by Andrew Grant
“And the computers?”
“Were any of them yours?”
“One of them. One of the new notebooks.”
“Then it’ll be in the box. You’ll have it by lunchtime.”
“And the company computers? Just out of interest.”
“Simon’s already set the IT boys to work on them. Stripping them down. Wiping the discs. Getting them ready for whatever tomorrow brings, I guess. With the level of access you had, you know we couldn’t just leave them lying around.”
I nodded. Wiping the computers clean was fine with me. I’d put a lot of effort into building those databases. If I wasn’t going to be there any longer, why should anyone else benefit from them?
THE BOARDROOM DOOR CLOSED behind me, but I didn’t start down the stairs right away. I wasn’t trying to delay my departure, though. And I certainly wasn’t trying to capture a lasting memory of the place. AmeriTel honestly didn’t mean that much to me. It was just that for the first time since I started my contract there, I didn’t have an urgent objective in mind. A burning task to complete, or meeting to get to. I could take my time. Do what I wanted. Not what the company wanted. And now that I realized how little they valued what I’d been doing, I was glad to be free of them.
I heard a rattling sound below me and when I looked down I saw a janitor wheeling a cleaning cart toward the exit. For one crazy moment I was tempted to call out to him and hitch a ride, since I was being thrown out with the rest of the trash. Then it struck me, I’d never seen the guy before. When I’d started working there, the cleaning crew had all been women. Thinking about it, they’d had different-colored uniforms, too. Blue. Not green. The original company must have lost the contract, somewhere along the way. I wondered what else could have changed without me noticing. The water coolers? The coffee machines? I wasn’t sure.
The realization kept me rooted to the spot for another moment or two, shaking my head at the irony. I make my living by seeing what no one else even knows is there. I use my analytical tools to peek beneath the skin of companies and make sense of whatever’s hidden beneath. Here, I’d missed the simple things that were in plain sight. But at least I wasn’t the only one who was out of touch. When I finally reached the parking lot I passed a pair of IT technicians making their way in with a portable degausser and a couple of cases of other equipment. They must not have started work on trashing my old machines yet, as LeBrock said they had. And they were from a different contractor, too. One with shabby coveralls and a name and logo I’d never come across before. Some kind of bargain basement, Mickey Mouse outfit, no doubt. Which meant the penny-pinching had spread all the way to business-critical systems.
AmeriTel must have sunk deeper into the mire than I’d thought.
All things considered, I was lucky to be out of the place.
Monday. Mid-morning.
WHEN THE GOING GETS TOUGH, THE TOUGH GO SHOPPING.
I left Carolyn a voicemail telling her to ignore any office gossip she might hear—plus a promised to give her the full story over dinner—then headed to one of my favorite spots in the world. The TL Gallery. It’s owned by a friend of mine, Troye (that’s Troye with a silent “e,” as he’s always quick to point out to new acquaintances) Liptak. The place is only five miles from my house in terms of distance, but more like five light-years in terms of contents. On any given day you could rely on Troye to have at least one Picasso. A couple of Miros. Maybe a Dalí. A Richter. A Matisse or two. It’s like having a world-class art museum in the neighborhood, except that if Troye thinks there’s a chance you might buy a piece, he’ll take it down from the wall and let you hold it. He’ll honestly stand there and put a ten, fifteen, maybe twenty million dollar painting right in your hands and let you drool over it for as long as you want. Forget the Met, or any of those other famous museums. The TL is the place to go if you want an up close and personal encounter with art.
Troye was wearing one of his more restrained outfits that day—a lemon-yellow three-piece suit, a green shirt, and a pair of black and white correspondent shoes. He watched me come in, then after a few seconds he levered himself off the pillar he’d been leaning against and ambled across the floor in my direction.
