This interview, for instance. It could not have happened at a worse time. But Clare is not a company that ducks the public, not a company that breaks appointments, not a company that misses a chance to represent itself in a large and sympathetic forum.
“Part one,” the producer has written him, “will examine business at the most fundamental level. What is its purpose? What do we want it to do?” Smirking a little at the questions, which would not survive five minutes in the real world, Kennibar sets his three-hundred-dollar fountain pen to canary yellow legal pad and begins to scribble:
To make a profit. To make a consistent profit. To make a profit in the long run. To make a living. To make things. To make things in the most economical way. To make the greatest number of things. To make the greatest things. To make things that last the longest. To make things for the longest possible time. To make things that people need. To make things that people desire. To make people desire things. To give meaningful employment. To give reliable employment. To provide workers with a steady income. To give people something to do. To do something. To provide the greatest good for the greatest number. To promote the general welfare. To provide for the common defense. To increase the value of the common stock. To pay a regular dividend. To maximize the net worth of the firm. To advance the lot of all the stakeholders. To grow. To progress. To expand. To increase know-how. To increase revenues and decrease costs. To get the job done more cheaply. To compete efficiently. To buy low and sell high. To improve the hand that humankind has been dealt. To produce the next round of technological innovation. To rationalize nature. To improve the landscape. “To shatter space and arrest time.” To see what the human race can do. To amass the country’s retirement pensions. To amass the capital required to do anything we may want to do. To discover what we want to do. To vacate the premises before the sun dies out. To make life a little easier. To make people a little wealthier. To make people a little happier. To build a better tomorrow. To kick something back into the kitty. To facilitate the flow of capital. To preserve the corporation. To do business. To stay in business. To figure out the purpose of business.
Kennibar thinks of adding: “To beat death,” but he’s afraid he’ll forget what he meant when the cameras roll this afternoon. He cannot concentrate. His heart is not in this commission. Already he feels that the floodgates have opened. Two weeks ago, the Masters of Tobacco, all innocence, taking Kennibar to dinner at the Union Oyster House, mentioned, in passing, the many advantages the two companies might enjoy by getting together.
Tobacco has no desire to “get together.” Tobacco means to eat Clare on the half shell with a squirt of lemon. Here was the nightmare scenario Clare has feared for months. What with the Common languishing down around 40, for no real reason aside from unfair concern over a few unrelated and easily addressed lawsuits out in the boonies, the company has become a steal. But neither Kennibar nor any of his field marshals have any intention of being stolen. And so they go into the fire drill they have prepared for just such an emergency.
The management group will make an offer to spin off much of the company while bringing the core industry private once again. Chopping up the firm will horrify the board; it may choose any other fate over such an end. Sprinkling the bloody pieces on the waters may make the sharks even hungrier. Or the move may prove a kind of starfish solution: each severed limb regenerating a whole new viable body.
Whatever the outcome, change will be massive and massively expensive. That is the nature of markets: the loser’s auction, throwing good money after bad, bidding things higher until whoever ends up with what is left of the company will be saddled with a lasting legacy of debt and downsizing. Debt that gets shouldered by the fifty thousand people who work for him in one way or another. Debt that gets passed on to the consumer, All My Brood, as the old Clare soap opera called them.
Five floors below him, middle managers teem, trying to make sense of their little corner of the numbers. The order goes out to bug Tobacco’s offices, down South. They will use the same people who tapped the phones of their own labor organizers, last year.
Out in Oregon, at a new plant site, environmental testing consultants stun the fish in the adjacent river to make a head count. Acquisitions has paid to have the river graded class five: do what you will to it. The soil of a pristine neighboring farm turns out to contain massive doses of heavy metals concentrated by cows processing their feed, poisons that the purchasing company will have to clean up.
Down in New York, one of his jingle writers rags the other: “Will you quit with that ‘con ve nience’ already? It’s like ‘Baby’ with you.” Three offices down, the ad firm’s accounts supervisor arranges with the networks to show its finished handiwork on programming that is guaranteed free of offensive content. Already they have arranged for the country’s second largest retailer to drop a competitor’s stock in favor of this new entry.
A team of twenty analysts looks over the management team’s buyout proposals and financing schemes. They have been doing this for four days, without sleep. Every two hours now, they scrap their last two hours’ work and start again. Raiders, poison pills, goal-line defenses, porcupine provisions, one of them thinks: didn’t we use to make things?
On the line in Rapid City, a woman with raging Type II diabetes picks defective wrappers off a belt as they try to slip past her. She converses with the woman next to her over the din of the conveyor, neither of them taking her eyes off their tollgate. “He was supposed to be paying maintenance on the mortgaged lot, okay. But before they could transfer the title, okay, he had to . . .”
