The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O.. Nicole Galland

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      Diachronicle

      DAYS 222–244 (MARCH, YEAR 1)

      In which there are constructive developments

      TRISTAN LATER MODIFIED HIS PLAN, deciding not to send me witch-hunting until we had a feasible chamber in which to put our witch. As there was nothing to occupy me, and I’d let slip that I had taken (one semester-long) shop class in high school, he declared me his aide-de-camp for the campaign of Office Reform that was to come.

      During the next few weeks the office, as I had known it, rapidly ceased to exist. Even before taking ownership of the building, Tristan had, with sledgehammer and Sawzall, wrought changes on it that, at the time, had struck me as quite material. He had perfected the art of gazing thoughtfully at a wall between office suites, casting his gaze hither and yon, and blithely announcing that it was not load-bearing and hence a candidate for being knocked out. In this manner the original DODO office had tripled its square footage during the time I had been working there, with several of its walls already marked for death whenever the neighboring start-ups went “Tango Uniform.”

      “Department of Demolishing Offices” was all I could say the next time I went to the building after our teatime strategy session at the Odas’ house. Less than twenty-four hours had passed, but Tristan appeared to have spent most of them walking freely through the building with a can of fluorescent green spray paint marking doors, walls, and other impedimenta with the word DEMO or, when he ran low on spray paint, with a simple X. In the center of the building was a large conference room, meant to be shared by all of the tenants. Tristan had hurled the conference table against the wall, Xed it, and then spray-painted a huge rectangle directly onto the industrial-carpeted floor and filled it in with the inevitable X. Young, lavishly bearded tech entrepreneurs were trudging forlornly down the hallways, laden with computers, printers, high-end coffeemakers, and foosball tables. Like digital Okies they loaded their stuff into their Scions or Ryder trucks and rumbled off into the unforgiving Boston commercial real estate market.

      “So you’re going to, uh, remove basically the entire floor of the conference room?” I inquired.

      “The conference room will cease to exist,” he said. “DODO is not about meetings. Not about PowerPoints.”

      “I never imagined otherwise,” I said.

      He had lost focus on me and was now looking over my shoulder at a wall, which currently supported a large flat-screen monitor. Something about the look on his face told me where this was going. “Not load-bearing?” I guessed, glancing back over my shoulder. He sidestepped by me, raised his can of acid green paint like the Statue of Liberty’s torch, stood up on tiptoe, and sprayed a dripping, diagonal slash across the entirety of the wall, passing directly across the monitor screen en route. As he completed the other leg of the X he explained, “Between the loading dock and here we need to clear a path for the tanks.”

      “You seem a little preoccupied,” I said, “and I don’t want to elbow in on your painting. I’ll just take all the translation notes back to my apartment before you paint them green.”

      “Remember to maintain—” he began.

      “—operational security,” I ended. “Not to worry.” I found my way to the part of the building where it had all started. Oda was there, perched on a large blue yoga ball before the largest computer monitor I had ever seen, peering intently at some tiny widget in the user interface of what I guessed was a computer-aided design program. Next to him was the cell phone Tristan had bought for him (his first) and a bowl of foamy green Japanese tea. Matcha. Still steaming and filling the room with a fresh but bitter fragrance. It had to have been made only seconds ago. A faucet gushed briefly down the hall, in the СКАЧАТЬ