Company

by Max Barry

  “Oh! Sorry, of course! I just didn't expect to hear from you. What's going on?”

  “Well,” Freddy says.

  It's a tight squeeze in the elevator, but the entirety of Project Alpha gets into it. In the close quarters, they mostly avoid Jones's eyes, except for Blake, who stares at him with outright hostility, and Tom, who looks plaintive. Halfway up, Tom says, “You haven't really, have you, Jones?”

  “Don't be a dick, Tom,” Blake says.

  “But why? Jones, why would you do something like that?”

  “Because they deserve better,” Jones says. “And because I don't.”

  Nobody responds to this. When they reach the monitoring room, they stare at the monitors in utter silence.

  Then Eve screams.

  It's short and sharp: a sound of pure frustration. Everyone jumps, including Jones. Blake, sounding shaken, says, “Jesus, Eve.”

  “Did you think I was kidding?” she yells at Jones. “My God, did you?”

  “No, Eve.”

  She yanks her cell phone out of her bag. “You watch those monitors. And keep this in mind: this is your fault. I warned you what would happen if you told them. You're doing this.”

  Nobody is angry; they're too stunned. “It's a joke,” says an accountant on level 7, but nobody responds. It doesn't feel like a joke. They look at their desks. Their in-boxes, piled high with fruitless tasks. It feels like Zephyr is making sense for the first time.

  The voice-mail lights all come on at the same time. A murmur sweeps through the building. Hands reach for phones.

  “Hello to all staff from Human Resources and Asset Protection.”

  The voice is female, and light in tone. Most Zephyr employees don't recognize it. But Freddy's hand tightens on the handset, and Holly feels something in her gut contract.

  “My name is Sydney Harper. I have some exciting changes to announce at Zephyr Holdings today, so please give this voice mail your full attention. As you know, last week most of Senior Management resigned. This has, obviously, thrown out our organizational structure, so Human Resources has worked hard to come up with an effective solution. After extensive consultation, both within Human Resources and the remaining members of Senior Management, we believe we've come up with a plan to maximize our resources during this difficult transition period.

  “Effective immediately, all positions are vacated. Employees may apply for their current jobs, or, if they wish, another position. Full details are posted on the Jobs Board. Good-bye.”

  The message ends. Stunned employees put down their phones. They turn to each other, but nobody has any answers. Slowly, they rise from their desks and file toward the elevators. The young ones don't understand; they think it's exciting. “So I can apply for any job in the company? Any one I want?” The others exchange worried looks. That's not what they heard. What they heard is that every employee has just been sacked.

  The Jobs Board is a large cork bulletin board fixed to one wall of the Canteen—or what was the Canteen before Catering was outsourced. It has long been a Zephyr Holdings policy that all vacant positions must be advertised on this board, in order to ensure that the hiring process is open and transparent; also it made the people interested in leaving their current job open and transparent. Employees who approached the board could feel the eyes of anybody nearby swinging onto them. They could hear rumors being birthed. In recent times, however, the Jobs Board has been a blank canvas, a morbid reminder of how bad things are. Then, of course, Catering was outsourced, the Canteen closed down, and nobody had much reason to look at it anymore.

  But now a black tack fixes a lone piece of paper to its center. It is brief and to the point.

  THERE ARE NO VACANCIES AT THIS TIME

  —Dept. of Human Resources & Asset Protection

  Then they get angry.

  Eve sits down heavily on the carpet: one second she's standing, the next she's on her butt. The other agents mill around uncomfortably, looking at each other.

  “Well,” Blake says. “That's that. Congratulations, Jones. You just got everyone fired.”

  “Don't even try,” Jones says.

  “I can't wait to see you try to explain this to them. That's going to be really funny. I'm going to stick around to see the look on your face when you realize they hate you for it.”

  Jones looks at the monitors. “I'm sure there's enough hate for everybody.” In the lobby, a group—perhaps “mob” is the right word—watches as a man begins to throw himself against the stairwell door.

  This elicits a murmur of alarm from the agents. Mona says, “Should we get Security up here?”

  From the floor, Eve says dully, “Security is not going to be on our side, Mona.”

  Tom says, “We haven't done anything illegal. There's nothing wrong with what we did.”

  Jones snickers.

  “How strong are those doors?” Mona asks.

  Everyone gasps.

  “Not strong enough, I guess,” Jones says.

  The sun sets on Zephyr Holdings. The building glows orange-yellow, as if on fire. The glass flares, appearing to dissolve.

  Men and women pound up the concrete steps. The stairwell fills with their raw emotion; it rebounds from the walls and redoubles in intensity. “We should kill them!” somebody shouts. “We should kill them!”

  Mona starts a thin, high-pitched whine and doesn't stop even when Blake gets on the phone and dials 911. He tries to shush her as he tells an operator that assistance is required right now, that people are trying to attack them. Some of the agents hurry out of the monitoring room—to barricade themselves in offices or hide under desks, Jones guesses. He kneels down next to Eve. Her hair is hanging over her face. He carefully moves this aside, and sees to his surprise that she is crying.

