No Way Back

by Matthew Klein

  ‘I think I’ll just turn this off for now,’ Liago says, fiddling with his cellphone. He presses the power button emphatically, to demonstrate how sincerely he hopes we will not be disturbed again.

  ‘Where were we?’ he says, looking down at his notes. ‘Oh yes,’ he says. ‘You’re going to fire people. Lots of people. Tomorrow. Tell me how that makes you feel.’

  CHAPTER 20

  Somehow I make it through the session. Liago must sense something is wrong, though, because after a few abortive attempts at conversation, he finally suggests we wrap up early, since my mind ‘seems to be elsewhere’.

  If my mind is anywhere, it’s in that filing cabinet, which holds just a single folder. Or it’s in his desk drawer, which contains a gun.

  But I don’t say either of these things. I just nod mute agreement, and let him lead me from the office. In the foyer, he puts his hand on my arm, and he says he’ll see me next week. Almost a question. I mumble agreement. He watches me warily from the front door as I back my Ford out of the driveway. I do it slowly – no flooring the accelerator, no gravel shooting from beneath spinning tyres. I just back up, as if there is nothing wrong in the world, nothing odd in what I just discovered, nothing at all unusual about a doctor who lives alone in a house, and is a specialist. A Jimmy Thane specialist.

  I drive, keep my gaze straight ahead. When I get to the highway, I drive for another mile, and then I pull over into the brown grass on the shoulder of the road. Cars whizz by. The Ford hasn’t even stopped rolling by the time I finish dialling Gordon Kramer’s number on my cell.

  ‘Hello, Jimmy,’ he rasps. ‘What the hell’s the matter now?’

  ‘Oh nothing, Gordon,’ I say, with false lightness in my voice. ‘Other than the fact that the doctor you recommended to me is a maniac.’

  ‘Maniac doctor, huh?’ he says. He doesn’t sound too concerned. ‘Why is he a maniac doctor, Jimmy?’

  ‘Let’s see, where to start? Well, there’s a gun in his desk drawer.’

  ‘I have a gun in my desk drawer, Jimmy.’

  ‘You’re an ex-cop, Gordon.’

  ‘That’s right. My job has me deal with a lot of cranked-up meth-heads. Guess what kind of patients Dr Liago sees.’

  ‘Funny you should mention that. That was my next point. Dr Liago apparently deals with only one patient.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Gordon says. ‘You.’

  He says this as if it were an obvious fact, one that we’ve discussed before, and one that should come as no surprise to either of us.

  ‘You know that already?’

  ‘Of course I know that, you moron. I hired him.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘I got him out of mothballs just for you. He was retired. I had to call in a favour. He didn’t want to do it, but – well, you know how persuasive I can be.’

  ‘Oh,’ I say, suddenly deflated. ‘So you knew all about it.’

  ‘All about what?’ he says. He sounds truly mystified by this entire conversation. Then, his breath catches, and he has a realization. ‘Oh, shit,’ he says. ‘Oh, shit, Jimmy. Are you tweaking? Are you getting paranoid again?’

  ‘I’m not paranoid. I’m not tweaking.’

  ‘Jimmy... ’

  ‘Gordon, he knows things about me. He has hundreds of pages of notes – things that I did not tell him.’

  A long silence. When Gordon’s voice returns to the line, he sounds disappointed. ‘Aw, shit, Jimmy,’ he says, again. ‘You’re using.’

  ‘I am not using.’

  ‘Then why are you being paranoid?’

  ‘I’m not paranoid. I’m just asking how he knows things that—’

  ‘Jimmy, I had him call Doc Curtis, before you saw him. She sent over your entire file. Of course he knows things about you. How else could he possibly treat you?’

  ‘Oh,’ I say again. An eighteen-wheeler barrels past the Ford, sucking the window out from the frame as it speeds by. I suddenly feel silly. Here I am, sitting in a car, on the side of a highway. I have just fled from the office of my shrink – literally fled – convinced that he was a gun-toting maniac. I am telling this to my sponsor, one continent and three time zones away, and asking him to explain the rather obvious fact that doctors share notes when they treat each other’s patients.

