Paranoia (6 page)

My father smiled triumphantly but said nothing.

“Anyway, what do I care?” she said bitterly. “This is my last day. I can’t
take
it anymore.”

The paid studio audience in the infomercial gasped and applauded wildly.

“Like I’m going to notice,” Dad said. “She doesn’t do shit. Look at the dust in this place. What the hell does the bitch
do?
”

Maureen picked up the laundry basket. “I should have left a month ago. I should never have taken this job.” She left the room in her strange lamepony canter.

“I should have fired her the minute I met her,” he grumbled. “I could tell she was one of those gray-murderers.” He breathed with pursed lips as if he were inhaling through a straw.

I didn’t know what I was going to do now. The guy couldn’t be alone—he couldn’t get to the bathroom without help. He refused to go into a nursing home; he said he’d kill himself first.

I put my hand on his left hand, the one with an index finger hooked up to a glowing red indicator, the pulse oximeter, I think it was called. The digital numbers on the monitor read 88 percent. I said, “We’ll get someone, Dad, don’t worry about it.”

He lifted his hand, flung mine away. “What the hell kind of nurse is she anyway?” he said. “She doesn’t give a shit about anyone else.” He went into a long coughing fit, hawked and spit into a balled-up handkerchief he pulled out from somewhere in his chair. “I don’t know why the hell you don’t move back in. The hell you got to do anyway? You got some go-nowhere job.”

I shook my head, said gently, “I can’t, Dad. I got student loans to pay off.” I didn’t want to mention that someone had to make money to pay for the help that was always quitting.

“Fat lot of good college did you,” he said. “Huge waste of money, all it was. Spent your time carousing with all your fancy friends, I didn’t need to spend twenty thousand bucks a year so you could fuck off. You coulda done that here.”

I smiled to let him know I wasn’t offended. I didn’t know whether it was the steroids, the prednisone he took to keep his airways open, that was making him such an asshole, or just his natural sweet nature. “Your mother, rest in peace, spoiled you rotten. Made you into a big fat pussy.” He sucked in some air. “You’re wasting your life. When the fuck you gonna get a real job, anyway?”

Dad was skilled at pushing the right buttons. I let a wave of annoyance pass over me. You couldn’t take the guy seriously, you’d go whacko. He had the temper of a junkyard dog. I always thought his anger was like rabies—he wasn’t really in control, so you couldn’t blame him. He’d never been able to control his temper. When I was a kid, small enough not to fight back, he’d whip off his leather belt at the slightest provocation, whomp the shit out of me. As soon as he finished the beating, he’d invariably mutter, “See what you made me do?”

“I’m working on that,” I said.

“They can smell a loser a mile off, you know.”

“Who?”

“These companies. Nobody wants a loser. Everyone wants winners. Go get me a Coke, would you?”

This was his mantra, and it came from his coaching days—that I was a “loser,” that the only thing that counted was winning, that coming in second was losing. There was a time when that sort of talk used to piss me off. But I was used to it by now; I barely even heard it.

I went to the kitchen, thinking about what we were going to do now. He needed round-the-clock help, no question about that. But none of the agencies would send anyone anymore. At first we had real hospital nurses, doing outside shifts for money. When he’d chewed through those, we managed to find a series of marginally qualified people who’d done two weeks’ training to get their nursing-assistant certificate. Then it was whoever the hell we could find through ads in the paper.

Maureen had organized the harvest-gold Kenmore refrigerator so that it could have belonged in a government lab. A row of Cokes stood, one behind the other, on a wire shelf that she’d adjusted so it was just the right height. Even the glasses in the cabinet, usually cloudy and smeared, sparkled. I filled two glasses with ice, poured the contents of a can into each. I’d have to sit Maureen down, apologize on Dad’s behalf, beg and plead, bribe her if necessary. At least she could stay until I found a replacement. Maybe I could appeal to her sense of responsibility to the elderly, though I figured that had been pretty much eroded by Dad’s bile. The truth was, I was desperate. If I blew the interviews tomorrow, I’d have all the time in the world, but I’d be behind bars somewhere in Illinois. That wouldn’t help.

I came back out holding the glasses, the ice tinkling as I walked. The infomercial was still going. How long did these things go on for? Who watched them anyway? Besides my father, I mean.

“Dad, don’t worry about anything,” I said, but he’d passed out.