  “No, I mean there are hundreds of them,” Blake says to the phone. “Literally hundreds, do you understand?”

  Eve looks at Jones. “They're going to get in here.”

  “I know.”

  She takes his hand. “You have to stop them. Please. Jones.”

  “How the hell do you think I can do that?”

  “Please.” Her body trembles. “Jones, please, they're going to hurt us.”

  Jones says nothing.

  She cries harder. “Jones, please don't let them touch me.”

  Level 13 is not marked as such, of course. The door says MAINTENANCE. But it's after 12 and before 14, and if you're looking for it, it's not hard to spot. A man with his shirtsleeves rolled up over bulging biceps—perhaps until recently a frequent user of the Zephyr gym—is the first to reach it. He tries the handle, but it's locked. He slaps his hand against the door in frustration. From the other side, there is a startled yelp. The man turns and yells down the stairwell. “They're in here!”

  Blake paces back and forth across the carpet. When he smooths back his hair, his hand trembles. Abruptly he grabs at his eye patch, pulls it off, and tosses it onto the carpet. The skin around his eye is gray and shiny. Something—or someone—crashes against the stairwell door, and Blake jumps. “We need some kind of barricade,” he says, his voice tight. “Something to . . .” He turns. “Jones. Jones. What's your plan?”

  Jones looks up. “What?”

  “Your plan. Come on. Yes, okay, you got us. Alpha is over. Congratulations. Now how are you getting out of this? You wouldn't have done this unless you had a way out for yourself.”

  Jones feels sympathy for him. Not a lot, but some. “Sorry.”

  Blake stares. Then he laughs. It comes out high and cracked, and breaks off when there's another crash from the stairwell door.

  Eve curls into a ball on the carpet. Jones thinks about suggesting that she move. It wouldn't be a good idea for her to be here, under the bank of monitors, when the horde bursts in. That would make a bad situation worse.

  He strokes her hair. “I don't think Zephyr is externalizing anymore,” he murmurs, as the stairwell lock splinters and the door bangs open.

  He hea
rs Mona scream. And somebody else—male or female, Jones can't tell—lets out a high, strangled shriek that he will never forget. “We're just businesspeople! We're just businesspeople!”

  Elizabeth walks to the corridor and presses for an elevator. She turns back to Staff Services, for one last look to remember it by—but there's nothing to look at. The people she worked with are already gone, seeking vengeance, and the interior decoration is nothing special. It's not even level 14, which at least had a distinctive feature in the Berlin Partition. There is nothing significant here for Elizabeth to remember.

  Maybe that's why she feels good about leaving. When the elevator arrives, she enters it with a spring in her step. The farther it descends, the higher her mood lifts. Good riddance! she thinks. She feels like laughing.

  She used to fall in love with her customers. What kind of person does that? Elizabeth wouldn't describe what she feels toward her embryo as love, not yet, but she knows that feeling is growing. By comparison, her workplace infatuations are—well, there is no comparison, is there? When she thinks about the person she was four months ago, she doesn't even know who that was.

  She wonders what she will miss about Zephyr Holdings. This place has dominated her life for most of the last decade. It has largely defined her. But sifting through her memories, the one that stands out is the time she sat in a bathroom stall and realized she was pregnant. So, as the elevator doors slide open onto the parking lot and the ramp and the sunshine beyond, she decides the answer is: Not much.

  APRIL

  THEY CLAP LOUDLY, passionately, and for far too long: they keep going even when the lights come up. It's a large room filled to capacity, so the applause rolls around like thunder. Jones, who knows he's not a rock star, feels embarrassed. He steps away from the podium and walks into the audience, where people rise from their seats and converge on him with a mixture of admiration and horror on their faces.

  Today they are from a whole range of companies, and their name tags glimmer as they press in from three sides. He gets the usual questions—asked while eyes flick over his body for some sign of the injuries—and delivers his standard answers, which elicit mass groans of sympathy and exhalations of disgust. Then a woman at the back says, “Steve, I have a question. How do you sleep at night, knowing you caused all those people to be hurt?”

  All eyes swivel to her. When he finds his voice, Jones says, “Hello, Eve.”

  “I was going to come up before you went on,” she says, clacking her way down the corridor. She's carrying a long black coat and wearing a thin gray skirt so narrow it's amazing she can walk, yet is somehow having no trouble keeping pace with him. “But then I thought, no, I don't want you changing it because I'm there. I want the full Steve Jones experience.”

  “I thought you moved to New York,” he says. They arrive at his little dressing room and he begins packing up his things.

  “I flew back just to see this. You must know why.” Her eyes search his. She looks, Jones has to admit, stunning. Her hair bounces; her skin glows; you wouldn't think that four months ago she was in traction.

  “I have no idea.”

  “I'm on the speaking circuit, too. I'm doing the exact same thing as you, only in Manhattan.” One corner of her mouth curves. “Well, maybe not the exact same thing. There may be certain details we don't agree on. But it's the same basic take-home message: ‘Don't piss your workers off so much that they bust into your office and beat the crap out of you.'” She laughs. “Oh, also, I charge more.”

