Easy and Hard Ways Out (20 page)

He passed the Accounting Department, looked in at the few remaining secretaries. There is a peculiar intimacy between people who work overtime in the evenings, a sense of duty shared, things mutually missed. Brank felt a special, extrasexual bond between himself and the secretaries. He wanted to go over and utter platitudes: Hi. Kinda lonely workin' nights, huh? Really gets dark fast this time of year. Real cold out, I hear. Progress reports flashed through his mind: with J. Dubrowolski, evaluating Mavis of Accounting for sexual potential. Retinal, oral, and olfactory measurements performed on subject's breasts, buttocks, and genitalia all agree with theory within experimental error.

He returned to his desk, drew four lines on his shop sketch, erased two. He put down some dimensions, added tolerances, then changed his mind and crumbled the sheet into a ball. He stood up, sank a fifteen-foot jump shot into the wastebasket, and sat down. He began another sheet, drew three lines, erased one, smudged another horribly. He carefully saved the tiny eraser shavings, which he collected in a small box that he periodically dumped on Dorfman's desk when Dorfman wasn't there. It drove Dorfman crazy. He started a calculation but lost his trend of thought in the middle. At ten thirty, Steinberg emerged from his cubicle and said, “Okay, men, let's call it a night, huh?”

Brank put on his jacket and walked through the corridors with Dubrowolski.

“You probably don't even mind this, do you, Dubrowo?”

Dubrowolski puffed his cheeks, smoothed down his blond hair. “Oh, who? Me? You mean the overtime?”

“Yes, John.”

“No, I don't mind. I enjoy derivations. I'd do them anyway. I have nothing else to do at night.”

They passed the guard at the door.

“Ever try getting laid?”

Dubrowolski smiled knowingly. “Oh, you mean intercourse? With girls?”

“Yes, John.”

“Never during the week.”

They separated, and Brank walked to his car. Bright spotlights blazed away, fighting off the blackness of the night and the asphalt. Brank listened to his footsteps, saw his car in the distance, standing by itself, freezing no doubt, even as he was. He imagined himself in the courtyard of a foreign prison, spied on, studied, machine-gun towers ready to open up should he make a wrong move. His head hurt. He began to jog. By the time he reached the car, he could hardly stand.

Progress Report—Job 6145—H. Brank—12/4

Working on shop sketches of fixture to hold spheres on rods without epoxy.

He felt sick. His throat burned and his eyes itched and Steinberg had told him they'd all have to work overtime for the rest of the week. “It's mainly for the appearance, Harvey,” he'd said. “Nobody enjoys it really, but sometimes the appearance of a thing is more important than the thing itself. I've been in the field nearly thirty-two years, and I know.”

Brank worked listlessly during the day, unable to concentrate. He paged Dr. Vincent Nardiello, Vincent Price, and Vincent Impelliteri, the first paging he'd done since that oaf, Brine, had stopped watching him. He dialed the weather, and spoke in hushed tones so Dorfman would be curious and overhear. A soft female voice relayed important facts.

“—becoming south to southwest later on. Small craft warnings are in—”

“I'd like to fuck you,” whispered Brank into the phone, as Dorfman suddenly stopped writing.

“Tides running one and a half to two feet above normal may cause minor flooding over low-lying coastal sections. Probability—”

“If you don't like it the regular way we could do variations, just as long as I get into your low-lying coastal sections.”

“Good morning. National Weather Service forecast for Nassau and—”

Dorfman was staring openly now, and even Dubrowolski had looked up.

“I'll meet you at lunchtime, but only if the weather holds out.”

Brank hung up and walked out of the lab. His body ached and he felt feverish. Psychosomatic, of course. He wandered through the halls till lunchtime, when he ate half a sandwich, felt nauseated, and went into the Accounting men's room to throw up. Just as he entered his favorite stall, the nausea abated slightly and switched instead to stomach cramps. He sat down on the toilet and soon the cramps passed, to be replaced again by head pains and perspiration. He glanced at the wall of the cubicle and saw the familiar scrawled lines of equations and dirty pictures he'd come to expect. One sketch, labeled “Laocoön,” showed nude Ardway-and Rupp-like figures obscenely intertwined with a giant letter A. Brank corrected a minor algebraic error with a pencil, added some hair to one of the drawings, and wrote “Good—Seems Publishable” near the bottom. He stood up and zipped his pants. The intelligent graffiti were his only reason for using the Accounting men's room. The mixture of mathematical formulas, scatological depictions of
A
, Rupp, and Ardway, and occasional philosophical remarks was always interesting, and demented.