I stood before him for a few seconds, watching to see if he was still breathing. He was. His chin was on his chest, his head at a funny angle. The oxygen made a quiet whooshing sound. Somewhere in the basement Maureen was banging stuff around, probably mentally rehearsing her exit line. I set down the Cokes on his little end table, which was crowded with meds and remote controls.

Then I leaned over and kissed the old man’s blotchy red forehead. “We’ll get someone,” I said quietly.

9

The headquarters of Trion Systems looked like a brushed-chrome Pentagon. Each of the five sides was a seven-story “wing.” It had been designed by some famous architect. Underneath was a parking garage filled with BMWs and Range Rovers and a lot of VW bugs and you name it, but no reserved spaces, so far as I could see.

I gave my name to the B Wing “lobby ambassador,” which was their fancy name for the receptionist. She printed out an ID sticker that said
VISITOR
. I pasted it onto the breast pocket of my gray Armani suit and waited in the lobby for a woman named Stephanie to come get me.

She was the assistant to the hiring VP, Tom Lundgren. I tried to zone out, meditate, relax. I reminded myself that I couldn’t ask for a better setup. Trion was looking to fill a product marketing manager slot—a guy had left suddenly, and I’d been custom-tooled for the job, genetically engineered, digitally remastered. In the last few weeks a few selected headhunters had been told about this amazing young guy at Wyatt who was just ripe for the picking. Low-hanging fruit. The word was spread, casually, at an industry convention, on the grapevine. I began to get all sorts of calls from recruiters on my voice mail.

Plus I’d done my homework on Trion Systems. I’d learned it was a consumer-electronics giant founded in the early 1970s by the legendary Augustine Goddard, whose nickname was not Gus but Jock. He was almost a cult figure. He graduated from Cal Tech, served in the navy, went to work for Fairchild Semiconductor and then Lockheed, and invented some kind of breakthrough technology for manufacturing color TV picture tubes. He was generally considered to be a genius, but unlike some of the tyrant geniuses who found huge multinational corporations, he apparently wasn’t an asshole. People liked him, were fiercely loyal to him. He was kind of a distant, paternal presence. The rare glimpses of Jock Goddard were called “sightings,” as if he were a UFO.

Even though Trion didn’t make color TV tubes anymore, the Goddard tube had been licensed to Sony and Mitsubishi and all the other Japanese companies that make America’s TVs. Later Trion moved into electronic communications—catapulted by the famous Goddard modem. These days Trion made cell phones and pagers, computer components, color laser printers, personal digital assistants, all that kind of stuff.

A wiry woman with frizzy brown hair emerged from a door into the lobby. “You must be Adam.”

I gave her a nice firm handshake. “Nice to meet you.”

“I’m Stephanie,” she said. “I’m Tom Lundgren’s assistant.” She took me to the elevator and up to the sixth floor. We made small talk. I was trying to sound enthusiastic but not geeky, and she seemed distracted. The sixth floor was your typical cube farm, cubicles spread out as far as the eye could see, high as an elephant’s eye. The route she led me down was a maze; I couldn’t retrace my steps to the elevator bank if I dropped bread crumbs. Everything here was standard-issue corporate, except for the computer monitor I passed by whose screen saver was a 3-D image of Jock Goddard’s head grinning and spinning like Linda Blair’s in
The Exorcist.
Do that at Wyatt—with Nick Wyatt’s head, I mean—and Wyatt’s corporate goons would probably break your knees.

We came to a conference room with a plaque on the door that said S
TUDEBAKER
.

“Studebaker, huh?” I said.

“Yeah, all the conference rooms are named after classic American cars. Mustang, Thunderbird, Corvette, Camaro. Jock loves American cars.” She said Jock with a little twist, almost with quotation marks around it, seemingly indicating that she wasn’t really on a first-name basis with the CEO but that’s what everyone called him. “Can I get you something to drink?”

Judith Bolton had told me to always say yes, because people like doing favors, and everyone, even the admins, would be giving feedback on what they thought of me. “Coke, Pepsi, whatever,” I said. I didn’t want to sound too fussy. “Thanks.”

I sat down at one side of the table, the side facing the door, not at the head of the table. A couple of minutes later a compact guy wearing khakis and a navy-blue golf shirt with the Trion logo on it came bounding into the room. Tom Lundgren: I recognized him instantly from the dossier that Dr. Bolton had prepared for me. The VP of the Personal Communications Sector business unit. Forty-three, five kids, an avid golfer. Right behind him followed Stephanie, holding a can of Coke and a bottle of Aquafina water.