“My goodness.” He swept a curtain of bleached blond hair away from his face before leaning forward and subjecting me to one of his trademark overenthusiastic hugs. He felt like he might have gained a couple of pounds since my last visit, but even after all the years I’d known him I would have struggled to guess his age. The cosmetic surgeon who’d raised his cheekbones and sharpened his nose had made that impossible.
“Marc? Is it you? Where on earth have you been hiding?”
“It’s me. You know how I am. Busy, busy, busy. But I haven’t been hiding. And I never stay away for too long.”
“Yes, you do. I thought you’d forgotten about me. Or found someone else to relieve you of your excess cash. I thought maybe you’d become a car nut. Or worse, one of those antiques guys. I was thinking of closing the place down, I was so worried.”
“Well, I’m glad you didn’t. What stopped you?”
Troye took a step back and spread his arms.
“I couldn’t bear to leave my babies. Although, if you wanted to take one of them home with you in exchange for an obscene sum of money, that would be perfectly fine. Are you in the mood for buying today, Marc? Or are you just here for a looky-lou?”
“To be honest, Troye, I’m here to relive a memory.”
“You’ve had bad news?”
I nodded.
“You need a Roy moment?”
I nodded again. I hadn’t gone there with any realistic intention of buying a painting, that day. What I needed was to revisit the scene of my greatest life-affirming moment to date. Because the TL is the place where—after ten years of aspiring and getting by with poster-store copies—I’d bought myself a genuine Lichtenstein. It’s only a small one. It’s not the most critically acclaimed. But it’s the most valuable thing I’ve ever owned. And I don’t just mean in terms of the price tag.
“You and Roy, you’re still soul mates?” Troye asked.
“Always will be.”
I never had the chance to meet Roy Lichtenstein while he was alive. I’m not related to him. But somehow I feel closer to him than to almost any other human. I felt that way the very first time I saw one of his paintings—or at least paid any attention to one—which wasn’t until I was thirty-two years old. I was on a business trip to Chicago and a client took me to a product launch he was hosting one evening at the Art Institute. The presentations were boring so I slipped into the store—the galleries were all closed—and came face-to-face with an enormous cartoonish print of a distraught woman talking on the phone. The image totally captivated me. But it wasn’t the bright colors that drew me in. Or the bold shapes. Or the woman’s words, spelled out in a speech-bubble above her head. It was the way Lichtenstein painted. How he took an intangible concept and made it visible through dots and lines. Because it struck me, that’s exactly what I did. Only in my case, the dots and lines weren’t stenciled in. They were the ones and zeros I harvested from my clients’ computer records.
“Your bad news—is it serious? Is anyone sick?”
“No. It’s just a project I was working on. It got canned. The guy I was running it for? He’s the head of AmeriTel. I was halfway to saving his company, and the asshole pulled the plug on me.”
“AmeriTel? Sounds familiar. Is that where your wife used to work?”
“It’s where she still works. We were there together, for a while. And now I’m not.”
“Ouch. That has to hurt.”
It did hurt. But nowhere near as much as Lichtenstein must have been hurt back in 1963, when a newspaper published an article reviewing his work. The critic’s verdict? That Lichtenstein was the worst artist in America. And this wasn’t a small-time regional rag the guy was writing in. It was the New York Times.
“Other people have had worse to deal with,”
I replied. “Don’t worry about me. It’s water off a duck’s back.”
It was the way Lichtenstein responded to the setback—to the reality of what happens when people don’t understand what you’re doing—that really cemented my connection with the guy. And appropriately—given my utter lack of talent when it comes to painting—it had nothing to do with his art. It was his attitude. Because Lichtenstein didn’t fold. He didn’t hide under a rock. He just kept on swimming against the tide, letting the vitriol and abuse wash over him until his critics began to take him seriously. Until they were forced to recognize his genius. To concede that he brought something new and unique to the table. And that’s exactly what I did, when I showed my then-boss my first attempt at an analysis tool and got laughed out of his company for my trouble. I dug deep, and when I got the product right, I sold it to his biggest competitor.