A truck driver in Karachi inches his load of Snowdrop through a particularly vicious snarl of city traffic at the crack of dawn. Each month, the jam starts ten minutes earlier. But this month three years from now, he will be free. Barring a bolt from God, he will have saved enough money by then to buy his own twenty-year-old two-ton grain truck and begin driving for himself.
The semiannual reviews come out in Dallas. A young chemical engineer, only three years out of school, reads her evaluation in mounting anger. “They can’t do this to me,” she tells her organic flavorings project partner, who nods in sympathy. “This is an insult. I don’t need this. I can get a job anywhere. I have three of the best new citrus scents in existence in my portfolio.”
The Clare Agricultural Muck Shuckers look over their new uniforms: gray flannel with red stripes, and a blue shovel as logo. To -night they begin defending their citywide sixteen-inch softball championship. Their only potential competition is a group of twenty-year-old upstart ringers from Sawgak College.
A public relations agent shakes her head over the latest spin challenge: a former Greensboro employee who claims to have been beaten and raped for telling the local paper about management-approved product adulterating. Out in the refrigerated warehouses, fork drivers slap their shoulders for warmth. A regional buyer whose territory spreads over four square states juggles his stock figures. A trio of R and D analysts in Detroit, L.A., and Kansas City get together via teleconferencing. They conclude that the company’s molecular toolbox ought to be producing a new product once every forty-seven days.
Team bosses at the Knick-Knocker packaging plant in Caracas come to reprimand the new nineteen-year-old hire. They told him when he joined a month ago that if he could manage a hundred packs an hour, that would be fine. By dint of discipline, practice, and hard work, the boy has gotten up to a hundred and twenty. “You don’t understand,” the shift foreman says gently. “A hundred would be just fine.”
In Lebanon, Ohio, a Ph.D. in music composition from Columbia repeatedly hits the BACK button on his CD remote, replaying a strain from a Shaker hymn. His last steady job was playing accordion at age fourteen for his friends’ bar mitzvahs. He has bounced from waiter to radio programmer to delivery man, landing at last as an adjunct professor at the close-security prison college just ten miles down the road from the vanished site of Mother Ann Lee’s failed utopian community, wher
e he gives the Western culture survey to lifers.
Almost by accident, a Clare creative director has heard the composer’s variations for solo viola on the old fuguing tune Idumea, performed in a Chelsea loft the year before. Now the composer has been given the offer of a lifetime, the chance to earn more for one half-minute scrap than all his other music combined has earned in his entire life.
He must set to music a digitally rendered ad sequence that makes the viewer feel present at the day of creation. He cannot help but grin euphorically, watching the rushes unfold. In the takes they send him, every human possibility flies up, freed, while doom morphs into dahlias, crop-filled fields flow like rivers of delight, and the sky rains contentment.
This is the vista that needs his thirty seconds of consummate tune. They ask for “something American, something Coplandesque.” Something yawping, praiseful, embracing. Again and again, he replays the old Shaker lines, ’Tis the gift to come down / Where we ought to be.
And on the top floor of One Clare Plaza, this year’s CEO readies himself for his latest Television per for mance. “Be prepared to speak a little about the history of your firm,” the producer has written him. To this end Kennibar is cramming, consuming thumbnail biographies of the first five Mr. Clares and all that they assembled. The ruined merchant family. Their rescue of the lost Irishman. The first sale, a five-cent loss. One and three-quarters centuries of product improvement.
He stops and gazes out the window again, musing on the story of the Clare who once searched for a hole at the Pole. They only looked, it occurs to him. We made one.
Years later, the thing he remembered most about the funeral was how many people came. He’d always thought of his mother as more or less alone. It shocked him, going into the church. The place was full.
He couldn’t imagine where all the people had come from. Yet he recognized most of them. Friends of his parents before the split. Colleagues of his mother from the real estate office. Neighbors. People she’d worked with on fund-raising and charity drives. Her best friends from college, from childhood. Aunts and uncles and cousins that Tim hadn’t seen for four or five years. His dad’s friends. His sister’s friends. His own friends. His friends’ mothers: all the sorry women who used to suffer with her, up in the soccer stands. People from the hospital. Her old chemo nurses.
The only person in that church who didn’t know his mother from Eve was the minister. The man talked for twenty minutes about a total stranger. His father and sister sat fixed in the pew, standing for the hymns but not singing, silent even during the prayers. Only, when the minister read that bit from the Bible, about God making man in his own image and telling him to be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it, his father had cried, loud enough for the five rows behind them to hear, “It’s subdued.”
