Shimmer (13 page)

“I think maybe you're being a little paranoid.”

“Earthquakes, sure,” he said, voice fading a bit, the noise around him invading the phone once more. “But a tornado?”

“You know,” I said, and again I wasn't sure he would hear me, “all of this—all these sales—it completely ignores the fact that at some point we won't be able to deliver anymore.”

“Well, fuck that, Robbie,” he said, his voice clear, and I could almost see him focusing on the phone, could see his sharp face, his black, wet eyes, even his long hands all now focused on the one and only thing that mattered to him. “Just fuck it. We can deliver today, all right, and I don't give a shit about anything else.”

“Wonderful.”

“Fuck you. Don't get all superior with me. Computers fail. Software fails. The company will collapse and we'll announce that our system stopped working. Period. We'll call it overload. We'll crash and burn with some ugly articles in the papers. Bankruptcy. Hand everything to the attorneys. Auction off the assets and blame it all on some rogue section. Fuck it. Who cares? You're rich. I'm rich. I don't fucking care.”

“It's not that simple, Trevor,” I said, even though, as always, I couldn't help but find some truth in what he was saying. Something possible. Something attractive.

“You see that too, don't you?” he said, voice so close to the phone now, speaking to me as if he were in the room.

I stared out the window. “What about the lying, Trevor? We are lying.”

“Okay, Robbie. I hear you. Really. You've made a point about the ethics of the situation. I hear you. But hear me out, all right? Because I mean what I'm about to say. Eff-you-see-kay-why-oh-you. Fuck you. All right? I don't care about lying. Everyone lies. Companies lie. Churches lie. Teachers lie. The fucking butcher lies.”

“What the hell are you talking about, Trevor?”

“I'm hungry. I'm light-headed. Forget the thing about teachers and butchers. What I'm saying is it doesn't matter to me. It shouldn't matter to you. And I don't care about anyone, anyone else in the whole motherfucking world.”

“Do you really care what happens to me?” I asked, standing, moving through my dim office, following the long windows. “Or do you just want me to stay on board so I'll keep this all afloat as long as possible?”

“Of course I fucking care. Besides these pissant, pantywaisted clients I suck up to on an hourly basis and the salespeople who are dependent upon me for their every thought and word, besides them, you, Robbie, are the only person in the entire fucking world who will speak to me. No one else will talk to me. No one else will even accept a phone call from me. People hate me, Robbie. They're disgusted by me. Christ, they're fucking
scared
of me. And here's the thing, Robbie. Here's what's worst of all. I like it. I enjoy this. I enjoy every waking moment of my life.”

I was standing just a few inches from the window now, touching the glass with my hand. “I have to say, Trevor, that I'm scared of you too.”

“And you should be. I'm a lying, self-serving, arrogant monster. I don't sleep. I drink too much. I want to have more money than anyone. Anyone, Robbie. And that alone could drive me to do anything.”

I shook my head. There was nowhere to go with Trevor. No end to it. No point to our talking, no purpose in what was said beyond the goal he defined himself.

“So just when is all this going to crash, anyway?” Trevor asked.

I looked toward the darkened floor, blinking. “I still don't know for sure,” I said.

“There's a fuckload more money to make before this goes under,” he said.

“Will you stop using words like
fuckload,
” I said, seeing a glimpse of myself in the light of the glass, tall and young and thinner, it seemed, than I'd remembered.

“Yeah, I know,” he said, and for a second he paused, the whirling sound of the airport filling his silence. “It's silly, really,” he said in a voice that had slowed just slightly. “It makes me feel good, though. Again I think about the Green Beret analogy. The lone soldier out on the battlefield.”

“I think it was a Navy Seal,” I said, smiling.

“Whatever,” he said, voice slowing another step, the tailing roar of jet engines passing between his words. “My point,” he said, “is that I find comfort in playing the role of the asshole.”

The light was turning red and orange in front of me. My reflection dimming in the glass, the fading image of the CEO on twenty. “What if we only had one day left?” I asked suddenly, not sure why.

