Company

by Max Barry

  She gets her hands inside his shirt and tries to pull it open from the inside, but it's new and the buttons don't budge. Her lips curve beneath his; they both laugh. Eve doesn't remove her gown but eventually Jones works out that he should do it, which initially seems like a challenge but turns out to be an amazing voyage of discovery. He kisses her from navel to shoulder, and when he arrives, she grabs his face and gasps, “I love you!”

  “I love you, too,” Jones says, and the terrible thing about this is that it is true.

  He almost makes it back to bed, but knocks the freestanding mirror with his hip in the darkness. The rotating section flips back and one end bangs against the wall while the other clocks him in the shin. “Owwrg.”

  “Jo-o-o-ones?”

  “Sorry.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Bathroom.” He climbs under the sheets.

  “Oh. Mmm.” Her arm snakes over his chest. Her head nestles into his shoulder. “I thought . . . you were trying to sneak off.”

  “No.”

  “Mmm.” A happy sound. Her fingers tighten on his bicep, then relax. To Jones, who has been single for a year, it is beautiful. In this moment, there is no Zephyr. No Project Alpha. No corporate heartlessness or productivity maximization. There is just him and Eve. There's not a trace of cruelty in the dim lines of her face. No hint of selfishness in the sweep of her hair. The world is perfect.

  Chapter 12 of The Omega Management System (“Meetings: The Good, the Bad, and the Unnecessary”) devotes several pages to the advantages of breakfast meetings. The earlier the better! is the executive summary, because people are at their most mentally alert first thing in the morning. It is a particularly good time to tackle seemingly insurmountable problems: you will be amazed, the book says, at how frequently a morning meeting will deliver breakthrough solutions. Jones was skeptical on first reading, but now he realizes Omega is right. Because it's 5:30 A.M. and it has just occurred to him how to beat Alpha.

  Q4/3: DECEMBER

  PENNY COLLAPSES into the café chair and peers at him. “What are you doing?”

  “What?” Jones says. “Nothing.”

  “You're smiling.”

  “Am I?”

  “Did you bring down Alpha?”

  “No. Well, I had an idea. But I haven't done anything yet.”

  “Oh. So you went the other way.”

  “What other way?” he says, but now even he can feel the smile.

  “Pathetic,” Penny says. “I'm disappointed in you, Stephen.”

  “And yet,” Jones says, “I don't care.” He laughs.

  At ten o'clock on Tuesday an odd smell wafts through Staff Services. A warm, doughy scent, laced with sugar. People stand up in their cubicles and peer around. There, coming through the door—a trolley! And—they rub their eyes—it is piled high with steaming donuts.

  Workers break from their cubicles. For a moment it looks like there might be carnage: torn pastry and cubicle dividers spattered with hot jam. But Roger is there with his PA plus two Staff Services employees—tender winners—and they stand firm. “Wait in your cubicles!” the PA orders. “Do not approach the donuts. The donuts will come to you.”

  The employees hurry back to their desks. They sit with growling stomachs and ears pricked for the trolley's squeaky-wheeled approach.

  Freddy, Jones, Holly, and Elizabeth sit in their cubicle without speaking. They know what's coming. They listen to the growing sounds of chewing and sucking, until the trolley squeaks up to their cubicle entrance and nudges inside. Roger has a donut in his hand. His lips are speckled with sugar. The PA and the two employees are each finishing one off. On the trolley are three donuts.

  “Last cubicle!” Roger says. “Go on, tuck in. Freddy, Jones.”

  They reach out and cautiously take a donut. Neither is brave enough to bite into it.

  “Holly.”

  “That's okay. I don't want one.”

  “Of course you do. Go on.”

  “Really, I'm not hungry. And if there aren't enough to go around—”

  “Take the donut.”

  Holly reluctantly reaches for it. She holds it in her lap and ducks her head so that her hair hangs over her face in a blond sheet.

  “Hmm,” Roger says. “You know what, Holly, you're right. We're one short.”

  Elizabeth shrugs. “Fine. I don't mind.”

  “I could have sworn we had the right number.” Roger puts his hands on his hips. “I'm sure we had exactly one for each employee.”

