Shimmer (5 page)

Cliff asked for supporting detail. Leonard handed us articles, budgets and comparative charts. It was thirty seconds before I had to smile again, looking out the window once more, realizing that Leonard still hadn't really told me why they were wearing green.

“Spread the main software over three months,” Leonard was saying now. “Schedule the attached hardware over five.”

Cliff nodded. I nodded. Leonard picked up another report.

I could see that even his watch band was green.

A joke that just couldn't be shared with the CEO. Or, more likely, a decision that Leonard—a young man completely lacking in even the most basic awareness of irony—simply could not find a way to explain.

“Impact, Freehand, Composer, Paint,” Leonard said.

“We go to the big boy?” Cliff asked.

Leonard and I both shook our heads. “We change,” I said, answering the question. “But it's not to the big boy.”

Leonard nodded quickly, flipped me a thumbs-up. He placed the completed reports at right angles to his desktop.

In his first year as head of technology for Core, Leonard told me
he'd taken business cards to his high school reunion and passed them out to all the people he had never known.

And now he was starting onto another list, Leonard with his deep, almost mystical ability to bend, shape, start and even stop the world of Core Communications. And so I sat taking in everything he said. Just as I'd absorbed every report, every plan, every budget and forecast I'd seen in the past three years. Every cost for every department. Every idea from each meeting. Sometimes even every responsibility and goal for each person in a room.

I took everything in. I remembered it all.

Because really this company was my whole life.

Nearing the end of the day. Holding an impromptu meeting with Julie in the mailroom. Staffed by eager, always well-meaning recent immigrants to the city, the mailroom was centered around a series of six huge copiers—six remarkably complex machines with smoothly harmonic noises, rapidly blinking indicator lights, brightly mirrored interior surfaces.

The paper so crisp, the sound an unwavering heartbeat of order and routine.

For years I'd used the mail room for meetings with Julie. Like me, she felt a deep and inexplicable comfort in being in the presence of the highly synchronized noise, light and human movement. This time, as always, the two of us left our meeting rejuvenated and ready, our ears still echoing with the densely orchestrated motions and sound.

Moving across ten with my assistant now, who took a moment to point at one of the oversized workspaces the company built for supervisors and managers. “Another owner-financed double-wide,” he said.

I squinted. Not understanding.

“You know,” he said with something like surprise. “The joke goes, ‘Did you hear about Sara? She got that promotion to section manager—
and, best of all, she done got herself an owner-financed double-wide!'”

I made a mental note. We moved to eleven. My assistant continued with a list of Whitley's plans to conduct security reviews of all backup systems in our Asian offices.

My lie, ever present, brought to the surface for a moment, once more my mind searching for ways to dodge the constant reviews and investigations that Whitley and her SWAT team were conducting.

Walking with Cliff, his thumbs twitching rapidly as we discussed the turnover rates of our German accounts receivable. We turned a corner, and a man bearing the telltale distant stare of a sleepless programmer came up to me, cutting off Cliff as he looked me in the eyes and said, “Here's a question you can answer—if I reinstall the service pack on the Japanese Maple in Nicaragua, will I lose all config changes to my ODBC connections?”

I stared back at his heavy, glassy eyes. Clearly he'd confused me with someone else. But I started to speak.

He raised a hand. “Never mind,” he said quickly. “Obviously, I've just answered my own question.”

And he was gone.

And I would never see him again.

And actually I had known the answer.

Walking with Whitley once more, finding her on seventeen, Public Relations, bright-faced young professionals and darkly clothed cynics all breaking plans into parts, offering a simple spin to define the chaos, trying in all things to spread the word, the good doings and best efforts, of Core Communications.

Three hundred e-mails.

Thirty more reports waiting on my desk for review.

Four holes of putt-putt with two novice players from Finance.

The ventilation system turning on, purring above us, Whitley and I hearing it for the second time that day, when usually it blew silently above the swirling noise of people, computers, phones and copiers.

Collabra, Marimba, Domino, Exchange. Software. Satellites. A marketing push into Asia.

Nineteen, and I was alone, passing through another of the Unoccupied Territories. And this time stopping. Standing still for a moment. Seeing the walls freshly painted, feeling my feet pressing easily into the untouched carpet, looking at the desk chairs still wrapped in paper and plastic. Standing alone in this area, untouched and pristine. In some deepest way pure. And all of it waiting. Waiting for more.

Every day there was more.

My ears seemed to ring. I felt short of breath. I could see the whole day, blinking once, it was there and gone and somehow with me forever, each part disconnected, the all of it forming a solid, bright whole.

It was eight o'clock.

And at two in the morning, she came into my office. Like many nights, though not all. A short e-mail sent at one. A brief call back to me at two.

A woman in a black suit walked into the room.

She followed me upstairs to my apartment on the twenty-first floor.

A black suit, black hair. The edge of her smooth white bra just visible as she stepped close.

All my life I hadn't slept much, even when I was a child. I can remember whole nights when I was six or five or even four and I lay in my bed, staring up at the ceiling, unable to sleep. Now, at thirty-five, instead of lying awake, I spent my nights in my office, there from nine till two, spreadsheet open on my computer, feeding more information into my secret model.

Now I was here, though. In my apartment. Six tall rooms cast in the gray light and dark shadows of lamps placed two or three or four
to a room. A kitchen I didn't use, a bed I could not find sleep in, wide windows onto the city, in every room, those windows. It seems now that I lived in those windows, raised from the wooden floors, suspended in the glass between building and city.

This black suit in front of me. The black hair long and a face beautiful and indistinct, only dark eyes, a mouth, chin, the neck and shoulders and arms and legs. The edge of that bra. The two-color silhouette of a woman in front of me.

