Company (9 page)

Elizabeth sits on the toilet and stares at the stall door. There's nothing particularly interesting about the door. That's why she's looking at it. Elizabeth has had a rough morning. Her stomach is tight. She has vomited. But it's not the individual issues that bother her. It's the thought that they may be symptoms. This is the third morning in a row she has been sick.

The realization has been growing in a corner of Elizabeth's mind for some time. Now she faces it, this tiny, wriggling zygote of knowledge. She mouths:
I am pregnant.
The words taste alien. There is an invader in her uterus.

She knows who the father is. She closes her eyes and puts her hand to her forehead. Yes, she falls in love with her customers, but she doesn't make a habit of sleeping with them. She's interested in relationships, not one-night stands. Except . . . it was the last day of the quarter and they were hammering out details over pizza and wine stolen from Marketing, and she was already in love with him even before he started talking about a “second round” of training. He was the personnel development coordinator of Forecasting and Auditing, and he hovered his pen above the dotted line, smiling, and said, “Sealed with a kiss.”

If he'd signed first, there would have been no problem. She found them less attractive once they signed. She would have shaken his hand, maybe kissed his cheek. But with the pen an inch from the paper, her adrenaline surging, and the wine buzzing in her brain, she kissed him, this man, who was then a customer and soon after transferred into Training Sales to become her colleague, and Roger kissed her back, and they had sex on his desk with her skirt bunched around her waist and the order forms scrunching beneath her buttocks. They didn't use protection, which seems idiotic now . . . but Elizabeth doesn't want to analyze this too deeply. She is single and thirty-six and was having sex for the first time in two years; it is not beyond the realms of possibility that a small, secret part of her—a part that has very little to do with selling training packages—performed an executive veto on the condom issue, striking it off the agenda, ensuring that the decision, much like Roger himself, slipped in without adequate review.

Near the end, she cried out that she loved him, and he said, “I love it, too,” which should have told her plainly enough that it was going to end badly. But she ignored it because she did love him, at least for a while, even when it was over and he was pulling up his pants, avoiding her eyes.

“We shouldn't tell anybody,” Roger said. “I'm not one of those men.”

“What men?” But he was scribbling his signature on the order and she felt the love draining out of her, dribbling away, even as an essential part of Roger did the same. Although, she realizes now, not
enough
of an essential part of Roger.

“You know. Men who do this.”

“Do what?”

He handed her the order. “Have sex with sales reps.”

He might as well have kicked her. She'd thought he was going to say “affairs.” She'd thought he was going to say “lose control.” She concentrated on tugging her skirt into place and let her hair fall over her face.

“Oh, don't be like that,” Roger said. “Come on. It was good.”

His transfer to Training Sales a few weeks later had nothing to do with her; she knows that. He is not pursuing her, hoping to make things right. At first she wondered, but then he arrived in the department and Sydney said, “This is Elizabeth,” and Roger frowned. It was a small frown, a wrinkle, but it conveyed his attitude clearly enough. She snapped her mouth closed on a more exuberant greeting and grew another small scar on her soul. But that didn't matter. Elizabeth has plenty of scars already. Her whole job is rejection; Roger's was merely her first for the day. If he wants to be a jerk about it, well, fine. Of course, she didn't realize quite how much of a jerk he wanted to be, but even so, it's not costing her any sleep. It takes more than a petulant ex-lover to upset Elizabeth.

Like a pregnancy. Sitting on the toilet seat, she clenches her hands into balls. Roger has turned out to be not a clean sale; there is a support issue. Things will happen to her if she stays pregnant, she knows. Zephyr Holdings is not exactly baby friendly. It is not pregnant-sales-rep friendly, either. Accounts will be reassigned. Plans will exclude her. She will lose the customers she loves. Management will discuss her: Did you hear? Elizabeth got pregnant. It's a pity. She was a good rep.

“Did I tell you about my plan?” Freddy says, shrugging off his jacket. He goes to hang it on the coat stand, then stops and looks at Jones.

“What?”

“I don't want to seem petty, but you've taken my hook.”

“
Your
hook?”

“It's not like it's a big deal,” Freddy says, but thin lines of anxiety are spreading across his face. His feet shift nervously. “It's just that's the hook I've used the whole time I've been here.”

“Well, if it's not a big deal . . .” Jones says, feeling perverse.

Freddy's hands tighten on his jacket collar.

“Okay, I'll move my jacket.”

“Thanks.” Freddy gushes relief. “It's just a funny thing, you know, you get, well, not exactly attached to these things, but used to them.”

Jones finds the idea of becoming emotionally involved with a hook profoundly disturbing. He hopes he never becomes sentimental about inanimate objects in the workplace.

Freddy wanders into his cubicle and sits down. “Anyway, my plan. Last week I filed an application for disability.”

“Disability? For what?”

“Stupidity.”

“Stupidity!”

“Think about it. If I'm born stupid, is that my fault? No, I'm just an honest, hardworking Joe, doing my stupid best. And the company can't sack people who have a disability. It's a fact.”

“Wow. That's clever.”

