One



1

More and more I have been thinking: What this country needs is war.

Don’t misunderstand. I’m not pining for another foreign adventure. I mean an honest reckoning, here on our own pilgrim dirt. One of the company’s Finance men is forever reading military journals and wringing his hands over the Chinese, a billion-strong infantry or something, cinches for any war of attrition, etc. Whenever I bump into him, I make it a point to hear him out. “Chuck,” I might say, “worst-case scenario: no way the People’s Army makes it past Nevada.” “Oh ho. You just keep thinking that. Here’s a tidy little fact for you. Last year Chinese defense spending more than tripled the previous five years’ total…”—this while I slide into dread anticipation like a warm bath. Mind you, I’m not winding him up. I want to be convinced. The more an old saber rattler like Chuck frets, the more I think: Let them come.

Later I am always ashamed. War is torture chambers, and fathers killed in front of sons, homes burned while children scream from the attics—what is the matter with me? But just moments ago I caught in the rearview mirror a glare from my fellow citizen. It was a look of such opprobrium, such astonished offense (I changed lanes too abruptly), that I would have the nerve, the gall to interrupt even for a moment her progress in the world, and back I am to thinking, Yes: tank treads and the tromp of boots, here on our courteous soil. It is the only remedy.

At last the Cyber tower rounds into view and I forget all about my military fantasies. This is a place anyone would be glad to work. A thirty-story functionalist construction, our building stands demurely aside from the steel sails and ribbons of the last boom—to say nothing of those glass three-stage rockets that sprang up across the Sunbelt in the futurist eighties. Its apartness is literal: the building is quite clearly removed from the skyline’s huddle of commercial A-space. However, the difference is not more than a few blocks. The downtown district is scarcely big enough to get lost in. It would take some real trying, anyway. No, I do not deceive myself that this is a sprawling capital city. Ours is a first-rate building in a not quite first-rate town. I’m not complaining. The city is all the better for it. I have traveled to so-called world capitals and found the inhabitants only too aware of themselves as such—that is, as movers in a world capital.

The lobby is a cavernous glass place with a red granite floor. A gigantic Christmas tree still looms in the atrium entrance. People stride for the elevators in a billow of coattails and trailing scarves. The morning light comes in like snowfall. I am especially brisk of step this morning. Earlier I received a call from my manager’s assistant. A summons at that hour, and from her, could mean only some wonderful or terrible bit of news. Except she gave nothing away. Her voice was colorless:

“Keith would like a word this morning.”

“Of course,” said I, just as soberly. We bid each other good-bye in tones gone positively funereal. Anyone listening would think what serious business this is, to be subpoenaed by the boss. Only not really. Keith and I are friendly.

Off the elevators and into a waking office. The floor plan is like an open range: elevators in the center, offices at the perimeter, desks among low divider walls everywhere else. Our eighteenth-story perch is generously windowed. Beyond the warren of cubicles is a bright winter sky. Small clouds stand in the blue like flak burst. Sunlight ricochets off downtown glass and beams upward through the windows. People attend the blinds, their heads looming like moai statues on the white drop ceiling. Others shuck jackets, greet neighbors, lift phones, punch buttons. Computers pop to life. It is a good bunch. Whatever stories we tell ourselves, it’s the one about the American work ethic that is observably true. A rare instance of treasured impression borne out by facts. Some of the most satisfying days I’ve known have occurred inside these walls. Just yesterday while searching my computer for a document, I came upon an old slide whose bold-boxed message read, Relentless focus to reduce waste, improve quality, and increase customer satisfaction. Its font colors were a kind of Mediterranean blue. I was cast back years ago to the moment of creation: hunched with my cohorts in a conference room on a midafternoon in summer, the sun in the blinds and the smell of carpet fibers and fresh paint. Four centered youths, our brains keen and college-minted, eager to be of use.

This regard for work surprises some. My sister, for example. In her mythology a corporate job is a necessary evil, to be tolerated only until a person finds what he was Meant To Do. I once felt the same. I landed a job with Cyber Systems straight out of college, and no sooner had the hiring manager handed me a security badge and shown me to my computer than was my radar wheeling around for a destiny. What changed my mind was love. Of money. I am only partly joking. There may be satisfactions like a thick wallet, but you need a thick wallet to have them. It’s no good avowing one’s regard for money, I know. You set yourself up as a satirical creature. And in fact money was not the only thing: also my destiny never resolved itself. There’s no lack of good to be done in the world, and as soon as any noble thing presented itself, it was replaced by another. To pick one and run is fine if there is nothing else. But when a person has already obtained a kind of momentum—it didn’t take long to see that acquiring a skill, linking arms with others to fix problems, fulfilling one’s duties with aplomb, all toward a commercial end, is its own kind of nobility. The nobility of no pretensions. Gretchen, my sister, works in Minneapolis for a charity shop whose wares are made by indigenous peoples guaranteed a living wage. It is a good mission. I must say, however, that her co-nonprofiteers are a fairly self-satisfied bunch. One of them, a Young Werther in East German frames, once told me that although his work might barely feed him, it would always sustain him. When I mentioned this later to Gretchen, she wasn’t surprised. My sister is perfectly clear-eyed. She allowed that if he of the politburo (I don’t recall his name) occasionally gave himself to stirring performances, it was all “positively directed.” She guessed that Cyber Systems must have a similar type: heroes who stayed late, worked weekends, sure of a hallowed cause. This was no hypothetical, of course. I explained, not for the first time, that as an industry, internet security software was as dear to me as it was to her: not at all. The day I hold forth on digital security at a dinner party is the day I quit. What moves me to work is money’s comforts, yes, and also a community of smart, mostly efficient people; the sense of place that a good office gives. If this sounds mundane, so much the better. Gretchen, in a dear little-sister way (she is thirty to my thirty-four), won’t accept that I feel no tug to heroism. And in a way she is right. Only my heroes are the mundane sort: good managers, homeowners, taxpayers.

Keith is on the phone, frowning. His office is a corner one. Windows for walls; the city hustles beyond. I am motioned into a chair. His desk is a polymer thing with a vast black surface shaped like an apostrophe. It is bare but for computer and telephone.

“That’s not the point,” he says.

And then: “Right. Barry—I understand the algebra.”

Ah. Barry is my counterpart in Sales. Sales is under tremendous pressure at the moment. Last quarter was horrendous, and this one has started no better. The responsibility for this ultimately lies with Keith. He has been General Manager a short half year, promoted from elsewhere to take over from the previous GM, who was shown the plank. I should explain that here “General Manager” retains its meaning. Cyber has so far avoided the usual arms race over position titles, the sort that ushers in dozens of “Chief” officers to the executive suite. Here each business unit is appointed one GM, and one only. They are the Mayors of the Palace. It’s true that Keith is answerable to an opaque tier of masters installed somewhere in far-off Dallas. But locally there is no higher power. At Cyber it is simple: there is the General Manager, there are the Directors, charged with running the various departments (I am one; Barry is another), and there is everyone else.

“Listen to me,” he says into the phone. “I get it. Going to bat for your team is what good managers do. But only to a point. Because at the end of the day, you own the number. And if this guy isn’t getting it done—”

There comes a tinny volley of apologetics. Barry is nothing if not persistent. Keith plants a heavy elbow on the table, laying his ear to the receiver. He is tall, big-bellied, broad-shouldered, broad-faced; heavy. Against the broadness of his face, the lips stand out. They are Cupid’s-bow-like, and oddly sensual. Then there is the gaze. Perhaps if you were to pass him in an airport or hotel bar, you’d notice little more than his ample frame and draping oxford shirt, the lank black hair attached to thinning part: one more Southern salesman nearly gone to seed in discount brokering or life insurance. But he is no Babbitt. There is the gaze, and it moves over the devices of the world, and it does not forget.

Now he is nodding testily. “Look,” says Keith. “My rule? Never carry a salesman longer than his mother did. You’re profitable in nine months, or you’re out.” The receiver goes back into its cradle.

“How’s the weekend.”

I report the weekend was fine.

“Yep.” The irritation of their back-and-forth has carried over into the room; he is not really listening. “Mine I spent doing honeydew chores. Not you, I know. No honey to tell you what to do.”

“The chores were here.”

“And? How turn the wheels of Engineering?”

“The team made some good progress over the weekend.”

“No thanks to their Director.” An absentminded jab. Really he is absorbed in his monitor.

“I’m single-handedly keeping this place afloat.”

Harmless banter, but immediately I see it is a stupid thing to say, the worst possible rejoinder in light of the last quarter. He looks up.

“Aha.” His eye goes past my shoulder. The door. “Shut that, will you?”

Now comes the first inkling that all is not well. At the doorway his assistant shoots me a curious glance. There is time only to offer an apologetic smile before the light of the wider office is sealed off.

“So,” Keith says. “We’re only as good as our last quarter. That’s the cold hell of business. Let’s start there.”

I wait. When nothing else comes: “Meaning right now we’re not very good.”

He nods. “And another one like it…”

“The market doesn’t forgive.” I surprise myself. The market. What do I know about the market. I have a team to feed and care for, software to design, code, test. The market I leave to economists.

“No,” Keith says. “The market forgives just fine. Nothing’s got a shorter memory than the market. It’s our bosses we need to watch out for.”

I am silent. Do I imagine it, or is there not an echo of threat in this? Although he may be thinking of Barry. Or perhaps he means pressure being exerted from Dallas on him himself. Having been brought in at no small expense to turn revenues around, and with last quarter failing to show any upward signs, the noose around his own neck may be going tight.

He is distracted again by email. The only sound is the rasp of mouse on desk, the quiet click of its buttons. He swears under his breath.

“Anyway. It’s what we get paid for. If there were only good quarters and better quarters, no need for managers. Now’s when we earn our keep.”

Though I have known Keith only these past six months, already he is the finest boss I’ve ever had. He uses only “us” and “our” and “we.” In the mouths of past supervisors, this team-speak always sounded mealy and euphemistic. Why not with him? I think it is because his sovereignty doesn’t frighten him. The worst managers speak of “us” in hopes of finding refuge among the masses. It is a bid to wish away the responsibilities of hierarchy. Keith has no qualms about the hierarchy or his place in it. We work at his pleasure, and he does us the courtesy of not pretending otherwise.

“To that end,” he goes on, “I need to be sure I’ve got the full attention, the commitment, of certain folks.”

“I see.” I see.

“You do.”

“I think I do.”

“Tell me.”

“The business is shaky right now. You want to be sure managers aren’t poking around at other opportunities.”

“I want to be sure you’re not poking around.”

“I’m not.”

“I’ve seen to it.”

Keith digs into his computer bag on the floor and withdraws a sheet of paper. He gives the page a frowning once-over, then sends it hissing across the desk: CS SALARY ADJUSTMENT FORM. The contents take a moment to register. My current pay is indicated at top; at bottom, the figure plus twenty percent.

“I’m counting on you. What happens in the next ten weeks will define us for a long time to come. Believe it.”

I am at a loss. He pushes from his desk and heaves around. I rise to meet him. We shake hands firmly and formally. Keith smiles down on me, and there comes a feeling like a pressed knuckle at my throat. Ye lovely saints above. The joy of money is sharp as grief.

