TheCorporation

by Jesus Gonzalez

  “So what are you going to do?”

  “Play hardball.” Donald paused, took a sip of wine. “One of the execs I deal with no doubt knows I’m on the case, and he might be inclined to convince his colleagues to pay the claim. If he doesn’t, I have a backup plan—Dr. Schellenger, a friend of mine at Lancaster Urological Group. He went through a similar case with another insurance company in North Carolina when he was working at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Hospital. In his case, the insurance company wanted them to go through a bunch of bullshit and Peter strongly advised his patient to go ahead with the procedure and damn the insurance company. The patient was financially strapped and decided to stick it out. Four months later the cancer metastasized to his lower back and his lymph nodes. By the time the surgery was approved, his medical costs ran triple—probably even quadruple—what it would have been had the insurance company originally accepted the claim.”

  “So his patient lived?”

  “Oh yes,” Donald said. He was almost finished with the casserole, which he’d wolfed down. “It had quickly turned to stage four testicular cancer, nonseminoma, and had affected much of the lymph nodes and the nerves in the patient’s lower back. Peter’s patient went through three surgeries and two heavy trials of chemotherapy and was out of work for over a year. It was rough going, but he made it.”

  “So you’re bringing Peter to your meeting with Red Rose?” Michelle didn’t know how Donald put up with the suits he had to deal with. She would have lost her mind.

  “Yes. Peter took over the case and I think with him on board, Michael’s surgery will have a good chance of being approved. It just shouldn’t have to be this way, you know? If a doctor makes a quality diagnosis, he or she shouldn’t be second guessed by a guy in a three-piece suit who doesn’t know a thing about medicine or anatomy for that matter, a guy who, I might add, is more interested in preserving the corporate bottom line.”

  Michelle took a sip of wine. “Yeah, well, welcome to Corporate America.”

  Donald finished his wine, his gaze distant and far away. “Corporate America. What a scam.”

  Michelle looked down at her plate. She felt a trifle embarrassed. She always did when talking about work with Donald. She admired him greatly—as a person, a lover, a physician. To be able to do something that improved and saved people’s lives...that was something to be proud of. It was something to be honored. She wished her work touched people’s lives. She’d read an essay by somebody, she thought it was Ray Bradbury, who said there were only two noble professions in the world: the physician, who heals the body; and the artist, who heals the soul. Might as well add the lawyer who could save the body and soul from a lawsuit, and the accountant who could save you from the IRS come tax time.

  “Yeah, it is a scam,” she said, the words coming effortlessly. “And I apologize for having to stoop down to their level, but somebody’s got to do it.” She rose from the table and began collecting the dishes.

  Donald looked up, the expression on his face indicating he’d said the wrong thing again. “Hey, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—”

  Michelle laughed. “You didn’t say the wrong thing. Really. You need to stop apologizing for ranting about corporate dolts. I do it enough myself.”

  Donald chuckled and they embraced. “Well...I am sorry. Sometimes I feel bad that you have to conform to corporate standards to make a living.”

  “I’m glad you realize I’m not like them,” she said, her eyes closed as they hugged. She felt his strong arms encircle her waist. “I could never be like them.”

  “No,” he said, pulling away and looking into her eyes. “That’s why I love you.”

  They kissed.

  Just as the kiss was getting hot, she broke it. “Let me finish the table and then—”

  “Forget the dishes,” he said, kissing her again, pulling her close.

  She let him.

  They left the dishes on the table, and on the kitchen counter, and went into the bedroom.

  CHAPTER THREE

  THE MUSIC AT the Lone Star Saloon near the El Paso Airport was loud and Michelle wasn’t paying attention to the conversation going on at her table. She looked around for the waitress, hoping to catch her attention. She was two tables over, flirting with a pair of guys who looked like they were in college. Michelle sighed and turned back to the table, trying to feign some semblance of interest in the conversation but finding it hard to do. Here it was, nine-thirty p.m. and her co-workers were still talking about work.

