Company (24 page)

Freddy arrives at Zephyr at eight thirty and his heart just about stops. A mass of people is milling inside the lobby. More alarmingly, a large group is gathered
outside
on the plaza, and blue-uniformed Security guards are progressively transferring people from the former to the latter. Freddy realizes it has happened. Zephyr Holdings has consolidated.

He forges blindly through the crowd toward the reception desk. Dozens of employees are trying to do the same thing, and it's hot with the press of anxious bodies. When he gets one hand on the smooth surface of the desk, he hangs on to it with all his strength.

Security, arranged around the desk, eyes the crowd with silent hostility. A guard looks at Freddy as if he is not positive that Freddy has been fired, but it wouldn't surprise him. Freddy feels terror bubble in his gut. On his left, a willowy female graduate trembles uncontrollably. A middle-aged man sweats into overalls on his right. One by one, they come before Gretel—not Eve; Eve is nowhere to be seen, which Freddy finds alarming all by itself—and are told they are no longer employed. There is no break, no respite: it is an uninterrupted stream of firings. With each one, the crowd groans as a single animal. By the time it's Freddy's turn, he has to fight the urge to flee before they can sack him.

Gretel's eyes move onto him. Freddy is shocked to see compassion in them. Sympathy in this cattle yard is so unexpected that it gets under his guard, unmans him. He sucks in a shuddering breath. He's glad Eve isn't here to see this.

“Which department?”

“Training Sales.”

“Training Sales . . .” Gretel flips through her papers. “Training Sales has been consolidated into Staff Services. The new department is on level 11.” She looks up. “All Training Sales staff have been retained.”

Freddy's vision washes white. His fingers gouge the desk.
Saved! Saved!
The crowd gasps. Freddy lets out a whoop. He wants to kiss Gretel. He wants to kiss Security. He starts to laugh.

“Marketing Research,” the willowy graduate says hoarsely, and Gretel runs her finger down the paper. Freddy comes to his senses and pushes his way through the crowd. He elbows, he shoulders; still, he is not quite far enough away to avoid hearing Gretel's response, or the ache of empathy that fills her voice.

An hour of this and even Alpha gets bored. Attention wanders from the monitors. Agents begin to discuss other projects, and the excellence of the BMW X5, and how terrific Blake's eye patch looks and where did he get it. Jones picks up his briefcase and begins to walk away. Klausman calls, “Going somewhere, Jones?” and Jones says, “To work,” without stopping.

Eve catches him by the elevators. She leans against the wall, tilting her head so her dark hair splashes on her shoulder. “Can we talk?”

He shrugs.

“I wasn't sure you'd show up today. You didn't answer any of my messages.” When Jones doesn't respond to this, she continues carefully. “Not that I blame you. I'm sorry about Friday. I really am. I kind of lost it.”

He looks at her.

“You're so new, Jones. I forgot that. I expected you to take on too much too fast. This is a tough business, a really tough business, and I want you to succeed. You have such an opportunity here. I don't want you to lose it. But I didn't go about it the right way on Friday. I got mad and . . . I didn't mean to do that.”

She looks so sincere; it's unsettling. When Jones drove down the parking-lot ramp this morning, he gripped his steering wheel as if he was trying to choke it to death. He spent the weekend mining out a deep, thick reservoir of bitterness toward Eve and Alpha—toward business in general, really—and the result of this was the resolution that while he might be powerless to change Alpha, he could at least hate them. This was, admittedly, not the most insightful or productive decision—but it was a decision nonetheless, one that allowed him to determine a kind of way forward. Now even this is under threat, because with Eve looking at him with earnestness swimming in her big bedroom eyes it's hard to cast her as the personification of corporate heartlessness.

He shrugs. “You told me the truth. I guess I needed to hear it.”

She puts her hand on his arm. “Jones, you have this amazing empathy for the Zephyr staff. It's . . . unusual in Alpha. It's not especially helpful, doing what we do. But I shouldn't have told you it's wrong. I realize now it's that empathy that makes you special. I don't want you to lose it.”

Jones is lost for words.

“Now,” she says, “don't tell anyone in Alpha I said that. This is our little secret.” She smiles, as if this is a joke, but there's no trace of humor in her eyes. “All right?”

Another agent, Tom Mandrake, comes out of the monitoring room and walks toward them, whistling. Eve removes her hand from Jones's arm and steps back. “By the way, I bought this dress for you. Do you like?”

“Um,” Jones says. “Yes, it's very nice.”

She smiles, genuinely, and does a little half curtsy. “Actually, to be honest, I bought it a month ago. But I wore it for the first time today.”

Tom stops beside them. “You own dresses you've never worn?”

“Oh yeah. Lots.” The elevator arrives. Before Jones steps into it, Eve says to him, “We'll talk later, okay?”