* * *

I was born and raised in Minnesota, went to college in Virginia, and chose the South to live. A proven decision, I think, not least for the mercy of Southern winters. Today at noon it is sixty degrees in the sun. I sit on a park bench a few blocks from the office, marking time before lunch. It is an attractive place, nearly ten brick-paved acres. Where once leaned tenement houses now are benches and green bandstands, potted conifers and towering obelisks of galvanized steel cut in the shape of torches. In summer, jets of water erupt from blowholes in the plaza’s brick floor while children frolic like mental patients among the geysers. The bricks themselves are stamped each with a name or short message. A few are engraved in memoriam. Today I found another: WILLIAM C. DAWES 1982–1985. It reminds me of a trip I made last fall to see a friend in Charleston. The visit itself was nothing to speak of; what I remember is the drive home. The roads of the low country are tricky things. They wind through realms of gray marshes and haunted forests, and after dark they become especially tricky. In plainer terms, I got lost. Doubling back, I caught something strange in the headlights. I stopped. The forest ran right along the shoulder of the road, a thick flanking of elephant ears and draping limbs, but here there was a gap. It worked as an entrance, a vestibule of a few trunks’ depth beyond which was a small clearing, opened among the trees like a bedroom. It was after midnight; the forest was quiet. No: in fact it was a riot of croakings and chirrings, but these were a solid pattern upon which the smallest exception could be heard. The engine ticked in the heat. Fireflies bobbed and winked their green signals. Soon I could make out the purpose of this place. Laid in a row were five cocoon-like mounds of bleached seashells, each glowing dully among the ferns.

What is my point? In the American South, Death won’t be ignored. Slavery and revolution have soaked its clays red. Everywhere one bumps into history, tragedy, and failure. Bandstands on gravestones, but no amount of happy theater will change the facts. This is the South’s great comfort, although, surveying the park, I am reminded it may not last. Across the plaza, a crowd of red-hatted tourists are admiring the two-story television marquee on the side of the city’s new convention center. Some strange cartoon is showing. The South’s major cities have, by tract house and conference center, begun to except themselves from their soil’s bony history. No nation ever had less use for a graveyard, and Dixie’s mayors know it better than anyone. Conventioneers have no chance at business with Death wheezing on their necks.

“I’m sorry sir: no sleeping on the park benches.”

“Hm—? Oh. Hullo Barry.”

“‘Hello Barry.’ Now that’s—jeez, that’s a funeral greeting. Let’s try again.”

Barry and I have worked together, not closely, though not by any means at odds, for almost two years. He has a decent, open face and reddish hair that is always neatly barbered. Today he wears gold-rimmed spectacles. I know this to be his academic look, the one he chooses when he is to be called upon to speak with fluency to numbers, as he will later today.

“Come on, Eeyore!” he cries. He really is waiting for me to try my greeting again. “What? Tough weekend? No, couldn’t be. No honeydews for this guy!”

“Right. No, it was—” A punishing fatigue takes hold. It is all I can do to finish the thought. “—fine.”

The lenses catch the sun and change his eyes to shining discs. Below the discs is a ferocious smile. I begin to fidget. Barry is straight as an arrow but this smile is the smile of a successful pornographer. Some time ago I discovered that certain faces give rise to an urge to smash them. This urge has little to do with personality; it is a reaction to pure physiognomy. With Barry’s, there is the slight poppet bulge to the ears, a particular wetness around the lips … Understand, I don’t wish any actual violence on anyone, and certainly not on Barry. Barry aches with good intention. But if I could have a model of his face done in Plasticine or frosted onto a cake, then I would smash it and be satisfied.

I ask after his weekend.

“It was very good. Very good. Say, let’s have lunch. Seems I never see you anymore.”

“It’s busy for you these days.”

Some of the wattage drains from his grin. It would not surprise me to learn I’ve ruined his day. Barry is possessed of an unpredictable wax-and-wane energy. He is not alone in this tendency; others of our coworkers show it too. Its characteristic is manic efficiency one day, ruefulness and exasperation the next. Yet Barry is a special case. When his batteries are charged, he’ll hurl himself from meeting to meeting, bullhorning hellos at coworkers. I’ve seen him startle client prospects with his crazed friendliness, cutting to them across the blue of office carpet, his trouser creases sharp as the prow of a destroyer, hand extended like a cannon. But of late, particularly as sales have proven hard to come by, it feels to me precarious, a kind of supererogatory sweating. Eagerness, not confidence.

“Busy’s good,” says he. By glancing at his watch and searching out some far-off point behind him, he makes it known the lunch invitation is withdrawn. I am meeting someone in any case. There is a moment of awkward silence. Having nowhere to go with our eyes, we consider a nearby group of men huddled around a chess table. I cannot quite make out the players in their midst except to say that one of them is white, which is unusual. From time to time a spectator will step away from the huddle and silently bite his fist or point skyward. Even from a distance the game makes me uneasy.

“See you at the Management meeting,” says Barry. He strides off, I fear bad-temperedly. Except when he reaches the chess match, he stops and takes perch among the spectators. His manner among these men, the sole white in audience to a game whose stakes surely involve the most delicate matters of tribal pride, is easy as you please. He watches the players. Now he shakes his head in marvel, confides some amusing thing to his neighbor, and is on his way.

* * *

We sit close as conspirators at our little bistro table. Jane studies the yellow plaster walls stuck with poster ads for bullfights, the cigar smoke and kitchen’s stewy smells. She tells me about a restaurant from her holiday, a brasserie in the 7th arrondissement. Knowing little of the language and in abject terror of French waiters, she pointed to the first thing on the menu.

“And do you know what I got? I got a big ole bowl of fried sardines. Heads, tails, eyes, everything. I guess you were supposed to munch them like fries, but I never found out.” Here she falls back and sets her face in profile. She squints abashedly at nothing. “Go ahead and say it.”

“Say what?”

“What a rube I am.”

“You’re no rube.”

“No?”

“No.”

“Tell it to my in-laws.”

Jane Brodel works in Marketing. She is very good at her job as best I can gather, though I know nothing about marketing. She shares a similar bafflement where engineering is concerned. This mutual ignorance permits a friendship that is innocent of the usual office angling. Also she is married. Another simplifier.

She raises the menu for study, clucking her tongue softly, absently. There is a smear of blood on her teeth.

“Jane, your mouth. It’s bleeding.”

“What?” She touches her lips. “Lipstick I think.” She runs her tongue over her teeth. “Gone?”

“Oh. Yes.”

She nods. “Blech. You’re nice to worry.”

The food is very good. Roasted whole chicken, yellow rice, and caramelized plantains. Parisian café life has suited her: she orders a glass of chardonnay. A plank of winter sunlight lies across the table and heavily, warmly, in our laps. There is nothing on my schedule until two o’clock. It is pleasant to sit in silence, to slip a little ways forward in time and think of nothing. Dessert is a kind of corn cake with jam. I watch as she tends the jar: a little brutish, this grasping and turning, all arms and elbows. I am reminded of her slightly male slovenliness, a kind of athletic carelessness in her posture and the use of her limbs. Holding the jar to her middle (its lid is stuck), the placket of her shirt opens to show more than is perhaps strictly decent. But there is nothing shameless here. It is simply her absorption in the task at hand, her obliviousness of the body’s own effects. The lid pops. One of her knuckles comes away bearing a small blood-colored gem. Into her mouth it goes, the finger sucked clean.

She asks, “What did I miss?”

“It’s been quiet.”

“Not good.”

“No,” I admit.

“People are worried. You don’t see it until you go away. I met Penny coming up the elevator this morning and she looked just awful. Who helps her if things go south? Is she sitting on a nest egg? What do you suppose she makes?”

“I don’t know.”

“Twenty-eight thousand, if she’s lucky. In America.”

“Plus benefits.”

The warning sign is in her eyes. They are a very deep brown. When she is angry the color stirs, tightens into itself until the eye’s gleam is turned impervious, wholly reflective.

“Super. Something else she can’t afford to lose.”

Clearly I once loved her. And I very nearly made an ass of myself saying so. As near as last summer I was sure the feeling was mutual. What subtexts of longing I parsed from her emails! The most throwaway lunchroom chat crackled with double meaning. Even to pass in the halls, the mere swap of nods as we went about our business felt like some sly tradecraft. But in the end I couldn’t budge the hard evidence of her marriage, the professional context of our relationship.

It is not strictly true to say it was love at first sight. I came upon her in a break room, bent over double with her hair down around her face. She was holding her side.

“Ooh,” she said.

“Are you all right?”

She stood up straight. The blood had gathered in her face. “No. But it’s self-inflicted. I’m a nut for iced tea. This is probably a kidney stone.” From the counter she lifted an enormous Styrofoam cup and pulled a mouthful of dark liquid through the straw.

“And that’s—?”

“Iced tea.” She stuck out a hand. “Jane. I’m new.” There followed the normal preliminaries, schools and roles and previous employers, a précis of our corporate existences. “Which department are you?” I wondered.

“Marketing.”

“Ah.”

“Marlene’s group.”

“Yes. Do you know Marlene?”

“Only from interviews.”

“You report to her?”

“Doesn’t everyone in Marketing?”

“I mean directly.”

“Yes.”

I nodded. She narrowed her eyes. “What?”

“Nothing. She’s good, very smart.”

“But…?”

I weighed it.

“She eats her own.”

A kind of glee came over her face. It confirmed my hunch. Here was a direct person, with no time for the usual corn syrup.

“Does she now! Well, well … Good tip. I’ll watch myself.”

Her color had returned so that it was possible to see her face. It occurred to me that she was one of those people whom you could not describe as pretty but who were nevertheless unusually beautiful. Her mouth was large, it was immodest, and her ears stood out. There was a faint asymmetry in her gaze, the left eye pointed slightly up and away. But you could not miss the gameness, the pulse of human intelligence; it came off her like a red aura, and together with her long-limbed ease, her natural male slovenliness, it was enough. It was plenty.

Jane seems to be waiting. In light of Penny’s concerns, she wants my verdict on the business.

“I’m not really worried,” I tell her truthfully.

“Sure. You can afford it. We both can.”

This is true, especially in her case. I happen to know Jane’s in-laws are what my sister would call pig rich.

“I mean I have faith in Keith.”

Jane thinks on this. “All right. You know him better.” She thinks further. “And Barry. I like Barry. He’s done some good things for us, right? Recently I know it’s been not so easy, but…” She peers at me narrowly. “No?”

I mention our conversation in the park, my theory of his highs and lows.

“You’re saying, what? Never get excited?”

“This swinging from mountaintop to valley and back again—”

“It’s undignified.” She is indulging me.

“Sometimes I feel like I’m watching The Passion of Barry. That’s not a dig at his religion.” Barry is quite a loud Christian. “I mean he needs to fall so he can rise again in glory.”

“Ah. Better detachment. Phone in what you have to, disconnect from the rest.”

“Not phone in, no. It’s not a vote for laziness. You can work hard without thinking the sun goes up or down on your effort.”

“He’s unabashed, and it bothers you.”

I say nothing. It was a mistake to bring it up. I am not even quite sure what I mean. Jane smiles, shakes her head.

“Henry Hurt: my dear, repressed friend.”

We laugh together, but I am stung.

* * *

The Monday Management meeting. There are five of us, department heads each: Sales, Marketing, Engineering, Operations, Finance. There is also Keith. We report to him; it is his meeting. I am aware that nothing conjures the tedium of business so much as a weekly meeting. And it is true we deliver our reports in the most nickel-plated of monotones. The worst you can do here is to insist: we are authoritative by our very bloodlessness. Yet the truth is I crave these sessions. Here commercial necessities are turned to concrete actions, with measurements and owners and due dates, and there is no pall to speak of.

Barry is last to present. He concludes his report by saying he remains pleased with the pipeline. Keith flips the few pages of the sales report with a sour look.

“You’re pleased with the pipeline,” he says finally. The pipeline is a list of sales prospects and dollar values, along with the percentage chance of our winning the deal. “Well. I am pleased you’re pleased.”

Barry shakes his head and gives the table a vaudevillian look. “I know I’ve said this for a couple of weeks, but if some of these don’t hit next week…” Some chuckle supportively. Keith does not.

“Then what?”

“Sorry?”

“If some of these don’t hit next week, then what?”

“Well…”

“Then I should look for a new head of Sales?”

“Ha. Ah—no.”

