The parties had become one of those New York events. They’d started as office parties, held quarterly or every other month—company-funded drinking gone unreported to our insurance provider. In the last year, though, the parties had become one of those unidentified events known to people across the city. They drew programmers from software firms city wide, founders of breakaway ad agencies holed up in Chelsea and Tribeca, brokers and investment bankers working late on Wall Street, even an unlikely sampling of junior moviemakers, directors and actors and actresses all talking up their new script, their new project, their next even better idea.
I was handed a drink. I thanked the stranger who’d already turned away, disappearing into the mix of people and music and easy warm light, all of it spread across the lobby of our building, four stories high, now filled with a few hundred people.
Friday.
“In the last six months,” I said to Perry, who was sitting next to me in a low, heavy chair on the first of two mezzanines above the lobby, “two hundred people have claimed to be my parents.”
“Sure,” he said, slowly crossing his bare feet on the table, “but at least a hundred of those claims came from me.”
His bare feet, his legs, all were motionless. His whole body was. Perry’s tremendous capacity for stillness. Especially now, stillness so obvious as the room moved steadily with people and light and sound.
In front of us were the groups laughing, the pairs drinking, the people shooting cocktail straws from one mezzanine to the next, and each person, each shooting straw, each image reminded me that my changes to the shadow network had worked. Now we had time. Now I had so much more time to find a solution.
And not one thing reminded me of the girl next door. I can see now how I sat there and did not think about her at all. Not a memory or a vision of the eighteen-year-old prostitute I’d been inside twenty-four hours ago.
“A new kid from my group,” Perry said, nodding in the general direction of the mezzanine across from us, “is able to shoot toothpicks with astounding accuracy.”
I saw two toothpicks shoot forty feet into the back of the head of a programmer from R&D, the kid who’d shot them very discreetly lowering the straw to his side. I heard myself saying, “Nice.”
Ronald Mertz viewed these parties as management-sanctioned breaches of corporate security. Outsiders roamed the halls of the floors just above us. They joined baseball games played across unprotected workstations. They lined up for putt-putt golf tournaments that led in and out of conference rooms and offices—notes, plans and reports covering the tables and whiteboards that surrounded the games. And, worst of all for Ronald, the outsiders joined in on any number of multiuser, networked computer games—killing, hunting, joking, plotting, driving and swinging their way through an immense electronic universe hosted on Core’s computers.
Despite the Regence attack, despite restoring the network and Eu gene’s blackmail with a fake Fadowsky journal, I’d said the party would happen. Security had been tripled, access to the network essentially eliminated, the layout of the putt-putt courses curtailed.
But Core would have its party.
As we sat in our chairs on the upper mezzanine, Perry and I had tiny earphones in our left ears, both of us listening in on the security team as they talked to one another. The sounds of urgency coming through the earphones were so disconnected from the easy, happy scene in front of us. It was an urgency that flowed directly from Ronald, who had a large force of uniformed and plainclothes security officers stalking the perimeter of the lobby, roaming from mezzanine one to the fourth floor and back to mezzanine two, issuing commands over the tiny microphones pinned to their collars, listening for instructions via the earphones hidden in their ears.
“Hansel, this is Gretel, please identify,” Perry and I heard an officer saying over the radio. “Repeat. Hansel, this is Gretel. Please identify.”
“This is Rapunzel,” said another voice. “Sector two is clear.”
As he had throughout the night, Perry spoke without turning to me, his voice instead drifting out into the space in front of us. “We have a sector two?” he asked.
I nodded. “Of course.”
I was handed a drink. I thanked the stranger who’d already turned away.
“I heard you got some good news,” Perry said.
“You’ve been talking to Whitley,” I said.
“And Cliff. Both said you lit up yesterday.”
I nodded. I shrugged. I hoped the topic would pass.
“Does it affect me?” Perry asked.
“Some bad conference call with an investor,” I said, smiling some, trying to answer him without giving an answer. “It would probably have gone better if I’d just gone to visit them.”
“You hardly travel anymore,” Perry said.
I took a drink. I shifted in my seat. “There never seems to be the time.”
“And you didn’t answer my question,” Perry said. “Why is it you were smiling?”
“Someone forwarded me an e-mail,” I offered lightly, “with a couple of really funny jokes.”
And there was a moment where he smiled.
“Up until a few days ago, Cliff was using barf bags,” I said.
“Julie was sleeping in her chair at night,” Perry said, and I hadn’t known that.
“Whitley seemed on the verge of finally taking up smoking,” I said.
He paused. I thought he might turn to me. “Even Whitley,” he said.
A toothpick stabbed into the armrest of my chair.
“I’m still worried about Regence,” Perry said.
“We seem to win every battle, though,” I said. “We seem like we can’t lose.”
I waited a moment, but he did not respond. In another moment he raised his hand, two toothpicks bouncing off it.
“Bold young man,” Perry said of the new member of his group who, apparently, was fearless in his chosen targets for cocktail-tooth pick war.