  “If Goodman wasn’t such a goddamn bastard we could get moving on this credit issue and—”

  “—I told her the price increase will reflect that in the table. What you have to do is run the Stock Transaction file and—”

  “—four hundred thousand dollars in missing inventory? I mean, how can you have that much missing at your main plant?”

  Michelle took a sip of her drink, listening to the Trace Adkins song playing over the sound system. It was April 30, almost four weeks since she’d started her job at Corporate Financial Consultants and those four weeks had been good. They had gone by in a whirlwind. The first week had been nerve-wracking and exciting at the same time; meeting her co-workers, settling into her cubicle, attending company orientation, sitting in on strategy meetings on the latest projects, learning the layout of the building, getting used to the daily commute. It was exciting and thrilling and she loved every minute of it.

  Within three days she was knee-deep in her first project; assisting a Data Base Administrator in rewriting some SQL code for a data warehouse. She did most of the work at the office, only stopping in at the client’s office in Adamstown twice to do some manual tweaks on their server. She spent another two weeks working on the layout and design of a technical manual, and she sat in on some meetings for this latest project, which she learned would take her to El Paso, Texas, where she’d be the main architect for the project—design, plan, write, and develop an online and printed technical document for a powerful Human Resources software system. Sam Greenberg presented the project to her a little over a week ago late one afternoon, visiting her in her cubical. “You think you’re up for your first jaunt outside the state?”

  “Absolutely!” she’d said.

  The work thus far had been pleasing; the paychecks even better. She was getting acclimated quite well, was getting home by five-thirty, five forty-five at the latest, and that was enough time to prepare a light meal. Sometimes Donald beat her home and he prepared dinner. She’d splurged on her first pay check and treated them to a nice restaurant in town and a play at the Fulton Opera House. She’d gone out the following day—Saturday—and gone shopping at the Park City Mall, buying a few new outfits and some new shoes. Then she’d had her car washed and detailed. It felt good to have some money left over after the bills were paid. She was going to look forward to this new job. The SQL stuff she could do without, but she was learning a good overview of Corporate Financial Consultants and the clients they dealt with. And the clients they had on their roster were impressive indeed.

  One afternoon Sam Greenberg took her on a tour of the data center in the building. “We keep all our client information on a rack of servers located at our Corporate Headquarters in California,” he said. “These servers,” he indicated a row of racks where IBM Servers resided, “hold local data and run local jobs. Our IT guys work closely with the Corporate IT Team in California. This is not only a climate controlled room, but this section of the building is built to withstand severe weather and earthquakes. There’s a backup generator that is switched on the minute power on the main switch is lost. Last summer, this particular grid lost power due to a lightning strike but we didn’t miss a beat. The generator did its thing and we kept right on ticking.”

  That afternoon Michelle learned that nearly every major corporation in the U.S. had, at one time or another, done business with Corporate Financial Consultants. “Microsoft, Wal-Mart, Universal, Time-Warner, Bertelsmann, Citibank,
Kroger’s, Home Depot, Sears...all of them had been clients at one time or another and some are still clients.” Sam nodded at one of the Systems Admin Techs monitoring the servers as they walked by. “Anything new for those clients gets handled out of our Manhattan office now. California handles Administration and they keep all the master records. We’re strictly second tier businesses—manufacturers, mid-sized retail chains, software companies, healthcare companies.”

  “Healthcare?” Michelle had asked, thinking about Red Rose and all the trouble Donald had been having with them. The night before, Donald told her that even Dr. Schellenger’s expertise had been unable to sway the suits at Red Rose to approve payment for the surgery for Donald’s testicular cancer patient. Donald was advising the young man to go ahead with the surgery anyway; the patient was stuck between a rock and a hard place financially, and was currently thinking about it.

  “Blue Cross, Kaiser, Aetna, Red Rose,” Sam rattled off as they exited the Data Center. “Pretty much all the major HMOs and PPOs in the area. Well, Kaiser isn’t here; they’re in Baltimore, but they’re close enough. Their California division deals with our Los Angeles office, so it’s only natural for them to work with us out here.”