Always somehow they were the same. Darkly perfect, quietly fit, seemingly kind, seemingly happy. This woman with the dark hair, thick, pulled lightly into a tie at the base of her neck, standing in front of me in a fine wool suit, low and simple shoes, as if she'd been pulled from a board meeting or presentation. But really she was a total stranger to me. Even the women I'd seen five or ten times in the last two years, all were strangers even if they'd been sent to me before. Because there was no banter, there were no questions, no anxious answers.

A few instructions maybe. Sometimes a guiding word.

But really I preferred no talking at all.

I did not do drugs. I did not gamble, did not even spend the money I was paid. This was my vice, dark music and gin, a woman escorted to me by my bodyguard.

There were no dim fantasies, no perversions or abuse. There was only nameless sex, steady closeness, the just quiet sounds of clothes coming off. Her participation imagined or faked, I didn't know and didn't care, because in all this there was acting, some play in the dark with shadows and silence, an agreed-upon game with simple rules and clear roles, much of it no different than the circling rhythms of Monday meetings or hallway games, all of us playing, all of us paid, everyone trying to leave behind each moment and role at the end of the day.

I came inside her.

Three offices to open in England and Ireland. Eight acquisitions in Taiwan and Korea. Cash soon shifting from Chicago to Omaha.

Five thousand, two thousand, six million, seven.

Collabra, Marimba, Domino, Exchange.

Messages, rogue sections, another meeting, another floor.

Every day was the same. For three years, I'd spent each day keeping the company on track toward its demise, adding pressure by the hour, all the while trying to find a way out of the trap I'd created.

This is what it meant to live a lie.

I came inside her again.

They do not have any kind of disease. They are not criminals. They are not forced into what they do. They were simply delivered to an anonymous apartment.

In New York, with enough money, you can buy anything.

These things were important to me. Because this was about the absence of any risks or possibilities or needs or cautions. This was only about the touching, the sounds and sex.

No cash exchange. No late-night cigarette as she or I broke the spell. No shared insights into her childhood or upbringing, no sharing of my weaknesses, wants and faults. It was over and she would leave and then I would finally sleep.

Masturbation on a credit card in a penthouse apartment.

And so at four in the morning on this Monday night, I did sleep. Lying on the sofa back in my office, the best place I'd found. The glow of the city, the distant glare from the waterfront over in New Jersey, all reflecting in on my high ceiling and I would sleep a few hours, till the sun came up, my mind moving through meetings and plans and expenses, finding details, concepts, tasks big and small.

In two months revenue would cross $21 billion a year.

At some point, any point, we'd be bankrupt and done.

I'd managed to keep us alive another day.

And I would sleep in that state, listing and racing and listing more, and maybe once, maybe not, would I think about the woman who'd visited me that night, maybe picturing her face, more likely her hair or clothes, some remnant memory of pleasure and silence, some
memory just marked by a disconnected guilt, and now I'd be awake, never sure how much I had really slept, now only staring out the window at the morning turning gold and white and a deep, deep blue, Tuesday, and I was floating, legs quietly pulled up to my chest, so silly, so obvious, but floating, flying, out the window, and toward the sky.

He rides home, nighttime, with the numbers still moving. There in the cab, riding home as he sits among the tightly stacked papers and clearly labeled files. Calculator still pressed between his narrow hands. CFO, still. Nine o'clock. Maybe ten now. The numbers of a hundred reports and a hundred budgets and a hundred campaigns and a hundred launches, all those numbers moving across the screen of the calculator in Cliff's hands.

But, really, moving across his eyes. Because the calculator is more habit than need. Pressing the buttons only absently. Barely glancing at the results, results he already knows. Results he can do in his head.

In fifth grade he learns geometry. In seventh he learns calculus. By tenth he is on to college.

There aren't any numbers Cliff can't do on his own.

The taxi bottoms out, hitting hard on a steel plate, then lifting for a second, just a second, and his papers slide in place and two files start their slow, slow fall to the floor and he's lifted with the cab and his stomach's fluttering and high in his chest and he smiles that kid's smile of riding
in the car with his mom, a kid, in the backseat, with mom in the front, and he's thinking now,
What night is it? What street are we on? What time did I leave home this morning? What time did my kids go to bed?

And there's only guilt when he thinks about that. Because why is he doing this? To himself and to his wife and to his kids.
My kids.
Six kids. None more than ten years old. Home asleep now. Most nights, asleep. Weekends he sees them. When he's home for a few hours. Weekends they all smile with him.

No one makes him do this. He can make money somewhere else.

He will get home and slide into bed and he'll want to sleep and already he knows he'll be out of bed by twelve, roaming the house, trying to empty himself of the numbers still moving through his mind, and finally he will give in, sit down, turn the TV on and stare. Stare for hours. Two hours or three. Bright infomercials and lost sitcoms and sad, heart-felt commercials. He likes the commercials best of all. And over time his mind will stop working. Finally it will let go. Emptied, dumbed down, left tired and somehow cold.

Then he'll sleep.

This is his ride home. Guilty and tired and the numbers moving. Once more folding the results, turning them over, seeing them again.

And of course, like always now, just as it's been for the past year, the numbers don't work for him. The numbers aren't right.

He's never seen a number he doesn't understand.

But he doesn't understand these numbers. The company's numbers.

And he thinks something's wrong with him. He thinks that, finally, the company has moved past him. He thinks that, finally, he's not able to understand. Finally the company needs someone else. Someone older. Someone more experienced.

Someone smarter.

He doesn't understand. The numbers are balanced. They're checked. The auditors sign off. His staff okays them. The bankers smile happily. Wall Street nods and nods.

But he can't touch something inside the numbers. Can't see some part of them.

And he thinks that Robbie always knows. Always, he's sure. Always, he understands.

But there's something, somewhere, that Cliff does not understand.