“Trevor did sixty-five million in sales last week,” I said.
“I know.”
“How do you know?” I asked.
“I can still access the sales reports.”
“We need to get that fixed.”
“I’m sure SWAT will find me someday.”
“Only if I sell you out.”
“It’s a good thing, right?” Perry asked.
“That you’re able to get into those systems? No.”
“The sales. We want sales, don’t we, Robbie? Or did I miss that meeting?”
I nodded. I glanced at him. I saw him sitting motionless in his chair. “Yes,” I said. “Yes, we do.”
And for the next five minutes, then ten, we only watched the party, saw it unfolding, growing, turning louder and brighter, and for me it felt good to sit next to Perry, saying nothing, a few times both of us pointing at scenes for which each of us knew the joke, smiling silently, all the while ignoring the half lie I’d just put between us. Because, in not answering Perry, not telling him what message I’d gotten during the call, I was certainly lying.
We watched the toothpick sniper move about the room. We watched the people still arriving, through the entrance, from the elevator, from offices and floors upstairs. We watched the senior staff, watched managers and assistants and coordinators and VPs all loosely circling the room, Julie near the bar and Whitley up above us on the second mezzanine and even Cliff’s white-shirted accountants and analysts and legal counselors, all of them were sharing their jokes with their boss, all of them sharing their take on the moment, the day, the week, the network attack and restart.
“We restored the network,” I said to Perry.
“Yes,” he said. “I was there.”
I nodded. I took a drink. I watched Perry’s eyes slowly follow the motion in front of us, drifting side to side with the flow of the party. “I wasn’t sure it would work,” I said.
“You’re not allowed to have those thoughts,” he said.
“I only share them with you.”
He nodded. “Personally, I’d bet a year’s worth of favors on the system winning this one.”
“Never bet against Leonard.”
“Never again.”
“Sometimes,” I said to Perry, pausing for a moment as I shot a toothpick from a straw at the unsuspecting kid from R&D, “I really like my job.”
The toothpick bounced hard off his neck. He buckled over, wincing in pain.
Perry nodded slowly, now shooting a toothpick of his own, the kid dropping for a moment onto one knee before scurrying into the crowd. Perry asked absently, “But do people still try to touch you?”
“I’m able to dodge most of the attempts.”
“The people here are beautiful,” Perry said. “Everyone here is so beautiful.”
I looked out, and it was obvious. All the people, each of them, seemed attractive and fit and beautiful.
“I’m not sure I like it,” I said. “Something inhuman, unreal.”
“No,” Perry said carefully. “I thought that too. But it’s okay. Because, if you look closely, it’s not so much that the people are beautiful. It’s the place. The lobby. The quiet music and steady light. The stone floors and bright metal in the walls. Look at that woman near the entrance, the man by the door. That whole group on the stairs to mezzanine one. None of them are pretty or not pretty. It’s just that here, in this place, they are beautiful.”
“So maybe it’s a good thing.”
“Maybe it is,” Perry said.
The kid from R&D had positioned himself behind a column, just twenty feet away. Perry spoke quietly into the security radio. In a moment, the kid was surrounded by two very humorless security guards.
“The power,” I said, and Perry only nodded.
“I’m watching Whitley on the mezzanine,” he said.
I looked, then found her, in black suit, white shirt, a group of cocktail straws placed carefully in her front pocket.
“I can’t see her clearly,” Perry said. “Too close, too familiar. Like Cliff, like Leonard or Julie. Like you. I can’t see any of you separate from my mind’s own vision of what you look like, who you are.”
And I couldn’t answer for a moment. Only because he was right.
“Can you see her, Robbie?”
I shook my head. “I suppose I can’t really see any of them.”
“I should probably help you see her,” he said. In a moment, he stood up. “But now I have to go.”
“Home?” I asked.
“Work,” he said.
“Among other things, Whitley’s people are on the verge of shutting me out of a number of the European accounting systems.”
“Can’t let that happen,” I said.
“I’d have nothing to do,” he said.
“Never bet against Leonard,” I said again.
“Usually,” Perry said, “I like my job too.”
“I’m glad.”
“What I hate is the lying.”
“When do you have to lie?” I asked him, leaning backward, wanting to sink into my chair, disappear into the cushions.
Perry blinked, a slow and drawn-out blink that was almost a wince. “I don’t lie, Robbie. I never have. At most I remain silent. Which, for me, can feel like a lie.”
He slid his feet into his sneakers without looking down. “Are there bigger lies, Robbie?”
“Join the senior staff.”
He turned away, then turned back to me. “Really, Robbie. I’m not joking. What I hate is the lies.”
And as he spoke I only pictured Shimmer, glowing, spinning, showing the shadow network, now extended, but still a lie, my lie, supporting us all.
And I didn’t know what to say.
“The people are beautiful,” Perry said, “because this is a place without cynicism, Robbie. These people, all of them, at some level, they can be their best selves here.”