  “Of course,” Michelle had said.

  There was so much to learn, both as far as the company history and what they did as a firm—as well as her duties—that the days flashed by so quickly that before she knew it, the trip to El Paso was upon her and she found herself kissing Donald one Sunday afternoon after having packed her luggage and her laptop. “I’ll be back Friday afternoon,” she told him. “Be good.”

  “Knock ’em dead, kid!” Donald said, returning her kiss.

  She’d flown to the El Paso Airport, rented a car, and drove to the Hampton Inn near the airport where Sam had made reservations for her. The next morning she’d driven to the client, a manufacturer of metal roofing and accessories on Mesa Street. She’d come prepared for the trip and sat in the company boardroom listening to input from the corporate bigwigs on what they wanted their documentation to convey. She’d spent the rest of the afternoon talking with the IT techs and accepted an early evening dinner and drinks with some of the other members of the team.

  And now she was bored.

  The table she was seated at numbered half a dozen. Sitting at her left was a web developer who worked for Building Products, a rail thin dark-haired guy named Jay O’Rourke, who seemed to have cigarettes growing out of his fingers and between his lips; every time he finished smoking one, another magically took its place. He was leaning back in his seat, a cup of black coffee in front of him, looking as bored as she felt. Michelle caught his eyes and offered a smile. “You look bored.”

  “No shit? Ya think?”

  Michelle’s grin widened. Jay had sat in on the latter part of their meeting today and she found him extremely likable; he was witty, brutally honest, and had a biting sense of humor. She also got the impression he was one of the few people at that meeting—and here at the Lone Star—who knew what the hell he was doing with his job. “I’ve been bored the past twenty minutes. You’d think they’d talk about something else besides work.”

  “These guys? Hell no. It’s all they talk about because it’s all they do.” Jay’s voice rose a tad and the inflection indicated he was deliberately trying to provoke some kind of response from the others at their table. “If these losers had any kind of a life, they wouldn’t need to talk about the same boring shit all the time. Sometimes I wonder why I even agreed to tag along with these morons.”

  Michelle laughed and the guy sitting to Jay’s left, Alan Perkins, another Corporate Financial Consultant from the Manhattan office, heard him and grinned. He nudged Jay playfully. “What’s up, Jay? Are we boring you already?”

  “Hell yes, you’re boring the shit out of me! Can’t you talk about anything else besides Building Products and this clusterfuck project? Jesus Christ in a chicken basket!”

  One of the employees from Building Products heard Jay’s comment and turned toward them. Michelle thought she caught the faint sense of disapproval on her face. “Must you go through another one of your worthless rants again, Jay? I mean...really!”

  “I suppose I don’t really have to,” Jay began, “but the more I sit here listening to the conversation, the more it’s pissing me off. You’d think that when a group of co-workers gets together to hang out after work and shoot the shit, they’d find other topics of discussion besides their jobs. You know, the weather, the latest movies and cultural events, what’s going on in the world outside of work, maybe even idle chatter about families and kids. Not you guys. You guys are abnormal.”

  Another Building Products employee, the team leader, said, “Guess that just means we’re more dedicated than you, Jay.”

  “More dedicated my ass! You guys need me more than I need you! I wrote that ASP code for the website in my sleep. I also know when to walk away from this shit and live life. Something you guys have a problem doing.”

  “You didn’t have to come, Jay,” the first Building Products employee said. Michelle thought her name was Barb. Barb was dressed tastefully in a blue business suit and had impeccable fingernails. She was nursing a glass of whiskey. To Michelle, she looked like a disapproving teacher or parent. “Sometimes I don’t know why you come to these things.”

  “Well, let’s see, I wanted to talk to Paul about the project he was working on and I wanted to hear about his daughter Amy,” Jay said. “You remember what happened to Amy, don’t you Barb?”

