The Fearsome Particles

by Trevor Cole

  “Uh, oh,” said Phil, giving the sides of his chair a foreboding thumpa-thump.

  “I have been made aware of something pretty shocking – shocking to me, anyway. It’s the fact that Spent Materials, in terms of its window-screen market share, is now at its lowest point ever, in its history.” He paused to make sure he had everyone’s attention. When he focused on his sales and marketing director, Trick hesitated, then startled into life.

  “Did you want …?” He made a move toward his laptop.

  “No. I think what you’re going to tell us, Trick, is that our market share percentage is around three something.”

  Trick was caught halfway between the table and his laptop. “Close, I mean, if I could look here I could tell you exactly, but once our Q-three spending kicks in, it should be up near four. But let me just –”

  “What I’d like to know,” said Gerald, “is what our share is at this moment. Do you have that?”

  “I’ll see,” called Trick, his voice sounding squeezed. Bent over and tapping away on the floor, he appeared to be tying his shoes. When he straightened, his chest heaved. “Whew! Hard to breathe like that.” Then he turned his chair back to the table. “Sorry, that number must be in another file.”

  Sandy gave a short, specific cough.

  “Well, it doesn’t matter because I already know the number,” said Gerald. “It’s two point five.”

  There were no audible gasps from either Doug or Phil, the only two people in the room who should have been surprised. Each of them, looking at Gerald, appeared unfazed. Gerald turned and wrote the number 2.5 on the whiteboard behind him. He tapped it with the marker.

  “Am I the only one who’s astounded by that number?”

  Around the boardroom table, faces moved. Doug regarded Phil and Trick. Phil looked at Trick and Doug. Trick focused exclusively on Sandy. Sandy kept her eyes to the front.

  “Phil,” said Gerald. “Did you know we were at two point five?”

  Phil placed his hands on the armrests of his chair, and pushed himself into a fully upright position.

  “Yes.”

  “What about you, Doug?”

  Doug appeared to suppress a burp. “I had an idea.”

  It seemed to Gerald the only solid thing in his life, the only thing he could count on, was the blue whiteboard marker in his hand. At least Sandy had come to him with the truth; where had the rest of them been when the company that kept them alive was sliding into the crapper? Where had he been? And where was the loyalty to Bishop? In the fist that hung at his side, next to his pants pocket, Gerald squeezed the blue marker as if he could choke answers out of it. And he reached for the granite strength of will he’d showed just a few hours before, in the face of the forces overwhelming his son. It was a cable of apathy that had them all in its grip, and he was going to frigging well cut it.

  “Here’s what I think,” said Gerald. “I think this company’s headed for trouble. Big trouble. Okay? I think that because we make window screens and furnace filters a lot of you” – he looked at the men – “have the idea we don’t need to be creative and energized and strategic. And that’s the kind of attitude that’s made us eleventh out of eleven. Or let’s make that eleventh out of ten. Because we’re now actually behind a company that’s out of business.” He reached and tapped the number on the board with his marker. “Two point five. I don’t know about you” – he looked at the men – “but to me that’s obscene. And we should all be disgusted with ourselves.”

  He searched for signs that Phil, Doug, and Trick were adequately disgusted. Each of the men was looking into a middle zone of nothingness somewhere above the table, which could have been read as either dawning shame or insensate lethargy. Gerald, reaching for optimism, chose shame. In contrast, by the oddly flat set of her mouth and the way her eyes seemed to be bulging, Sandy appeared to be wrestling mano-a-mano with a writhing gator of mirth. Well, that was fine, thought Gerald, because as the one Spent employee with a fresh idea in her head, she’d earned a moment of self-regard.

  “So,” he continued, “what are we going to do about it? What are our options? I guess one, the one we seem to like around here, is to do nothing and let Spent Materials, the company that feeds our families, and Bishop Spent, the man who gave all of us our jobs, just slide into oblivion like a cardboard box you toss into the recycling bin.”

  “Mr. Woodlore?” chirped Sandy, pushing her chair back from the table’s edge. “Gerald? Do you think this might be a good time for me to come up?” She edged her chair one anticipatory inch farther.

