The Balance Thing (3 page)

T
hree days later I presented myself to the receptionist at PlanetCom prepared to knock them dead—despite the fact that I knew absolutely nothing about the job I was interviewing for. Mitch had been pretty vague about the details. He'd just said there was a project in a horrible mess and he'd thought of me. I told myself that was because he knew I was brilliant at solving problems and not because the phrase “horrible mess” called me to mind.

The first person I spoke with seemed as clueless about the position as I was. But she was just a recruiter sent from human resources. She was only there to get me to sign a few nondisclosure forms and verify that I was indeed Rebecca Mansfield, Marketing Genius, before taking me to the real interviewers.

She led me down a series of hallways, making lefts and rights and more lefts and leaving me with no hope that I'd ever be able to find my way back without an escort. Of course, I'd have an escort. The big pink tag I'd been instructed to wear around my neck clearly stated that I was not to be set loose in the building alone.

Actually, as I watched the candy-colored stripes on the
HR rep's pantsuit streaming down the hall ahead of me, I reflected that the security seemed a little over the top. There were cameras in every corridor, and everyone I saw moving purposefully from closed door to closed door wore a color-coded picture ID badge. Stripy suit had to keep pulling her (bright orange) badge out and swiping it in readers as we went farther into the labyrinth of commerce that was PlanetCom.

I knew the company's major focus was on wireless communication, which was presumably a pretty competitive marketplace, but I'd never seen this level of corporate paranoia. I started to get a little excited. Maybe what they were doing was so earth-shatteringly, groundbreakingly revolutionary that corporate spies were just dying to get their hands on it. Maybe, after all this time, I was on to a winner.

I started peeking at the little placards outside the rooms we passed. The personality quirks of high-tech companies often show up in the naming scheme for their conference rooms. I worked for one place that held meetings in Yosemite, Yellowstone, and Joshua Tree. The implication was that they were into some sort of “green” technology, but no. They produced a hideously boring (which is not how I marketed it) customer contact tracking system.

If I was trying to learn anything about PlanetCom from their room names, I was out of luck, unless I could infer anything from A207E or S99F. I couldn't for the life of me figure out the meanings behind the codes, which was possibly the point.

At last we arrived at C767U, which was just as cozy as it sounds. The HR rep gave me a professional smile and sent me into the room with assurances that Chad would be there
in a few minutes, and in the meantime I could enjoy the bottle of water she'd provided and stare at the clean white-boards.

“Great,” I said, and she vanished.

Chad. I had no idea if he was someone I'd be reporting to or someone who'd be reporting to me. Or possibly neither. I opened the water and sipped self-consciously, wondering if there were hidden cameras on me, observing how I behaved when unobserved. I was trying to decide if it would look bad for me to subtly adjust my interview outfit (sober black Donna Karan skirt and perfectly tailored Thomas Pink blouse) when the door opened.

A preppy young executive type appeared, wearing khakis and a blue Oxford shirt with a discreet PlanetCom logo over his heart. He had that intentionally harried look that people wear around an office, the one that says “God, I'm busy and important” and was calculated to make you feel grateful for five minutes of his time.

“Becks Mansfield? I'm Chad Barlow. I've heard so much about you!”

I heard the faint sound of a starter pistol, and we were off.

 

I WAS FABULOUS.
I know I was fabulous because people kept saying things like “Really? That's fabulous!” I was amazing. I'm sure I was amazing because there was more than one instance of someone saying, “Gosh, that's amazing!”

I might not have found my dream job in the past few years, but I had damn well learned how to kill in an interview.

I was three people into the process before I had a glimmer
of understanding of what exactly PlanetCom did and what precisely they'd like me to do for them. That understanding came with the realization that I'd have to shelve any feelings I had about the protection of individual privacy rights and somehow embrace the beauty of point-to-point wireless communication, but for the right salary I could probably do that.

Suffice it to say, things went well.

Particularly with one Mr. Chad Barlow. I'd spent five hours talking to five people and thought I was finished when Chad came back for seconds.

“Exhausted yet?”

I was, but I grinned in an I'm-game-for-anything way. “Hell no. Bring it on.”

