Big If

by Mark Costello

  Peta found it funny, Jens and his dilemma. She called it their mixed marriage. She said that fives should never marry fours, it only led to nines or ones. She was satirizing Jens’ indecision and his old programmer’s bad habit of seeing things in logical or numeric terms—people, feelings, tendencies pseudo-quantified as code, four, five, OFF, ON, IF/WHILE. Peta said that nothing but the gas bill could be quantified in numbers, that nothing was precisely this or that. Peta could accept the gray of how things are, and, because she could, her political opinions were ironically quite black-and-white, this is who I am, this is where I’m coming from, this is what I think. Jens, seeking black-and-white, never found it, and wound up lost in gray. He had tried to analyze the question algorithmically, comparing the two candidates’ positions on a number of issues, global warming, NATO, tax cuts, Russia, thinking that he would draw up a kind of tote board, his beliefs compared to their beliefs, with his vote going to the man who had the most checkmarks in his column when the process was completed. To do this, however, Jens first had to find out their positions, which turned out to be hard because their issue papers were vague and platitudinous. He also had to learn his own positions, which dragged the process out a lot. Russia, for example, was sprawling and chaotic, as a country and a subject. He stayed up late at the condo, trying to work on Monster Todd, failing in this effort, taking a quick break to cruise and study websites about Russia, the gangsters and decay, engrossing and disturbing, the short break from his monster often stretching toward the dawn.

  When he shared his partial findings with Peta, she became exasperated, he became defensive, and sometimes they fought. Jens knew that they were really fighting about something deeper—their life as a whole, the work slump he was in, his problems at BigIf.

  Jens stood in the voting booth: the VP or the senator? He was thinking about options. He had joined the game to make cool objects out of software, and, yes, for the money and the options, the chance to cash out young and return to pure research. He had built BigIf with Naubek and the others, and his options were waiting for the IPO, and everything was good, but was it what he wanted? He was undecided, a kind of cosmic five. On the one hand, there was Walter, so clearly disapproving in the months before his death. Jens had come to see his father’s point. BigIf was immoral or amoral—the sheer scale of the killing, the product tieins with the frequent-flier miles, and the sinister new monsters (Postal Worker, Todd), the ones who look like us. This was the case for quitting. On the other hand, Jens knew it made no sense to leave BigIf now, after all his work, with his options vested.

  He pulled the iron lever in the voting booth. The curtains leapt apart and Jens walked out.

  “Hello,” said Bradley Schwartz, “my name is Bradley Schwartz. I’m Naubek’s replacement. Are these workstations being used or can I just pick one?”

  Jens looked up from a screen of e-mails. Bradley Schwartz was a young man in loose chinos and a blue polo shirt. His glasses were gold-rimmed, moderately round. His chinos were slightly darker than most chinos at BigIf, more a light brown than a beige. Otherwise he seemed quite normal.

  “Two of them are free,” said Jens. “The rest are assigned. A few more may open up before the day is over. Naubek sat right here.”

  “Thank you,” Bradley said. He sat at Naubek’s terminal and looked at the keyboard. “Has this thing been cleared for booby traps at all?”

  “I don’t know,” said Jens. “I’m not sure who does that. E-mail Digby. Digby probably knows.”

  “It’s just that I heard that Naubek was a hard case,” said Bradley Schwartz. “They say he’s holed up with a cache of weapons, an actual cache. Is he the sort of guy who would take it personally, me replacing him?”

  Jens said, “He was personally fired.”

  Bradley Schwartz logged on, triggering no booby traps. He pulled up the last draft of the Postal Worker, taking up where Naubek had left off.

  Jens looked around the Bot Pod, doing a quick head count, making sure that he recognized his coworkers. Lu Ping was on the pushed-together bed, reconfigured as a love seat, wearing blue pajamas over a turtleneck and a green silk dressing gown, a gift from his bride, Phoebe Rosenthal, the artist-in-residence, on day two of their honeymoon. Phoebe was at her terminal, working on a likeness of Monster Todd. Prem Srinivassan was at the mirror in the corner, waxing his mustache. Bjorn Bjornsson, across the room, was reprogramming his screen pets to have sex. The only Podders missing were the firees (Mayer, Naubek), Davey Tabor (trekking), and Beltran, who was due in from his mental health day. Jens relaxed, returning to his e-mails. Somebody named Carolyn had extra Celtics tickets, good seats on the baseline against Portland. Somebody named Chuck was turning thirty, cake and ice cream in the first-floor kitchenette at noon. Somebody named Pete needed a kidney. O-negative donors were asked to stop by his cubicle on two.

