Shimmer. Eric Barnes

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СКАЧАТЬ the night, when I did sleep, these were the things that drifted through my dreams.

      I leaned back in my chair, absently touching the thin, straight edge of Leonard’s desk. Everything in Leonard’s office was set at right angles to the walls. As always, this had a calming effect on me. His four computers, his five monitors, his multiple stacks of status reports, software documentation, heavy reference books, even the requisite collection of sci-fi trading cards—not only was each item squared to the desk or table on which it rested, but Leonard had clearly gone so far as to bar the public display of any rounded items in his office. Leonard’s office—Leonard himself—gave me a sense of order and uniformity, not just among the physical objects within my reach but within the very structure of the universe around us.

      “Corel, Claris, even Quattro, even Symphony,” Leonard said, sighing again. “In this there will be no diversity. We go to the one place. We go to the big boy.”

      Cliff nodded quickly. I nodded again. I said once more, “Leonard, you’re wearing all green.”

      He looked up from his notes. In a moment, he nodded, flat tongue wetting his wide lower lip, his whole presence seeming to prepare itself for an extended response. “Yes,” Leonard said, “I am.”

      He nodded again, Cliff asked for costs, Leonard gave him answers, I glanced toward New Jersey and smiled. Leonard’s sincerity, the pure earnestness he brought to his work, to this life, it could make him impenetrable.

      “Forty-four K, thirty-two K, an even hundred,” Leonard said.

      “Was there a memo?” I asked. “Or an e-mail?”

      “What’s that?” Leonard asked.

      “How did everyone know to wear green?”

      He paused, letting his head fall to the side, confused. Then he nodded. “Right. Yes. I see. Green. No. It’s the first of the month. On the first of the month, we’ve all decided to wear green.”

      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, СКАЧАТЬ