I thought Troye was about to ask me something else, when I heard the door scrape open behind me and instead he excused himself, no doubt anxious to greet the new customers. I wandered farther into the gallery, glancing at the exhibits on the walls and weaving my way through a cluster of waist-high sculptures until I came to a painting that caught my eye. It was a view of a city at night through the rain-swept windshield of a car. But it wasn’t the main part of the image—the other vehicles and buildings and pedestrians and streetlights blurring together into a rushing mass of streaking lines—that intrigued me. It was one tiny detail. The car’s instrument panel. It grabbed me because that first product I designed—the one that was initially ridiculed, but eventually set me on the path to my own Lichtenstein—was based on the concept of a car dashboard. I’d chosen it because I wanted something that anyone could intuitively understand. Something that made visual sense, not a forest of numbers and charts you’d need a degree in statistics to decipher.
I’ve done more complex stuff since then, but I was still proud of that original system. Under the hood it used some hard-core algorithms—it had to, given the way it boiled a whole business down to just five key pieces of information—but on the surface it looked like a bank of round, retro-style dials, freshly ripped out of a hunk of Detroit’s finest heavy metal. The dials had numbers around the edges. Needles that moved. And the best part? Backgrounds that changed color depending on how things were going. Green meant you were OK. Red, it was time to worry. Amber, there could be a problem, so take a second look, if you’ve got the time.
“Are you having a moment?” Troye had snuck up behind me. “I can see your reflection. You stand in the corner grinning to yourself, you look like an insane person. What’s the matter with you?”
“Oh, nothing. I just like this picture, is all.”
“Like it enough to buy it?”
“Well, no, but …”
“I knew it. You are turning into a car guy.”
“No, I’m not.” I was distracted for a moment, thinking about the racing car Lichtenstein had been hired to paint in the seventies, when he wasn’t a geek anymore. “It’s just that this picture—it reminded me that the future’s going to be pretty damn bright, after all.”
“It did? How? Tell me. Then I can enlighten my other customers. And then lighten their wallets …”
I tried to find the words to explain what I was thinking, but I was actually a little embarrassed. The truth was, I’d been imagining what my life would look like if it were broken down across those original five dials. My key indicators would be, what? My relationship with my wife? That would be green, definitely. Carolyn was smart and beautiful, and—having put a couple of garden-variety bumps in the marital road behind us—we were as solid as a rock. My friends? Green, again. I’d always had my fair share. Family? Amber, I guess. But there was nothing I could do about that—we didn’t have kids, my parents were dead, and I had no brothers or sisters. Finances? Green. Leaving AmeriTel early was going to hurt me a little, but the long-term damage would be minimal. And finally, my career. On the face of it you’d think, red. I’d just been fired, after all. But over the weekend, I’d had an idea. My biggest one yet. So big that when I was finished with it, I wouldn’t be looking back at buying my first Lichtenstein. I’d be looking forward to my second. Maybe even my third.
Cash wasn’t an issue, the way it had been when I quit my job to perfect my first product. Now, there were only two things I’d need. Time to develop the idea, which I suddenly had in spades, thanks to Roger LeBrock. And raw materials to experiment with, which in my line of work meant data. Huge volumes of data. And I had that, too. On a pair of rubber-coated memory sticks. They were in my pocket. I’d clipped them to my key chain the previous night, on my way out of AmeriTel’s office. There hadn’t been any particular reason to keep them, at the time. The data was a by-product of another project I’d been working on. I’d just thought it was too good to waste, the way a carpenter might feel about a hefty off cut of oak or mahogany. But now, taking the memory sticks seemed like a stroke of genius. They were going to change my life. I could feel it.
“Sorry, Troye.” I gave up on the explanation. “You’ll have to spin your own bullshit. I’ve got to go. I need to strike something while the iron’s hot …”
Monday. Lunchtime.