  Elizabeth abruptly stands up. Her thin gray coat, which these days she never takes off, billows down to the floor. She stares at the ceiling and begins breathing fast.

  “I can only suppose,” Roger says, “that someone must have taken two.” He shakes his head, bewildered. “But who would do that? What sort of person would take an extra donut, knowing they'd be stealing from a co-worker?” He looks at his PA.

  “I don't know, Roger.”

  “Jones? Freddy? Holly? Any ideas? No? No thoughts? What about you, Elizabeth?”

  Her head snaps down. Her face is flushed a deep, angry red. “I took your donut. Is that what you want to hear? There. I took your donut. I was hungry, I ate it. My God! You are so petty! So petty!”

  Roger folds his arms. “So you took my donut.”

  “Yes!”

  “Wendell,” he says, “was fired for that donut. Do you realize that?”

  Elizabeth puts her hands to her face. “Oh my God.”

  “On the one hand, Elizabeth, I appreciate that you've finally confessed. But you need to understand the gravity of the situation. This isn't just about a donut. This is about teamwork. It's about respecting your co-workers. What is a person meant to think when you steal their donut? What does it say about your respect for them?”

  “I can't resist you,” Elizabeth says.

  “It's a sad state of—” Roger stops. “What?”

  “I think about you all the time. I don't mean to. I can't help it. It's making me crazy. I . . . I . . .” Her voice tightens, then she spits it out. “I want you.”

  Holly claps a hand over her mouth. Freddy's mouth sags open. Jones's eyes expand until they take up his entire face.

  “I see.” Roger's voice is a growl. “You're being funny.”

  “I'm desperate,” Elizabeth whispers, “for . . . you.”

  Roger's lips tighten until they are almost invisible. His jaw muscles work. Jones, Freddy, and Holly simultaneously push back in their office chairs, moving themselves out of the firing line. Then Roger turns on his heel and strides out. His three surprised lackeys are left to maneuver the trolley around and wheel it after him. The Training Sales team listen to its slow, squeaky progress.

  Freddy says, “Oh. My. God.”

  Holly says, “Elizabeth, you kick so much ass.”

  Elizabeth's face is drained of color. “I need to sit down.” Holly leaps up. Elizabeth takes her hand until she can grip the chair's plastic armrests. She looks from one awestruck sales assistant face to another. “That . . . I was just joking, you know.”

  “Oh God, of course,” Holly says. “That's why it was so funny.”

  “Right.” She is starting to shake. “Exactly.”

  Roger slams his office door hard enough to make the glass wall shudder and the vertical blinds bang. He stalks to his desk and snatches up the phone. He gets as far as dialing the first three digits of Human Resources . . . then hesitates. If he completes this call, Elizabeth will be off the premises within ten minutes. But that will be the end of it: she will then be beyond his power. The story of this humiliation, however, will live on in corporate memory. It will be the punch line to Roger's entire career.

  With a strangled growl, he slams the handset back down. He throws himself into his leather chair and puts his head in his hands.

  A large yellow envelope of the sort used for internal mail sits on his desk in front of him; it must have been delivered while he was out. One end bulges oddly.
Roger sits up, unseals the envelope, and tips its contents onto his desk. A plastic cup sealed with a yellow lid tries to roll away; he grabs it. It is empty. A sticker on the front says NAME and EMPLOYEE ID #, and has spaces for writing in both.

  He checks the envelope and finds a memo stuck to the inside. It's from Human Resources and Asset Protection, to all department heads. In the interests of company productivity, it says, Zephyr Holdings has introduced a drug-testing policy. Every week, one employee will be randomly selected from each department to provide a urine sample. Employees who fail the test, or refuse to comply with it, will be terminated. This is covered by Section 38.2 of the standard employee work contract, a clause Roger recalls having queried when he first joined Zephyr. If he remembers right, Human Resources told him not to worry about it because the clause was just a standard industry thing and Zephyr didn't actually do drug tests.

  The memo contains a list of all the employees randomly selected for the first round of testing, and advises departmental managers to keep this relatively quiet. There is no need to make this into a big deal, the memo says. Employees should not be made to feel they are being singled out.