Keith waits, an ear cocked in Barry’s direction. In these meetings the role of listener also carries with it certain affectations: eyes narrowed, legs crossed, pen to lips, the occasional nod or frown. The corporate world’s skeptical punctuation. None of which applies to Keith. Keith doesn’t go for affectation.

“I feel excellent about these, Keith. Maybe not the ones listed at twenty percent probability, but these sixty-and-above ones, hoo boy—”

“That’s two. Two opportunities at sixty percent. What’s your revenue target?”

“Right at fifteen—”

“For the quarter.”

“Four.”

“Four million dollars. What’s the total value of these two? Assuming we get them both, which I most certainly am not.”

“One million.”

“One million? It’s not even that much, friend. Not according to this. You’ve got seven hundred fifty here. Five hundred thousand for Markitel, two fifty for Delta. Any deal north of a million is still sitting in sub-twenty probability, which means we have what? Two, three quarters of coaxing ahead of us for any of those? Best case?”

Barry’s phone buzzes in its holster. He consults it seriously, hopefully.

“OK,” Keith says. “All right. Let’s take these one at a time, focus on the birds in hand. Markitel. It’s the biggest of the sixty percent probabilities. You see them this week?”

“Thursday,” Barry affirms.

“Talk to us about the strategy.”

Having pressed him, Keith will back off. It is important that Barry leave on a note of confidence. Buyers can smell panic on a salesman.

“Well, I’ve got a new contact there. My old guy was bumped.”

“Uh-oh,” says Keith, but not without sympathy.

“No, it might could work in our favor. The G-2 I have on this new guy is that he’s pretty respected. He could probably move things quick.”

“What do we know about him?”

“Not a ton. He’s from inside, I know that. I don’t have to reeducate him on who we are.”

“Good. No lost ground. He’s from inside the company? What group?”

“Ah … Engineering I think. Ninety percent sure.”

“A tech guy. OK. Take Henry with you.”

Barry nods energetically, as though he were about to propose just this. But what he says is, “Yes, although I’m thinking on this one, since I haven’t met this guy myself yet, I fly solo. Build the relationship. Then bring in a heavy hitter like Henry.” He means he doesn’t want to share credit if the deal closes. I don’t blame him. It’s not my desire to go along in any case. Business travel no longer suits me.

An ominous glow comes into Keith’s face. Through sheer professional will, he appears to consider Barry’s plan. Then he says, “No. No time. We need to hit this guy with everything we’ve got, and this week.”

“Agree one hundred percent. My only thing is, I don’t want to scare the guy off. You know? He hasn’t even met me, and all of sudden I’m up there with an army of folks—”

“Not an army. One other person. Our Director of Engineering, which shows how much we value his time. We’re sparing two of our Directors.”

“Yup. The only other thing—”

“Because our situation, Barry?” Keith interrupts, his temper slipping again. “Our situation is this. It’s January twelfth. We have about ten weeks to get to four million.” He catches himself, nods, addresses the table: “And we’ll do it. No question. But we don’t have a lot of room. Markitel’s key. Barry’s done a great job priming them”—here Barry studies his lap modestly—“and the deal’s worth a half million. So we’d be a good ways along.”

“And I think we’ll nail it,” Barry adds, though he is distracted again by his phone and is tapping away even as he says this. This is too much. Keith sets a careful hand on the table.

“Barry? Next week I want to hear what you know. What you have made happen. Not what you fucking think.” He slaps shut his portfolio and is first out of the room.

There is a brief, even apologetic, clearing of throats. People rise and file out. Barry touches a hand to my sleeve. He shuts the door behind the last person, ducking his head to scan the terrain through the room’s low porthole windows. Satisfied the hall is free of spies, he faces me.

“That guy…”

“Keith.”

“Keith, yes. I mean, sometimes he gets to you, you know?”

“He’ll catch twice as much hell when he delivers his report.”

“Oh, I know, I know,” Barry replies quickly. He is silent for a moment, nodding his agreement while pacing a tight circle. He’s tucked his hands in the pockets of his trousers so that the thumbs remain exposed. It is an unnatural stance; he has to stiffen at the elbows to hold it: a lawyer delivering impassioned closing to skeptical jury. The poor bastard.

“He might have waited to make his point though.”

“Exactly! That’s exactly it! I’m not saying he’s wrong. I’m on the hook here, no two ways about it. But in front of everyone else? That’s what gets me. That’s all I’m saying. And then you get dragged along, which I’m sorry about that.” He wags his head and sighs. “It just makes you wonder, you know? This place? Whether it’s all worth it?”

Ah, but already he is recovering. I know that sigh. In it is captured the entire American romance of moving forward, moving on, a job well done, or not well done, or not done at all, never mind, turn the page, a blank sheet, a fresh start, and this time … Yes, Barry is a true wax-and-waner. Whatever his dejection now, it will not last the week. Sunday morning will come again.

* * *

Driving home I am reminded how the South in January boasts her own chilly glory. Denied the magisterial furs of snow perhaps, but the city is thick with woods. Everywhere the branches are wet with frost melt. Caught in the slashing beams of commuter headlights, the bark shines like sealskin.

My neighborhood is an older one, blue and yellow Craftsman bungalows plunked in modest yards, their wide porches within easy hailing distance of the sidewalks. Fences are uncommon. But do not get the wrong idea. I bought my home three years ago for an excellent price, and there are still deals to be had. Despite its antique houses set neighborly cheek by jowl, my neighborhood is not bucolic. The place two doors from mine is wrapped in red plastic chili peppers, string lights that at night lend half the block a bordello glow. Atop its perilously hammocked roof is a decorative mob of Santa Clauses and Uncle Sams and Easter bunnies. These characters hold their posts all year, never properly inflated and so sagging knock-kneed or doubled at the waist, pitched over the rain troughs as if to retch their holiday guts. The owner has lived in the neighborhood thirty years. Shortly after I moved in I asked him about its history, this to indulge his veteran credentials. I expected the usual newspaper phrases about a community tumbled into disrepair and then reborn, etc., but instead it was explained to me that “the niggers swarmed in, shat everywhichwhere like they do, then skedaddled back over the tracks, praise Christ.” He said he never once thought of selling. In fact there leans in his yard a sign, hand-lettered on a plywood sheet: NOT! 4 SALE. The normal reaction to such a neighbor is to resent his effect on property values. But I am glad to have him. He is all the proof I need that I live somewhere actual.

The dash registers an old familiar music. I know this song: it’s the one about the rains down in Africa. A soaring chorus that practically begs to be howled along with. And thus howling and driving it happens: scene details snap together in the best possible confederacy, the workday’s end and home within reach, a faded winter sky, the glossiness of Southern woods in winter, African rain …

The evening blooms in possibility.

Only a lousy thing happens. Glimpsing the rearview mirror, I find there a woman in exactly the same pose. Her face is locked in a grimace of rapture. A terrible likeness. She notices our duet before I can look away. At a traffic light, she pulls alongside and lowers her window. Despairing, I do the same.

“Toto fan?” She smiles, eyebrows hiked ironically. “Don’t tell me: only when no one’s looking, right?”

Often in even small conversations with strangers I can feel the heat of klieg lights, sense direction being listened for. This can’t end well. Having caught each other singing, we are like performers made aware that an identical act is going on one grandstand over—a reminder that there is no audience, only stages, one performer each, each flouncing proudly to his own orchestra. What is left is to applaud our own gestures as weighty, original, and that is an absurdity I will die rather than join.

On a business trip to Manhattan months ago, I had lunch with a colleague at a small restaurant just off the park. He asked our waitress for a recommendation, and when she’d told him, he leaned over his corner of the table and said to her: “Well, if you recommend it, it must be good.” It was mock suggestive, deliberately boorish. A joke on the businessmen who might actually behave this way toward young, pretty waitresses. And she got it. She laughed, blushed (knowing that even the joke-on-the-joke proceeded from real admiration), and said we’d be surprised how many of those types she gets. When she left, my colleague raised his menu and pretended to absorb himself, tongue pushed into cheek, his pleasure spelled out like a lunch special. Here we were, two men of means, alive and flying in sunny Manhattan.

“Henry,” he said, still in faux boor character, “I’ve always had a way with the ladies.”

But there’d been something in her face, a fatigue around the eyes, that made me too depressed to eat. What settled like ash was the thought that this joke-on-the-joke, and even the end joke on the joke-on-the-joke, had been said, done, billions of times already and was, at very nearly that moment, being said in the same smirking sardonic way in a thousand restaurants across the country.

I smile to the woman, nod, say nothing. The light turns, and she is gone.

2

Thursday morning, underground, waiting for the train to terminal B.

Markitel is headquartered in Minneapolis, which means time with my family. It is something of a relief. I no longer have any appetite for business travel. Although once upon a time it was everything my heart desired—those sacrificial days of late alarms and flying taxis, charging down concourse halls, the tyranny of luggage adjustments and great sighs of defeat at the check-in lines … And there was the cast of handlers: drivers, concierges, flight attendants, waiters, each at the beck and call of an expense account. Even our clients received me like an honored guest, the software seer.

However. After a few years in planes and hotel rooms high over strange cities, an unsettling thing began to happen. My importance evaporated. In small measure this would have been no more than expected, youth’s solipsism yielding finally to facts. But this was no small measure. It was total. I became a Stranger: rootless, anonymous, another well-meaning face to be passed from cab to gate agent to doorman to reception to temporary cubicle and on again when the job was done. The nights turned paralyzing. I would awake to find myself shrouded in cold hotel sheets in rooms as dark as caves. Staring into the black, I could see only the pure impossibility of being so much as a pinhole in the wide world. In this blind, wide-eyed state, I began to mistake myself. No longer Henry Hurt, tireless engineer and beloved brother and son, but mammal—a biological happenstance as meaningful and inspirited as the shrew. On my worst night, a fog-bound horror show on the tenth floor of a San Francisco Hilton, with the buzz of the ventilation system pouring into my head, I cried out. No, not quite a cry. I wasn’t raving. It was more of a pip, a quick yelp to pierce the buzz and reassert myself in scene: a businessman in a fine hotel in a fine city who was having trouble sleeping.

And yet in the morning, showered and caffeinated and looking at a day of binary computer riddles, the previous night would be revealed as so much silliness. Hadn’t I read somewhere this affliction was the price of modern living, our streaming, borderless, disaggregated whatnot? And sure enough, the moment I was back on turf where I had history, I slept like a lamb.

Barry is seated at the departure gate, nodding into his phone by way of finishing. Spying me, he comes leaping over, grinning and popping his fingers.

“That was my guy at Delta. He’s ready to ink the contract. Next week. I can feel it!” He hunches and brings up his fists, swaying in the manner of a prizefighter. I am delivered a roundhouse tap on the biceps. “Look out! I’m back!” Nearby passengers watch with amusement. I give Barry his due. Sometimes his buoyancy is contagious.

“Say…” He is still swaying, alternating slow motion taps to my biceps. “That little powwow in the conference room. That’s just between us girls, right?” He squints and bites his lips together in mock effort. Tap.

“What powwow?”

He grins. Tap. Tap. “I appreciate it, amigo.”

The call comes for first class. Barry winks and disappears into the gangway. Only then do I realize what he’s talking about.

* * *

The sales call is a disaster from top to bottom. For starters, there is the weather. A warm front has heaved north from the Gulf and rolled the landscape under fathoms of advection fog. In the gloom we miss an exit and carry on for a full twenty minutes before realizing our mistake. When finally we arrive at the Markitel offices, Barry is in a state. He leaps from the rental car and is nearly across the parking lot before remembering his portfolio. I wait by the entrance. The building is part of a newly tilled office park near the Mall of America. A long, two-story brick affair, its architecture is as square and utilitarian as boxcars. There is little to inspire in these office parks, yet the companies they house are usually as stolid and profitable as banks, sponges for every bit of available local talent and run by top graduates of the state’s best public university. Some of the most frank, rooted people I’ve met, people who’ve never in their lives coveted a more epic context, go gladly to work each day in these anonymous pillboxes. I envy them.

