. If Jones believes the stories, when the elevator doors open on level 2 he will be confronted with rolling meadows, frolicking deer, and naked virgins feeding grapes to Zephyr executives reclining on cushions. As for level 1, the sprawling penthouse office where Daniel Klausman composes all-staff voice mails and receives strategic visions—that's different. Nobody claims to have been there.
The button for level 2 lights up, then goes dark. Jones tries again. He reswipes his ID. But the elevator does not want to take him to level 2. Across the lobby, he sees the front doors slide open and Gretel Monadnock walk in. Jones calls, “Hey, Gretel, how come the elevator won't go?”
“Um . . .” She puts her purse on the giant orange reception desk, eyes the enormous flower arrangement, and runs a hand through her hair. Jones feels a twinge of sympathy for Gretel, who would probably be considered beautiful if she didn't sit next to Eve Jantiss. “I guess you don't have the proper security clearance.”
“How do I get that?”
“Where are you trying to get to?”
“Level 2.”
She looks startled. “Why do you want to do that?”
“I want to talk to Senior Management.” The lobby doors part again: this time it's Freddy, finished with his cigarette. “How do I make an appointment with someone from Senior Management?”
Gretel looks at Freddy, uncertain. Freddy says, “No, he's serious.”
“Um . . . can I get back to you on that? Nobody's asked me that before.”
“You're kidding.”
“No, she's not,” Freddy says. “You're meant to send requests like this up through your manager, Jones. You don't barge in on Senior Management.”
“This is ridiculous.” Jones puts his hands on his hips. “I just want to know what the company does.” Then he spots the coffee table for visitors, littered with marketing brochures and annual reports. “A-ha.”
“He's happy, now,” Freddy says to Gretel. “Hey, is Eve due in this morning or what?”
“Eve doesn't keep me up-to-date on her movements.”
“Oh.”
“Um . . . Jones?” Gretel puts out her hand to touch Jones, who is passing by with a handful of annual reports.
“I'll bring these right back, I promise.”
She shakes her head. “No, I mean . . . I've wondered what Zephyr does, too. I've . . . well, we're not supposed to maintain contact with people who have left, but . . . I've been writing down their names.” She looks embarrassed. “It's just nobody ever talks about them, and I think . . . someone should remember them. So I write down their names. I've got the name of everybody who's worked here in the last three years.”
“Oh,” Jones says. He's not sure what to do with this information. “That's . . . really nice.”
“It's really morbid,” Freddy says in the elevator. “It's wrong. What sort of person writes down the names of people as they get fired? It's like a death list.”
Jones flips through the annual report. “‘Diversified product offering.' ‘Vertically integrated distribution chain.' ‘Chosen markets.' This tells me nothing!”
“It's Zephyr Holdings. I don't think we manufacture anything directly. We just control other companies.”
“Mmm,” Jones says, unconvinced. He flips the page and is confronted with a glossy photo of smiling employees underneath the words: NOT A JOB. A WAY OF LIFE. “Why are there no pictures of Daniel Klausman in this thing?”
“He's camera shy. There are no photos of him anywhere.”
“None?”
Freddy shrugs. “He doesn't like to meet people face-to-face. Doesn't mean he can't do his job.”
“Do you even know what he looks like?”
“Me? No. But some people say they've met him. Hey, check it out.” He points at the button panel. “No more Information Technology.”
Jones realizes that instead of the number 19, there is a small round hole. “They actually remove the button?”
“For security, I guess.”
Jones looks at him.
“Chimps,” Freddy says. “Think of the chimps.”
“I don't want to be the new chimp.” Jones snaps shut the annual report. “I want to know what the hell's going on.”
Elizabeth sits on the toilet and stares at the stall door. There's nothing particularly interesting about the door. That's why she's looking at it. Elizabeth has had a rough morning. Her stomach is tight. She has vomited. But it's not the individual issues that bother her. It's the thought that they may be symptoms. This is the third morning in a row she has been sick.
The realization has been growing in a corner of Elizabeth's mind for some time. Now she faces it, this tiny, wriggling zygote of knowledge. She mouths: I am pregnant. The words taste alien. There is an invader in her uterus.
She knows who the father is. She closes her eyes and puts her hand to her forehead. Yes, she falls in love with her customers, but she doesn't make a habit of sleeping with them. She's interested in relationships, not one-night stands. Except . . . it was the last day of the quarter and they were hammering out details over p
izza and wine stolen from Marketing, and she was already in love with him even before he started talking about a “second round” of training. He was the personnel development coordinator of Forecasting and Auditing, and he hovered his pen above the dotted line, smiling, and said, “Sealed with a kiss.”
If he'd signed first, there would have been no problem. She found them less attractive once they signed. She would have shaken his hand, maybe kissed his cheek. But with the pen an inch from the paper, her adrenaline surging, and the wine buzzing in her brain, she kissed him, this man, who was then a customer and soon after transferred into Training Sales to become her colleague, and Roger kissed her back, and they had sex on his desk with her skirt bunched around her waist and the order forms scrunching beneath her buttocks. They didn't use protection, which seems idiotic now . . . but Elizabeth doesn't want to analyze this too deeply. She is single and thirty-six and was having sex for the first time in two years; it is not beyond the realms of possibility that a small, secret part of her—a part that has very little to do with selling training packages—performed an executive veto on the condom issue, striking it off the agenda, ensuring that the decision, much like Roger himself, slipped in without adequate review.
Near the end, she cried out that she loved him, and he said, “I love it, too,” which should have told her plainly enough that it was going to end badly. But she ignored it because she did love him, at least for a while, even when it was over and he was pulling up his pants, avoiding her eyes.
“We shouldn't tell anybody,” Roger said. “I'm not one of those men.”
“What men?” But he was scribbling his signature on the order and she felt the love draining out of her, dribbling away, even as an essential part of Roger did the same. Although, she realizes now, not enough of an essential part of Roger.
“You know. Men who do this.”
“Do what?”
He handed her the order. “Have sex with sales reps.”
He might as well have kicked her. She'd thought he was going to say “affairs.” She'd thought he was going to say “lose control.” She concentrated on tugging her skirt into place and let her hair fall over her face.