After On

by Rob Reid

  “Heyyy, Champ!” Ellie Jansen’s mahogany eyes glittered merrily as she took her seat one row behind Mitchell in Creative Writing class. Champ. It was an odd sobriquet for a guy with dim college prospects in baseball and none in football. But kindly exaggeration was Ellie’s hallmark. And while a real athletic future would’ve been nice, having Ellie call him “champ” was a fine consolation prize. Although to be clear, it was a thoroughly G-rated delight! Though gorgeous (quite), and charming (utterly), Ellie was the opposite of smutty, and Mitchell had lost all interest in demure cuddling. He was a high school junior with three varsity letters, and his virginity was somewhere between an embarrassment and a flat-out disgrace!

  On top of that, he was pretty sure Kuba was hot for Ellie. True, he didn’t know this factually (because you try clawing that sort of fact out of him!). But as Kuba was an odd mix of best friend and SPCA rescue, there was NO WAY Mitchell was about to take any chance, however slim, on breaking his precious, fragile heart! At least not if Ellie wasn’t going to fuck him senseless as part of the deal, and this seemed unlikely. Not that he’d want to do that! Mitchell recalled righteously. He and Ellie went clear back to grade school. They were practically related!

  Mitchell returned his gaze to Ellie as she twisted toward the door and dropped her voice an octave to greet the latest arrival. “Mr. Bowles?” she said with mock solemnity. “High five.”

  Scruffy, lanky, half-shaven, and clad in black jeans and a Portishead hoodie, Paul Sanders grinned shyly and smacked palms with the lass while taking his assigned seat to her immediate left. Ur-goths like Paul usually shunned this bro-tastic greeting—but Ellie dealt that high five with irony, and she could get anyone to act a bit playfully. In IMs and emails with Kuba, Mitchell referred to Paul as “Pall,” for his pallor and moroseness. But Pall had an odd streak of charisma, and (like Ellie) took literature very seriously. And so Ellie nicknamed him Mr. Bowles, coyly implying lineage to a master of downer novels who they both apparently idolized. She and Pall had been strangers when a randomly generated seating chart made them neighbors in this class back in September. Since then, Mitchell had been a ringside witness to a blooming friendship just as unlikely as his own alliance with Kuba. Something big happened between the two of them around Thanksgiving. At first, Mitchell thought they’d hooked up. But recent rumors had it that Pall was briefly suicidal, and Ellie hauled him out of it. Since then, she’d made a project of pulling Pall into the mainstream, and it was actually starting to work.

  Mitchell respected this—and grudgingly respected Pall even though the kid could be a condescending dick to him. Oddly, that very dickishness abetted his respect. Although Mitchell’s athletic gifts and easygoing charisma placed him in the school’s elite, being atop the ziggurat didn’t mean he approved of its existence. He therefore found it cool that Pall kowtowed to no one and only valued intelligence. It would have been cooler still if Paul had valued Mitchell’s intelligence, but everyone’s entitled to his opinion.

  “Alright, you delinquents, hop to it!” Ms. Tharp commanded cheerfully as the bell rang. Everyone got to work, and Ms. Tharp slowly orbited the room, dropping in for private coaching sessions with her various scribes. Late in the class session, she visited Mitchell. “This is such a fascinating project,” she murmured while scanning his output. In the three weeks since Pugwash talked the boys out of beating Facebook to the trillion-dollar punch, they had wholly focused on building that human-like chatbot. Knowing nothing about coding, and being Kuba’s better in English, Mitchell was developing an arsenal of stock phrases and language rules for it. It was an oddball project for a class. But Ms. Tharp thought it was smart and inventive and approved it. Mitchell had written hundreds of standard sentences by then, as well as Mad Libs–like rules for generating many more. After skimming through much of his output, she disclaimed, “I’m no computer scientist. But if you really want people to think these sentences are coming from a human, I’d say they should be a lot more…voice-y.”

  Mitchell nodded. “Voice-y,” he parroted, having no idea what this meant.

  “Which means, written in a distinct voice,” Ms. Tharp coached. “A quirky voice, but consistently quirky. That’ll sound more like it’s coming from a living, breathing person.”

  “You’re right,” Mitchell said. “So what do I do next?”