  Across the room, Beltran signed in at the white board.

  “How’s the nervous breakdown coming?” asked Bjorn.

  “Pretty good so far,” said Beltran, who had learned to fit his breakdowns into weekends, holidays, and other forms of leave. “It’s amazing what you can accomplish in a day. I took a scissors to my sheets, disinfected my apartment, binged and purged on cupcakes, smashed my television. It’s all about time management. What’s the word from Davey Tabor? How’s Tibet treating him?”

  “Nepal,” said Bjorn. “He calls in once a day, like he’s fooling anyone. My roommate from Berkeley saw him in the lobby at DigiScape in Mountain View. This was yesterday. Davey’s such a bullshitter.”

  “DigiScape?” asked Beltran. “What do they do?”

  “They design and manage various types of digiscapes,” said Bradley Schwartz.

  Beltran nodded and sat down. He said, “You’re not Naubek.”

  “No,” said Bradley Schwartz, “I’m Bradley Schwartz.”

  Jens said, “They fired Naubek. Charlie Mayer too.”

  Beltran cleared his throat and turned to Bjorn. “This DigiScape—they hiring?”

  “I guess so,” said Bjorn. “But they give shitty options. Slow vesters, says my friend. He’s been there a month already. Everybody’s looking.”

  Jens opened a file on his screen, the specs for Monster Todd. He was thinking of this room and how it had been when the game was in design. At first, the only coders were Jens and Naubek. Charlie Mayer came later and Lu Ping after that. They wrote the game here, eighteen million lines, wizards and rivers and moons. They knew that they were writing code for a war game. None of them—not Jens, not Naubek, not Charlie Mayer—had any right to claim surprise when the game became a silly, violent thing. They knew it on the first day, writing the first lines. But somehow, as they wrote more, they forgot more. They plunged deeper into code with each passing day. As they fell in love with their creation, the world around their maze seemed to fall away. For a long time, in the heat of their creating, they knew and didn’t know (they knew but they forgot) what the code was for. If a subroutine is beautiful—flexible and balanced, efficient, multithreaded, not one line longer than it needs to be—does it matter that its purpose is to make a cartoon fart? Jens remembered the night they wrote the sun. It was Naubek’s project, and a challenge. Every game had a sun, Elfin, Napalm Sunday, Red Motorcade. Most of them were horseshit suns, a crayon-yellow circle on the screen. It wasn’t hard to write a sun, but it was very hard to write the sun. Naubek went to work, modeling a pulsing, flaring, molten organ. He made it round; he made it move; he linked it to the cloud routines, sometimes behind them, sometimes burning through. Jens and Charlie Mayer were in the room too, working on their projects, and as Naubek coded, they came over and looked at his screen, and Jens had an idea for a haze-inversion module, a cool flattening effect, or maybe Mayer did, but it was Jens who wrote the mod, and Naubek who perfected it, and Mayer who debugged it, as Jens and Naubek hacked out the refraction math, a way to get the white of the sun turning yellow-orange-bloody-red as it descends. Jens knew that he would never feel that way a
gain. None of them would ever feel that way again.

  Jens had tried to tell his father that it didn’t matter that the code was for a war game. Walter didn’t understand, of course. How could he? He wasn’t there the night they wrote the sun. Jens thought of Vi at the house. He thought of what she had said—not everything in your life has to do with you. He hadn’t understood it at the time, but now he thought she’d meant that he ought to mind his own life and family, and not worry about BigIf, and whether it was good or bad, perfect or imperfect, the cartoons or the code. Give yourself a break, give Walter a break, don’t worry about purity, just live. Peta could have said the same thing probably, but from Vi it carried weight. Vi had been there at the start. Vi had been there all along. Vi had seen the paper train derailed outside Berlin.

