Paranoia (9 page)

Noah Mordden took a hasty swig of his Dr Pepper and stood up. He had brown stir-fry stains on the front of his Aloha shirt. “Pardon me,” he said uncomfortably. “I have a one-on-one.” He left his dishes spread out on the table and bolted just as the white-blond guy got there, hand outstretched.

“Hey, man, how you doing?” the guy said. “Chad Pierson.”

I went to shake his hand, but he did one of those hip-hop too-cool-to-shake-hands-the-normal-way hand-slide things. His fingernails looked manicured. “Man,” he said, “I’ve heard so much about you, you stud!”

“All bullshit,” I said. “Marketing, you know.”

He laughed conspiratorially. “Nah, you’re supposed to be the
man
. I’m hangin’ with you, learn a trick or two.”

“I’m going to need all the help I can get. They tell me it’s sink-or-swim around here, and it definitely looks like the deep end.”

“So, Mordden give you his cynical egghead shit?”

I smiled neutrally. “Gave me his take.”

“All negative. He thinks he’s in some kind of soap opera, some Machiavelli-type deal. Maybe
he
is, but I wouldn’t pay him much attention.”

I realized that I’d just sat with the unpopular kid on the first day of school, but that just made me want to defend Mordden. “I like him,” I said.

“He’s an engineer. They’re all weird. You play hoops?”

“Some, sure.”

“Every Tuesday and Thursday lunchtime in the gym there’s always a pick-up game, we gotta get you on the court. Plus maybe you and me can go out for a drink some time, catch a game, Whatever.”

“Sounds great,” I said.

“Anyone tell you about the Corporate Games beer bash yet?”

“Not yet.”

“I guess that’s not exactly Mordden’s thing. Anyway, it’s a blast.” He was hyper, torquing his body from side to side like a basketball player looking for a lane to make a monster dunk. “So, bud, you’re going to be at the two o’clock, right?”

“Wouldn’t miss it.”

“Cool. Nice having you on the team, bud. We’re gonna do some damage, you and me.” He gave me a big smile.

14

Chad Pierson was standing at a whiteboard, writing up a meeting agenda with red and blue markers, when I walked into Corvette. This was a conference room like every other conference room I’d ever seen—the big table (only high-tech-designer black instead of walnut), the Polycom speakerphone console sitting in the middle of the table like a geometric black widow spider, a basket of fruit and ice bucket of soft drinks and juice boxes.

He gave me a quick wink as I sat down on one of the long sides of the table. There were a couple of other people already there. Nora Sommers was sitting at the head of the table, wearing black reading glasses on a chain around her neck, reading through a file and occasionally muttering something to Chad, her scribe. She didn’t seem to notice me.

Next to me sat a gray-haired guy in a blue Trion polo shirt tapping away on a Maestro, probably doing e-mail. He was thin but had a potbelly, skinny arms and knobby elbows poking out of his short-sleeved shirt, a fringe of gray hair and unexpectedly long gray sideburns, big red ears. He wore bifocals. If he’d had a different kind of shirt on, he’d probably be wearing a plastic shirt-pocket protector. He looked like an old-style nerd engineer from the Hewlett-Packard-calculator days. His teeth were small and brown, like he chewed tobacco.

This had to be Phil Bohjalian, the old-timer, though from the way Mordden talked about him, I half expected him to be using a quill and parchment. He kept sneaking nervous, furtive glances at me.

Noah Mordden slipped quietly into the room, didn’t acknowledge me or anyone else for that matter, and opened his notebook computer at the far end of the conference table. More people filed in, laughing and talking. There were maybe a dozen people in the room now. Chad finished at the whiteboard and put his stuff down in the empty seat next to me. He clapped a hand on my shoulder. “Glad you’re with us,” he said.

Nora Sommers cleared her throat, stood up, walked over to the whiteboard. “Well, why don’t we get started? All right, I’d like to introduce our newest team member, to those of you who haven’t yet had the privilege of meeting him. Adam Cassidy, welcome.”

She fluttered her red fingernails at me, and all heads turned. I smiled modestly, ducked my head.

“We were very fortunate in being able to steal Adam away from Wyatt, where he was one of the key players on Lucid. We’re hoping he’ll apply some of his magic to Maestro.” She smiled beatifically.

Chad spoke up, looking from side to side as if he were sharing a secret. “This bad boy’s a genius, I’ve talked to him, so everything you’ve heard is true.” He turned to me, his baby-blues wide, and shook my hand.