  “Well, as this is writing class and all, maybe you should try mimicking some of your favorite voice-y writers?”

  “Hmm, like…Hawthorne?” A pathetic shot in the dark. Like most of his countrymen, Mitchell had once read The Scarlet Letter on a teacher’s strict orders. The first book to pop into his mind now, he hoped it qualified as voice-y.

  “I…suppose. But I think you’d have a lot more fun with more modern styles.” As Ms. Tharp told him about some far more recently deceased writers, Mitchell’s phone buzzed faintly. As always, it was tucked between his thighs to allow him to view inbound texts with an innocuous deskward glance. Nodding along with his teacher’s ideas and suggestions, he carefully calculated whether she was seated far enough away for him to check the text without her catching on. Probably. Feigning a glance at his pen, he processed it in his peripheral vision. From Ellie, it reads: So when’re you going to fuck me, champ?

  A quick glance says it all—the swank Bavarian frock, the solid gold accoutrements, the he-tiara—Prince Stefan von Deutschmark is swimming in it! And an hour of play with the little blueblood was the perfect segue to revealing the broad contours of our financial straits to our young daughter, and explaining how finding herself a real Prince Stefan might one day help us all transcend this awkwardness. Look, Darling, it’s your future ex-husband!

  When Mitchell’s phone received the first wanton text from that of his best friend and future co-founder’s future wife, his future boss was taking a call at his desk from ePetStore’s last remaining employee. Britney sat one floor beneath, and about 150 feet southeast of him in Reception. “How much longer are you keeping him down here?” she whispered.

  Jepson considered this. He never let visitors up within fifteen minutes of their appointed times because he’d hate for them to think he had nothing more pressing to do than to meet with them. When he wanted to come off as bustling but friendly, he’d cap it at thirty minutes. Imperial but courteous was thirty to forty-five, and willfully haughty was forty-five to ninety. Today, he was going for flat-out delusional. “How long has it been?”

  “Two hours!”

  “I guess that’s enough. Bring the ol’ Semite up.” Ooops. That just kind of slipped out. And yes, it was clumsy—but also, meaningless. Not just some, but most of Jepson’s best friends were possibly Jewish for one thing! Plus, he pegged the odds that Britney knew the word’s meaning at about zero.

  Jepson rose and surveyed the yawning second floor of his domain. It was almost perfectly empty, and silent as a graveyard right before the first clutching arms erupt from the ground. During the run-up to his clash with Kielholz and the board, he had reasoned that the more recklessly he spent, the more desperate his investors would grow; and therefore, the more quickly and cheaply they’d sell out to him; and, ergo, the more money he’d personally bank in the end. And so he maintained that huge staff while funding any number of cash-hemorrhaging follies.

  Then the instant the investors were gone, and he owned virtually all of the company, austerity commenced her cruel reign! The deranged marketing budget had served its cunning purpose, so he shut it off. His employees had rent to pay and mouths to feed, so he fired them all (save Britney). This made those who held nuggets of company stock all the more willing to dump it at near-zero prices. So he hammered them nearer-still-to-zero, then bought them all out. He meanwhile sold off every cubicle, computer, and stick of furniture, except for a vast herd of Aeron chairs, which he carefully arranged to evoke a packed and bustling office staffed by ghosts with invisible desks. The office thus staged, he invited the company’s creditors to drop by and bicker over nickels-on-the-dollar debt settlements.
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  Jepson postponed his most important meeting until now, gaining ample practice before the big match. The ol’ Semite was ePetStore’s landlord. Like many dot.com CEOs crocked on free money, Jepson had signed a ten-year lease at the market’s apogee. And unless this unclefucker waived it, it would slowly deplete all the cash he had so fiercely preserved throughout his smack-down talks with now-former investors, employees, and creditors! Yes, he could sublet. But no tenant would pay more than a third of what he was on the hook for. And the gaping differential would gradually drain the company’s bank account. The very thought of this filled Jepson with righteous fury!

  “If it isn’t Tav—Tav the rent farmer!” he said as his chubby landlord puffed up the steps. Jepson extended his spine and rose slightly on his toes to showcase his superior height, then added, “Shalom!” thinking an interfaith shout-out might cop him some goodwill.