  ‘Oh,’ I say one more time. Then: ‘Gordon, I am deeply embarrassed.’

  ‘“Deeply embarrassed”?’ Gordon repeats. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever heard you use that one before, Jimmy. ‘“Shit-faced drunk” – yes. “Cranked Out of My Mind” – yes. But never “Deeply Embarrassed”. That’s a new one. I like it.’ He pauses. ‘Go back to work, Jimmy. Stop freaking out, and go back to work. Don’t make me get on a plane and come find you. You would not want that. I promise you. You would not want that.’

  CHAPTER 21

  The next day, the lay-offs come.

  In my career as a restart executive, I have fired four hundred and ninety-six people. Mass lay-offs are the first and most important step in any corporate turnaround.

  People who don’t understand business have the wrong idea about capitalism. They think capitalism is heartless and cruel – that it puts profits above people, that it makes managers do inhumane things – and that this inhumanity is the reason we have corporate lay-offs.

  In fact, the opposite is true. Lay-offs are the result of people behaving with too much compassion. Too many managers run their business like a family, and they treat their employees with the same misplaced kindness that we show our sons or daughters. Your twenty-two-year-old son is a fuck-up who lives at home and wants to be a musician? Why not let him stay for a while, rent free, while he finds himself?

  The same thing happens in business. Look at Cheryl in Accounting. Oh sure, she’s lazy, and her numbers are always wrong, but she’s our Cheryl, and she buys us doughnuts on Doughnut Wednesday, so why not let it ride? So much easier than firing her. After all, she might cry.

  And so, over the lifetime of a company, hundreds of these small, seemingly inconsequential decisions build, like plaque in corporate veins, hardly noticeable at first, until finally you step back and realize that the system is filled with these deposits – people who don’t do their jobs well, or who don’t care, or who are lazy – and soon the business seizes up like an arrested heart, and needs to be shocked back to health.

  That’s my job – to shock a company back to health. To do the painful thing, the necessary thing. If the original executives had possessed the courage to do what I must do, back when it mattered, the company would not be in the situation in which it finds itself. There would be no need for mass lay-offs. Hell, there would be enough profit to allow us to hand out raises instead of pink slips.

  But of course no one sees it this way. People who make tough decision are vilified; cowards are praised. This is the nature of the world: we wish things were one way, regret they are another, and blame the difference on someone other than ourselves.

  The protocol that I follow when I fire people is the same no matter where I go. First, I wait until Wednesdays. Wednesdays are best, both for the people being fired (so they don’t have to stew over the weekend) and for the lucky people who remain (so they can start fresh on the following Monday, the trauma long past).

  Typically I do the deed in the afternoon – just after lunch – after nerves have been sated by a big meal – but not too late, because I don’t want everyone leaving early for the day, missing the bad news, and then wandering in the next morning, puzzled that their desk has been emptied without explanation.

  At some companies, I hire a security guard, to protect both myself and the other remaining employees. I do not bother to do this today, because Tao is a computer software company, and the worst that happens at a software company is the occasional barrage of curse words and maybe a paperweight being thrown into a computer screen.

  The one thing that is critical at a software company, is that you prevent theft of intellectual property. The only real asset a technol
ogy company has is the computer code residing on its hard disks and tape backup systems. You do not want this software to be copied onto a CD-ROM and physically carried out of the building, nor do you want it emailed off the corporate network. In either case there’s a good chance the code will wind up in a competitor’s hands.

  This is why, ten minutes before I’m about to begin the mass firing, I bring Darryl into my office, shut the door, and tell him that lay-offs are imminent, and that I’m going to need his help.

  ‘Wow,’ he says. ‘When?’

  ‘Ten minutes,’ I say.

  ‘Ten minutes?’ He does a cartoon double-take. ‘Holy shit!’

  That’s another rule. Never tell people in advance. No one can keep a secret about anything. No one.

  I tell Darryl that he will remain at Tao, and that he’ll take over Randy’s job as VP of Engineering.

  ‘No shit?’ he says.