  Gerald shook his head as a frowning Trick raised his hand halfway in the air.

  “Yes, Trick?”

  “Why is Sandy asking if it’s time to go up?”

  “You’ll find out in a minute.”

  “Well” – he looked hurt – “she’s my assistant.”

  “I was wondering the same thing,” said Doug. He looked over at Phil. “Weren’t you?”

  Phil, dab-dabbling the table with an oscillating thumb and fourth finger, nodded to the beat. “Uh-huh.”

  Gerald breathed noisily to convey his irritation. He’d planned a whole lot more chastising about the systemic infection of inertia at Spent before getting to Sandy’s idea. He’d also planned to do the presenting himself, while giving Sandy full credit, because he had more presenting experience than she did and knew exactly how to use her idea to spark a productive brainstorming session. On the other hand, he understood that delegating – the Prime Instrument for Executive Success (“PIES”) according to every leadership training workshop he’d attended – was something he needed to work on. And he recognized that meetings were living things, that they couldn’t always be contained and controlled, and that thanks to Sandy’s over-eagerness his grip on this one was slipping. So he decided, just this once, to take his hands right off the leash.

  “Sandy,” he said, “why don’t you come on up here. Now people” – she was already at his side – “I want to preface what Sandy has to say by telling you that we have put ourselves in a position, all right?, where we have to consider the unusual, we have to be prepared to take a bold step outside our comfort zone and take a chance. So now, let Sandy give her presentation, and then we’ll get into some discussion. And keep in mind that I’d like to come out of this meeting, at the end, with some kind of action plan.” He turned to Sandy and offered what he hoped was an encouraging smile. “Okay, Sandy?”

  Sandy, it was quickly apparent, had no need of his smile. She swept her eyes from Gerald to the men seated around the table and opened her folder like wings. “People,” she said, “get ready to have your worlds rocked.”

  It was at 10:13 a.m., by Gerald’s watch, when Sandy lost the group. There’d been a few moments, while she was talking about uncontrolled incursions of potentially deadly viruses and bacteria riding into homes on the backs of Algerian dust particles like suicide bombers ploughing through unarmed checkpoints, when she seemed to have them in thrall. There’d even been a glimmer of admiration in Trick Runiman’s otherwise hooded-with-suspicion eyes. But the window filter idea itself met with incredulous squinting all around. And when Doug Allsop averred that it might be a tad harder than perhaps Sandy realized to convince residential building contractors and housing material resellers to stock up on a lot of washable furnace filters repurposed to function as view-blocking window screens – and Sandy responded by grabbing her throat and making wet gagging noises to suggest their lack of courage – it became obvious to Gerald that he needed to step in.

  He lifted a hand. “Let’s hold off on making any quick judgments.”

  “If you don’t have those contractors and resellers onside,” warned Doug, “then you’re pissing up a dead tree.”

  “Thank you,” said Sandy. “Great universal metaphor.”

  “I’m telling you.”

  “What I wanna know,” said Trick, “is when she had the time to put all this together when she was supposed to be working for me.” He
spread his hands imploringly. “Like, was she doing this when we were supposed to be making trade show calls?”

  “I did it after hours,” said Sandy. “I stayed late. Do I have any witnesses? Uh, no.”

  “What’s that mean?” said Doug. “No one else works late?”

  Phil Barbuda fired a quick drum roll and jabbed a finger at Doug. “That’s it.”

  “I stay late sometimes,” Doug insisted. “When it’s necessary.”

  “So do I,” said Trick.

  Sandy shuffled her papers and sniffed. “Not since I’ve been here.”

  “I think,” said Gerald, “we may be losing the thread.”

  Trick thrust out an arm and pointed to a symbolic region in space. “I take work home.”

  “Can we get back to the idea?” pleaded Gerald. “Sandy’s at least trying to make a contribution.”

  “Thank you,” said Sandy, offering him a solemn smile.