Barry returns with portfolio. He is wired, even by his own electric standard. “Let’s hit it!”

Our contact is waiting at the security desk. His wide face burns with cheeriness. “You’re the Cyber guys?” He extends a hand. “Mike Cottrell. I’m the new sheriff, I guess.”

Barry clasps his arm and snaps it like a well pump. “Glad to put a face to the name! This is my associate Henry. He directs our Engineering group. We brought all the big guns!”

Mike is perhaps forty. He carries a sort of pregnant girth in his belt, slung over a pair of creaseless trousers. His loafers are stained with road salt. I am tempted to read in this mild sloppiness a genial spirit—but there is a beady-eyedness that puts me on my guard.

“Mike, I’m sorry about the time,” Barry says. “The usual travel hiccups I’m afraid.”

Our host lets drop my hand and turns to face Barry directly. His movements are oddly sedate.

“Hard stop at eleven.”

“Oh. I thought … Could’ve sworn we booked through lunch.”

“Eleven.” His tone is mild, even benevolent. “You guys were any later I would’ve canceled.”

We follow Mike to a conference room on the second floor. It is a narrow, hall-like chamber, featureless but for a bank of slatted windows. The carpet is gray. An immense oval table commands the floor. This is a room built to vet vendors, I know; solemnity is its point. But someone has made a mistake. The screws have been turned a little too tight. With its mass slab table and grim colors, its narrow dimensions and hyperbaric air, the seriousness of the room is in danger of turning over on itself. It is very nearly hilarious.

Four other men are clustered at one end. Each is introduced somberly as one kind of specialist or another. When we are acquainted and seated, Mike nods to Barry. Barry hops from his seat to begin.

“My apologies all around for the delay. We’ll get straight in because I know our time’s limited. Can we skip all the song-and-dance on Cyber’s background and standing as a company? Everyone’s nodding yes. All right. So. We’ll start with the technical portion, my colleague Henry’s portion. We can circle back for any more general questions. So, I’ll just dim the lights … and the switch is … where? Here! Yes. Henry?”

It is a part of the job. A day out to help Sales make pitches of a certain type, often to large, cynical prospects who want to see and hear from the person whose team will make sure the software behaves. And once the oddness of arrival and introduction is passed, I find it’s a job I can do. I like to explain our technologies. Even the idioms of our science appeal to me. Wedding cakes. Fish bones. Bit rot. And usually among other engineers I’ll encounter a shared interest—an appreciation, at the least—for the decisions we’ve made, for the strategies we studied and rejected, and the reasons for their dismissal.

Only today what I find is silence. Mike studies the table. The others regard my slides with the waxen look of actors feigning death. I can see nothing to do but press on. Barry, however, is itchy. After several slides he begins to hear interjections in every cleared throat.

“Mark, you had a question?”

Our host looks up from the table. There is a moment’s confusion. He folds his arms and squints at Barry.

“Are you speaking to me?”

“Yes.”

“Mike.”

“Mike—forgive me. You had a question?”

“No.”

“I thought you looked like you did.”

“You’ll know if I have a question.”

“Of course.”

The best sales pitch I ever heard about was made by a Cyber competitor. It was told to me by the salesman himself, whom I met one evening at a conference in Washington. He told me about a sale he’d once made to the Central Intelligence Agency, as jaded and bored an audience as you could ever hope to find—there is nothing but nothing a mere salesman could tell the CIA about security—but who became suddenly inclined to buy when it was revealed that the salesman’s analyst, pounding away on a keyboard at the back of the room, had contrived to deface the agency website in the time it took to pass around the coffee. (THE WORK OF A NATION. THE CENTER OF INTULLIGENCE.) But here there are only mannequin faces in the gloom. The minutes drip. When I am finished, Barry stands and raises the lights. He smacks his hands together, rubbing them and making a slight bow to our host. Mike remains as he has throughout, absorbed by the area of table before him.

“So, Mark,” Barry prompts. “Now what are your questions?”

We are lost.

This emphasis on name is meant to show he’s taken special care to get it right. Except because he has fumbled the name again, the effect is opposite. It seems he’s making some bizarre point of defiance. Mike says nothing. He stares at the table, his arms crossed heavily over belly. A forelock of hair drops onto his eyebrow. He smooths it into place with his ring and pinky fingers. The gesture is ominously dainty, bottled.

Barry sees his mistake. “Mike! Mike! What is wrong with me today?”

Our host picks microscopic lint from his trousers. “I don’t know. What is wrong with you today?” The question is posed offhandedly, almost kindly. It is possible to imagine he’s as curious in the answer as Barry.

“It’s the cold!” Barry cries. “Us Southerners don’t do well in the snow. Our brains freeze—”

Mike leaps from his chair and thrusts out a hand. “I want to thank you.” He is grinning, shaking Barry’s arm. “A revealing presentation. Guys? Am I wrong?”

His team swaps private glances. Mike calls to one of them: “Tom! What was your favorite part?”

Silence.

Mike leers at the group. His eyes pop with good-willed expectancy. One of the men clears his throat.

“Tim, I think you mean.”

“Tim! Yes!” He throws back his head in marvel. “How stupid of me! Goddamn brainless. You’re critical to our business here, so to not get your name right … I feel like a turd.” Tim smiles uncomfortably. Mike paces to the window. There he stands, nodding, tapping his lip. “I wouldn’t be surprised, Tim, if you wanted to walk right out of here, never talk to me again. Wouldn’t blame you a bit. Quality in everything, that’s what we preach. So the least you’d expect is that I could remember your name. No?”

“Yes.”

“Absolutely right.”

He turns to Barry, whose face has gone bland and waxy.

“Safe travels, friend.”

In the stairwell, Barry pulls off his spectacles and digs at his eyes with thumb and forefinger. Really his face has never looked more fiercely smashable.

“Barry, the man is certifiable. Forget it.”

“No.” Barry replaces his frames, blinking at me through glass. “We don’t talk about customers that way.”

So this is how he will have it. His dignity will be restored by lesson giving. As engineer I misunderstand the dynamics of selling. It falls to him to show how the licking just received is in fact small sacrifice for fealty to the high cause of customer service. It’s no small alchemy, to turn a humiliating episode into a business lesson, with Barry as a master of subtleties that my poor nuts-and-bolts brain has missed. Having been condescended to, Barry would condescend. And if I were a bigger person, I might allow him his pose of sensei, might sit as apprentice while Barry lectures himself back to level. A smart thing where Cyber is concerned, because a salesman with doubts is like a prostitute with inhibitions. Only—

“Getting their names wrong. That’s how we speak about our customers.”

He glares. “By the way? Thanks for the assist. Really tremendous. Just sit there while I get”—even when he’s angry, cursing comes hard to Barry—“screwed up the rear. Big help. Your problem, Henry, if you want to know, is you always think discretion is the better part of valor.”

Nothing useful can come of this. When at last we part company, I am glad to be rid of him.

3

The fog has cleared. Revealed is the north state I remember, a land that in January is bright and cold as the moon. It’s cold all right. Outside is the razor edge of ancient winter. The barest sliver of open flesh and sffit!—right down to the bone. But in here all is well. The Pontiac’s heater roars like a firebox.

Before me is the family house. Idling at the curb, I consider it. A boxed two-story of white aluminum siding and black shutters with a single chimney, a style of dwelling as fundamental to suburban Minnesota, and maybe the entire Middle West, as sod homes were to the prairie. No one is expecting me. I was home only a few weeks ago for Christmas and a return so soon is not such a big deal. It is my idea that I would make a kind of drop-in surprise. Except now I am not so sure. For one thing there is the matter of the foyer. The foyer alone is enough to defeat reentry. There one is set upon immediately and without warning by the ancient smells, of firewood, of dog fur, the very smells of a childhood yet closeted away in the secret dusty places of the house. On the road I nearly drowned in anonymity, but in there history pads the rooms like satin in a coffin. The closet shelf in my old bedroom is lined with hockey trophies. On a lone hanger is a purple high school letter jacket. Propped on various surfaces are pictures of a boy named Henry. He stands in a wading pool with his toddler’s potbelly; he waves from a tree branch; he smiles competently from under his mortarboard. Too much history, too much affection for one’s own history, is also a possibility I think. There cannot be any charge toward the future. Nostalgia cloys; it gums the gears. Who knows, maybe it can even kill you.

It is as quiet as any winter night. Up and down the street the lawns smolder. Their smooth white capes emit a purple radiation in the dark. At last I shut the ignition and climb the driveway. Too much red meat for a psychologist, to come this far without going in. My sister answers the door.

“HH!”

We exchange a hug across the threshold. “What on earth? My God! Come in, come in!” Past her shoulder at the end of the front hall, I can see an edge of the kitchen cabinetry where our mother painted roosting hens and nests of hay, all of it in country-French style. In the evenings I used to study right there at that table. When the math assignments turned surreal, which was always (a train leaves an inscrutably named station with its windows open; if the amplitude of cricket song something something but not less than the velocity of the first apple, how far is it to the moon?), I would reduce myself and burrow into the sweet-smelling hay and lie down with the eggs. Fare thee well, ye variables and sines and cosines! I am off to the chicken coop, whose x/ycoordinates you don’t have a chance in hell of solving. Only the scene’s painter knew where and how to retrieve her son—but enough.

We stand apart now, Gretchen and I, inspecting each other in our overt fashion. She is white-blond. Not unusual in these parts, but exotic to the Hurt bloodline. Once there was a time when she renounced her blondness; in college her hair was black with violet streaks. But it has been its old color now for years, and for years worn like this, in cropped layers at the neck and with the front lengths tucked behind an ear. Under the chained light of the foyer her face is full of shadows. She tugs and wraps the corner ends of her long blue cardigan around her middle, holding them at her waist with arms crossed. Actually she holds together the ends and the waistband of her flannel pajama bottoms, which is soft and stretched and in danger of giving up the ghost. She is very good looking, my sister. Blond and hazel-irised and finely drawn. But tonight with these coal shadows around eye and cheek, the bedtime attire pinned up about her thin body by her hands, she looks a little postoperative.

“You look good,” I tell her. “Thin, maybe.”

“Makes one of us.”

“The spoils of commerce. In fact I picked up a raise this week.”

“Sickening.”

“The more to spend at the Village.”

“Right answer.”

The Village is where Gretchen works. We have an arrangement, she and I, that whenever I am in town I will shop generously there. It pleases me to support my sister’s work, and it pleases her to have that income go to good mission—and also, I believe, to have an older brother with the means to spend.

“Where’s Dad?”

She puts a finger to her lips. “Asleep.”

“With this racket?” The voice comes from the dark at the top of the stairs. He makes his way down, the light of the foyer rising on him as he comes: slippered feet, white shins, green tartan robe. The musculature of his long pilgrim face is drawn and droopy; he was deep under, but his mind is awake. “What ho! What brings you to town?” I explain the circumstances of the visit. At the mention of a customer meeting, he is keen for status. “And?”

“Not so hot.”

My father is consoling. “You folks will figure it out. Those are some sharp minds you’re working with.” A retired schoolteacher himself, my father has an abiding respect for the machinery of enterprise. More than once have I been assured that a good businessman has “a brain like a saw blade.” (True, where Keith is concerned. Barry’s must be nearer an eggbeater.) He nods, settling the matter. “As long as they’re not counting on you. That would really spell disaster.” This is of a piece with the ancient paternal ribbing, but he speaks with such grave deadpan that it is hard not to laugh. Now he pockets his hands, not yet fully descended but stalled on the third step and of two minds, whether to join the bright land below or return to the night country above. At seventy-three, he does not look to me as old as he is. He is clear of eye and straight of spine, and his hair is thick and white. He might easily pass for the ageless New England stalwart, a Unitarian minister perhaps, though our stock is Scotch-Irish and our brand lapsed Presbyterianism.