  ‘When you leave this room, you will walk directly into the server room. Do not pass go. Shut down the network so that no emails or files can be transmitted from the LAN. Can you do that?’

  ‘Hell yes.’

  ‘I want RDP shut down, SSH, and telnet. Do you understand?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘When you’ve done that,’ I continue, ‘I want you to change the password of every user account. No one should have access to his account any more. Do not tell anyone what you’re doing. Just do it. Choose a different random password for every account. Write each one on an index card. Do not make a copy of these passwords. Bring them directly to me.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘Do you have any questions?’

  ‘I need the root password.’

  ‘Who has the root password?’ But I don’t wait for an answer. ‘Randy.’

  He nods.

  ‘Bring him in. He can be first.’

  A minute later, Darryl returns with Randy Williams, VP of Engineering. That is his title, for thirty seconds longer, anyway.

  Randy’s round Midwestern face still has that big blank expression, a calf on the way to the slaughterhouse, but I see a glimmer of understanding forming behind his eyes.

  ‘Have a seat,’ I tell Randy, and I gesture to the chair across from mine.

  Darryl is about to leave the room. I say, ‘Stay, Darryl. Shut the door.’

  Darryl obeys.

  To Randy, I say in a firm voice meant to telegraph that I will accept no opposition, ‘Randy, I want you to tell me the root password for our network. Write it down here.’

  I slide my pad across the table to him.

  This is the moment he realizes what is happening. He looks down at the pad, then at me, and then at Darryl.

  ‘What’s going on?’ he asks, even though he knows. His voice falters. He tries his gap-toothed smile on me. Receiving no response, he lets it droop, then vanish. He shrugs, takes his pen from his shirt, and writes down a string of characters and symbols on my pad.

  I tear the page from the pad, hand it to Darryl. ‘Make sure it works. If there’s no problem, just do what I told you.’

  Darryl nods. Randy looks at him pleadingly. ‘Et tu, Darryl?’ Randy says.

  Darryl opens his mouth, about to answer, then thinks better of it. He looks down at the ground, turns the doorknob, and leaves.

  ‘Randy,’ I begin, ‘I’m afraid that I have some bad news.’

  Once you start, you have to hurry, because the general population soon learns what’s going on. The goal of a mass firing is to get it over with, to get people out of the door, quickly, before they can cause mischief – erase hard drives, filch files, destroy property – before they can do anything they’ll later regret.

  When people leave the death chamber – in this case, my broom-closet office – onlookers, curious about their colleagues’ shell-shocked expressions, or their red and puffy eyes, or their tear-streaked cheeks, typically ask what’s going on. ‘I got canned,’ the passive ones say. Or, the angry ones say, ‘Cocksucker Jim fired me.’ Or something in between.

  I go through my list efficiently. Each session takes only a few minutes. By the end, when people enter the room, they know exactly what’s coming, and some even do my job for me. ‘I’m being fired,’ they immediately start. The helpful ones try to assuage any guilt I might have. ‘I understand; it’s not your fault, Jim,’ they say.

  In all cases, when I describe the reasons for the person’s firing, I stick to the abstract and impersonal: bad decisions were made by previous management, venture capital firms have less cash to fund development, economic times have changed, the identity-management market has become more competitive. I use the passive voice – mistakes were made – and am vague about whom to blame. The time for hard truths and plain speaking has long passed.

  Last on my list of forty people is Dom Vanderbeek. He knows what’s coming as soon as he walks in. He doesn’t even bother shutting the door or sitting down.

  Before I can say a word, he leans over my desk, gets in my face and says, ‘Fuck you, Jim.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Dom. It just didn’t work out.’

  ‘What about our agreement?’

  To my credit, I don’t laugh in his face and say, ‘What agreement?’ He’s talking about that bargain we struck when I first came to Tao: Vanderbeek would work hard to sell our lousy software if I agreed to recommend him for the CEO position after I left.

  But whatever agreement we made – and it wasn’t a formal contract, not even a handshake, come to think of it – we made it before I understood my job at Tao. Now that I know my role – to keep things quiet, to keep the police at bay, to overlook the money being shovelled out of the back door – now that I understand these things, keeping Vanderbeek around is both unnecessary and impossible.