  Roger has an encyclopedic knowledge of Zephyr employees. So he notices that every one of the randomly selected employees is female and in her twenties or thirties. He notices that the employee selected from Staff Services is Elizabeth.

  The other day Eve and Jones were in the underground parking lot and she was fiddling with his tie and giggling while he made jokes about Tom Mandrake's taste in shirts when Blake's Porsche cruised by. The windows were tinted too darkly for Jones to tell whether he and Eve had been spotted, but ever since Blake has seemed even more disgusted with him than he was previously. He has tried to be more discreet, but now it is eleven o'clock, Holly and Freddy are out of the department, and Jones is having trouble thinking about anything but Eve. Screw it, he thinks. He is going to visit her.

  He bounces out of his chair and walks to the elevators. He knows where she'll be, because yesterday afternoon Human Resources announced that reception could be adequately staffed by a single person, and thus there was no need to supply Eve with help while Gretel Monadnock is on stress leave. This caused much amusement when relayed in this morning's Alpha meeting, to everyone except Eve (and, for diplomatic reasons, Jones), and culminated in a bet from Blake that she wouldn't last the week. “Are you saying I don't usually work the phones?” Eve challenged, and Blake said, “That's exactly what I'm saying.” Eve shook her head and said, “You have no idea,” even though it seemed to Jones that Blake had a very good idea indeed. Eve will require some moral support in the days ahead, he suspects.

  The elevator opens onto the lobby and Jones crosses to the reception desk with a brisk stride. Eve is hunched over, lines of strain on her face. She doesn't look at him. “Holy God,” she says to her handset. “How hard is it for you to understand? I need to know your name before I can connect you.” Then she sees Jones and tears off her headset. “This is insane. They just keep calling.”

  “Aw,” Jones says.

  “If Gretel isn't back tomorrow, I'm going to make sure she doesn't come back at all, I swear to God. How long has she been off, two weeks? It's pathetic.” She shakes her head. “Want to go to lunch?”

  He blinks. “Don't you have to stay here?”

  “I'm done. I am done.” She stands. “The company won't collapse if nobody answers their damn calls for an hour or two.”

  “You expect every other employee to do their job,” Jones points out. He notices Freddy standing outside the tinted lobby glass. Freddy is staring in at Jones, a cigarette in one hand, and there is something wrong with his expression.

  “Yes, well.” She gathers her handbag. “You and I aren't like every other employee, are we?”

  “Eve, is something wrong with Freddy?” She doesn't say anything. Jones turns back to her. “Eve?”

  She puts her hands on her hips. “Oh. I told him.”

  For a second he is too flabbergasted to speak. He simply cannot conceive that she could have done this. “About us?”

  “Look, he came up and started bugging me. I didn't have time to deal with him. I just told him.” She comes around the desk. “He had to find out eventually, Jones. It was cruel to keep him in the dark like that.”

  “You didn't mind before! Jesus, you strung him along for six months before today!”

  “Well, before now, he had a chance.” She smiles and tilts her head, in a way Jones usually finds cute. “But now . . .” She reaches for his tie.

  Jones pushes her hand away. It's like flicking a switch: Eve's face turns to stone. A second passes, then another. They stare at each other, mentally feeling out the shifting ground.

  Eve says softly, “Don't ever touch me like that.”

  Jones looks to his right. Freddy is still watching them through the glass, but as Jones's gaze meets his, he turns away.

  Jones says, “Apologize.”

  “For what? For not keeping that we're screwing each other a secret?” Jones winces. He is well aware of the security cameras, the hidden microphones, the snarl of wiring that connects them all to level 13. “For telling Freddy that his best friend in Zephyr is lying to him?”

  “Don't you dare tell me this is a lesson.”

  Eve raises her eyebrows. “Why? Do you need one?”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Done that,” she says.

  Freddy is already gone when Jones exits the lobby doors. He squints in the sunshine and catches a glimpse of Freddy's back disappearing around the corner of the building. Jones breaks into a run. Freddy is walking at a fast clip, but Jones catches him next to the new Smokers' Corral, under the big, painted eyes of cartoon cows. “Freddy!”