Nine thirty at night his father, a man caught up in the mechanics of using the telephone, called him at the office.

“Hello? Hello? Harvey? Is Harvey Brank there? I'd like to speak to Mr. Harvey Brank, please.”

“Dad? Dad, it's me.”

“Hello? Is Harvey Brank there?”

“Yes. Dad? It's me, Harvey.”

“Is this Harvey Brank?”

“Yes. Dad, it's me, your son, Harvey.”

“Oh, Harvey, yes, my son. Yes, now I can hear you.”

“Good.”

“I got a new tone dialing the operator.”

“What's doing, Dad?”

“Like a whistling noise,
ooo-eeeeeeeeeeee
. You ever hear of such a thing?”

“No, I haven't. Uh, what's new?”

“So I hung up and tried again, but this time I got a busy signal, a trunk line type, you know, very closely spaced buzzes. So I hung up again and dialed the operator, but then a loud beeping started up and—”

“Dad, I'm a little busy now. Are you calling for anything special?”

“Now you're coming in loud and clear, though. We really have an excellent connection now.”

“Dad, I'm—”

“I just spoke to Joan and she said you were working late. Is this something new?”

“It's just a project that has to get out.”

“I hear it's going to pour tonight, maybe turning to snow. You have a raincoat with you?”

“Dad, I thought we agreed—no more weather reports.”

“All right, make believe you didn't hear me. Listen, your mother and I thought we'd take a ride out on Sunday. You want us?”

“I'm not sure, Dad. Lemme check with Joan and I'll call you back tomorrow.”

“No, no. Listen. Do it this way. On Sunday, give us one ring if you want us to come, and we'll give you one ring back if we're coming.”

“Dad, wouldn't it be easier if I just spoke to you?”

“But why? Why waste a call? I don't know, Harvey, sometimes, for an engineer, you don't think.”

“All right, Dad. One ring.” There was a long pause. “Dad? Is there anything else?”

“Huh? Oh. Oh, no. No, I just hate to break the connection, that's all. This type of hookup you get once in a million years.”

Progress Report—Job 6145—H. Brank—12/5

Completed sketches of fixture and submitted them to model shop.

“So, uh, it looks like, you know, like we're at the end of the rope,” said Dubrowolski.

“What rope?” asked Brank.

“Oh, that was just an analogy,” said Dubrowolski cheerfully, his blond hair hanging over his eyes, his large frame looming over Brank's desk. “I meant the rope was analogous to the situation about the Yig filter.”

“I don't think a rope is like a Yig filter.”

“No, no. See, what I meant was—”

“John, John, I'm teasing you. I know what you meant. You're right. Auerbach Labs is going to have to tell the Air Force we have a problem that'll take a couple of months to solve, that's all.”

“Yes, that's what I meant.”

“Dubrowo, who's going to protect you after I'm gone?”

“I got another letter from my draft board,” said Dubrowolski. “Boy, are they after me. They said I didn't answer their last questionnaire.”

“Did you?”

“No, I lost it.”

“Did they send you another one?”

“Yes. But,” he giggled, “I don't know where it is. I think I wrote a derivation on the back of it.” He saw Brank staring at him. “I can't help it. I get ideas. I've been getting them lately just before I go to bed at night. I don't have paper in my bedroom so I write a lot on the sheets.”

“Dub, you better find the questionnaire.”

“I know. It's either that or the Viet Cong.”

By 8
P.M.
Brank was wandering again through the half-deserted halls. He passed outside the Production shop, looked in at the endless greenhouse rows of oil-washed, chip-spitting machines, at the acres of fluorescent lights, at the hunched-over night-shift workers poring over their bits of precious metal. He glanced in at Plating, at the jars of chemicals, at the lines of huge, smoking vats and masked attendants. He walked through the neat, unattended desks of Legal and out through the plush, carpeted conference rooms of Sales. He leaned in to say hello to Bea, secretary to the empty room. (Her boss, Mr. Frankel, a minor Production Control functionary, had died four months before, but an
EPICAC
programmer's error had failed to remove him from either the payroll or company records, and Bea had continued taking his messages, sorting his mail, and handling routine business to the satisfaction of everyone except Accounting, which sent occasional cranky memos about failure to cash paychecks.)

At ten o'clock, Steinberg called Brank into his cubicle, just after dismissing the rest of the staff. A thin line of clear fluid trickled from one of Steinberg's nostrils, and he swiped at it hopelessly with the edge of one hand. His eyes were red; he seemed about to cry.

“I gather your fixture isn't ready,” he said.

Brank shook his head. “Shop said it'll take at least three weeks with their present work load. Vargas said he's had to put another man on Rupp's boat. Surprisingly, a new epoxy sample did come in”—Steinberg's eyes brightened momentarily—“but Incoming Inspection, Holtzmann and Boltzmann, rejected it. Improperly marked can.”

Steinberg nodded and took a deep breath. “When the Air Force comes, you, as project engineer, will have to be standing by while your part of the system undergoes the qual tests for the inspector.”

“Right,” said Brank.

“I don't want you to mention anything about the troubles with the temperature cycling.”

“Stan,” said Brank, stunned, shaking his head, “somebody's—”

“I know all your objections. I'm not asking you to lie, I'm just asking you not to volunteer that we haven't met our design goals, that's all. It's a completely different thing.”

“Stan, you don't understand, somebody is—”

Steinberg, agitated, rose from his chair, shaking, eyes streaming. “No, no, it's you that doesn't understand. You. I'm fifty-two years old, and my job and my life are at stake here. You don't know from such things!” He sat now, drained suddenly. He held his head in his hands, distracted. “I'm sorry, Harvey, I am. Believe me, as an engineer, this goes against my grain. Sometimes one has to compromise, though, and this is one of those times. I'm sorry, what were you going to say?”

Brank, embarrassed, felt tongue-tied. “Well, I don't know. I wanted just to point out that someone is going to be flying with that thing, that's all.”

“I know,” said Steinberg. “I know. Look, these devices are always overspecified. You know the Air Force bureaucracy. Listen, would you just give it some thought? That's all I'm asking for now. Thought.”

Brank mumbled an assent, but Steinberg seemed not to hear. “Oh, yes, by the way, before I forget, you'll have to come in Saturday. I realize it seems silly, but sometimes, you know, the appearance of a thing …”

INTERLUDE BETWEEN TWO WORKING DAYS

“I'll give a little on the price, but that's it,” the builder had said. “Take it or leave it.” Brank, already moved out of his apartment, had taken it, a house seemingly predestined for problems even before it was built. An architectural error had resulted in a downstairs bathroom that was located in a traffic area between kitchen and den; at the housewarming, two cousins had passed through while Brank was urinating. “It's a beautiful, beautiful place,” they'd said. “You should be proud, we don't see a thing.”

The first few months were idyllic, Brank putting up little soap dishes and towel racks and shelves, each day crossing the street to gaze at his lawn from a distance, drunk with ownership. Once, when Joan had gone out, he'd walked through the sparsely furnished rooms speaking aloud, using a different tone of voice in each, saying,
“This
is my house,” or “This, you see, happens to be
my
house.”

As years slipped by, however, and vacation money was diverted to mortgage and property taxes, and maintenance took up the weekends, a series of minor catastrophes had occurred, seeming to parallel, in a curious way, the difficulties Brank was having with his jobs. A sudden summer invasion of black beetles, for instance, had prompted a panic phone call from Joan. “Harvey! You have to come home. They're all over everything. They're in the beds!”

“I'll be home in half an hour,” he'd whispered. “Bendleman is here with me. I think he's firing me. He caught me sleeping at my desk.”

Or the time Alan Meltzer had severed him from Sanders Associates. “You're a bright fellow, Harvey, but you simply can't take the
Times
and disappear for two hours every day in the men's room.”

That evening the cesspool backed up, the first of many occasions, and a frantic phone call to a local repair service produced a short, ill-shaven man wearing a peaked cap and rubber boots. Before descending to the basement with jugs full of chemicals, he said to Brank, “Confidentially, you got any do-do floating around down there?”