  ‘I agreed to try my best,’ I say. ‘But you didn’t deliver on your end of the bargain. I don’t see any sales happening because of you. Do you, Dom?’

  ‘You know the product stinks.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I say again.

  He turns, heads to the door, then stops at the threshold. With one arm on the doorframe, he pivots and looks at me. ‘I know a lot about you, Jim. A lot. And guess what? I know a lot about Tao. About where our money goes, for instance. I wonder if other people would be interested in finding out what I know.’

  ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about, Dom.’

  ‘Then you won’t care if I make some phone calls.’

  ‘Dom!’ I say. But I’m speaking too loudly. The door of my office is open. People are listening. How much of the argument have they heard, out there in the bullpen? I lower my voice. ‘Dom,’ I say, again, more quietly, ‘if I were you, I’d be very careful.’

  Immediately I regret this.

  A look of pleasure washes over Vanderbeek – this is exactly what he wanted. ‘Jim, are you threatening me? Are you fucking threatening me?’ He shakes his head, but he’s smiling merrily, because I’ve taken his bait.

  ‘Dom, I’m not threatening you. Be quiet and close the door—’

  He raises his voice. ‘Are you threatening me, Jim?’ He leans out through the door, and yells into the bullpen, ‘Hey everyone, Jim just threatened me.’ Turning back to me: ‘What do you mean, “If I were you, I’d be very careful”? What are you going to do? Beat me up? Kill me?’

  From my vantage behind the desk, I can only see a sliver of the bullpen – just one of the engineers packing a box of his belongings. There can’t be many people left in the office at this point, with the firings almost done – yet I hear murmurs of interest nonetheless. People are listening.

  ‘It’s time for you to leave now,’ I say. I keep my voice quiet.

  Dom nods. ‘OK, buddy. OK. But you haven’t heard the last of me.’

  This would normally be the moment when I would respond with a witty comeback, but my wit – whatever is left of it – is cut short by a female voice shouting from the bullpen: ‘No! Don’t!’

  I jump up from my desk, race past Vanderbeek, into the bullpen, to see w
hat is happening.

  David Paris, ex-VP of Marketing, who took the news of his termination with such stoic good grace only twenty minutes ago, is standing on top of his desk, with his naked ass cheeks exposed. His pants are bunched at his ankles, and people are shouting, ‘David, no!’ And: ‘Oh gross!’

  As I circle him, I see a stream of urine flowing in a graceful arc from David’s impressively large cock to the floor of the bullpen. ‘Here you go!’ he shouts. ‘Here you go! Take it! Take it all!’

  He turns, directing his spray this way and that, like a fireman dispatching the last stubborn embers of a blaze. Someone shouts, ‘David, what are you doing?’

  ‘Something to remember me by,’ he explains.

  ‘Look at it!’ Rosita calls gaily, and it’s unclear if she’s talking about the piss or the huge penis.

  David turns to me. ‘Here you go, Jim,’ he says. He aims his piss at me, but I’m hopelessly far away, and he is nearly drained anyway, just a trickle now.

  ‘All right, David,’ I say, trying to sound authoritative, ‘that’s enough. Put your... thing... away.’

  Out of ammunition, David shrugs, pulls up his pants, zips. He leaves his belt unclasped.

  I help him down from the desk. He is strangely passive, acting as if nothing unusual has happened. ‘Thank you, Jim,’ he says, accepting my hand as he jumps off the desk. ‘I just had to do that. I don’t know why.’

  I tell him it’s OK, people do strange things at times like these. But he smells like piss, and I see drops of the stuff beading on his left sock, like morning dew, and I want him out of the building before he can cause more trouble.

  ‘You’re a good man, Jim,’ he says to me, as I escort him to the front door. I accept his thanks, but I’m hardly paying attention. Instead, I’m looking behind him, to the parking lot, where I watch Vanderbeek slide into his BMW, slam the door, and peel onto Route 30, tyres screeching.

  CHAPTER 22

  I return home at four thirty in the afternoon, which is the earliest I’ve left the office since starting my job at Tao.