by Mark Parragh
“Twelve years in this job,” he said. “I’ve seen a lot. Let me tell you what I’ve learned. If you’d been there, your mother would still be in that room. And you’d be in the room next door. Or dead more likely.”
“But I did nothing!” Georges said. “I didn’t protect her. I was boasting how clever I am!”
“Listen!” Officer Makoun snapped. “If you want to be useful, listen to me!”
Georges glared for a moment, then let out a breath and nodded.
“I don’t know who these men are,” Makoun said, “but I’ve seen a thousand like them. They’re strong and cruel, and you’re not. That’s their power. Don’t try to fight your enemy on his ground, with his weapons.”
Makoun’s expression softened. “At the school,” he said gently, “they told me that you’re smart. Very smart. The kind of smart government men come to see. That’s your power. If you want to help your mother, do something smart.”
Georges sat back in the cracked vinyl chair. He didn’t know what to think. He sensed the officer was trying to help him, but what could he do?
Then an orderly appeared. “Mr. Akema,” he said, “please come to the telephone. We have your father, from America.”
He rose and stood motionless for a long moment. He met Officer Makoun’s eyes and his voice was faint when he spoke, as if it was all he could do to force out words.
“Thank you,” Georges said.
Then he followed the orderly back to the receiving counter. They handed him a telephone, and through the static of the connection he heard his father’s voice. It was an older voice than he remembered. Something had gone out of it. But then something had gone out of him, too.
“Are you all right?” his father asked.
“I wasn’t there,” he said.
“I need you to do something for me,” his father said. “It’s important.”
Georges paused. The phone sounded like a seashell held to his ear. “All right,” he finally said into the line noise.
“I’m not coming home,” his father said. “I’m going to stay here. There are people here at the conference who can help. They speak good English. They will help me with the paperwork. They can put me up until we get settled, and they’ll help me find work.”
For a moment, Georges thought his father was abandoning them. It was insane, but nothing made sense anymore.
“I need you to go home,” his father said, “and get your sister. Pack whatever the two of you can carry on an airplane. I’ll arrange tickets and travel documents. Stay inside until you hear from me. Then you’ll come here.”
“What? What about mother?”
“She’ll join us when she’s well enough to travel.” Then his father turned to speak to someone there at the other end. “I understand,” his father said in English. “Yes, please apologize for me. A family emergency.”
“I need you to do this,” his father said to him after a moment, and Georges heard his voice nearly crack. “I need to know you and your sister are safe. Can you do this?”
“I can,” Georges said.
“Good, good.” They both listened to the sound of their breathing over the wobbly connection. Georges didn’t know what to say and apparently neither did his father.
“Your mother,” his father said at last. “Is she…?”
Georges thought of Officer Makoun. He had seemed to be a decent man, and he had more experience of these things. What was it he had said in the car?
“She’s going to make it,” Georges said.
Palo Alto, California – One Year Later
Jaipur Masala closed at 10:00, but a large table stayed late, ordering drinks and samosas and making noise. Georges gathered their startup had attracted new financing. It was nearly midnight by the time he got off work.
Georges walked through dark and silent streets to the bus stop, waited for the night bus to East Palo Alto, and rode quietly back to his neighborhood. Outside, the condos of Silicon Valley’s wealthy slid by. It was a surprisingly short ride from there to East Palo Alto, where those who didn’t rule the world eked out their unimportant lives.
Georges was startled as they passed a street corner. A girl stood waiting for the light, and for a moment Georges thought she was his sister, Carine. But Carine wasn’t here anymore. As soon as she’d turned 18, she’d announced that her parents had no more right to tell her what to do. She’d gone off with a man, and Georges hadn’t seen her since. Her last email claimed she was in Utah, working at a convenience store. She claimed everything was fine. That had been months ago. He could only wonder where she was now and hope she was happy.
The bus let him off on Bay Road, and Georges walked down a side street past crumbling apartment buildings, a mural with slogans in Spanish, and a construction site behind a high fence that promised workspace lofts with fiber connections. Even here, it was just a matter of time before the tech workers squeezed them out.
The apartment was quiet as Georges let himself in, but he could tell something had happened. Light and shadows fell strangely across the living room. A lamp had been overturned. His father sat on the sofa with a bottle of gin, staring into the wood grain of the coffee table. Georges saw the remains of a shattered plate on the floor.
His mother had had another episode.
Georges closed the door and locked the deadbolts.
“Was it bad this time?” he asked his father softly.
“She doesn’t mean it,” his father replied in slurred French. His English was still terrible, which was a big part of why he couldn’t find work. “She gets frustrated. People stare at her. It’s hard to do what she used to with just one hand. Left hand.”
He sloshed the gin around in the bottle, then took a drink. “It’s hard for her, what I did to her. It’s hard. She doesn’t mean it.”
“I know,” said Georges. He sat on the sagging couch beside his father. “Is she okay?”
“Sleeping at last, I think.”
Georges studied his father’s profile. He had been handsome when he was younger, a proud and confident man, and some of that was still there. But he was broken now, with scars of his own.