  Lu Ping was doing tai chi, the flowing early moves, Raise Hands, Cradle Swan, Strum the Lute, Repulsing Monkey, nearly hitting Jens, who was heading for the door. Jens ducked under Monkey and went up to the second floor.

  Meredith Shattuck was enthroned behind her desk of solid butcher block.

  “How’s Bradley working out?” she asked.

  “He seems very nice,” said Jens.

  “Has he mentioned any preexisting medical conditions? Jaffe has to do the health insurance paperwork.”

  “Not so far, but I’ll keep my ears open. May I sit? Thanks. Meredith, the reason why I wanted to stop by is I feel I ought to clear the air with you. I lost my head a bit yesterday. Vaughn Naubek was my friend and a great coder. Charlie Mayer was a friend too. I’m not going to sit here and tell you that I think it was a smart move, firing those guys, because I don’t. I think it’s a mistake in the long run, because whatever productivity dips they may have been going through, they had experience, Meredith, and that’s important too—you can replace the old guard with the kids, but the kids don’t have experience. So yes I was upset. And I admit I lost my head and I apologize for that. And I just wanted to make sure that we’re fine, you and me, with our relationship. I know I haven’t been the most productive member of the team either. Hell, I’ll say it, Meredith: I’ve been in a slump. Monster Todd—he troubles me. I’m not sure why and I doubt you care. It’s the damnedest thing, because I could always work. Remember when my dad died? And you sent those flowers, which was awfully nice of you. I handled the arrangements, and two days later, bang, I was right back at the code. Remember when I wrote the river algorithm? My son was born that night, that very night. I stood there in the delivery room in my booties and my desperado mask watching my child slide out of my wife. It was like nothing I have ever seen. Then she fed him, and they slept, and I came back here at three a.m. and the river just poured out of me. But it’s been different with Todd. I couldn’t work, I mean, I could—I could work on certain things. I wrote the shadow for the crater smoke, which is, by the way, a cool utility. Sometime when you get a minute, load it up and take a look. Then look at the file size. Less than a kilobyte, a single kilobyte. It’s beautiful, it’s beautiful, so tiny and complete, just like my son that night. There aren’t a dozen men—people, sorry—who could have written that utility to compile as a k-byte. Let’s see Bradley Schwartz do that, let’s see goddamn Digby try to do that. I didn’t come to pick a fight or grovel. I know we’re living in the marketplace—that’s fine and I accept it, which is why I didn’t make a big deal about SmoShadow. I know that you and Head and the twins have prioritized Monster Todd, and, yes, I know Todd’s overdue. I can’t account for it. I couldn’t work or I couldn’t work on Todd. It was like a flu bug, Meredith, like a three-day flu, a head cold, a nothing stupid kind of thing, and yet you’re totally wiped out, you’re good for nothing, and there’s nothing you can do but wait until it clears. What I came to say is that it cleared. Now I’m better. I feel like I can work and that’s why I thought I ought to clear the air.”

  Meredith said, “Yes. Thank you, Jens.”

  “Yes?” said Jens. “How can you sit there and say, Yes?”

  Meredith spoke very softly, as if talking to a child in the dark. She said, “A corporation is a forest, Jens, and I’m the forester. In forests you have lightning strikes, and fires, and many trees are burned, but the forest is renewed. But it’s over now—or it will be as soon as Davey Tabor shows his face and we can eighty-six his ass in person. Relax, Jens, the fire passed you by. Do me a favor—go home and get some sleep, or whatever it is that you need. I promise I’ll look at your shadow later.”

  The roadblock was on Hanover Street, police cars nose to nose across four lanes of traffic, cops in yellow ponchos waving motorists away. Jens slowed, ran his window down.

  “What’s happening?” he asked.

  “Big rally,” said the cop. “Where you headed?”

  “To the square.”

  “Park it by the library. You’ll have to walk from there.”

  Jens took the detour to the right, came all the way around again to the public library, parked his car. He dropped three quarters in the meter, set it ticking with a crank.

  The sidewalks turned to brick coming into Market Square, the streetlights turned to gaslamps, and the shops and offices took on the look of Dickens’ Christmas without snow. A crowd was forming on the cobblestones and workmen were assembling a scaffolding out of tube aluminum. Jens saw a news van parked the wrong way on the street, a small dish antenna slowly rising on a mast.