I’D THOUGHT IT WOULD ONLY TAKE TEN MINUTES TO GET HOME from the gallery, but I was wrong. The route I ended up taking was twice the distance I’d expected. And it took three times longer than it should have, due to a jackass in a silver Audi who’d pulled out of Troye’s parking lot in front of me. He’d seemed eager enough to get on the road, but then hesitated before every turn and dawdled through each junction as if he were happy for every other car in the county to pull out in front of him. He was so indecisive I couldn’t understand how he’d made up his mind to leave his house in the first place. Maybe I should have felt sorry for him. He’d probably been drifting aimlessly around all morning, ever since the breakfast-time rush hour had left him in its wake like a piece of automotive flotsam. But since he was all that stood between me and the work I was raring to begin—and because he stayed resolutely in my way right up to my street—I couldn’t help cursing him instead.
I turned into my driveway and for a moment I thought the silver Audi was already there, ahead of me. Then I realized it was Carolyn’s car. A silver BMW, which cast Troye’s crazy theory in its true light. Me, a car guy now? Hardly.
CAROLYN HAD THE DOOR open before I was halfway up the front path, and even from that distance her presence lit up the entrance to our home. She was wearing the navy blue suit I’d watched her set out the night before—at least I assumed it was the same one, because there’s no way to adequately compare clothes on a hanger with clothes that Carolyn’s wearing—and her hair was still pulled back in the severe style she uses for the office in the hope that people don’t see blond and think stupid.
“You’re home early, gorgeous.” I leaned down to kiss her, and imagined how she’d look with her hair set free and the suit replaced by a bathrobe. Or by nothing at all …
“Where have you been?” she demanded, pulling away from me and breaking the spell. “I was worried. Why didn’t you answer your phone?”
I followed her inside and took my phone out of my pocket. It showed twelve missed calls and three voicemail messages. A four-to-one ratio. And I knew from experience—coming from Carolyn, that spelled trouble.
“Are all these from you?”
She glowered.
“I’m sorry, sweetheart. It was on silent, I guess. I had a meeting with LeBrock, first thing. It was a surprise one. An ambush, really. It didn’t go too well, and when I came out, I must have just spaced turning the ringer back on.”
“I can’t believe you.” She turned and headed for the living room. “Why are you always so inconsiderate?”
“Be reasonable.” I followed her. “I had other things on my mind. Like being shit-canned by one of my oldest friends. When’s that ever happened to you? How about a little sympathy?”
She moved to the chair farthest from me and sat down, b
rushing a stray hair from her cheek and then crossing her arms and legs.
“I did try to call you. I left you a message. Didn’t you get it?”
“Of course I got it. And when I tried to call you back, you’d disappeared. What was I supposed to think?”
“I don’t know. Maybe that having been stabbed in the back, I needed a little time to recover? That I’d fill you in tonight, like I said in my message?”
“Leaving me to get the news tonight, when it was cold? When you were done recovering from it? I should be the first one you tell, Marc. The one you talk to about things like this.”
“You were. You are.”
“We should have talked then. Right away.”
“We couldn’t.”
“Why not?”
“You were working. You didn’t answer your phone. I guessed you were busy.”
“You could have come and found me.”
“No, I couldn’t. I was shut down. Thrown off the premises.”
“Then you should have kept calling till I picked up. I’d have dropped everything and come to you.”
“Would you? Are you sure?”
She looked away without replying, so I took the chair closest to hers and leaned forward.
“Sweetheart, let’s not fight over this. What’s done is done. The smart thing is to draw a line and move on. Plus, I’ve had a great idea. I’m dying to tell you all about it. Do you remember—”
“Where did you go?”
“What about my idea?”
“I want to know where you went.”
“When I left AmeriTel?”
“Yes, when you left AmeriTel. Who did you talk to?”
“Oh, I see where this is coming from. This isn’t about supporting your husband. It’s about protecting your career. You’re worried about the fallout. What my contract being canceled might do to your reputation. You wanted to get to me first, to make sure I didn’t run my mouth.”