“Thanks.” He smiles. “See, you just need to know how to work the company.”

Jones sits. He is interested in finding out how the company works. But there's something wrong with his computer. “Freddy . . . can you connect to the network?”

“Ah . . . hey, no.”

“Damn, that's a pain.”

Freddy rises slowly to his feet. “Wendell . . . the day
Wendell got canned, Elizabeth tried to e-mail him and it bounced back.”

“So?”

“This is what they do just before they fire you. They cancel your account. They don't let you—” His hands dance about in the air. “There was an incident a few years ago, a guy in Public Relations got told he was fired, and he walked straight back to his desk and e-mailed a video of his boss giving a blow job to the whole company.” He sees Jones's expression. “I mean, he e-mailed the whole company. The video was just of those two people.”

“Oh, thank God.”

“But the point is it's an early-warning system. I wasn't thinking with Wendell, I didn't realize . . .”

“You think we're being sacked?”

Freddy walks briskly to Megan's empty desk and grabs her mouse.

“Well?”

“The same.” Freddy hurries past, into West Berlin. After a minute, he calls over the divider, “The reps too! No one can connect!”

“So it's just a network problem,” Jones says.

“No. No.” Freddy's head pops over the Berlin Partition, his face pale and moonlike. “It's happened! It's finally happened! The department's being outsourced!”

Training Sales is not being outsourced. Throughout the building, employees try fruitlessly to log on to the network. They click their mice. They hammer at their keyboards. Finally, they pick up their phones and dial the IT help desk. Their calls race through the wiring of the Zephyr building to the nineteenth floor. There, rows of cubicles stand mute and empty. The lights are off. Office chairs sit vacant. Nothing moves. On empty desks, so thoroughly cleaned that you would think no one had ever used them, the phones ring and ring.

Elizabeth is missing and no one dares to disturb Sydney, so Roger takes charge. He orders Freddy and Jones on an exploratory mission to establish whether the whole building has lost its network connection (which would be good news), or just Training Sales (very bad). First stop is level 15, Infrastructure Management and Infrastructure Maintenance, both of which are cube farms surrounded by real offices—but of course,
all
the floors are cube farms surrounded by offices. Freddy and Jones peer over the dividers. There are a lot of people playing solitaire on their computers. One gives them a fright by having an open Web browser, but he is just clicking the
REFRESH
button over and over, getting network errors each time.
Addict,
Freddy mouths, making a
click-click
mouse motion with his hand.

So Infrastructure Management has no network. They go down a floor: Logistics has no network. They visit level 17, and—well, whoever those people are, they have no network. They barely have computers. “Amazonians,” Freddy whispers. “Lost tribe.” The level-17 people wear casual clothes and stare at Freddy and Jones as if they have never seen suits before. Freddy and Jones scurry back to the elevators. When they're safe, Freddy exhales. “Did you see those monitors? Those guys haven't requisitioned anything for a long time.”

Freddy and Jones aren't the only explorers doing the rounds; little teams crawl throughout the building. By noon, everyone but Senior Management knows the network is down. Senior Management remains ignorant because nobody on level 2 uses a computer except the PAs, and if a PA is having computer trouble, well, that comes as no surprise to Senior Management. To them, the capacity of PAs to ensnare themselves in computer problems is a source of endless amusement. If it's not the printer, it's the mouse, and if it's not either of those, it's—you know, one of those software things. Senior Management knows very little about computers, but it feels confident that most “computer problems” could be more accurately described as “unintelligent PA problems.” Senior Management may not use a computer, but they use toasters and microwaves, and worked out how to program their car's stereo—well, not worked out, but the dealer showed them how to do it—so how much more complicated could a computer be?

The departments don't report the problem because a good manager knows the only reason to call Senior Management, ever, is to deliver good news. People who ring Senior Management with problems do not have much of a future at Zephyr Holdings. Senior Management is not there to hold departmental hands. It is there to dispense stock options. So it's three in the afternoon before word filters up.

The only reason it happens then is because eight departmental managers gather on level 19 and wander between the empty desks. There is no help desk. There are no pale, floppy-haired tech-support people. There are plenty of computers, though, and the managers peer at their screens, looking for problems. “Over here!” calls Risk Management, and they all hurry to a tiny monitor that sits on a table outside a glass-encased room full of fat, beige computer cases and a web of colorful cables. The monitor is black except for a single line in glowing green:
04:04 NETWORK ERROR 614

The managers look at each other, just in case anybody knows what this means. When it becomes clear that no one is entirely sure what those beige things in the glass room even are (let alone what they do), they decide to call Senior Management. This is a viable option because reporting problems in someone else's department isn't nearly as bad as reporting problems in your own. So they get a PA on the phone, and she promises to pass on the message as soon as Senior Management gets out of a meeting. The managers hang up, satisfied. They mill around for a few minutes, chatting about cars and golf handicaps—it's not so often that the departmental managers get to hang out together—then reluctantly head back to their own crummy departments, their lazy, stationery-stealing, unproductive employees, and their hopelessly unattainable productivity goals.