  Tav gave him a baffled look. Tav was short for Tavit. Like all Tavits, he was Armenian; and like pretty much all Armenians, he was Christian.

  “It’s been far too long since you visited,” Jepson added. “Let’s give you the tour!” Deftly dismissing Tav’s attempt to escape, he led them on a serpentine circuit of the ghostly floor, grandly identifying this quadrant as Marketing, that one as Engineering, and so forth. He described each team’s duties in lavish detail—and in the present tense. He’d tested many dispositions on visiting creditors: panicked, thuggish, slippery, and so forth. And this one—he called it “undermedicated”—was getting the best results.

  “But, uh, where are the people?” Tav finally asked. “And their desks, their computers, and…?”

  “My staff? Temporary hiatus. And the hard assets?” Jepson dropped to a whisper, as if to foil eavesdroppers. “Seized!” A pleasing ripple of panic crossed Tav’s brow. “It was collateral for venture debt. And now, the ‘lenders’ have ‘requisitioned’ the ‘assets,’ to ‘protect’ their ‘investment.’ ” Air-quoting every other word, he resembled a child miming a bunny rabbit. “I mean, miss eight or nine months of payments and…” He flicked a fussy wrist at the Aeron wasteland, like a dowager damning a houseboy’s shoddy work.

  “But you have plenty of money in the bank,” Tav said, naïvely revealing that he’d been tracking the company’s accounts.

  Having expected as much, Jepson was ready for this. “Yes,” he chuckled ruefully. “In a certain local bank, ePetStore has millions. But I’m afraid that’s more than offset by an offshore credit line we’ve drawn down. Way down.” Foreign debt doesn’t always show up in basic credit checks, which was all he figured Tav had sprung for. “Senior debt,” he added.

  “Senior to…?”

  Jepson shrugged. “Everything.” This being a landlord’s nightmare. When a company goes bust, a judge determines which creditors get paid first from its remaining assets. Unpaid employees stand at the front of the line, followed by senior debt. Future rent obligations are way down the list because however big the lease (and however much rent might notionally be due three, five, or ten years hence), a landlord isn’t actually a creditor if a tenant hasn’t yet fallen behind on rent. Anticipating this endgame, Jepson had kept the company’s accounts scrupulously current with Tav.

  “So…where does our lease fit into this?”

  “I was just about to bring that up myself!” Jepson burbled, as if madly tickled by a zany coincidence. This, plus an edge of hysteria in his voice, got Tav unconsciously backing up a few millimeters. “I’ve actually been hoping to…renegotiate with you. It turns out we don’t need quite this much space.”

  “It looks like you don’t need any.”

  “Ahh, but we do!” Jepson flashed a conspiratorial grin. “You see, I don’t have to make my first payment on the Euro debt for a while.”

  “So you’re going to spend the cash you’ve got in the US bank while you still have it?”

  “Invest it,” Jepson snipped. “But, yes. And to be honest, my board of directors was dead set against this. Visionless bean counters! They’re the ones behind all this ‘austerity.’ ” He squeezed off more air quotes while waving indignantly at the entire abandoned floor. This came off like a voodoo hula dance, and Tav retreated another inch. “But now, I can start hiring again. Because the board just quit! All of them.” At this, Tav blanched, as hoped. The man was no venture lawyer, but tech-world landlords do know the basics. Such as: in cases of extreme malfeasance, board members can be personally liable for a company’s shenanigans. “D&O insurance” offers some protection to directors & officers. But when the going gets scary, the scared get going—straight off the board. And if a gagging canary means you should get the hell out of the mine, a sudden board exodus is like ten beefy prospectors keeling over with blackened tongues and purpling faces.

  Jepson could count on Tav to realize this. He also knew the guy would be highly allergic to inquests, courts, and forensic accounting (an awesome term he’d just learned, and hoped to work into the conversation). Because dismal though Jepson’s sense for ethnicity and religion might have been, he was masterful at hammering on an opponent’s weakness in a negotiation. And Tav, he’d learned (by way of a wee payment to a sketchy private eye), had midsized problems with the IRS, and big’uns with immigration. Just a bit more legal scrutiny could have him packing his bags! And much as Tav might like to fight for eight more years of rent at 1999 rates, he was even more motivated to stay well clear of his homeland (wherever it was), where a crypto-Putinite gang was itching to vivisect him.