Nora went on, “As we all know far too well, we’re getting some serious pushback on Maestro. The knives are out throughout Trion, and I don’t have to name names.” There was some low chortling. “We have a rather large, looming deadline—a presentation before Mr. Goddard himself, where we will make the case for maintaining the Maestro product line. This is far more than a functional staff update, more than a checkpoint meeting. This is life or death. Our enemies want to put us in the electric chair; we’re pleading for a stay of execution. Are we clear about that?”

She looked around menacingly, saw obedient nods. Then she turned around and slashed through the first item in the agenda with a purple marker, a little too violently. Whipping back around, she handed a sheaf of stapled papers to Chad, who began passing them around to his right and left. They looked like some kind of specs, a product definition or product protocol or whatever, but the name of the product, presumably on the top sheet, had been removed.

“Now,” she said, “I’d like us to do an exercise—a demonstration, if you will. Some of you may recognize this product protocol, and if so, keep it to yourselves. As we work to refresh the Maestro, I want us all to think outside the box for a couple of moments, and I’d like to ask our newest star to look this over and give us his thoughts.”

She was looking right at me.

I touched my chest and said stupidly, “Me?”

She smiled. “You.”

“My . . . thoughts?”

“That’s right. Go/no-go. Greenlight this project or no. You, Adam, are the gatekeeper on this proposed product. Tell us what you think. Do we go for it, or not?”

My stomach dropped. My heart started thudding. I tried to control my breathing, but I could feel my face flushing as I thumbed through it. It was all but inscrutable. I really didn’t know what the hell it was for. I could hear little nervous noises in the silence—Nora clicking the top of the Expo marker off and on, twisting it with a scrunchy noise. Someone was playing with the little plastic flex-straw on his Minute Maid apple juice box, pushing it in and pulling it out, making it squeak.

I nodded slowly, wisely as I scanned it, trying not to look like a deer caught in the headlights, which was how I felt. There was some gobbledygook there about “market segment analysis” and “rough estimate of size of market opportunity.” Man oh man. The nerve-wracking music from
Jeopardy
was playing in my head.

Scrunch, scrunch. Squeak, squeak.

“Well, Adam? Go or no-go?”

I nodded again, trying to look fascinated and amused at the same time. “I like it,” I said. “It’s clever.”

“Hmm,” she said. There was some low chuckling. Something was up. Wrong answer, I guessed, but I could hardly change it now.

“Look,” I said, “based solely on the product definition, of course, it’s hard to say much more than—”

“That’s all we have to go on at this point,” she interrupted. “Right? Go or no-go?”

I riffed. “I’ve always believed in being bold,” I said. “I’m intrigued. I like the form factor, the handwriting recognition specs. . . . Given the usage model, the market opportunity, I’d certainly pursue this further, at least to the next checkpoint.”

“Aha,” she said. One side of her mouth turned up in an evil smile. “And to think our friends in Cupertino didn’t even need Adam’s wisdom to greenlight this stink bomb. Adam, these are the specs for the Apple Newton. One of the biggest bombs Cupertino ever dropped. Cost them over five hundred million dollars to develop, and
then
, when it came out, they lost sixty million bucks a
year
on it.” More chuckles. “But it sure gave
Doonesbury
and Jay Leno plenty of material back in 1993.”

People were looking away from me. Chad was biting the inside of his cheek, looking grave. Mordden seemed to be in another world. I wanted to rip Nora Sommers’s face off, but I did the good-loser thing.

Nora looked around the table, from one face to the next, her eyebrows arched. “There’s a lesson here. You’ve always got to drill down, look beyond the marketing hype, get under the hood. And believe me, when we present to Jock Goddard in two weeks, he’s going to be getting under the hood. Let’s keep that at top of mind.”

Polite smiles all around: everyone knew Goddard was a gearhead, a car nut.

“All right,” she said. “I think I’ve made my point. Let’s move on.”

Yeah, I thought. Let’s move on. Welcome to Trion. You’ve made your point. I felt a hollowness in the pit of my stomach.

What the hell had I gotten myself into?

15

The meeting between my dad and Antwoine Leonard did not go smoothly. Well, actually, it was a total, unmitigated disaster. Put it this way: Antwoine encountered significant pushback. No synergy. Not a strategic fit.

I arrived at Dad’s apartment right after I finished my first day at Trion. I parked the Audi down the block, because I knew Dad was always looking out of his window, when he wasn’t watching his thirty-six-inch TV screen, and I didn’t want to get grief from him about my new car. Even if I told him I’d gotten a big raise or something, he’d find a way to put some nasty spin on it.