That much Tim always remembered. Afterward, a lot of people came back for a reception at his dad’s. He spent the afternoon eating little sausages on toothpicks and eavesdropping on the adults. Everybody either had cancer or knew three people who did. That was the afternoon when his dad met Hannah, his mother’s best friend from college. Hannah, who would become Tim’s stepmother for seven years, more than half as long as he’d known his own mother. Seven pretty rocky years of power struggle on behalf of a woman whom each loved better than the other.
A week after the funeral, Tim and his sister and father returned to his mother’s house with the packing boxes. His mother’s old boss at Millennium offered to sell the place at reduced commission and was optimistic about an asking price. Ellen found the first note. She was cleaning out the cedar chest upstairs. On top of the pile of winter sweaters was a yellow Post-It: “Wash these in cold water, on gentle. Lay them flat on a towel to dry!”
It seemed a fluke, until the next one. Tim found it on a bird feeder in the basement. “If you leave this out over winter, make sure to keep it filled.” A moment later, Don turned up a green one, in the deep freeze: “Feb. Ellen’s favorite ratatouille. Thaw the day before. Heat at 350, about 20 min. Very good batch.”
Maybe a hundred color-coded notes, throughout the house. All the things none of them knew how to do. They sold the other house, his father’s, and moved back to the one with all the instructions.
They had all moved back in when Clare announced a massive corporate reorganization involving the sale of the Agricultural Products Division to Monsanto. The high bidders didn’t really want the division, but even less did they want it to fall into the hands of American Cyanamid. Two years later, the new owners moved the plant to a maquiladora, several hundred miles from the nearest fertilizable ear of corn.
After the move, the town more or less shut down for a long winter’s sleep.
Ellen never touched a dime of her settlement money. She didn’t want to give the company the gratification. But she never returned it either. She studied botany at Sawgak, answered phones for a design firm for two years, went to Chicago to get her LPN, moved back to a dying Lacewood, and worked at Mercy. She fell for and married the sporty Tom of Tom and Al’s Sporting Goods, who wanted nothing more than to give her everything she wanted.
The only thing Ellen really wanted was to have kids. She and Tom tried for years: concentrations, harvesting, implanting, in vitro. Nothing worked for them. But because the doctors were perpetually in there looking, they saw her ovarian trouble early, and gained her many years.
For a time, Tim, too, did nothing with his lump-sum buy-off. While still in high school, he purchased a pretty fast rig and some decent software for it. As he saw things, that machine got him into MIT.
In his junior year of computer science, he fell desperately in love. The woman toyed with him for two months before upgrading. Thereafter, he stuck with the dependable. He worked late at night, in the subterranean caverns, on self-propagating learning routines and distributed processing.
Burnt out by graduation, he went to work as a data processing pack animal for a firm down at Lewis Wharf. He fell in love again, tentatively, then floridly, with a married woman who used him to hurt her husband, to whom she finally returned.
He lived in a hole in the wall near the North End, a two-room apartment he refused to furnish. He bought only secondhand clothes, and he ate only fresh vegetables from the Haymarket stalls. On those rare occasions when he resorted to manufactured goods, he always checked the labels. Nothing made him happier than going without. For three years running, he marked the anniversary of his mother’s death with hunger vigils on One Clare Plaza.
After some time, he went back to Cambridge, to graduate school. There, curiosity slowly got the better of bitterness. He hooked up with an interdisciplinary research group working on a computing solution to the protein folding problem. They sought to write a program—a whole library, in fact—that would take any amino acid sequence and predict exactly how it would fold up. For if they could find the folded enzyme’s shape, they would know how the molecule behaved. And knowledge of enzyme behavior was the key to a cell’s life and death.
The problem was intractable, as adamant as creation. Tim’s program lines ran into the millions. The monster grew eternally bigger, slower, more brutish and bug-ridden. It threatened to collapse under its own weight.
Then one year, under constant heat and pressure, the eight of them managed to dissolve the problem. The trick relied upon a chunk of code whose ambidextrous data structures looked out Janus-faced to mesh with both raw source and finished product. The result was a transforming algorithm that worked in two directions. The program told how a given protein sequence would fold up and behave. But for any given enzymatic action, the program also supplied a sequence recipe.
In such a vat, people might create molecules to do anything. The team found itself staring at a universal chemical assembly plant at the level of the human cell. Together with a score of other machines just then coming into existence, their program promised to make anything the damaged cell called out for.
And no one needed to name the first cur
e that would roll off their production line.
It was then that Timothy Bodey mentioned a healthy bit of capital he had tucked away, untouched since childhood. The sum had been compounding forever, waiting for a chance to revenge its earning. The figure was now huge, a considerable bankroll. And softly, Tim suggested that it might be time for the little group of them to incorporate.
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