  Freddy turns. There's a smile on his face, or, rather, a gruesome, twisted attempt at a smile. “Hey, Jones.”

  “Freddy, I am so sorry—”

  “No, no, it's okay. Really. You don't have to say anything. I mean, it's not like she was ever going to go for me anyway. Holly was right. I'm not the kind of guy who gets girls like Eve. I'm the guy who hasn't been promoted once in five years.” He lets out a short bark of a laugh. “So it's all good. You just saved me forty bucks a week in flowers.”

  “Freddy, you're not that guy. You're better than that. You're better than this place deserves.” This comes out with real venom, but he can tell from Freddy's expression that he thinks Jones is just being polite, which inflames him even more. “Freddy, this place is wrong. It has to change. It has to.” And then the words just pop out: “And if Senior Management won't change it, we have to overthrow them.”

  Freddy says, “What?”

  “We need a rebellion. A revolution. A resistance. To make Zephyr Holdings a good place to work again.” Jones hesitates, unsure if Zephyr ever was a good place to work. “Why can't the company care about you? Why doesn't it give a shit? You're not a resource, you're a person. This company is hollowing itself out. It's mined too deep into its own employees. We need change, not just because that's what we deserve but because that's the only thing that will save Zephyr from eating itself.”

  “Jones, you sound a little crazy.”

  “Why can't the company be better? Only because Senior Management doesn't want it to be. That's the key: control of Senior Management. If the workers act together, we can get that. How could they stop us? We're the company. We just need to unite. We need to form a union.”

  Freddy blinks.

  Jones says, “Or let's go back to ‘resistance.'”

  “Resistance is better.”

  “So are you in?”

  Freddy holds up his hands. “Jones, I get what you're saying. And, yeah, it'd be nice if things were better. But it's not going to happen. First, it takes three weeks' notice in this place to organize a meeting. Second, as soon as Human Resources finds out what you're doing, they'll toss you out of the building.”

  “I know.” Jones licks his lips. “But I have a plan.”

&nbs
p; Freddy's gaze drifts to the Smokers' Corral. Two people are headed over there now; they walk inside and take seats at the wooden bench, feeling in their pockets for cigarettes. “Is this plan going to get me fired?”

  “No.”

  He looks back at Jones. “You promise?”

  “I swear it.” And in this moment he really means it; he means it with all his heart.

  “Okay,” Freddy says. “Let's hear it.”

  Holly sits alone in a small meeting room off the lobby. There is an open folder and some scattered pages on the table in front of her, but these are just props in case someone peers through the little window in the door behind her. She's not actually meeting anyone.

  She didn't expect to do this again. Not after Roger assigned her the gym—the gym!—the one place in Zephyr Holdings that makes any sense to her whatsoever. Forty-five minutes ago, she saw her red voice-mail light blinking, and dialed in to discover that Roger had called.

  “Holly. After some further investigation, I've found we're unable to keep the gym. It turns out it's just not cost-effective. This news will come as a disappointment to you, I'm sure, but you know how these things are. I hope you understand it's nothing to do with you; you would have done a great job. Come see me if any of this is unclear.”

  So he didn't actually say, You're a fool and I took advantage of your stupidity to find out who took my donut, but Holly heard the message clearly enough. By the time she got the phone back in its cradle, everything was burning: her eyes, her ears, her heart. Elizabeth was sitting behind her in the cubicle, and Holly didn't dare turn around for fear that Elizabeth would see her and ask what was wrong. Instead she stayed rigid in the same position and swallowed over and over. But there was something thick and bitter rising in her throat, and it was, she realized, going to pop out of her in a completely humiliating sob, so she grabbed a random folder from her desk, hugged it to her chest, and stood up. Elizabeth glanced at her face—her red, sweaty, swelling face—and her lips parted in surprise, and behind them, Holly knew, was a question she couldn't face, so she ran out of the cubicle. The first three lobby meeting rooms were full, and she began to panic that she was about to have a wet, messy breakdown right there in the lobby, under the curious eyes of passing co-workers. But the last one was free, thank God, and she hauled open the door and threw herself inside. She sat with her back to the door so nobody could see her face and let herself go.