I become aware of the silence. Not awkwardness, quite. More a new family habit of testing the air, the three of us parsing what is to be spoken of when; where, emotionally speaking, to next place our feet.

At last he says:

“Are you with us for the weekend?”

“Afraid so.”

“You’re not going to spend it talking technology, are you?”

“I’m glad you asked. I hoped we could speak about the challenges caching introduces to password management.”

He yawns, shaking his head. Family footing reestablished, he is free to return to sleep. “I’ll leave this one with you, Gretchen.”

We fall in at the kitchen table. Beyond the foyer and the kitchen, the house is dark.

“Early nights for the Hurts,” I observe.

“Winter hibernation. There’s no other way through.”

“How’re things at work?”

She considers it. “You know, it’s good. We found some craftspeople in Kenya who make the most beautiful carved giraffes, Masai giraffes, about this big. They’re made of jacaranda wood, which is fast growing, very sustainable. And they paint them in the most extraordinary sort of berry red…” My sister trails off in mild reverie. She is not lost in her own do-goodism. Rather it is the beauty of the objects. To wander the shelves where she works is to be struck by sheer human ingenuity, found materials shaped into essential forms by hands that know. Software has its own symmetries, but software doesn’t root you in the world in the way of simple, well-made things. In this atoms are superior to bits, I admit it. Although the pay is garbage.

“What about you?” she wants to know. “How’s Cyber? You said it wasn’t a good day?”

“No.”

“And today was important?”

“It’s all important these days. Jesus, our head of Sales. Everything that happens, good or bad, hits this guy right in the chest.”

“He’s alive, sounds like.”

“Yes, well, the business counts on him being able to put aside his feelings from time to time and actually sell something.” My sister is nobody’s fool and I love her, but sometimes her instinct for the soft focus is too much. “I don’t pretend to be a salesman, but you’ve got to be able to read people without being read yourself. Keith compares it to a relief pitcher—”

“Ugh. Is Keith big on sports metaphors? That’s how I picture your world. Everyone talking about touchdowns and slam dunks. Or, I don’t know, paradigms.”

This is not a tangent that interests me. To say business-speak is shot through with cliché is itself a cliché. And besides, I trust our clichés. They’re dead, and everyone, or nearly everyone, knows it. To use them is a sort of code of modesty, a signal that none of us have figured it out on our own.

When I mention this to her, Gretchen is dubious.

“Seems like it’d be the opposite. A lot of making the obvious sound profound.”

“No. The clichés come with a wink. It’s a shorthand. Our clichés say that everything there is to say has been said already.”

She says nothing, only traces the grain of the table with a thumb.

“This is all generally speaking, of course. Some people use the clichés earnestly, but they’re understood to be ridiculous.”

Nothing.

“There at the Village, you’ve thrown off the shackles of cliché.”

“Somehow I don’t think there’s the same need to make a lot of guessing sound like science.”

“It must be wonderful.”

She puts her arms straight out on the table and lets go a long whispering sigh in which the only audible phrase is “robotic and god-awful.”

A pause, lest things escalate. Not twenty minutes in and ready to lock horns. It’s a foreign state for us, historically speaking. For most of our lives we’ve been especially close. In fact our mother used to complain about it, this in her put-upon and faux fatalistic way, a conveyance purely of tone that said her loving rule had produced only conspirators against it, and the monarch who expected different was kidding herself. But of course it pleased her. It pleased us too. Not just to be so bonded, but to have adults marvel at the privilege. Our closeness became something of a watchword around the neighborhood. Say anything enough and lo, you make it true. Recently, however, I’ve noticed our talks have begun to labor under the old superlative. We might be speaking of everyday things in the everyday manner, and one of us—or more often both—will be seized by worry that here finally is the conversation that sounds the depth of our partnership. We never name this trouble, of course. It is marked by a grasping that intrudes upon the talk, a fumbling for the confessional. “God, I wouldn’t tell this to anyone else,” she will say, before turning our idle chat about some movie into a revelation: she connects more deeply with certain films than with most people. Or perhaps in the course of talking about not much, I will theorize that an unmarried man feels whole only because he doesn’t see the half he’s missing. I know. But to our ears it’s the way near-dear people are to speak. And although I’m as eager as she to pretend solidarity when the real thing isn’t forthcoming, it is a slippery slope. Petty arguments I can manage, but the bigger worry is that we are becoming like everyone else: one more pair of happy fakers.

Even now the worry presents itself. Neither of us will resort to cheeriness or small talk, it would be too horrible a proof, and so the silence prevails. The small sounds of the house are not so small. Each drip from kitchen faucet hits the basin’s enamel with a plashy pap. Heated air murmurs in the ducts. But when I hitch my chair to fetch a drink, the shriek of the linoleum spooks the other noises to silence.

“Where’s the whiskey?” The cupboards above the stove reliably hold a bottle of rye. Tonight I can find only cooking sherry.

“Gone,” says she, without further comment.

The sherry is not much for taste, but the esophageal burn is a comfort. I take my seat. We settle ourselves, two people perfectly at ease and not at all oppressed by the silence.

Pap goes the sink.

“Do you remember the Deep Devil?” she wonders.

“I haven’t thought of that in years.”

“You used to scare the hell out of me with that.”

“I scared myself.”

“How did it go again?”

“Let’s see … It started with the old chandelier in the living room.”

“Hardly a chandelier.”

“Whatever you call it. A hanging light with arms. It was kind of a spidery little thing with brass arms, and plastic candlesticks with flame bulbs.”

“And there were heavy curtains on the front window then so you could black out the room.”

“Yes, right. And I’d turn down the rheostat to the barest current, so the filaments in the bulbs were only just glowing—”

Gretchen shakes her head. “First you’d say, ‘He’s coming!’”

“Did I?”

“Yes. Oh my God, the fright.”

“All right, yes. Because the trick was to hide. You had to be hidden before the rheostat got down to where you couldn’t even see the flame bulbs, only the red of the filaments…”

“Yes. Yes! And they made a kind of satanic circle, these strange wormy things just floating together. I don’t know why but it was awful, how small they were. Like evil little spirochetes buzzing over your head. Also, I remember they made a dark orange stain on the ceiling. It was a popcorn ceiling, and in the stain it looked like old skin. Ugh…” She reaches for the glass. “That’s when I first understood what the word ‘nightmare’ meant.”

Gretchen touches a hand to her breastbone as she drinks, a kind of ward for the naked vulnerability of her throat. I feel toward her a very old tenderness. The Deep Devil. Who else knows this about her, about me? No one. Not another soul on earth. Even now she smiles. Between us there are no bad memories, not really. Never are we closer than when we revivify time like this.

“Do you remember at bedtime—”

“I was just thinking of that!” she cries. “Mom’s game with the lights?”

“She’d call bedtime, and start snapping off the lights behind us as we raced upstairs, and if we weren’t in our beds…”

“Yes, but that was a much safer affair. She never once let us get caught in the dark.”

“True.”

We take a moment, remembering, nodding professionally. The small sounds of the house come up around us. She gives me a look reserved for such times as these, when the wing shadow of grief passes over and we become aware of ourselves as Somber Survivors. It is not quite a year since our mother died. Leukemia. A bolt from the clear blue. She was ten years younger than our father and on track to outlast us all. Gretchen moved home to help with our mother’s care; she has remained here since. There is nothing more to say about it.

Yet here we sit, and the pressure is on to Say Something. Whatever is said, it must be something that pierces to the heart of things. Yes. The trouble is that my mind is blank. She too struggles for it. Together we are practically sweating. Dear God, if ever a brother and sister were to affirm their bond, now would be the time …

Pap.

* * *

On Friday my sister goes to work and so do I. For me it goes poorly. Seated at my childhood desk with laptop open and the glow of email before me, I feel the mockery of time. The old spindle-legged chair is for a schoolboy, and in it the wide bottom of an adult feels obscene. Even as I type

without a better measure of our accumulated technical debt, we cannot make a case for code refactoring

there is a strong sense of playing dress-up.

Lunch is a solitary affair. I have come down late, and my father is a committed taker of afternoon naps. (Also he is careful to leave his working son wide berth. All morning I have been aware of his method for going by the bedroom door: softly, almost on tiptoe, so not to interrupt commercial genius at work.) Outside is a low ceiling of winter cloud. The day pours down its gray light. Something is still not right. I notice it again in the act of chewing, which becomes labored because it is absurd. This dead-eyed jaw rolling, like a beast of the field. At once I am aware of the need to act naturally. Put down the sandwich, wipe your chin. The audience must be reassured! But—it is no small matter, acting naturally. What does the normal person do next? It comes to me: he moves on to the living room, and there selects an issue of The Economist from the coffee table. Yes. He settles into the couch, legs crossed and fingers propped on temple, etc.

The house is silent. The news of the world is old: checking the magazine’s publication date, I discover it is from last year. The others too. Even the TV Guide is from before Christmas. On its cover a handsome actor I do not recognize gives a frozen cry of pleasure. A girl in a green velvet dress and white stockings is fitting his head with a band of reindeer antlers. The gray afternoon light is in the wide front window. It lies on the glossy covers. The images blanch, their old eagerness sepulchered in a fine layer of dust.

It is somehow unspeakable.

There is no telling what comes next. Then it is here: an episode from last summer. One night while flipping television channels before bed, I happened on a scene from an old film. A man stood in the doorway of a parlor, fedora in hand, fingering its brim nervously. An old woman in a shirtwaist dress and lace apron invited him to sit, then disappeared. The man looked around the room. His eyes settled on something. The camera cut to a staring black Chihuahua. A phonographic score, lilting and scratchy, played just beneath the surface of the scene. The dog darted; the camera cut back to the man with the animal now bouncing on hind legs around his knees and yelping. On the stairs, the old woman reappeared with a pretty young woman. They beheld the man’s plight, then turned to each other and smiled. The man looked up sheepishly, holding off the dog with his hat. The final shot was a close-up of the Chihuahua perched in the younger woman’s lap and eyeing the camera bulbously. I turned off the television and went to bed. It was then that something began to trouble me. The dog was dead. Dead as a doornail. The antique phrase ran on a loop. And yet here was the creature, fixed in monochrome, to be re-presented endlessly in its antic prancing, fateless and unaware.

Now, as then, a dim anxiety rises. There is an old trick of sound. Tiny noises are put right up against and made painful in the ears.

Concentrate on other things.

But what?

The heart beats its answer: An-y-thing, an-y-thing, any-old-thing.

When I was young and did not have a name for it, I called it boredom. It is not boredom. To watch on television a whispered round of golf, knowing that there is nothing in the fridge for lunch: that is boredom. But to sit on a childhood couch and wait in the gray afternoon while motes of fur from dogs long dead, the dust of trodden carpet, and smells of ancient dinners swirl the room like spirits—that is to feel the pall. It is a far more complex and desperate thing. Boredom’s solutions are easy because boredom is no match for the immediate. But the pall is not so easily thwarted. When it settles, the body is irreversibly diminished. You become a speck of sand in the howling Sahara. Distractions of the sort that work against boredom only reinforce this sense. No, what comes is the need to be recentered in the world. And what follows, if a person lets it, is the imagining of great deeds. This is the danger. You make for yourself a mission, a struggle. The pall may be natural, even inevitable, but it is not innocent. The trick is to accept one’s minor plot without despair, or the invention of grander narratives.

The remedy is obvious: to the laptop. Metaphysical dislocation is no match for a to-do list. Upstairs again and seated at the desk I feel stirrings of relief. When I open the machine, there comes the familiar glow. I wait for the pall to lift.

Only today it doesn’t work. I don’t know why. The light of afternoon is no different from the computer’s screen. A few uncomprehending minutes and I am on the bed, rigid as the dead, heart thumping like a wound.