  Jones stops packing. “You are speaking about ethics?”

  “At the end of the talk, when I tell them about the riot, we turn the main lights off so it's just me on a stool in a spotlight. It's so quiet, nobody even breathes. Then I'm done and the regular lights come back up, and I see this ocean of shocked faces. It's like their worst nightmare. It's like the most appalling thing they've ever heard.”

  After a second, Jones laughs. “I don't know why I'm surprised.”

  She's watching him carefully. “Are you pissed?”

  He considers. “What you're doing now is not really relevant to me.”

  Her lips press together. “How about Blake, then? He's selling cars now. Nice ones,” she adds, to Jones's expression. “If you want a good deal on a Merc, call him.” She tilts her head. “Or maybe not. Then there's Klausman; he retired. Moved to northern California, I think. I haven't heard from him since we beat the class action.”

  “How much did that cost? Just out of interest. I heard you had about a dozen lawyers.”

  “Look, Alpha did nothing illegal. I kept trying to tell you that. The only thing we were guilty of was giving those people jobs.”

  “Fake jobs.”

  “There's no requirement that jobs be meaningful, Jones. If there was, half the country would be unemployed. That's why we won the case.”

  He zips up his bag. “Well, I'm glad to hear you're all doing so swell. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm meeting Freddy and Holly.”

  Eve's eyebrows shoot up. “Don't tell me they forgave you. Wow. I wouldn't have. But then, I guess Freddy and Holly didn't end up in a hospital.” For a moment, her face twists. Then she smiles. “But! I did get a free nose job out of it. What do you think?”

  “I was wondering what was different.” He hefts his bag. “Okay, I have to go.”

  When he reaches the door, Eve says, “You know, I tried to get in touch with you.”

  He looks at her. “I know.”

  There's a silence, during which Eve seems to be waiting for Jones to say something. When he doesn't, she lets out a laugh. “To be honest, I had an ulterior motive for coming out here. I wanted to see how I would feel about you.” Her eyes flick between his. “To see whether I wanted to kill you or . . . not.” Again Jones says nothing. “Want to know which it is?”

  “Not really.”

  “Oh, come on. I know you still think about me. I think about you.”

  Jones says, “Eve, I have no interest in you whatsoever.”

  This is clearly not at all what she expected: her face registers surprise, then doubt, then finally her features harden into a mask. All this happens in about half a second. “I mean, when I say I think about you, it's just, I feel bad for you. I know it must piss you off that Blake and I are making good money, while you . . . well. But what can I say? That's how business works. Nobody gives a crap about ethics. That's why people like me will always be successful.”

  “You have a funny definition of ‘successful.'”

  She frowns. “Huh?”

  “Still lonely?”

  Eve blows air between her teeth. “I was never lonely. I just said that to make you feel better.”

  Jones snickers. “It was good to see you again, Eve. Really.”

  He leaves the dressing room, his bag over his shoulder. He is almost at the exit, where Freddy and Holly will be waiting for him—he can't wait to tell them about this—when Eve calls out, “Hey, Jones. Don't blame me when America loses its corporate base to countries that aren't so hung up on labor conditions, okay?”

  He turns. “I don't blame you for anything. Except being you.”

  Eve thinks about this for a moment. Then she grins. “Thanks,” she says.

  Acknowledgments

  I AM ETERNALLY grateful to those people who read my crappy first drafts and told me what they think. I know it's not easy to read three hundred pages of unbelievable characters and inexplicable plot developments, then craft an insightful, helpful response that doesn't also make me want to jump off a bridge. But somehow these people did it, and it's thanks to them that I managed to claw my way toward something that finally resembled a novel: Beth English, Roxanne Jones, Gregory Lister, Lindsay Lyon, and Dennis Widmyer.

  Charles Thiesen, my mentor (or I'm his, I forget), read more drafts than I can remember and played cheerleader when I needed encouragement, and oracle when I needed advice.

  Kassy Humphreys gave me a ton of great ideas exactly when I needed them, and, a
s if this wasn't enough, let me plunder huge tracts of her career for inclusion in the book. As she said, “It would be funny if it wasn't my life.”

  Luke Janklow, my agent, continues to be the most dependable, supportive, and all-round awesome guy in the Universe.

  It's thanks to Bill Thomas, my editor, that the final version of this book bears little resemblance to the one I sold him. That's a good thing, trust me. He helped turn a book I was happy with into one I loved.

  And Jen, my wife, is perfect. Always.

  ALSO BY MAX BARRY

  Syrup

  Jennifer Government

  FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, MARCH 2007

  Copyright � 2006 by Max Barry.

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2006.

  Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:

  Barry, Max.

  Company : a novel / by Max Barry.

  p. cm.

  1. Young men—Fiction. 2. Corporation—Fiction. 3. Business ethics—Fiction. 4. Work environment—Fiction. 5. Corporate culture—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3552.A7424C66 2005

  813'.54�dc22

  2005048498

  www.vintagebooks.com

  eISBN: 978-0-307-27966-8

  v3.0