He gave me a crusher handshake. “Adam, I’m Tom Lundgren.”

“Nice to meet you.”

“Nice to meet
you.
I hear great things about you.”

I smiled, shrugged modestly. Lundgren wasn’t even wearing a tie, I thought, and I looked like a funeral director. Judith Bolton warned me that might happen, but said it was better for me to overdress for the interviews than to go too casual. Sign of respect and all that.

He sat down next to me, turned to face me. Stephanie shut the door behind her quietly as she left.

“So working at Wyatt’s pretty intense, I bet.” He had thin, thin lips and a quick smile that clicked on and off. His face was chafed, reddened, like either he played too much golf or had rosacea or something. His right leg pistoned up and down. He was a bundle of nervous energy, a ganglion; he seemed overcaffeinated, and he made me talk fast. Then I remembered he was a Mormon and didn’t drink caffeine. I’d hate to see him after a pot of coffee. He’d probably go into intergalactic orbit.

“Intense is how I like it,” I said.

“Good to hear it. So do we.” His smile clicked on, then off. “I think there’s more type A people here than anywhere else. Everyone’s got a faster clock speed.” He unscrewed the top of his water bottle and took a sip. “I always say Trion’s a great place to work—when you’re on vacation. You can return e-mails, voice mails, get all kinds of stuff done, but man, you pay a price for taking off time. You come back, your voice mailbox is full, you get crushed like a grape.”

I nodded, smiled conspiratorially. Even marketing guys at high-tech corporations like to talk like engineers, so I gave some back. “Sounds familiar,” I said. “You only have so many cycles, you’ve got to decide what to spend your cycles on.” I was mirroring his body language, almost aping him, but he didn’t seem to notice.

“Absolutely. Now, we’re not really in a hiring mode these days—no one is. But one of our new-product managers got transferred suddenly.”

I nodded again.

“The Lucid is genius—really saved Wyatt’s bacon in an otherwise dismal quarter. That’s your baby, huh?”

“My team, anyway. I was just part of the team. Wasn’t running the show.”

He seemed to like that. “Well, you were a pretty key player, from what I’ve heard.”

“I don’t know about that. I work hard and I love what I do, and I found myself in the right place at the right time.”

“You’re too modest.”

“Maybe.” I smiled. He got it, really gobbled up the fake modesty and the directness.

“How’d you do it? What’s the secret?”

I blew out a puff of air through pursed lips, as if recalling running a marathon. I shook my head. “No secret. Teamwork. Driving consensus, motivating people.”

“Be specific.”

“The basic idea started as a Palm-killer, to be honest.” I was talking about Wyatt’s wireless PDA, the one that buried the Palm Pilot. “At the early concept-planning sessions, we got together a cross-functional group—engineering, marketing, our internal ID folks, an external ID firm.” ID is the jargon for industrial design. I was jamming; I knew this answer by heart. “We looked at the market research, what the flaws were in the Trion product, in Palm, Handspring, Blackberry.”

“And what was the flaw in our product?”

“Speed. The wireless sucks, but you know that.” This was a carefully planned dig: Judith had downloaded for me some candid remarks Lundgren had made at industry conferences, in which he confessed as much. He was blisteringly critical of Trion’s efforts whenever they fell short. My bluntness was a calculated risk on Judith’s part. Based on her assessment of his management style, she’d concluded he despised toadyism, grooved on straight talk.

“Correct,” he said. He flashed a millisecond of a smile.

“Anyway, we went through a whole range of scenarios. What would a soccer mom really want, a company exec, a construction foreman. We talked feature set, form factor, all that. The discussions were pretty free-form. My big thing was elegance of design married to simplicity.”

“I wonder if maybe you erred too much on the side of design, sacrificing functionality,” Lundgren put in.

“How do you mean?”

“Lack of a flash slot. The only serious weakness in the product, far as I can see.”

A big fat pitch, and I swung at it. “I absolutely agree.” Hey, I was totally prepped with stories of “my” successes, and pseudofailures I managed so well they might as well have been battlefield victories. “A big screwup. That was definitely the biggest feature that got jettisoned—it was in the original product definition, but it grew the form factor outside of the bounds we wanted, so it got scrapped midway through the cycle.” Take
that
.