* * *

“Catatonic,” my father pronounces with a yawn, coming into the living room. “Out like a light.” He consults the bookshelf clock. It is after five. He shakes his head, then is distracted by one of the spines. “Know this one?” He draws out the book and holds it up: Eastern Approaches.

“No.”

He is glad for the chance to explain it. There follow several minutes of description and keen judgment both. It is stoked by his capacity for recall, the canonical antecedents right at his fingertips: a knack for memory and catalog such as only the self-educated possess. When he was seventeen his own father contracted tuberculosis and was sent away to a sanatorium, so my father dropped out of school to support his mother and sister. His aborted education made him a fiend for generalized knowledge. He tutored himself in the classical, liberal, self-made sense, a program of encyclopedias and Great Books and primary sources. Even today there remains something a little Rosicrucian in his fervor for self-taught revelation. Except that my father has no use whatever for secret societies or everything-is-connected symmetries—nor, for that matter, God Himself. Luckily, among the public schools there was no prejudice toward a noncredentialed expert. In fact he was a board favorite, able to fill for every subject but the foreign languages. Upon his retirement he was presented with a medallion embossed with the Vitruvian man. Each of the circle positions touched by the figure bears the name of a subject taught by my father. It pleased him very much.

“… I mean the only doggone thing Byron has on this guy is that he swam the Hellespont!” He pauses, watching me. “Anyone home?”

I am still reeling a little from the afternoon. He comes to the wing chair and puts a hand on my head. A testing squeeze. “Thinking great thoughts. My God. Just feel the heat.” I have to smile. Long has my father accorded deep thinking to these fugue states. His hand remains, testing. The pall recedes.

“I know what…” He disappears into the kitchen. There is the knocking of cabinet doors. After a moment the noise stops. “That’s strange. The whiskey seems to have wandered off.”

“Yes. I noticed.”

“I wonder if Gretchen knows something about it.”

“Why? Have you been doing the Irish proud?”

Ha-ha, says he, not quite answering. “She can be an aggressive minder, your sister.”

This is true. My sister is a born caregiver. She is drawn, moth to flame, to the damaged, the confused, the rib-kicked, the well-meaning but self-sabotaging. And while she is a born caregiver, under no circumstance will she be cared for. She’s left cold the men who failed to understand this.

My father returns with the sherry bottle and two glasses. “Best we can do.” He has an idea and goes into the kitchen again, there fetching a lemon and the red-handled peeler. Perched on the couch’s edge, he hunches over with the peeler braced in his spotted hands. He turns the fruit under the blade, and off comes a waxen yellow coil, one for each glass. When we have fortified ourselves a little, he says, “How are you getting on?”

“Fine. Business could be better, but I’m confident—”

“I meant in matters regarding your mother.”

“Oh.”

It is a curious circumlocution. Usually on this subject he is never less than precise. No quaint constructions for him. She has not passed on; she did not leave us. She is dead.

I tell him I am managing. “You?”

“It’s difficult. I can’t say whether better or worse.” Now he sets down his glass, clapping hands to knees. The casualness of it means: on to trivial matters. “Tell you what. I’ve got to get the blood flowing again. The firewood bin’s empty…”

A half cord is arranged against the gardener’s shed in the trees behind the house. The moonlight makes things mysterious. The tree line is very dark. No more than a stand of pine and maple, but there is about it a proximate, slightly minatory presence. My father pays no mind to any of this, of course. He is enjoying this march across the property. He thrusts along like a general; I must scramble to keep up.

“Why not just move the firewood against the house?” say I, panting.

“Not on your life. A woodpile’s a hotel for mice.”

Yes, but also it pleases him to be tested by heavy cold and hard labor. In profile he is a portrait of Midwestern resolve: ear tucked in wool watch cap, eye sharp to the task, straight Hurt nose steaming like a freight.

At the shed he instructs, “Crook your arms. I’ll load you up.” He selects the pieces two at a time, drawing them slowly from beneath the blue plastic tarp so as not to buck its roof of snow. He claps the wood, then sets the pieces across my arms. At the house the storm door looks to swing open of its own accord: Gretchen, home from work. “Brr,” says she, holding off the door. The stack hits the bin with coppery, clanging thunder. My father is close behind, red-faced, a pile hooked under one arm and a single piece in the other.

Out again. The snow squeaks like Styrofoam underfoot. Not the crunching sound of milder temperatures, but an actual squeal. How well I remember this setting, our walking measurements of the property and the world. Although never in this cold. Always it was at the turn of fall, when the entire Northern Hemisphere becomes wistful and contemplative and everyone girds himself for five months of life as a root vegetable. Then we would venture out, under leaves gone to rust, the frosted grass crunching underfoot. What did we talk about? Nothing less than the histories and adventures of the species—revolutions, market capitalism, Maginot Lines, the catastrophes of ’42 … all of these things unpacked and laid out on the table, piece parts accorded their genera, then put properly away. The rationalist-humanist father and his whiz kid son.

My father too must be thinking of the old talks, for now he says:

“It’s a funny thing, Nietzsche talking about there being no facts in this world, only interpretations.”

“Mm-hm,” say I (but sagely, sagely).

“I don’t know if he was syphilitic by then and just raving, or what. But it’s the damnedest observation.” He points at the moon. “That body is about four and a half billion years old, which we know by the decay of chemical isotopes. There’s a fact, Herr Friedrich. Those white pines are the tallest tree we’ve got east of the Mississippi. Another fact.”

“We’re a few miles west of the Mississippi.”

“Wise guy … No facts, my foot. You don’t build bridges based on interpretations.”

“Not systems either,” say I, thinking on it. “Computers aren’t interpretative machines. The machine only knows what you give it; it won’t make any educated guesses on your behalf. In programming we call it GIGO—garbage in, garbage out.” I am not sure this is quite to the point, but he is generous with me.

“Exactly. We’re only as good as our facts. And heaven help us if at every uncertainty we were to throw up our hands. Anything can be sorted. It only takes patience and a little elbow grease.”

“You’ve got to get inside the clockworks.”

“You’ve got to get inside the clockworks!” A favored classroom phrase. He’s pleased I remember. “How’s that for a codger’s metaphor? Straight from before the Great War.”

The frozen wood is heavy as iron. I stagger home. Inside, he deems our collection sufficient. Gretchen begs for a fire. My father grumbles that in these temperatures an open chimney is murder on the thermostat, but he is secretly glad to oblige. He builds a pyramid of logs on the fire grate: a nimble, practiced assembly, his fleshy ears red with pleasure. Watching him, I think perhaps it is not so difficult after all to work out one’s place, to be in the world simply and as oneself, without recourse to grandiosity or despair. The flue draws beautifully. Orange flames spring from the wood and flap like tatters. The day’s confusions fade like memories of a bad dream. We stand at the brick hearth, abridged as a clan it’s true, but no mere remnant, and all of us with enough sense not to jinx our gladness by naming it.

4

Monday morning. At last check my email queue showed 117 unread messages. Most of my team are programmers, for whom direct communication is a thing to be avoided at all costs. This means some desperate and time-sensitive decision—say, whether there is wiggle room on an imminent deadline—is almost certainly ticking away inside my inbox as we speak. I’ve lectured them, but my engineers are like the British soldiers I have seen in war films. Short of a German wire breach, it is impolite to ring the brigadier. Still, today I prefer to watch the city while passing idle semicircles on the oiled swivel of my chair.

Now there comes a rap at the door and Barry’s wet-brushed head.

“Got a minute, chief?” He strides in and closes the door. “Look. I owe you an apology. I had no right to lose my temper with you.”

This again. I make some noises of absolution and develop a frowning interest in the papers on my desk.

“You’d only taken time out of your busy schedule to try to help.” To try to help. This qualifier is the only sign that any resentment lingers. Otherwise his apology is genuine. The problem is that before finishing, he will ask my forgiveness. I know because each of our past disagreements has ended this way, with a door closed and Barry eager to humble himself.

“Henry?” He sets his palms on the desk, leaning over them. Here it comes. “Will you forgive me?”

Now the solemn wait. I hate being made to feel that I would withhold something so dear to him, but neither do I want a part in his asinine morality play. These acts of contrition are, I imagine, tied up in his religiosity. They are the same each time. For one thing, he is formal to the point of belligerence. Always: “Henry, I have something I need to say to you…” Also he leaves these sessions irritatingly buoyant. I don’t care to be part of his penances. They leave me feeling somehow one-upped.

“It’s not as bad as that, is it?”

He only looks at me from under his brow. There is something a little predatory in his supplication. This goddamn beseeching—

“Yes! Yes. You are forgiven.”

“Thank you. I mean that. I’ll let you get back to it.”

Back, wearily, to email.

124 …

123 …

122 …

Pecking, pecking.

120 …

119 …

The world will end in tedium.

118 …

117 …

Four new messages arrive. 121 …

120 …

Another email pings in. 121 … And another. 122.

Peck, peck. 120.

Ping, ping, ping. 123.

Go for coffee.

* * *

Returning, I am stopped dead by a vision. It is Jane framed in a conference room’s windowed door. She sits sideways in a black Eames chair, as easy and elongate as a lioness draped in the afternoon branches. Her eyes are directed at some unseen speaker, lips faintly parted: a moment of rapt concentration. One bare foot is tucked beneath her thigh; the other traces figure eights on the carpet with a crimson toe. Desire strikes. A bolt like holy retribution. There comes a riot of spots in my periphery and a strangled sound. Suddenly her eye catches mine. It is all I can do to fix my face in nonchalance—a little raise of eyebrows, a sip of coffee (bitter, bitter): So? She gives a grin and broad wink, then returns attention to the speaker.

Only the speaker has noticed. Jane’s eyes widen in innocence. She laughs, makes some soundless protest, gestures to me. Her inquisitor looms into frame.

Keith.

He opens the door a crack and says good-naturedly, “Beat it. We’re working.”

Laughter as the door shuts.

5

Today I forgo the Management meeting for my own with Engineering. These departmental gatherings are not my idea. Human Resources has asked that all Directors “take the pulse” of their teams monthly. They mean for us to find out what people might be unhappy about and feed this information back to HR for remedy. It is a recent policy and might be a fine strategy if it weren’t obvious what people are unhappy about: our terrible quarters.

After having done my bit to reassure the organization I return to my office, only to discover my fine assurances are too little, too late. Working the email queue, I find this, sent Saturday:

Henry,

In advance of the meeting Monday, I want to share some concerns I have hear from people on the floor:

• If another bad quarter, are cuts planned?

• If so, would Eng. be at risk or only elsewhere?

• What is Sales doing?

I think good to address head-on. Rumors are flourishing.

thank you,
RAHIM

Rahim is the head of my Development team. Beneath his message there is one from Cory Freer, who heads Architecture. His reads:

H-

Some caterwauling among the troops. “Last quarter sucked, now look at this one” etc. Have told them: less hand-wringing, more coding. Think you should too.

-C

I summon both leads to my office. Cory arrives first. He sits heavily opposite my desk. A bearish head with stiff copper hair brushed back in waves. Thirty degrees this morning but he is in a short-sleeved polo, impervious.

“This ’bout my email?”

“Yes.”

“Storm in a teacup.”

I have trouble imagining what it would take to worry Cory. Only twenty-nine, he carries himself as an old son of the soil. He is an unironic follower of stock car racing, and proud brewer of a dandelion whiskey he calls GatorByte. He is also quite probably a genius. In his senior year at some godforsaken public high school in middle Georgia, he wrote a program that forecast, with an accuracy near eighty percent, the selections in the National Football League’s annual draft. It earned him a partial scholarship to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which he turned down in favor of the University of Florida. He did this not because Florida offered better money (they did), but because “MIT’s sports are for shit.”

And now Rahim. Rahim has a good, fierce face, with a wide squashed nose and a black strap of beard that holds his chin like a stirrup. Except today he looks chastened. Unusual to be summoned to my office.