It was another moment before he spoke, and I wasn't sure he'd heard me. “I have to eat now, Robbie. I have to sleep. I'm playing golf on Sunday.”

“You told me.”

“Really?” he asked carefully. “Did I tell you about the CIA meeting?”

“We'll bring order to their metropolis,” I said, and again I remembered Omaha.

Mention Omaha.

“Where am I, Robbie?” he asked slowly, seeming to pause and look around.

“Kansas City.”

“And what did I do in sales?”

“Forty-nine plus nine in options.”

“That's pretty good,” he said, slower now, his voice fading again. “Isn't it?” he asked.

“Eat something,” I said. “Sleep.”

“I hate to golf.”

“Sleep.”

“One day left,” he said, still quiet. “Did you just tell me that?”

“Maybe.”

“And how close did Leonard get in Budapest?” he asked.

“Close,” I said.

He was silent. Wandering, I imagined, though it was an image foreign to my thoughts of Trevor. But for that moment, I saw Trevor wandering.

“Rogue sections in the DMZ,” I heard him say, voice drifting from the phone. “SWAT finding problems.”

Wandering.

“One more day isn't enough, Robbie,” he said

I was quiet.

“And Whitley,” he said. “SWAT. They could find us. You're saying they could find us soon.”

“Yes,” I said.

“Forget the money, Robbie. For a second. Because really, I just don't want all this to end.”

I touched the window again, pressing my fingers against the glass, watching the light on the horizon, shifting red to purple in just the last minute.

“Do you?” he asked.

I stared at those fingers. Saw the sky behind them. Waiting to answer. Trying to find an answer. “Do I what?” I asked, phone turned away from my mouth. Hoping Trevor would move on to something else.

“Do you care?” he asked, voice still quieting, still fading with every word. “Do you care if this ends?”

I took my hand from the glass. “Sometimes I'm not sure,” I said.

“The last time I slept,” Trevor said, not a whisper but halting, so quiet that I had to replay each phrase, repeating it in my mind to be sure of what he'd said, “the last time I slept, I had a dream about your dad.”

I watched the sky change color. I saw beside me, above me, how the light was now gone from my office and I was standing in near darkness.

Talk to him about Omaha another time.

Next week, Omaha.

In a moment, I asked Trevor, “What was he doing?”

“Nothing,” I heard Trevor say, and still I had to repeat his slowing words as he spoke. “Nothing. Just watching. The way I remember him. The thing I miss. He was just sitting there, in your chair, watching the two of us play on the floor.”

It was only a few months after our IPO that, as I neared my office door, a man and woman broke into tears, the man rushing forward, throwing himself at my feet.

“Robbie!” he moaned loudly, his heavy face pinched in pain. “Robbie, it's your papa! It's your papa!”

My father had died years earlier. But as an adopted only son turned near billionaire, I'd found that this was a scene I would have to deal with regularly. People worldwide hoping they could get rich claiming to be my birth parents.

My assistant had stood up at his desk, covering his eyes as he slowly turned away from me. My driver—a man who most employees knew was actually my armed personal bodyguard—winced and rose from a chair near my assistant but only stared at the man now writhing on the floor.

“It's your papa!” the man moaned again, his wet mouth twisted with some uneven mix of joy and pain.

The strikingly short woman standing over him stared up at me,
teary-eyed, unblinking, her wide mouth choking on words she found herself unable to form.

My assistant turned back to me. “I'm sorry, Robbie,” he said quietly. “They had authorization. They showed proper ID. They were supposed to be with the local news.”

When I was a child, my father had told me that my birth parents had died a few weeks after I was born. During the three years of mass publicity for this company, however, women and men kept calling me, writing me, running up to me in the lobby, all telling me I was their long-lost son.

Sometimes they even ran up to Trevor, having seen our pictures in the same article or feature and confusing him with me.

