Shimmer

SHIMMER

SHIMMER

ERIC BARNES

This is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Unbridled Books
Denver, Colorado

Copyright © 2009 by Eric Barnes

All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof,
may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Barnes, Eric.
Shimmer / by Eric Barnes.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-1-932961-67-6
1. Chief executive officers—Fiction. 2. High technology industries—
Corrupt practices—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3602.A8338S54 2009
813'.6—dc22
2008053523

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Book Design by SH • CV

First Printing

For Elizabeth, Reed, Mackenzie, Andrew and Lucy.
We are our own party.

I'd started having dreams where I could fly. Not dreams where I took firm, superhero steps that catapulted me up and into the sky. Not dreams where I soared at high speed over rivers, mountains and streams. Instead they were only dreams where I brought my right knee to my chest, in another moment lifted my left knee from the ground, my tightly curled body now hovering a few feet in the air.

“If you were a food, what food would you be?”

It was Julie who responded to Whitley's question, not hesitating for a second, speaking as if this alone were her reason for working at this company. Julie said flatly, “Cream.”

One hour into my Monday morning staff meeting, and the sensation of flight from my previous night's dream still hung lightly around my thoughts, a distant and comforting feeling made more real with every digression we took.

“A chef's salad,” said our CFO, Cliff Rees.

Whitley nodded in appreciation. Julie's soft jaw shifted left as she
mouthed Cliff's words. Leonard paused for a moment, heavy eyes leaving the pages of the network overview in his hands. Cliff himself tapped buttons on his calculator, then squinted carefully at the results.

“No, wait,” Cliff said, lifting a hand from his calculator, interrupting Leonard before he could answer. “Sorry. I meant a cobb salad.”

It was six in the morning. We had been here since five. We had already approved $200 million in monthly expenses, agreed to acquire eight suppliers in Taiwan and Korea, authorized the opening of three new field offices in England and Ireland. Monday, and the day had just begun. Monday, and all of us had spent the whole weekend in this building. Monday, and we would not go home till sometime late that night.

This was Core Communications, a $20 billion company linking mainframe computers worldwide via a high-speed network of low-altitude satellites, fiber-optic cable and dedicated connections to the Internet backbone.

“Mousse,” Leonard said thickly, gold and broken light crossing his warm and round and biggest of faces, the sun rising to his left, the light somehow caught, then scattered by the high windows of the conference room. “Because all my life,” he said, “people have thought of me as pudding.”

Leonard, our head of technical development, was the smartest person I'd ever known.

“Would you be chocolaty rich?” Julie asked him, her small hands lifting from the surface of the table, her short fingers spreading as they met at her chin, her hands and arms and face all streaked in yellow and shadow.

“Would you have a texture so velvety,” Cliff asked slowly, smile growing, “pearly thick and buttery sweet?”

Cliff and Julie shared an unspoken fascination with TV commercials, every Monday ready to mimic the coded rhythms and grammatically senseless phrases each had heard as a child.

Julie nodded. “That and more.”

“I would be a filet,” Whitley was saying, absently dragging two
knuckles across the steel and wood conference table, the smoothness of her wrists scraping lightly across a hundred flaws and ridges, as always lowering her eyes behind her black hair as she thought, never hiding, never shy, just pulling in on herself for a moment to think. “A filet cooked well with only pepper and salt.”

As I listened, I couldn't stop myself from floating toward the high windows, my dream now taking me out into the twentieth-story air, flying in my way above the streets and cars and people of TriBeca, drifting toward the streaks of sunlight now reflecting off the shore of New Jersey.

“I want to write a novel that will be billed as a
sexcapade,
” I heard Julie saying.

“Why are you so preoccupied by sex?” Cliff asked.

“I'm not preoccupied by sex,” Julie said, the edges of her teeth just showing as she turned her head, smiled. “I'm preoccupied by sexual innuendo.”

Core was a company marked by the barely restrained sounds of a just-tempered joy. Five thousand employees so overly devoted to this place and each other. All so focused on the clients we served, all so happy in the work we did. Three years ago there had been just thirty people. Now the five thousand all took direction from us.

“The French are on board for the marketing campaign in Europe,” Whitley was saying, the group easily moving into the next topic, the conversation shifting in steady, rolling waves.

“The EU has approved a renegotiation of the Scottish buyout,” Julie said.

“The banks have signed off on the Asian joint venture,” Cliff said.

I faded out, I tuned back in, not bored, not uninterested. Just unable to put aside my flying, floating dream.