I could only blink. And nod.
“I realized that,” he said, “sitting here with you.”
“It’s a powerful thing,” I said. “If it’s true.”
“It is true,” he said, staring at me now, somehow studying me. “These people have commitment. Community. The possibility of achieving at the very extreme of their potential. They restored the network, Robbie.”
“Yes,” I said. “Yes, they did.”
“They did the unknown. They did it for themselves, for each other and for you.”
I searched for some response, some typically restrained and sarcastic response, but couldn’t find it.
“Growth is good, right, Robbie?” he said. “Trevor’s sales are up. The stock price is rising. The company expands. Grace comes closer.”
“Join the se nior staff,” I said.
“Is there an end to this?”
“To what?” I asked.
He shrugged. He looked around the room. Women said he was good-looking. To me he looked mild, still, a presence that floated between the cracks and empty spaces in the glowing, turning light. “This,” he said.
“I don’t know.”
“It seems like there should be an end,” he said. “A predetermined end. Expected and planned for.”
“In essence, foretold,” I said, trying to smile, trying to joke with him.
“Yes,” Perry said, smiling some, but waiting. Wanting that answer.
“I don’t have an end.”
He nodded.
“I haven’t left the building in four months,” I said, and it was something I hadn’t spoken out loud. Something I had barely said to myself. Knowing it but not admitting it. And so now the words hung distantly in my mind, as if I’d overheard someone else talking about a person I didn’t know, but a person who seemed very familiar to me.
And it sounded strange.
“Four months,” I said, but quieter now.
Perry stared at me. His face held an expression I didn’t know and had never seen. A face I still see now, thinking back. Kindness.
In a moment, I said, “Maybe I’m here searching for an end.”
“Should I be worried?” he asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Go outside,” he said. “There might be an answer there too.”
“Leave the building.”
“I will.”
“Tonight,” Perry said.
“We’ll see.”
“Tell me if I should be worried,” he said.
“I will.”
“Tell me,” he said. “Tell me anything.”
And the party was building, Perry disappearing into the crowd, nodding at the people who tried to approach him, head ducked slightly, shoulders pulled high, like a man caught unexpectedly in a violent rainstorm. My sometime alter ego running from the dance floor to his dark office on nine.
And the party was building.
Julie stood smiling, laughing at the center of a swirling group near the reception desk, and I saw that she was absently pressing the Start button on a small desktop copier, bright light from the edges of the machine periodically flashing across her soft face.
Cliff’s arms waved rapidly as he clearly talked finance with a group on the upper mezzanine, the people around him standing just a step or two away, listening intently, but wary of being knocked across the face.
Whitley found me standing, watching the others. “Get me a drink,” she said.
“Is this one of your favors?” I asked.
“Not quite,” she said, face half hidden behind her hair.
“Am I underestimating the weight of your upcoming requests?”
She was staring at me. “That and worse.”
I nodded. I smiled. I didn’t know what she meant.
“I have questions,” she said. “I don’t understand.”
“Understand what?”
“How they work,” she said, staring at me, talking slowly, oddly. “I don’t understand how you made this all work.”
I tried to stare. Tried to nod.
“Someday you should tell me,” she said, slow, and I saw how many cocktail straws were in her front pocket, and I realized Whitley was half drunk.
She was smiling now. “Or maybe,” she said, her words slowed, not slurred but slow and very deliberate, “maybe I could just tell SWAT to find out.”
She turned away.
I was so scared of Whitley.
And the party was building, louder and darker and people moving, smiling bright and moving close, and I could see Cliff moving so smoothly now, fluidly, not dancing, just moving, and could see Julie leaning close to Leonard as she spoke to him, Leonard almost wide-eyed as Julie entered his massive presence, the people, all these people, all moving and talking and turning and laughing, all here and so happy and all of it, all of it happening in the cavernous lobby of a supplier of networking services and equipment to mainframe computers worldwide.
I did not go outside that night.
It’s not that I was afraid of what I might see, or find.
It’s not that I was afraid of crowds or open spaces.
It’s not that I was afraid the shadow network would collapse if I simply left the building for a few minutes or hours.
It’s just that I didn’t have a reason to leave.
There’d been a time when I went out with friends almost every night. When I went to apartments on the upper West Side for dinner and parties, out to Montauk for the weekend, went to bars and clubs with a group of people I’d known from college and California. But, over the past two years, that had stopped. Invitations slowing as my declines increased. Until finally, although I received printed invitations to holiday parties hosted by those people, to weddings between people I’d lived with in school, art openings by women I’d dated off and on, really now I was so separate from that life.
An executive who’d rarely slept more than two hours at a time in the past three years.
A liar searching for an end he could control.
A thirty-five-year-old with an addiction to prostitutes. Closeness, for a fee. The only closeness other than what he found at work.
I did not leave the building that night. Because I’d already made a call.