Elizabeth exits the elevator on level 11, her new home, with a certain wariness. But it is, of course, an exact replica of level 14. The carpet is the same retina-scraping orange. The sign on the frosted glass door says
STAFF
SERVICES
instead of
TRAINING SALES,
but it's in the same position and the same HR-approved company font. In the actual department, the fluorescent lighting is just as cheap and there is even a single flickering fixture
(bink! bink bink!),
although it's in a different position. There's the bathroom on the left, the manager's office and meeting room straight ahead (their glass walls shrouded by vertical blinds), and between them and her is the grand open pasture of the cubicle farm.

Here, at least, is a major difference: no Berlin Partition. Instead there's an ugly mess of two dozen cubicles jammed up against each other, as if the large ones of East and West Berlin had given birth to a litter. There's no sense in the arrangement, as far as Elizabeth can tell, which suggests there is no seating plan, and a land grab is in progress. She should have arrived an hour ago; by now she is probably stuck next to the xerox machine.

But before she can tackle that issue, she has a personal matter to attend to. She enters the bathroom, which is indistinguishable from the one on level 14 right down to the little black-and-orange tiles and pools of water around the basins left by careless hand-washers. She smiles at a woman she's never seen before, enters a stall, and closes the door. She sits on the closed seat, pulls out a nail file, and begins to trim. She does her left hand, then the right. She spreads her fingers and inspects them. Only then does she realize something important: she isn't nauseous.

She freezes. She has followed this routine long enough to know how it goes. Right now she should be flipping up the seat and retching. She stands and begins to pull up her skirt, which first requires unbuttoning a jacket because these days her work outfits are elaborately crafted to conceal a growing belly. She struggles out of her tights and checks her underwear. Nothing. Relief hits her like a gust of wind. She claps a hand over her mouth to suppress a burst of laughter.

She rearranges her skirt, sits back down, and rubs her abdomen through the fabric. She cannot stop smiling. If her morning sickness is over, then maybe her body is getting used to her new arrival. Maybe she and it are beginning to get along. It is both obvious and unbelievable: she is going to have a baby. The idea fills her with silent joy.

Jones presses 11 for Staff Services, his new home, and looks expectantly at Tom Mandrake. “Seven,” Tom says. “Compliance is part of Business Management now.”

Jones presses for level 7. “Compliance was on 6, wasn't it? You guys have gone down a floor.”

Tom smirks. “No doubt that will be the subject of intense discussion today.”

“So people really do care about their floor number.”

“Absolutely. Anytime you rank people, they care. Doesn't matter what you rank them on. And you know what, they believe it, too. At least a little.” The elevator stops at 11, and Jones steps out. “Have fun,” Tom says. He winks as the doors slide closed.

Jones looks down the corridor at the frosted glass doors. Vague, person-sized shapes move about beyond them. These are the people Alpha is interested in, of course: the survivors. The rest are of no apparent concern. Jones wonders how this can be: How can you excise a human being from the company's tiny but fully developed society so easily? How can you excise hundreds? In Alpha it is common to compare Zephyr Holdings to a tribe, since both are self-contained social structures with hierarchies, etiquette, and norms—indeed, this is the basis for many amusing sidebars in Omega Management System books, describing (for example) how departments fight to protect resources in terms of warriors, meat, and feathers. But if this analogy is true, then this morning a rockfall left two hundred tribespeople trapped in a cave, and nobody gives a crap about them.

Jones can understand, at least a little, the behavior of the survivors: creating a lot of noise might trigger more rockfalls, and trap them, too. On top of this, their social order has mutated, and they are trying to grab a fingerhold in the new hierarchies. But why are the victims so accepting of their fate? This is beyond him.

He looks at the elevator button. Then he presses:
DOWN.

On the screens in the level-13 monitoring room, the tiny figures of the recently redundant looked blurred and meaningless, cartoonish. So as he exits the lobby doors, Jones is surprised by their sheer presence. There are a lot of people crowded onto the plaza outside the building, talking and shuffling their feet and fogging the chill air with their breath. Jones looks from face to face as a fresh bay wind whips up Madison Street and ruffles everyone's hair.

“Hey,” a man says. At first Jones doesn't recognize him. “They got you too, huh?”

It's a smoker. Jones has seen him out in back of the building. Once again, Jones realizes, he's an impostor. “Ah, no. I just came to see what was going on.”

“Oh,” the man says.

“Sorry. You don't deserve this.”

The man looks at him quizzically. “Why do you say that?”

Jones is surprised by the question. He realizes Tom Mandrake was right. And this is why they are fatalistic; this is why Alpha can safely ignore them. They think they deserve it.

Jones says, “Because you don't.”

The man considers this. Then, unexpectedly, he laughs. “Well,” he says. “Maybe we don't.”