I put the matter to them directly:

“Is there panic on deck?”

A pause.

Cory says, “What we’ve got is a bunch of Henny Pennys.” Seeing Rahim frown, he explains: “Hen gets knocked on her head by an acorn, thinks the sky is falling.”

“Ah.” Rahim nods. “People like to predict disaster.” He considers it. Rahim is a gifted programmer and, inasmuch as I understand these things, a devout Muslim. Once, racing to a meeting on 16, I nearly fell over him in the stairwell. He was crouched on the landing with his forehead flush to the carpet, abjuring this world in a rather beautiful tenor voice. “But…” says he, “is there not more than an acorn?”

Cory slides his bulk low in the chair and props his head on its back. “It’s the L-word people are worried about.”

“‘People’?” I ask.

He lifts his head. “Not including myself. But—”

“I am,” Rahim confesses. I remember Rahim is a family man. As breadwinner, he experiences the usual dark rumors with a different weight.

Very well. One of the first managerial tricks I learned is how to shore up employee faith. Convincing a group is much harder than convincing people one or two at a time. To speak to a group is to perform. Your audience becomes aware of themselves as such, and everyone fights not to be taken in. But to speak in intimate numbers is to confide. If a manager approaches his team piecemeal, if he is known to be fair and human, allergic to hyperbole, very often his employees will assign him something like omniscience. It helps too that businesspeople, though rational to their very marrows, are natural believers. In the American corporation, optimism brims like laughing gas.

So it is that I fix Cory and Rahim with a solemn look. They steel themselves accordingly, sitting upright or leaning forward: the seriousness of entering their manager’s confidence. What follows is a frank but encouraging appraisal. I am careful to emphasize “Keith’s plans” because I know even an old cynic like Cory respects him.

“Now here is what we’ll do,” say I, still solemn as an eagle. “I’ll send a note to the department, summarizing what we’ve talked about. To call the team together again for purposes of encouragement would be too suspicious. It’ll only worry them more. But I want you guys to talk with your folks. One-on-one—that’s important. Let them know we’re in good shape.”

Cory and Rahim take their leave, exchanging serious, knowing looks.

Team-

I’ve realized there are some concerns about company performance I meant to address more directly in this morning’s meeting. A few points to bear in mind:

1) It is January 19. We have until the end of March to meet first quarter revenue targets.

2) We are but one business unit in the wide Cyber Systems universe. Even if we were to have another down quarter, CS isn’t going anywhere.

3) In the catastrophe scenario—layoffs—Engineering is very well positioned. We are a software company. Our department is at the heart of business strategy.

4) It won’t come to 3.

As usual, if you still have concerns, please do not hesitate to share these with your managers.

Thanks,
Henry

A sound email, I think. Direct, transparent, calm. How quickly the stage is regained.

Cory reappears. “Just sent the email,” I tell him.

“Yup, OK.”

He says nothing more, only stands with bunched fists, curling his wrists and studying the play of tendons.

“What is it.”

“Hm? Oh. About next Friday.”

“Your day off.”

“Cracker Barrel 500.” He speaks of a major stock car race.

“Good. Don’t kill yourself on booze.”

“Want to come? One of my guys backed out. Track’s not but an hour from here.”

I am surprised. Between Cory and me, the relationship is pure corporate: arch, even playful, but not especially close.

“I can’t take Friday off.”

“Don’t have to. The race isn’t till Sunday. Friday’s to get a start on the tailgate.”

I have never been to a stock car race.

“You’re on. It’ll be a good education.”

“Yankee, you got naw idear.” He says this in the droll way between us, wherein he will sometimes crank up his Southern saltiness and I my Northerner naïf, these mechanisms looser and less brittle than our employee-employer roles.

Now he stretches, fitting his knuckles to the points of his hips. He looks around the room as though he’s misplaced something. There is more.

“Mebbe I’m just an ignorant Reb—” He catches himself. When he speaks again, it is not as the salty Southerner.

“As straight as you can give it: We on track here?”

“We are.”

“Because I don’t like to think what happens. We got people who’ve given about all there is. We can talk about difficult quarters, but that’s the world from fifty thousand feet. On the ground it’s folks with families to feed and but two weeks’ severance.”

“I know. Don’t worry.”

Cory pushes out his lips, bobbing his large head. Whether because he feels better or because he knows it’s the only answer I can give, it is impossible to say.

6

The drive home is slow. I mark my way by checking off billboards.

This one asks, GOT SALVATION?—a churchy play on another campaign sponsored by the Dairy Association.

And a few minutes later: OUR GIRLS STOP TRAFFIC. Beneath, a woman in a bikini and white gloves blows lusciously on a whistle.

Gradually another Christ-themed one, WHO LOVES YA, BABY?, signed JESUS. Then we are under the leaden eyes of the buxom giants of TIGER LILIES.

It occurs to me that certain people I know (none better than myself of ten years ago) would be tempted to read into this back-and-forth a very easy kind of irony about the South. And it is true these signs aim for the same audience. It is the man who Friday night rollicks in a champagne bath in one of these club’s private rooms, but who Sunday morning can be found muscling in on the front pew. Yet despite appearances, hypocrisy doesn’t enter into it. This man is not a hypocrite for he never pretends to have another self. He embraces the strip club or sanctuary, each in its moment, as honestly and fervently as a convert; the other he forsakes with all his heart. It is only that his abandonment doesn’t last. After some time—a night, a month, a year—he sees the error of his way and returns to the other, shaking his head, rueful-joyful. Why? Because he has convinced himself the other is purer, truer? No. They are both traps. He knows this, without being quite aware of it. What rescues him is the switch. He lives by the thrill of changing course, of putting it all behind him, of starting again. Only by tacking and jibing does he keep full the sails of his existence. It is quite a serious business. He must court the liminal to survive.

Ah, but the rational mind rejects the switch. The rational mind is not distracted. It works out the secret of itself by diligence and study. My father is right. Our place in the world may derive from mysterious cosmic programs, but the code is not indecipherable. If a person is patient and watchful enough, if he observes quietly enough and resists the exaggerations of the liminal, lo and behold what comes?

The wits to pick the lock.

7

“Tell me about Markitel.”

Keith is not given to abruptness. I proceed carefully.

“Not great.”

Silence. My phone emits a low seashell roar.

“Where are you?” he wants to know.

“Home. Just walked in the door.”

Another pause.

“Early, isn’t it?”

I cannot think of an answer.

“Where were you today?” He means the Management meeting. I explain about my department session. There is some muttering, then:

“I need you back here.”

“On my way.”

A mile out, he calls again. “You eaten?”

“No.”

“Meet me at Cirelli’s.”

This is a happy turn. Cirelli’s is a very good trattoria. A dinner invitation confirms that whatever the day’s disasters, I am not to blame.

The restaurant is midtown’s last standing wood structure, a converted four-bedroom bungalow. It is flanked on three sides by the soaring glass obelisks that dominate this quarter of skyline, a plucky last-century artifact, happily, stubbornly lousing up the city’s cool steel march. Inside I find Keith already installed.

“I took the liberty of ordering us some plates,” he says. He splashes wine into my glass. “Good visit with the family?”

“Fine, thanks.”

We are seated between bar and fireplace, in what was once a living room. It is early; Cirelli’s is not crowded. He sweeps the room’s few faces, attending each a second or less. It strikes me we have been catalogued, confirmed in a role (Laugher, Smoker, Young Beauty, Lonely Old Man, Loyal Lieutenant), and will be held to account.

“So. What happened?”

With the matter suddenly at hand, I am not quite at ease. “What did Barry say?”

“I’ll tell you exactly what he said. Then you’ll do me the courtesy of not being coy.” There is no heat in this. It is a simple statement of contract. “Barry said the new guy at Markitel is a tough customer but he was cautiously optimistic that we could turn him our way. Now, there was a lot of hemming and hawing while he said it. But Barry’s not much of a liar, and when I pressed him he didn’t budge. I wanted you there to check his story, but never mind. ‘Cautiously optimistic.’ That was his mantra. You don’t feel the same. Let’s hear it.”

I comprehend two things at once. First, Keith’s irritation on the phone was exaggerated. He only suspected catastrophe; my reaction confirmed it. Second, this change from office to restaurant is to remind me of our bond. Last week’s generous raise, tonight’s fine meal: flattery for a trusted deputy. I am not a little in awe. Here is a boss who need never shout or bully. His guile is more than enough.

While I summarize the Markitel adventure, Keith only listens impassively. I can detect not a single change in his face.

“And?”

“We were kicked out, more or less.”

He sips, says nothing. The silence makes me nervous.

“I’m not sure they were much interested in any case. There wasn’t a single question in the technical portion. And the new contact, Mike. This guy might be a little unhinged—” But I have put my foot wrong. Keith comes to life:

“I don’t care if he’s Charlie goddamn Manson! The man has budget! And I’ll tell you something else. Barry’s been working on this for six months—six. If he’d closed already, he wouldn’t be sweating this new character. Disinterest is leverage, every fool knows that. The guy was prepared to meet with us. He’s a serious buyer.”

The waitress arrives, balancing a line of oval dishes. She refills our glasses and slips away. More silence now, punctured only by the screech of knife on plate. “I had no idea you were so forgiving,” he says, chewing. “You’ve always struck me as a guy whose tolerance for bullshit is nil. But what I’m hearing is…” Keith pauses, mopping his mouth with his napkin. “I’m hearing if you’d been sitting in the meeting today and you’d heard Barry report that he’s ‘cautiously optimistic’ about our chances at Markitel, you’d have agreed?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know.”

“I’m not sure.”

Keith sets down knife and fork, and jerks his chair as if to have a better look. “Well, this I should hear. I’m certainly paying you enough. Why might you have agreed?”

It occurs that Keith aims to convince himself of something by first convincing me. And the longer this takes, the worse my standing. But I am stuck now and must make a case, if not for Barry’s sake then for my own. So I point to Barry’s natural optimism, his honest belief, perhaps, that the sale is still salvageable. There is also the matter of the holiday slow period—

“What do you mean, ‘the holiday slow period’?”

“I mean the, ah, whatever we call it. The slowdown in corporate buying around the holidays.”

“Henry, you worry me. Don’t confuse what we tell the employees for Management’s expectations. If I tell the staff our struggles are part of a normal slow period around the holidays, that’s lipstick on a pig. We don’t need people quitting in droves because they think the place is going under. But you imagine I go to my bosses and say we’re going to be short on revenue because of Hanukkah? Think. Any seasonal slough-off is part of the forecast. When Barry and I sat down to plan out the quarterly numbers, those were the ones he agreed to. Weexpected fewer dollars this quarter. And Barry hasn’t even hit that.”

Now I do feel foolish.

“I see.”

“Good. Then you understand there’s not much to be done.”

It’s not clear to me where we’ve arrived. But I am not interested in embarrassing myself again. “I suppose that’s true.”

Keith is happy to find agreement. “At last. He sees the light.” Up comes the bottle, its neck steadied above my glass, then his own. The bottle is turned upside down and given a shake. He slumps back, throwing his arm up to signal for another. Not his first serving tonight. “Wish it were different,” he says. “You know?”

“Sure, sure.”

He eyes me significantly. “Aw, hell!”

When the new bottle comes, he adds to our glasses. The waitress clears our plates. He admires her backside as it disappears into the kitchen. Seeing my eye, he fixes me with a wolfish grin.

“What about we finish this bottle, then see if we can’t take in the ballet?”

This is said conspiratorially, the favor of favors. I am the good soldier reenlisted. Yet my heart sinks. “Now thatis an idea,” say I. Enthusiasm without commitment. But this seals it. He slaps the table.

“Drink up!”

* * *

The water-stained marquee locates this as the home of “Big Blondie,” she of the eighty-eight-inch chest measurement. The marvel of it is signaled by a heraldry of exclamation points. Also, naturally: GOD BLESS OUR TROOPS.