“You can't say
stroke
in a meeting,” Whitley was saying to Leonard, taking on the friendly tone of a lifeless HR manager leading a sexual harassment seminar, carefully articulating selected words of selected sentences. “
Stroke
has been deemed
inappropriate.
”

“You can't say
vagina,
” Julie was saying to no one in particular, she
too highlighting selected words as she spoke, “but you can say
vaginal delivery.
”

“You can't say
penis,
” Cliff was saying as he cleaned off the screen of his small calculator, “but you can say
penal colony.
”

“You can't say
insert,
” Julie was saying as she passed out reports to everyone, “but you can say
insertion.
”

“No,” Whitley said, voice returning to its normal tone. “You can say insert.”

Julie shook her head. “Not around me.”

Our stock price was up. Sales had quadrupled. We'd just bought this building. I now owned this view. These were the days after electronic commerce, after e-business and the dot-com layoffs, after the double burst in the market's bubble. The days when the market, the business press, day traders and the most level-headed of investors all looked at Core and saw a real company, a real product, real sales, real profits.

Ours was the bulletproof stock, they all said. Ours was the company without real competition or strategic threats.

That few of these outsiders actually understood what we did—this was unimportant.

“Planning for the next annual meeting has already begun,” Julie was saying. “There will be insightful 3D bar charts. We have prepared color bullet points. Leonard will conduct a tour of the redesigned Web site.”

Four of the brightest people, thirty to forty years old, all sitting around me, leaning heavily on the metal conference table or pushed back from the group, teetering effortlessly on the rear legs of their chairs. All caught in the spreading sunrise, each cast against a simple background of steel and glass and birch and sisal.

And all of them tired. Each silently carrying the accumulated exhaustion of the three years spent building this company. Seventy-hour weeks, separation from their families, stress beyond boundaries none of them could find time to see.

I'd slept just two hours before arriving in this office. I'd gotten e-mails from all of them at two in the morning, or three.

“Cliff, you'll play the role of cost-conscious CFO,” Julie was saying, “sprinkling your glowing financial projections with penny-pinching jokes about the excessive use of tape.”

Cliff nodded quickly. “Check.”

“Whitley, you'll play the role of the demanding yet creative COO,” Julie said, “the strategic spirit for us all who humbly portrays herself as nothing short of the life and mind behind our ongoing expansion and evolution.”

Whitley blinked twice in affirmation. “Prepare yourselves for a generous overuse of the word
interactive.
”

Julie nodded quickly. “Check.”

I spoke for the first time in fifteen minutes. “And I assume,” I started to say, words seeming to flow as slowly as my intermittent journey over the rooftops nearby, “that I will play the role of the vaguely mysterious, elusively appealing, yet charmingly effervescent CEO?”

Julie cocked her head, squinting her eyes, smiling with a warmth so artificial as she said, “As long as you keep using words like
elusive
and
effervescent.
”

Soothing, calming, steady. Aimless but important banter at the start of a week. Deceptively meaningless. Functionally critical. Our Monday meetings were a microcosm of the disjointed culture rampant in the company around us, our detailed assessment of current operations always balanced against a constant array of offhand asides. The company's most productive meetings were inevitably filled with half-wrought reviews of movies seen that weekend, with musical interludes marked by an almost karaoke-like fervor, with vague but enticing insights into each other's personal lives. For us, on a Monday, this was what settled the senior staff into its shared rhythms, it was what we relied on to set the tone, to get us ready, to prepare us for another week of this life.

And it was a phenomenon that would be repeated all morning in departments and groups companywide.

“Sioux City confirms they are six months ahead of schedule,” Leonard was saying.

“Omaha sees no hurdles to the pending acquisition,” Cliff was saying.

“Cincinnati is ready for an internal expansion,” Whitley was saying.

“Bellingham is poised to start its Asian production,” Julie was saying.

I nodded. I agreed. I rejected. I deferred.
Yes,
I said.
Good,
I said.
Absolutely not,
I whispered.
Please, tell me,
I asked carefully,
tell me this is not for real.

The three years had passed at a frightening speed, forming a connection among us all that seemed to have been built over a decade or more.

“We use St. Louis to shift cash into Omaha, right?” I asked.

“Clearly,” Whitley said. “Like Chicago to Cleveland. It's the same.”

“Whose group is watching for another false start on the lock boxes?” I asked, starting to point at Cliff, and Julie was already nodding.