  Barb’s forehead grew creases. “Wasn’t she in an accident?”

  “Yeah. She was hit by a car two weeks ago. Paul’s been out of his mind every day since and has missed over a week of work, and all he gets is a bunch of shit from those numb-brained managers about missing work because of it. What kind of shit is that?”

  “Isn’t Paul in Sales?” Barb asked.

  “That’s him,” Jay said.

  “Well, I’m sure Jim has very good reasons for leaning on him about missing work,” Barb said. Whatever everybody else was talking about at their table was forgotten and became focused on Jay and Barb. “I mean, I sympathize with what he’s going through, but he should be thankful his daughter’s alive.”

  Jay was looking at Barb as if she were from another planet and Michelle felt her admiration for him leap into the stratosphere. It was rare to meet a man who worked a white-collar job who held such unapologetic views about taking time away from the duties of work to tend to the needs of his family. Of course, Donald was very much like Jay in this respect, but then Donald was a doctor. Different ballgame, different mindset. “Man, you don’t get it, do you?”

  “What’s there to get? His daughter was hit by a car, it was a terrible thing, she lived, that’s that! He should be thankful things weren’t worse. That’s all I’m saying.”

  Jay took a deep drag on his cigarette and leaned forward, his lanky frame hunched over the table. He was dressed in a pair of black khaki’s, a blue long-sleeved shirt, the sleeves pushed up to his elbows exposing his tattooed forearms. “So if it was your son you’re telling me you wouldn’t be home with him right now; you’d rather be here wasting time with us idiots?”

  Scattered laughter around the table. Barb managed a slight smile at the jab. “I suppose I would. Does that bother you?”

  “Does it bother you?”

  “No.”

  “Why the hell not?”

  “Why should it?”

  “Is your job more important than your son?”

  “What kind of question is that?”

  “What do you mean, what kind of question is that? It’s a very simple question. Is your job more important than your son?”

  “That’s asinine.”

  “Asinine,” Jay said, his voice a mocking snort of dismay. He dragged on the butt of his cigarette and stubbed it out in the ashtray. “That’s right. It’s asinine to be more concerned for your kid than your day-job, but what the fuck do I know, rig
ht? I’m just the grunt that maintains the website and fixes the shit whenever some hacker releases a new Trojan on the internet.”

  “Jay, I think you’re making a big deal out of this.” This comment came from Harold Tyler, one of the men who was in the meeting and who’d tagged along to Lone Star. He was at the far end of the table. Michelle didn’t know what his working relationship on the chain of command at Building Products was, but Michelle got the impression he had some kind of seniority over Jay. “Besides, Paul isn’t here anymore.”

  Michelle was thinking this, too; she’d met Paul briefly when they first entered the Lone Star and hadn’t paid much attention to him as she tried to get involved with the conversation of her Corporate Financial Consultant colleague Alan, and the rest of the Building Products team. Jay and Paul had sat on their end of the table and talked and Michelle hadn’t really paid much attention to them until she happened to notice Jay was now alone. Paul had left, and Jay was nursing a cup of coffee and smoking a cigarette. Everybody else was nursing beers, except for Barb, who had been drinking bourbon on the rocks since their arrival. A few of them were getting tipsy, and Jay was watching them with what appeared to be a faint sense of scorn. It was then that she’d taken a step back and began listening to the conversations around her; they were talking about work and the project, and it had been their sole source of conversation for the past hour and a half.

  “Yeah,” Jay said. “I guess I should have left when he took off.”

  Barb gave Jay a look again, one that seemed to say I got the best of you, then turned to the rest of the party. Alan and Harold and the others slipped back into their conversation and once again the topic was work. They slipped into it so seamlessly that it was as if they hadn’t stopped the conversation—they just picked right up where they left off. Michelle was a little taken aback. I guess they were really itching to get back into whatever it was they were talking about. She picked up her glass, which was a quarter filled with beer, and took a sip.