  “So how much space do you need?”

  “This is best discussed in private,” Jepson whispered, beckoning Tav toward the CEO suite. Shutting the door behind them, he whirled and said, “All fifty of my best guys will come back to work for me the instant I do…this.” He snapped his fingers and clicked his hidden remote. The outside office burst into view. Tav’s eyes widened, confirming Jepson’s suspicion that no one ever told the landlord about the Magic Window. “And I’m doing this—” Snap! “—tomorrow.” The outside vanished, and Tav was again in a confined space with an evident madman. “And it looks like we can sublet a smaller office that’s just right for us on Potrero Hill.”

  “So you want to break your lease?” Valiantly trying to sound irked, Tav was now so nakedly eager to shed his crooked, bipolar tenant that Jepson almost pitied the fool. “You know I can’t do that without a major prepayment.” Again, trying to sound all tough. But Tav’s sweat glands and body English told Jepson that he’d shred the lease and thank Yahweh if offered just a few of his hundred-plus months of prospective rent. Which would leave 95 percent of ePetStore’s cash in the bank! So as with Kielholz, Jepson sensed he was already doing way better than he’d dared to hope. And once again, he smelled room for improvement.

  “Gosh, I…I’d love to help you out, Tav,” he offered in his hip guidance counselor voice. “But we don’t have a ton of cash here. And we need everything that we’ve got to fund the relaunch! But…” Jepson wrinkled his brow. Contorted it, really. Counted eight Mississippis. Then a couple more. Then finally, “Wait. I’ve got it! I don’t need all two hundred of these chairs, now, do I?”

  “Chairs? You want me to take some chairs?? In lieu of eight years of rent???”

  “Not chairs, Tav. Aeron chairs!” These ergonomic thrones were issued to tech industry recruits like uniforms to cadets during the bubble years. They’d since retained value far better than most of the NASDAQ. Reusable and resalable, they’d become a shadow currency—rather like cigarettes in prison.

  “Well…I guess I could get something for two hundred of these, and—”

  “Easy, Tav. Remember my fifty guys?” Jepson snapped, and the outer office rematerialized. “I’m rehiring, here!”

  “Right. Right. Well, for a hundred and fifty of these, I guess I could—”

  “A hundred and fifty?” Snap! “Did I say a hundred and fifty?”

  Jepson got him down to ninety chairs on principle before letting him go. Then, as his vanquished landlord stum
bled down the steps, he stifled a strong urge to high-five himself in the bathroom mirror. He’d done it again! After three weeks of practice on lesser creditors, he’d turned his most important post-Kielholz meeting by far into an unqualified success!

  But important as this was, it wasn’t his hardest meeting. No. That would be tomorrow, when he’d square off with his very last outside shareholder. With his one and only angel investor.

  With Pugwash.

  While I’m certainly no Bing Crosby, Mrs. Higgensworth is fetching enough that a truly bisexual woman might plausibly deem us to be an alluring (if imbalanced) package. For this reason, my own favorite fantasy—which authors Gammon and Strong have psychically intuited—once seemed at least notionally in reach. Briefly determined to act upon it, I devoured this promising volume. Alas, it seems the stern Latin Catholicism of Carlotta’s youth found a more pliant student in her than a passing leer at her summer frocks might imply, and the fact that her name rhymes promisingly with “Harlotta” is but a cruel irony. Her favorite fantasy, it seems, involves wedding an older Bostonian, then raising a family in strict monogamy. And of course, she’s already living that particular vida loca.

  Mitchell’s night was a long, doomed campaign to make token progress on his homework. His attention kept getting yanked into the gravity well of his ever-humming StarTAC. Ellie had been SMS-ing him a steady drip of pornographic propositions and confessions since Creative Writing. And by evening, his conception of the world had been completely reordered! Bisexuality, he’d learned, enjoyed huge market penetration among his school’s hottest girls, including three of the (seemingly) primmest. And yes, penetration was an operative term here—one of several, and not even the most shocking! These revelations (and Mitchell’s bumbling responses) ran strictly through their phones, per ground rules Ellie dictated at the outset: