Paranoia (39 page)

Guru—the project was code-named TSUNAMI—was a supercharged handheld digital assistant, really killer technology and Trion’s only convergence device. It was a PDA, a communicator, a mobile phone. It had the power of a laptop in an eight-ounce package. It did e-mail, instant messages, spreadsheets, had a full HTML Internet browser and a great TFT active-matrix color screen.

Goddard cleared his throat. “So I understand we have a little challenge,” he said.

“That’s one way of putting it, Jock,” Audrey said smoothly. “Yesterday we got the results of the in-house audit, which indicated that we’ve got a faulty component. The LCD is totally dead.”

“Ah hah,” Goddard said with what I knew was forced calm. “Bad LCD, is it?”

Audrey shook her head. “Apparently the LCD
driver
is defective.”

“In every single one?” asked Goddard.

“That’s right.”

“A quarter of a million units have a bad LCD driver,” Goddard said. “I see. The ship date is in—what is it, now?—three weeks. Hmm. Now, as I recall—and correct me if I’m wrong—your plan was to ship these before the end of the quarter, thus bolstering earnings for the third quarter and giving us all thirteen weeks of the Christmas quarter to rake in some badly needed revenue.”

She nodded.

“Audrey, I believe we agreed that Guru is the division’s big kahuna. And as we all know, Trion is experiencing some difficulties in the market. Which means that it’s all the more crucial that Guru ship on schedule.” I noticed that Goddard was speaking in an overly deliberate manner, and I knew he was trying to hold back his great annoyance.

The chief marketing officer, the slick-looking Rick Durant, put in mournfully, “This is a huge embarrassment. We’ve already launched a huge teaser campaign, placed ads all over the place. ‘The digital assistant for the next generation.’” He rolled his eyes.

“Yeah,” muttered Goddard. “And it sounds like it won’t
ship
until the next generation.” He turned to the lead engineer, Eddie Cabral, a round-faced, swarthy guy with a dated flattop. “Is it a problem with the mask?”

“I wish,” Cabral replied. “No, the whole damned chip is going to have to be respun, sir.”

“The contract manufacturer’s in Malaysia?” said Goddard.

“We’ve always had good luck with them,” said Cabral. “The tolerances and quality have always been pretty good. But this is a complicated ASIC. It’s got to drive our own, proprietary Trion LCD screen, and the cookies just aren’t coming out of the oven right—”

“What about replacing the LCD?” Goddard interrupted.

“No, sir,” said Cabral. “Not without retooling the whole casing, which is another six months easy.”

I suddenly sat up. The buzzwords jumped out at me.
ASIC . . . proprietary Trion LCD
 . . .

“That’s the nature of ASICs,” Goddard said. “There are always some cookies that get burnt. What’s the yield like, forty, fifty percent?”

Cabral looked miserable. “Zero. Some kind of assembly-line flaw.”

Goddard tightened his mouth. He looked like he was about to lose it. “How long will it take to respin the ASIC?”

Cabral hesitated. “Three months. If we’re lucky.”

“If we’re
lucky
,” Goddard repeated. “Yep, if we’re
lucky
.” His voice was getting steadily louder. “Three months puts the ship date into December. That won’t work at all, will it?”

“No, sir,” said Cabral.

I tapped Goddard on the arm, but he ignored me. “Mexico can’t manufacture this for us quicker?”

The head of manufacturing, a woman named Kathy Gornick, said, “Maybe a week or two faster, which won’t help us at all. And then the quality will be substandard at best.”

“This is a goddamned mess,” Goddard said. I’d never really heard him curse before.

I picked up a product spec sheet, then tapped Goddard’s arm again. “Will you please excuse me for a moment?” I said.

I rushed out of the room, stepped into the lounge area, flipped open my phone.

Noah Mordden wasn’t at his desk, so I tried his cell phone, and he answered on the first ring: “What?”

“It’s me, Adam.”

“I answered the phone, didn’t I?”

“You know that ugly doll you’ve got in your office? The one that says ‘Eat my shorts, Goddard’?”

“Love Me Lucille. You can’t have her. Buy your own.”

“Doesn’t it have an LCD screen on its stomach?”

“What are you up to, Cassidy?”

“Listen, I need to ask you about the LCD driver. The ASIC.”

When I returned to the conference room a few minutes later, the head of engineering and the head of manufacturing were engaged in a heated debate about whether another LCD screen could be squeezed into the tiny Guru case. I sat down quietly and waited for a break in the argument. Finally I got my chance.

“Excuse me,” I said, but no one paid any attention.

“You see,” Eddie Cabral was saying, “this is
exactly
why we have to postpone the launch.”

“Well, we can’t
afford
to slip the launch of Guru,” Goddard shot back.

I cleared my throat. “Excuse me for a second.”

“Adam,” said Goddard.

“I know this is going to sound crazy,” I said, “but remember that robotic doll Love Me Lucille?”

“What are we doing,” grumbled Rick Durant, “taking a swim in Lake Fuckup? Don’t remind me. We shipped half a million of those hideous dolls and got ’em all back.”

“Right,” I said. “That’s why we have three hundred thousand ASICs, custom-fabricated for the proprietary Trion LCD, sitting in a warehouse in Van Nuys.”

A few chuckles, some outright guffaws. One of the engineers said to another, loud enough for everyone to hear, “Does he know about connectors?”

Someone else said, “That’s hilarious.”

Nora looked at me, wincing with fake sympathy, and shrugged.

Eddie Cabral said, “I wish it were that easy, uh, Adam. But ASICs aren’t interchangeable. They’ve got to be pin-compatible.”

I nodded. “Lucille’s ASIC is an SOLC-68 pin array. Isn’t that the same pin layout that’s in the Guru?”

Goddard stared at me.

There was another beat of silence, and the rustling of papers.

“SOLC-68 pin,” said one of the engineers. “Yeah, that should work.”

Goddard looked around the room, then slapped the table. “All right, then,” he said. “What are we waiting for?”

Nora beamed moistly at me and gave me the thumbs-up.

On the way back to my office I pulled out my cell phone again. Five messages, all from the same number, and one marked “Private.” I dialed my voice mail and heard Meacham’s unmistakable smarmy voice. “This is Arthur. I have not heard from you in over three days. This is not acceptable. E-mail me by noon today or face the consequences.”

I felt a jolt. The fact that he’d actually
called
me, which was a security risk no matter how the call was routed, showed how serious he was.

He was right: I had been out of touch. But I had no plans to get back in touch. Sorry, buddy.

The next one was Antwoine, his voice high and strained. “Adam, you need to get over to the hospital,” he said in his first message. The second, the third, the fourth, the fifth—they were all Antwoine. His tone was increasingly desperate. “Adam, where the hell are you? Come
on
, man. Get over here
now
.”

I stopped by Goddard’s office—he was still schmoozing with some of the Guru team—and said to Flo, “Can you tell Jock I’ve got an emergency? It’s my dad.”

70

I knew what it was even before I got there, of course, but I still drove like a lunatic. Every red light, every left-turning vehicle, every twenty-miles-an-hour-while-school-is-in-session sign—everything was conspiring to delay me, keep me from getting to the hospital to see Dad before he died.

I parked illegally because I couldn’t take the time to cruise the hospital parking garage for a space, and I ran into the emergency room entrance, banging the doors open the way the EMTs did when they were pushing a gurney, and rushed up to the triage desk. The sullen attendant was on the phone, talking and laughing, obviously a personal call.

“Frank Cassidy?” I said.

She gave me a look and kept chattering.

“Francis Cassidy!” I shouted. “Where is he?”

Resentfully she put down the phone and glanced at her computer screen. “Room three.”

I raced through the waiting area, pulled open the heavy double doors into the ward, and saw Antwoine sitting on a chair next to a green curtain. When he saw me he just looked blank, didn’t say anything, and I could see that his eyes were bloodshot. Then he shook his head slowly as I approached and said, “I’m sorry, Adam.”

I yanked the curtain open and there was my dad sitting up in the bed, his eyes open, and I thought,
You see, you’re wrong, Antwoine, he’s still with us, the bastard,
until it sank in that the skin of his face was the wrong color, with sort of a yellow waxy tinge to it, and his mouth was open, that was the horrible thing. For some reason that was what I fixated on; his mouth was open in a way it never is when you’re alive, frozen in an agonized gasp, a last desperate breath, furious, almost a snarl.

“Oh, no,” I moaned.

Antwoine was standing behind me with his hand on my shoulder. “They pronounced him ten minutes ago.”