  “I’ll show you,” grunted Trick, who was now bent over, clicking on the floor. “Here! Look at the modification times on all these newsletter files. Like twenty of them. Look at this, eight-seventeen p.m.”

  “That’s fine, Trick.”

  “Ten-forty-one.”

  “Phil, did you –”

  “Some of these I wrote in bed.”

  “We believe you,” said Doug. “Everybody here works hard.”

  Trick sat up red-faced, gasping for air. “Anyone wants to look, it’s right there.”

  Phil brought his hands down flat on the table. “I’m willing to talk money issues whenever you want.”

  “Yes!” exclaimed Gerald. “Please, Phil, what are the money issues?”

  Phil turned his palms over. “We have no money.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “No money to speak of. We have debt. We have a lot of debt. And we have assets. But something like this, new product development, needs cash, of which we have none.”

  Doug shook his head as though greatly saddened. “Well, that sounds pretty final to me.”

  “No,” said Gerald, “we can reallocate money. When Phil says we have no cash, he means we have no cash reserves. It doesn’t mean we can’t push money around.”

  “Not mine,” said Doug. “Bishop told me my budget was untouchable.”

  “Our R&D money’s already tied up in maintenance overages,” added Phil.

  “My department’s barely scraping by as it is,” said Trick.

  At the front of the room, Sandy pressed her hands to her ears. “Everybody’s just protecting their turf here. No one’s talking about the actual idea!”

  “We’re being polite,” said Trick.

  “Oh?”

  “Opaque window screens?” He made a face of distaste. “I don’t think so.”

  “Translucent window filters.”

  Trick shaped a newspaper ad in the air. “ ‘Block Out the Sun with Spent Window Filters.’ Oh yeah, that’s a grabber.”

  “ ‘Stock Up on Building Materials No One Will Buy,’ ” offered Doug.

  “Try ‘Keep Your Family Safe’ or ‘Guard Your Family’s Health.’ ” Sandy threw up her hands. “I mean, I could be just as negative as you if I wanted to be. How about ‘Let Every Invasive, Deadly, Evil Particle Known to Science into Your Home with Spent Window Screens,’ or ‘Spent Window Screens – the Next Best Thing to Doing Nothing.’ Or, hey, ‘Want Your Family to Get Sick? Get Spent.’ ”

  “Okay, Sandy.” Gerald knew he had to grab hold of the meeting before it rolled away, beyond his reach, but he was battling waves of disappointment. He’d wanted keenly to believe that a daring business idea could invigorate a static mindset, that risk could spur real change, that a bolt of innovation could trigger creative aftershocks that would wipe out the impediments to industry, in the fundamental sense of that word – energy, diligence, devotion!

  And he’d wanted to prove he could lead, that with a light touch he could steer a company clear of the black waters, the way a chief executive was supposed to.

  But he was starting to think it wasn’t that easy. Or maybe not easy for him. He’d been willing to try delegating. He’d been willing to hope for the best. But he had the sense now that allowing Sandy to present her window filters idea had made the task of getting people onside and focused a whole lot tougher. And so, when Gerald rose from his chair, he was triply angry, at the inability of a daring idea to engender yet more daring, at the failure of the delegating approach, which he’d never had any faith in no matter what the workshops said, and at himself, for having faint-hearted instincts that twittered when they should have shouted, and for leaving himself bereft of anything remotely like a Plan B.

  “You know,” he said, walking slowly to the front of the room, “I’m hearing a lot of unconstructive whining and ass-covering going on here and I’m a little sick of it.” He picked up the blue whiteboard marker and circled the 2.5 he’d drawn. “This is the problem.” The misgivings shouting at him now, he decided, were too late to do him any good. “This member of our team” – he pointed his marker at Sandy – “has tried to solve the problem by contributing a bold, imaginative idea. And because none of you has offered an even slightly better one, this is what we’re going to do.”

  Gerald wrote Window Filters on the whiteboard, then he underlined it, twice, and turned. “This is our new product initiative.”