“We had lives,” his father said suddenly, as if he could read Georges’ thoughts. “I was respected. And your mother was so lovely. You should have seen her when I first met her. I knew she could do anything she wanted. Anything in the world.”
“It’s all right, father,” Georges said gently. “It’s all right.”
“No! You have to know it wasn’t like this. Your parents were good people. We were young. We had dreams, and we worked hard.”
“I know,” Georges said. “I remember. What happened wasn’t your fault.”
“You know what it was for? Do you?”
Georges said nothing. His father took another long slug of gin and dropped the nearly empty bottle on the floor.
“A degree. For a stupid boy from Adamawa. He was a bad student, but his father was a big man among the Tikar there. They wanted me to forge his transcript. Pass him in courses that he never took and get him a degree. With honors! So he could move up in the regional government. That’s it. So he could be water commissioner or something. What difference did it make? But I was too proud.” He spat the word with disgust. “I had to have my integrity! Where is it now? I’m a bum who drinks on money his son makes working late into the night. What pride in this life? Carine saw it. She wanted none of it, and she was right. And your mother…” he began to sob.
“I know,” Georges said. “She was beautiful. I remember.”
“She’s still beautiful!” his father said suddenly. “But her heart is broken.” He waved an arm to take in the shabby living room, and beyond it the worn out, threadbare reach of East Palo Alto. Perhaps the whole world. “This isn’t the life I promised her.”
Georges put his arm around his father’s shoulders and felt him tremble. “It will be all right,” he said quietly.
They sat in silence while a police cruiser flew past outsi
de, its red and blue lights flashing through the slits in the blinds, its siren wailing the way his mother had. As the sound faded, his father rose and stumbled off to bed.
Georges had the day shift for most of the next week, though he picked up a couple nights as well to make the rent. He was washing plates during the lunch rush on Friday when his boss, Mr. Malhotra, burst into the kitchen.
“Somebody! You, Georges! I need you to bus the tables in Section two! Come on, come on! People are waiting!”
Georges shut off the water and put the sprayer back on its hook. He turned to Mr. Malhotra and gestured to his stained, water soaked apron.
“Yes, yes, get that off! Just do the needful. Come!”
A pair of waiters stuffed him into a white collared shirt. Then they gave him a tray and sent him into the front of the house. It was packed. Major technology companies were clustered all around the neighborhood, and Jaipur Masala was a popular lunch spot. Georges cleared an empty table so the hostess could seat the next group. By the time he got those dishes back to the kitchen, there was another. And the work fell into a steady rhythm.
Eventually there were no waiting customers clustered near the front door. Then there were a few empty tables, and Georges figured he’d be sent back to the kitchen soon. He was heading to a rear corner table when he stopped suddenly. In the booth he’d just passed was a young man finishing his Thali platter. His t-shirt said, “There’s no place like 127.0.0.1.”
That man was Joshua Sulenski.
Georges didn’t recognize the two men with him, but there was no mistaking Sulenski. He’d read everything he could find about the man. And now Georges had come halfway around the world and here he was, having lunch at Jaipur Masala.
Georges set his tray down on the corner table and took a deep breath as he approached their booth.
“Good afternoon, gentlemen,” he said. “Is everything satisfactory? Is there anything I can bring you?”
“We’re good. Thank you,” one of the others said. Georges thought he might be a bodyguard.
“Very good. Thank you,” said Sulenski, and snapped off a piece of poppadum.
Georges lingered just long enough for them to notice he hadn’t left. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but you’re Joshua Sulenski, aren’t you?”
Sulenski smiled. “That’s me.”
The bodyguard started to shift toward the edge of the booth.
“There’s something I have to ask you,” Georges said quickly. “How did you synchronize your data streams?”
Sulenski made a subtle wave, and the bodyguard moved back into place. “How did I synchronize my data streams?”
“Feeding into the analytical matrix,” Georges said. “Events had to sequence properly, down to the microsecond. Otherwise, the matrix would sort incorrectly, pass bad results to the query engine, and you’d waste time testing bad hypotheses. It just wouldn’t work.”
Sulenski nodded and smiled up at him. “You’ve done your homework.”
“I built my own version of your architecture back home in Cameroon,” Georges said. “Very simple of course. It watched a set of pendulums and derived Newton’s laws of motion.”
“You did that?” Sulenski said. “It worked?”
“It was just a demonstration model,” Georges said. “It had to be simple because I could only synchronize a few inputs, and those only because I controlled them. But I read your paper. You had twelve different intraday and historical feeds, updating at different times, feeding thousands of transactions into the matrix. How did you keep the timing consistent?”
Mr. Malhotra hurried over, but Sulenski was enthused now. Mr. Malhotra pulled up and simply observed.
“Well, that was the problem,” Sulenski said. “Each feed had its own delays. They disagreed by half a second sometimes. It was a mess. But the markets would reconcile it all for me after the close, so I had that. Finally, I just ran several days of historical data and kept tweaking my input timing by hand until they predicted what really happened.”
Georges felt a rush of revelation. “You cheated!”
“Well,” Sulenski said with a grin. “I found a loophole. Sometimes that’s the only way to get things done. What’s your name?”