Single and fifty when he brought me into his California home, my father was neither a hardened, emotionally vacant businessman who'd groomed me to be a CEO nor a kind and gentle caregiver who'd always wanted the deeper warmth of raising a child.

All his life he'd lacked the time to get married. At fifty he'd found himself wanting to be a father. Because, as he told me when I was much older, over time he'd become jealous of the joy his friends had found in raising their children.

“Joy?” I'd asked him carefully, the two of us riding in a car near his office in Redding, California. I was twenty-five then. Living and working in Silicon Valley. Home for the weekend to see my father.

He nodded. He shrugged. “Not a word I use often,” he said quietly. “But what they found, what I wanted, was joy.”

My father was a gracious, settled man who I most easily remember sitting in his office, at work, his long hands in careful motion, moving simply and slowly as he talked about business. Even when I was very young, as I played in the corner of his office while he met with the people who worked for him, I could see how he was the person in control. Talking carefully, with a measure and weight, those strong hands moving slowly across the pages of a report or plan, fingers pulling gently at a paper clip or staple. He was the owner, the president, always leading and admired.

And since then, all my life, he'd been that whisper in my ear.

You know, Robbie. You know this is right. And you know that is wrong.

Yet only in this fourth year after he'd died did I realize that my conscience had been formed by the work he'd done. Not by anything he'd ever said aloud. He'd committed his life to his company, and to me, and nothing else. Work was our only religion, ever present. It was in the phone calls I heard my father place after he'd put me to bed. It was in the trips we took to visit clients—and theme parks—all over the country. It was in the talk from the investors who joined us for Wednesday dinner, each taking a break from their discussions with my father to spend some time with me on the floor, or at my table with the crayons, or in front of the basketball hoop outside.

Rarely did my father seem distracted by work. Rarely did the pressures enter our home or life together. And yet never was there a time when work was, really, gone.

Maybe it's like being a farmer's child, growing up in a world you never question, that permeates your existence, that you enjoy and see no reason to leave. It's what you know. What you want. What has always been.

It just is.

My father certainly saw in me the next generation of his company. But it wasn't that he pushed me to take over his business. Instead it was something I always wanted. He told me often that I did not have to do it. But I always said I did. Because always I'd expected it to happen.

My father's mistake wasn't pushing me too hard. It wasn't setting too high a standard for me. My father's mistake was not holding me back, just a bit, from the only life and pursuit and meaning I'd known.

In the self-pitying days of middle school, on a few first dates in high school and even college, I sometimes portrayed myself as an orphan child plucked from the gray and damp aisles of some Dickensian maternity ward. Whispering this darkest truth to the girl at my side, I
could sometimes evoke from her a kind word, a muttered moan. Sometimes even a careful, soft but quite promising kiss.

But I had not been an orphan child. I hadn't been plucked from some dark maternity ward. Actually I'd been purchased, bid on through a private network of wealthy white families, a transaction brokered by a husband-and-wife team that, decades later, was shut down following an investigation by a national TV newsmagazine.

And by the time I'd reached my twenties, all this—the adoption, the purchase—struck me as absolutely irrelevant, adolescent angst I had long since accepted, incidental cocktail banter that did not haunt, curse or bother me. My life with my father had always been nice, often great, and never once truly bad. It was my father who had told me that my birth parents were both dead. He'd had no reason to lie to me. I have always been certain he never lied to me about anything.

Except that three years of constant calls, claims and inquiries from so many people had, at some level I could not control, made me wonder if maybe my birth parents actually were alive.

And except that Trevor had always liked to raise doubts about my father's story. Only because Trevor was mean. Only because Trevor forever seized on any possible weakness in the people around him.

“There was always talk,” Trevor would say to me. “When we were kids. Anytime you left the room. Christmas, Thanksgiving, a Wednesday night in spring. Always there was talk.”

“Talk of . . .?” I would ask, sitting back, turning away, having learned early on that dealing with Trevor usually called for as much distance and disdain as possible.