I touched Dad’s face, his waxy cheek, and it was cool. Not cold, not warm. A few degrees cooler than it should be, a temperature you never feel in the living. The skin felt like modeling clay, inanimate.

My breath left me. I couldn’t breathe; I felt like I was in a vacuum. The lights seemed to flicker. Suddenly I cried out, “Dad. No.”

I stared at Dad through blurry tear-filled eyes, touched his forehead, his cheek, the coarse red skin of his nose with little black hairs coming out of the pores, and I leaned over and kissed his angry face. For years I’d kissed Dad’s forehead, or the side of his face, and he’d barely respond, but I was always sure I could see a tiny glint of secret pleasure in his eyes. Now he really wasn’t responding, of course, and it turned me numb.

“I wanted you to have a chance to say good-bye to him,” Antwoine said. I could hear his voice, feel the rumble, but I couldn’t turn around and look. “He went into that respirtary distress again and this time I didn’t even waste time arguing with him, I just called the ambulance. He was really gasping bad. They said he had pneumonia, probably had it for a while. They kept arguing about whether to put the tube in him but they never had the chance. I kept calling and calling.”

“I know,” I said.

“There was some time . . . I wanted you to say good-bye to him.”

“I know. It’s okay.” I swallowed. I didn’t want to look at Antwoine, didn’t want to see his face, because it sounded like he was crying, and I couldn’t deal with that. And I didn’t want him to see me crying, which I knew was stupid. I mean, if you don’t cry when your father dies, something’s wrong with you. “Did he . . . say anything?”

“He was mostly cursing.”

“I mean, did he—”

“No,” Antwoine said, really slowly. “He didn’t ask after you. But you know, he wasn’t really saying anything, he—”

“I know.” I wanted him to stop now.

“He was mostly cursing the doctors, and me. . . .”

“Yeah,” I said, staring at Dad’s face. “Not surprised.” His forehead was all wrinkled, furrowed angrily, frozen that way. I reached up and touched the wrinkles, tried to smooth them out but I couldn’t. “Dad,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

I don’t know what I meant by that. What was I sorry for? It was long past time for him to die, and he was better off dead than living in a state of constant agony.

The curtain on the other side of the bed pulled back. A dark-skinned guy in scrubs with a stethoscope. I recognized him as Dr. Patel, from the last time.

“Adam,” he said. “I’m so sorry.” He looked genuinely sad.

I nodded.

“He developed full-blown pneumonia,” Dr. Patel said. “It must have been underlying for a while, although in his last hospitalization his white count didn’t show anything abnormal.”

“Sure,” I said.

“It was too much for him, in his condition. Finally, he had an MI, before we could even decide whether to intubate him. His body couldn’t tolerate the assault.”

I nodded again. I didn’t want the details; what was the point?

“It’s really for the best. He could have been on a vent for months. You wouldn’t have wanted that.”

“I know. Thanks. I know you did everything you could.”

“There’s just—just him, is that right? He was your only surviving parent? You have no brothers or sisters?”

“Right.”

“You two must have been very close.”

Really? I thought. And you know this . . . how? Is that your professional medical opinion? But I just nodded.

“Adam, do you have any particular funeral home you’d like us to call?”

I tried to remember the name of the funeral home from when Mom died. After a few seconds it came to me.

“Let us know if there’s anything we can do for you,” Dr. Patel said.

I looked at Dad’s body, at his curled fists, his furious expression, his staring beady eyes, his gaping mouth. Then I looked up at Dr. Patel and said, “Do you think you could close his eyes?”

71

The guys from the funeral home came within an hour and zipped his body up in a body bag and took it away on a stretcher. They were a couple of pleasant, thickset guys with short haircuts, and both of them said, “I’m sorry for your loss.” I called the funeral-home director from my cell and numbly talked through what would happen next. He too said, “I’m sorry for your loss.” He wanted to know if there would be any elderly relatives coming from out of town, when I wanted to schedule the funeral, whether my father worshipped at a particular church where I’d like to have the service. He asked if there was a family burial plot. I told him where my mom was buried, that I was pretty sure Dad had bought two plots, one for Mom and one for him. He said he’d check with the cemetery. He asked when I wanted to come in and make the final arrangements.

I sat down in the ER waiting area and called my office. Jocelyn had already heard there was some emergency with my father, and she said, “How’s your dad?”