  Moss Properties was on the harbor end of Market Square, a building called the Moss Block, a stately brick Bulfinch with a bow facade between the Aran Isle knit store and the new patisserie. Jens stood outside the realtors for a moment, looking at the ships in the window, a model wooden frigate and a schooner named the Sally Ann, and the other toy-sized relics from the age of sail, a two-pound anchor on a coiled chain, brass cannons, and a polished sextant, and, higher up, a cork-board for new listings, snapshots of properties and two-sentence blurbs, stock phrases of the trade: move in now—your country hideaway—stone’s throw to the beaches.

  Peta was in her office with Daphne Jaffe, the rotundly pregnant wife of BigIf’s corporate counsel. Daphne Jaffe was sitting in a rocker, one hand on her belly, leafing through a binder. Peta was on the phone, pacing back and forth.

  Jens said, “Good morning.”

  Daphne recognized his face, he saw, but couldn’t place him. She smiled slightly and went back to the binder, as Peta turned and looked at Jens and made a face like You? She was talking to a Kenny, somebody named Kenny, as she made the face at Jens.

  “Kenny, it’s a madhouse here,” she was saying. “Just check your book and tell me if noon works for you. You’re beautiful. Goodbye.”

  Peta did the introductions, Daphne Jaffe to Jens, Jens to Daphne Jaffe, a tongue-twisterish introduction, but Peta brought it off with her usual aplomb.

  “Nice to meet you,” Daphne said.

  Jens said, “You already met me. At the BigIf Christmas party. I got your husband in the Secret Santa draw. I’m the one who gave him the case of Glucola.”

  “Yes of course,” said Daphne.

  “Don’t mind my husband, Daph,” Peta said. “Just go through the binder. I’ll be back.”

  Peta took Jens into the corridor. She said evenly, “This is a surprise. Why aren’t you at work?”

  “Meredith gave me the day off.”

  “Why would she do that?”

  “I think it’s her idea of a peace offering,” said Jens.

  “Hope you locked your desk. I don’t trust that wench one bit.”

  “Meredith’s okay—we had a long talk. Let’s get a cup of coffee, Pet. Better yet, let’s get two—one for each of us.”

  It was an old Jens joke. He’d used it on their first, fourth, and eighth dates.

  “Let me deal with Daphne,” Peta said. “She’s due any day now and she’s renting presently. Hang out in the conference room. It’ll be a couple minutes.”

  Noel Moss was in the conference room with his lobbyists, discussing what sounded like the overthrow of Cuba, so Jens wait
ed in the corridor, looking at the noble oil portraits of the Mosses on the wall, Grampa, Noel’s uncles and his father, five portraits in a line, middle-class conquistadores, storms on their foreheads, lightning in their eyes, pork chops on their minds. Jens had come to tell Peta that everything was going to be all right now. He felt it in his chest as he waited in the hall, new health and peace. He would get back to work and finish Monster Todd, the school shooter whom other kids could hunt through the halls.

  Daphne Jaffe, showing great quickness for a woman of her size, left Peta’s office, nodded at the secretaries and at Jens, and went out the door.

  Peta stood behind her desk, doing seven things at once, making notes on Daphne’s nascent househunt, pressing speed-dial B (Lauren Czoll’s cell phone), kicking off her pumps, shouting around the corner to Claus, looking through her tote bag for the number of Anthony Bordique, the carpentry contractor, finding instead a dented can of seltzer. She opened the seltzer. Much shaken from her travels, it burst like a grenade, spraying seltzer on her lap. She left a message: “Shit!”—for the seltzer—“Oh hey, Lauren. It’s Peta, honey, listen, I’ve found the perfect house. It’s everything you’re looking for, Greek Revival, sea views, a gazebo, humidor with net access. They have several offers, so we’ve got to shake a leg. I’m trying to organize a showing at noon. Page me when you get this, okay bye.”

  Claus came around the corner, dressed like a kommando, big black roll-neck sweater, polished boots and black cargo pants, bearing Peta’s rolodex. They called Anthony Bordique, the old carpenter, on the speakerphone. Bordique was on a rush job for Moss Properties.