“Georges Benly Akema, sir.”
Sulenski handed Georges a business card. It was blank except for a phone number.
“It’s good to meet you, Georges,” he said. “We should talk more. Call this number, and I’ll have someone pick you up. Are you working tomorrow?”
“No, sir,” said Georges. “I would be honored.”
It was only after Sulenski and his party had left that Mr. Malhotra dragged Georges back into the kitchen and screamed at him for ten minutes.
His parents didn’t seem to know what to make of this development. They were torn between hope and suspicion.
“What does this man want from you?” his mother kept asking. “Is he legitimate?”
Even Georges wasn’t certain that he wasn’t the butt of some esoteric joke. But at the appointed hour, a black Mercedes pulled up outside. Georges took a deep breath, kissed his mother, and shook his father’s hand. Then he walked down the crumbling cement walkway with grass growing through the cracks, and a uniformed driver opened the door for him.
The car took him to a gleaming corporate campus with a sign reading “Myria Group” at the entrance. It drove past glass and steel buildings and grassy meadows with walking paths, and finally deposited Georges in front of the main building. There, a man asked Georges’ name and spoke quietly into his wristwatch. Then he ushered Georges inside. Josh Sulenski was waiting beneath a large impressionist statue of Albert Einstein.
Sulenski wore jeans and a plaid button-down shirt that wasn’t tucked in. Georges felt awkward in his carefully pressed suit, but Sulenski smiled and shook his hand. “Good to see you again,” he said. “Can we get you something?”
“No, thank you,” said Georges. “I’m very grateful for your kindness, Mr. Sulenski.”
“Oh god, call me Josh.” He led Georges to glass doors that slid open as they approached.
For three hours, Josh took him everywhere, introducing him to development teams, showing off prototypes, answering his questions. At the end of it, Georges still had no idea what kind of company Myria Group was meant to be. He also couldn’t say whether Sulenski meant to offer him a job. He’d certainly talked Georges up to his project leaders. But there was nothing specific. Perhaps Sulenski was known for occasionally sweeping through the office with temporary enthusiasms that never went anywhere. Georges still didn’t know what to think as they ended up at a restaurant on the roof of the main building.
They sat in a corner as the sun began to set, looking out over the parklike grounds. Ducks settled onto a pond as waiters brought out a tray of Ethiopian dishes on spongy injera bread. They ate and talked about details of the projects they’d seen.
“So what do you think?” Josh asked as the meal wound down.
“It’s very impressive,” Georges said.
Josh laughed. “Did I ever mention my father ran a strip mall print shop? Business cards, birthday invitations, stuff like that. Great dad, not much of a businessman. What I mean is, I wasn’t born to this. I know where you’re coming from and what’s at stake. I did some background on you, too. You’ve had a shitty year, Georges. Seriously, one for the books. And now you’re thinking I can reach down and change everything, get your family out of that crappy apartment in E.P.A. I can turn your whole life around. Or I can just send you home and forget about you. So you’re going crazy trying to work out what I want to hear, aren’t you?”
Georges said nothing. He could feel his hopes slipping.
“Don’t worry, I’m going to give you a job,” said Josh. “There’s a lot going on here. Any of these projects, you’ll do fine. But here’s my question. Do you know why I have Albert Einstein in the lobby?”
“What?” Georges had felt a moment of exhilaration, but quickly fell back into uncertain
ty. What did the statue have to do with anything?
“It’s because of the Nobel,” Josh said. “I like to keep that in mind.”
“The Nobel Prize?”
“Einstein won for physics in 1921. But not for relativity. Relativity freaked people out. Scientists and philosophers lined up to trash it. They gave him the Nobel for the photoelectric effect. That was nothing new. A guy named Fritts built a working solar cell in 1883. He just didn’t know why it worked. Einstein just explained something everyone was already familiar with. So that was fine, but relativity was too big and scary. The committee went out of their way to say the prize wasn’t for relativity. It’s in the presentation speech.”
“I see,” Georges said. He wasn’t sure why Sulenski was so surprised by this. It seemed obvious to him that the world tore you down, that you did your best and it came to nothing.
“So Albert in the lobby reminds me, keep your best stuff behind the curtain,” Sulenski said. “If you have to go public, for money or whatever, show them your second rate work. That won’t upset them so much.”
Sulenski stopped and looked out at the setting sun.
“So you’ve got a job if you want it,” he said. “We’re doing an actuarial package for the insurance industry. Boring, but it keeps the lights on. You’d be a great asset. You can walk out of here right now and show up for work Monday morning, making six figures with top health coverage for your mom. Or you can ask me the question I’m pretty sure you want to ask me.”
“If predicting the stock market was your second rate work,” Georges said, “what have you got behind the curtain?”
Sulenski grinned and pushed back his chair. “Come on,” he said.
The room was spacious, but sparsely furnished. Tables and chairs were scattered seemingly at random, loaded with laptops and papers. There were server racks against one wall and a large flat screen monitor on another.
“It’s not exactly mission control,” said Josh. “But welcome to the skunkworks.”
He closed the door behind them. “Over here’s what I want to show you.”