An overpass thunders above. We are in a nether region somewhere near the airport. Only under extraordinary social pressure will I go to these places. This has nothing to do with prudishness. It is simply a policy of avoiding misery. Patrons of these clubs the world over labor under the same mandate: that in their happy welcoming of tits and asses and fetishistic getups and grinding drum dances, in their whooping embrace of the uproarious naughtiness, they corroborate for all mankind what a bite of the real life looks like. I’ve seen adult men seized by their ties and led to private rooms by women dressed as kittens, and to a man their behavior is the same: a broad, backward glance at his woofing cohorts, the headshake of faux resignation, and then a wild little shimmy at his escort’s back. Keith goes into the gloom ahead readily and with the sap rising. But already the show is over; already the subject waits, stripped and laid bare. There’s only one thing ever truly naked in these places, and its name is Despair.

I am not mistaken. Inside the club there isn’t a dancer in sight. It is dark but for a catwalk whose margins are traced by a glowing plastic tube. I can make out perhaps ten other men. Each sits with chin on chest, stirring some radioactive concoction from the bar, looking caved-in and alone. They have come straight from their orphanages. This is worse than imagined. A strip joint too seedy and sad even for the tyranny of high times. We fall into one of the tables at a remove from the stage. Keith casts an arm at a passing shadow. Some form appears at our table with a wooden rack of test tubes. Their liquids glow like fissile material. A voice says: “Watermelon, raspberry, banana…” Keith hands me two tubes and takes two himself. His are finished in short order.

“Those aren’t made for sipping, you know. Down the hatch.”

The flavors are indescribable.

“My policy?” Keith shouts, apropos of nothing. “Don’t. Over. Think it.” A jab at each period. His gestures have become broad and lunging, like a thespian who must signal the action for the balconies. “We want to come here? Done. And I love my wife, it’s not that.”

I nod. It is the first tactic of active listening. One nods, and pays no mind to the jungle narcotics spidering along one’s brainstem.

“… But some people, they never get there. Everything goes under the microscope, nothing gets decided. Too many possibilities. Or— You can stop nodding.”

“Sorry.”

“Or they get to a decision but”—he flops his hand over and back—“second-guess it every time the wind blows.”

“Ha. Yes.”

“Either way will sink you.”

“Yes.” Though I am not so sure of myself. Have I made a poor showing at dinner?

“You go on what you know. Think of a guy who’s decided his best bet is to stand stock-still, hoping to see any one thing”—here he makes a little framing device with his hands, squinting through it—“right square as it is. Nobody’s opinions, not even his own, to block the view. What happens to him?”

“What?”

“He’s dead of old age before he’s done it!”

“Oh.”

Keith leans over. There comes a hard, avuncular squeeze on my shoulder. It activates a quivering resonance in the speakers. The curtains part in a hissing jet of fog. A spotlight blinks to life on the floor and goes racing for the stage. He falls back.

“Ho now…”

Some black-clad creature, an assemblage of knee boots and cinched leather, separates from the fog and comes prowling along the walk. There is not a single whistle, only a scraping and scurrying as men drag their chairs to sit at her feet. Ah, but not so fast. First we must endure her choreography. It is a rodeo pantomime. Some galloping in place, an arm whirled loosely above her head, etc. I study my watch. Twelve minutes of this. Only by degrees does she oblige the room: a long undoing of bodice strings, the slow-motion spilling of her marquee gifts … The audience remains transfixed throughout. These poor souls. When I see them lined along the catwalk, gazing up with open mouths, there enters my head a blasphemous image of Communion takers at the altar rail.

Keith is clawing his face. “You lucky devil.”

“Me?”

“You!”

“Why?”

“Why. Only one free man at this table.”

Under no circumstances will I be going home with an exotic dancer.

“Ah, but you could. Hundred bucks plus cab fare, maybe.”

“You know.”

He gives a sidelong squint. “I wasn’t always married.”

“Baloney.”

“Believe what you like.”

The dancer steps down from her platform to go among the men. Here and there she stops, choosing. She reaches out and grasps her man by the head, then buries his face in her bosoms. Truly “buries” is the word: the men go in up to their ears. They remain as docile as sheep, the chosen ones in particular. There is no hooting or hollering. Each one looks up gravely from his chair, nods, and bends his neck.

“I can think of someone I’d like to give me that treatment,” says Keith.

“Who?”

He turns sly.

“If you could pick one person from the office, who would it be?”

I am surprised. Sober, Keith doesn’t engage the usual locker-room amusements.

“I don’t know,” I tell him.

“Let’s have it.”

“I’d need to give it some thought.”

His cheeriness begins to slip. “It’s not an essay question.” I am on thin ice. Wrecked as he is, his antennae for angles remains keen. There is no question of his disclosing anything personal, not even in drunken jest, without me going first.

“What’s-her-face. Sixteenth-floor reception.”

Keith is gratified. “Ho! All right. I know the very one. You like ’em young.”

“Well—”

“I’ll remember that!”

“Yes.”

“So OK, my turn.”

I regard him dutifully.

“Jane Brodel.”

“Aha.”

“Marketing.”

“Yes.”

“Now: she’s not the only one. I’m not saying that. But she’s right up there.”

“She’s married I think.”

Keith, who has been keeping a weather eye on the dancer’s performance, shifts it to me. “What?”

I am a fool. He screws up his face. “Jesus Christ,” says he, baffled to the point of irritation. “What, I’m going to torpedo everything to run away with her? Am I that guy?”

“No, no.”

“We’re just bullshitting.”

“I know that.”

Still I am under watch. Why did I open my mouth? He is drunk, but not so drunk as to miss the scent of jealousy. It doesn’t help that I can feel my spine stiffening of its own accord. The mere mention of her name, in this place, in another man’s mouth … I have an idiotic yen for chivalry. It rose up in boyhood and never left. I blame my sister. What pride I used to take in chaperoning her past imaginary neighborhood dangers, a role that occasioned one of our mother’s friends to remark, “He’s such a gentleman, your son,” thereby ruining me for good. I have been conscious of my standing as a gentleman ever since, and it is Gretchen’s fault.

Keith watches, but to my relief when he speaks again it is as the office scold: “And don’t you get any ideas about that receptionist.”

“Absolutely not.”

“I’m serious.”

“I know.”

“Bad for business. Find someone you’re not going to see in the elevator the next day.”

This settles it. He tips out of his chair and lumbers upright; I am bid to hold tight, smaller bills are on the way. Like that, we are comrades again. The fog machine pumps its sweet-sick smoke into piles on the stage. Our dancer fades to apparition, and soon we are all subsumed in the gas.

8

Early the next morning I am awakened by the phone. The bedcovers sit like a lead apron, but hearing the voice I am instantly bolt upright.

“What is it?”

Gretchen is slow to answer. “It’s probably a simple mistake.”

“Tell me.”

“Last night…” A small ticking comes over the line, the sound of her nail on a tooth. “It started with one of those awful dreams where what’s actually happening goes into the dream. I dreamt a winter branch reached its arm in through my bedroom window and was rubbing at my shin. It was the strangest thing. The rubbing was like a slow torture.”

Her objective tone is enough to raise hackles. Whatever this is, she has the narrator’s bird’s-eye advantage. But for the listener it is pure agony.

“Finally it was too much, I woke up: it was Dad. ‘Gretchen, I’m concerned.’ Scared me half to death. He had a look on his face like, I don’t know. I mean it was clear he’d just woken up, but he didn’t look confused.” The line is quiet for a moment. “He sits down on the edge of the bed and says, plain as this: ‘I simply cannot think where your mother might be.’”

I become aware of a pain in my hand. I have the receiver in a kind of death grip. Changing hands, it is difficult to straighten the fingers.

“I said, ‘No, Dad: she’s gone, remember?’ And he said”—there is a small harrumphing noise as she bears down—“‘Remind me where.’”

“What did you say?”

“What could I? ‘I mean she’s dead.’ But all of sudden he was fine. He just sort of popped to. ‘That’s right, that’s right. What the hell’s the matter with my brain.’” She makes another clearing sound in her throat. “He asked that I not say anything to you.”

“I won’t mention it.”

“How worried are we?”

I tell myself there is no cause for alarm. Likely he was not fully awake himself. In those twilight states anything is possible. As I interpret it for Gretchen, it seems he proceeded by old memory, and finding her asleep in the house no doubt worsened his confusion: Here is my daughter, in her bed as she should be. Where then is my wife?

“I feel better for calling,” she says. “I wasn’t sure.”

“I’m glad you did.”

“OK.”

“Absolutely.”

Silence. With the urgency past, we are at something of a loss.

“What’s the weather like?”

This I actually say, so excruciating are these dead spaces of social protocol. She laughs, then is embarrassed and makes a kind of midair adjustment: “Well, it’s … cold. I mean, it’s winter. You remember.”

“Ah yes. Winter. Cold you say.” It’s no use. Not even irony can save me. “You should come visit,” I tell her, now well and truly desperate, although in the instant after I see what a good idea this is. “Really. It’s at least sixty degrees warmer here. Take a long weekend.”

“Hm. Tempting.”

“I’ll pay. It’s a no-brainer.”

“‘No-brainer.’ What a gross expression.” She is prickly in the face of charity, especially her brother’s charity. Her caregiver pride is roused. But not to the point of refusing. “Maybe I’ll look into dates.”

We are at the cusp of disconnecting when something else occurs to me—“Gretchen?”

“Yes?”

“The whiskey bottle, the one over the stove.”

“What about it.”

I am silent.

She says, “I’m trying to be—how would it go in your world? ‘Proactive’?”

“Is it connected to this sleepwalking episode?”

“No. This was a first. But he’s better off without it.”

I am a little fearful of asking what she means. We leave it at that.

Awake now but with no inclination to get up. A bar of sunlight materializes on the ceiling. Gradually it descends the far wall, at last settling on a small family picture above the dresser. The Hurts at a scenic overlook in Arizona. Gretchen stands with hands in pockets, blond as can be, foal-legged in her canary short-shorts. A middle-aged edition of my father gazes into the lens with a faraway look. My mother is to the side, behind me, with her hands on my shoulders. She wears turquoise earrings and a turquoise bracelet and a red-fringed serape. (This was during her Southwestern phase.) Her eyes and teeth are alight in the flashbulb or settling sun. Mine also. This flushed grinning is a mystery—perhaps we have just switched places, a little fire-drilling before the shutter’s click.

A parent dying is no world-historic event—I know this. One of the aims of the grief literature, I discovered, is to remind you that you’re in good company, that legions die every day, and in any case dying is as natural as birth: we are all leaves in a stream or stars in the firmament or raindrops on a something. Yes, true. But it is also true that when we sat together school nights at the kitchen table, she with her crossword and I with my story problems, and after I’d given up hope and climbed into the cabinetry’s painted hay (become “lost in a brown study” in her phrasing, an expression that provoked its own images and wanderings), I would be summoned back to place by her voice—What’s transpiring in that brain of yours? And if I remembered I would tell her what it was I’d been thinking, easily and forthrightly, never mind how stray or odd, because when she asked you something she meant to hear the truth. Her curiosity wasn’t rhetorical. The miracle was that a truthful answer seemed possible. There opened a space for two people to speak, however fleetingly, without the talcum of safe sentiments that powders everything.

The alarm sounds. I rise and busy myself at the dresser. Yes, yes, lay thee thy garments out and never mind the picture. She smiles as ever, I know. I know every inch of that photo, having searched it many times for the filament, the fine thread that attaches the here and now to the there and then. Once found it can be followed, back to this snapshot eternity where she lives, in perpetual coincidence with her family, just as was agreed.

The truth is I understand my father’s confusion. It never occurred to me she would die.



Copyright © 2016 by J. Bradford Hipps