  Trick raised an index finger. “Yeah, but shouldn’t –”

  “Tomorrow afternoon,” continued Gerald, “I want all of you to come in equipped with some serious, constructive thoughts on design and production, on sales and marketing, on customer support and anything else you can think of, so that we can shape and implement Sandy’s idea.”

  Sandy’s hand shot up like a flare. “Gerald, do you want them to report to me?”

  He tossed the marker onto the whiteboard ledge. “No,” he said. “I’ll be directing this.”

  7

  There were other places, closer to home, that I could have gone. But I didn’t care about convenience; I didn’t care about saving time or money or gas. Niagara Falls was the place that I thought of as soon as the image on the screen seized up and the clicks stopped getting through, and so I just went with it. I was adapting to circumstances, you know? Being equa-mouse.

  As I drove along the QEW, around the toe of the lake, I hit the scan button on Dad’s radio and just let it run the dial. After the third or fourth pass through all the six-second fragments, it was obvious that all the stations were playing garbage, nothing you could really listen to. I mean, unlike Dad, I can’t get all caught up in talk and traffic reports and weather. So I turned off the radio and gave in to the music in my head. Sometimes in camp you could hear songs coming from the tent with the Kurdish workers. You could hear flutes and drums that rose and fell like wind sliding over the dunes. A couple of times during the water run in Balakhet I heard music that was similar coming from the mud-wall buildings. So I just let that run in my head while I drove, and it made me think of other things.

  “You playing or what?”

  It was my first night of cards with Legg and his buddies: the big warrant officer named Tanner, the sergeant Joe Leunette, and another corporal they called “Wedge,” maybe for the shape of his chin, although Legg didn’t seem to know him as well as the others. It was ten or so at night and we were sitting around an end table under the hanging fluorescents of the Camp Laverne kitchen, me beside Leunette, Tanner and Legg across from us, and Wedge on the end, dealing.

  Tanner had already folded his cards and Wedge was staring at Legg, who was leaning forward onto the back of his turned-around chair, the curved edges digging into his chest. “I said, you playing?”

  Legg frowned up at him. “Whaddaya mean am I fuckin’ playin’? That’s my money already in there. You raised, I fuckin’ called.”

  “You haven’t even looked at your hole cards.”

  “What the fucksit matter to you if I look at my cards? It’s not gonna change ’em. They’re still gonna beat y
our fuckin’ shit.”

  “So you’re in.”

  “I’m in, I’m in! Let’s play!”

  Wedge turned to me. “What about you?”

  All I had was a pair of sevens – one turned up and one in the hole – but it was early and we were just playing for quarters. And to be honest, I’d never played a lot of poker. “I call.”

  Wedge lifted his eyebrow at me. “You sure about that?”

  “Yup.”

  Wedge seemed unhappy. He waited for Leunette, who’d bet first with two nines showing. Leunette folded.

  “You guys keep bulldozing right over my fifty cents,” said Leunette. “Like to see a little more respect for your elders.”

  “Okay,” said Wedge. “Last card down.” He dealt cards to Legg, me and himself, and gave his new hole card a look. Then he glanced around the table. “My pair of sixes bet. I check.”

  Legg flicked in two quarters from his pile.

  “You still haven’t looked,” said Wedge.

  “Are you gonna fuckin’ hound me all night?”

  It was my turn next and I called.

  Wedge smiled. “Looks like both you fairies have fallen into my web.” He tossed two dollars into the pot. “Raise a buck fifty.”

  “Limit’s a buck,” said Leunette.

  “You’re not playing.”

  “Still a buck.”

  “Just take ’em back, asshole,” said Legg, and he slid two quarters out of the pot toward Wedge. Then he looked at his hole cards, shrugged and tossed them into the discard pile.

  “Finally,” muttered Wedge.

  I started to reach for my quarters.

  “Hoo hoo,” said Tanner, rubbing his hands. “Action’s heating up.”

  “Watch it – what’s your name, Kyle?” said Wedge. “I’d be careful.”

  “Why?”

  Wedge seemed to think this was funny. “Why? I just checked and raised. That’s not telling you something?”