I got there just in time to see Maureen wheeling a big black nylon suitcase up to a cab. She was tight-lipped, wearing her “dressy” outfit, a lime green pantsuit with a riot of tropical flowers and fruits all over it, and a perfectly white pair of sneakers. I managed to intercept her just as she was yelling at the driver to put her suitcase in the trunk and handed her a final check (including a generous bonus for pain and suffering), thanked her profusely for her loyal service, and even tried to give her a ceremonial peck on the cheek, but she turned her head away. Then she slammed the door, and the cab took off.

Poor woman. I never liked her, but I couldn’t help but feel sorry for the torture my father had put her through.

Dad was watching Dan Rather, really mostly yelling at Rather, when I arrived. He despised all the network anchormen equally, and you didn’t want to get him started on the “losers” on cable. The only cable shows he liked were the ones where opinionated right-wing hosts bait their guests, try to piss them off, froth at the mouth. That was his kind of sport these days.

He was wearing one of those sleeveless white undershirts that are sometimes called “wifebeaters.” They always gave me the willies. I had bad associations with them—whenever he “disciplined” me as a kid, he seemed to be wearing one. I could still remember, clear as a snapshot, the time when, eight years old, I accidentally spilled Kool-Aid on his Barcalounger, and he took the strap to me, standing over me—stained ribbed undershirt, red sweating face—roaring, “See what you made me do?” Not the most pleasant memory.

“When’s this new guy getting here?” he said. “He’s already late, isn’t he?”

“Not yet.” Maureen refused to spend a minute showing him the ropes, so unfortunately there’d be no overlap.

“What’re you all dressed up for? You look like an undertaker—you’re making me nervous.”

“I told you, I started a new job today.”

He turned back to Rather, shaking his head in disgust. “You got fired, didn’t you?”

“From Wyatt? No, I left.”

“You tried to coast like you always do, and they fired you. I know how these things work. They can smell a loser a mile off.” He took a couple of heavy breaths. “Your mother always spoiled you. Like hockey—you coulda gone pro if you applied yourself.”

“I wasn’t that good, Dad.”

“Easy to say that, isn’t it? Makes it easier if you just say that. That’s where I really fucked you up—I put you through that high-priced college so you could spend all your time partying with your fancy friends.” He was only partly right, of course: I did work-study to put myself through college. But let him remember what he wanted to remember. He turned to look at me, his eyes bloodshot, beady. “So where are all your fancy friends now, huh?”

“I’m okay, Dad,” I said. He was on one of his jags, but fortunately the doorbell rang, and I almost ran to answer it.

Antwoine was right on time. He was dressed in pale blue hospital scrubs, which made him look like an orderly or a male nurse. I wondered where he picked them up, since he’d never worked in a hospital, as far as I knew.

“Who’s that?” Dad shouted hoarsely.

“It’s Antwoine,” I said.

“
Antwoine?
What the hell kinda name is Antwoine? You hired some French faggot?” But Dad had already turned to see Antwoine standing at the front door, and his face had gone purple. He was squinting, his mouth open in horror. “Jesus—Christ!” he said, puffing hard.

“How’s it going?” Antwoine said, giving me a bone-crushing handshake. “So this must be the famous Francis Cassidy,” he said, approaching the Barcalounger. “I’m Antwoine Leonard. Pleasure to meet you, sir.” He spoke in a deep, pleasant baritone.

Dad kept staring, puffing in and out. Finally he said, “Adam, I wanna talk to you, right now.”

“Sure, Dad.”

“No—you tell
An-twoine
or whatever the hell his name is to get outta here, let you and me talk.”

Antwoine looked at me, puzzled, wondering what he should do.

“Why don’t you bring your stuff to your room?” I said. “It’s the second door on the right. You can start unpacking.”

He carried two nylon duffel bags down the hall. Dad didn’t even wait for him to get out of the room before he said, “Number one, I don’t want a
man
taking care of me, you understand? Find me a woman. Number two, I don’t want a
black
man here. They’re unreliable. What were you thinking? You were gonna leave me alone with Leroy? I mean, look at your
homeboy
here, the tattoos, the braids. I don’t want that in my house. Is this so damned much to ask?” He was puffing harder than ever. “How can you bring a black guy in here, after all the trouble I have with those goddamned kids from the projects breaking into my apartment?”