He came in and closed the door behind him. “I don't think you'll be surprised to know we're all pretty excited about you.”

Not surprised, no. But relieved anyway. “Thanks.”

He sat and gave me an endearingly shy smile. “Speaking for myself, I'm very excited.”

Okay, he clearly expected me to say something. “So what brings you back, Chad?”

“Oh.” His eyes widened. “Someone else wants to chat with you, just for a minute, if that's okay.”

“Sure, no problem.”

“So I thought I'd grab the chance to spend a little more time with you myself.” There was that smile again.

“Do you mind telling me who I'll be seeing?”

“It's such a coincidence. She couldn't believe it when I mentioned your name earlier. Said she'd worked with you back—Oh, here she is now!”

The door opened again to reveal a small thirtyish gnome.
She wore a floaty gray dress and had a seriously bad dye job. The long red hair parted in the middle and hanging over her face, paired with the hideous dress, indicated that she was going for some sort of Druid priestess look. I remembered her instantly. Everything except her name and where I'd worked with her. But the hair was etched in my memory. And, if the pieces were coming together correctly, she'd had a habit of knitting in meetings.
Madame Defarge
, I thought, but knew I was wrong. So I did what any other self-respecting marketing professional would. I faked it.

“Oh my God! It's so great to see you!”

She smiled a tight smile that triggered a little something, but no name popped magically to the forefront of my brain.

“Becks.” She dropped my name on the table like a gauntlet.

“Wow, I had no idea you were here!”

She turned to Chad. “Could you give us a minute?”

“Sure.” He turned to me with another smile, this one less shy and possibly inappropriate. “I'm sure I'll be talking to you again, Becks.”

And he winked. Definitely inappropriate, but I didn't care because the next thing he said was “See you, Rita” before he left.

“Rita!” I gushed. “How long have you been at PlanetCom?”

She gave me a look that could have frozen lava in its tracks. “Since you fired me, you bitch.”

 

“SHE DIDN'T!”
Max's jaw actually dropped, which is exactly why I'd called him to meet me for drinks the instant
I'd gotten out of PlanetCom. You could always count on Max to provide a gratifying audience for life's little disasters.

“She did,” I affirmed. “‘You bitch,' she said.”

“And did you remember firing her?”

“I didn't
fire
her.” I downed the last of my lemon drop and looked meaningfully at the empty glass. Max, bless him, made the universal “another round” gesture at the bartender. “It was when I was a manager for a minute and a half at WiredGlobe and I got stuck doing a bunch of layoffs before I got laid off myself. She called me a bitch then, too.”

“Well, given the circumstances, I suppose that might have been expected.”

“But, come on!” I protested. “She still hasn't gotten over it?”

Max patted my arm. “Not everyone is as used to it as you are. Now, take it from the top. Tell me everything she said.”

I nodded and reached for my new drink. “First”—I sipped—“she told me she'd see me in hell before she'd let me get a job at PlanetCom.”

“Ouch.”

“Then she just started shouting at me. That I was—again—a bitch, and that everyone at WiredGlobe had hated me and—” It was too much. I had to stop for vodka. “She said I was a corporate machine,” I told him. “She said I didn't care about anything but getting promoted.”

This was the point at which Max was required to murmur “That's complete nonsense” or something equally reassuring. I looked at him expectantly.

He suddenly found the stem of his glass completely fascinating.

“Max?”

“Was that all she said? Becks, she's just a sad, bitter woman. You shouldn't spend one more minute thinking about her. Life's too short.”

I nodded glumly. “Life's too short,” I agreed. “Assuming you have a life.”

And by a life, I meant a job.

A
fter a few days of licking my Rita-induced wounds, I decided I'd better keep my day job. That is, I'd better keep vanquishing the evil foes of Vladima, Defender of the Night. Meaning, I'd better go see Josh.

The studio where he and a small but dedicated band of artists and animators created Vladima's bloodthirsty world was located in a low brick building on Folsom, in a neighborhood where electrical supply houses and auto repair shops were giving way to trendy bars and industrial lofts. They were pretty nice digs, considering the fact that I couldn't figure out how Josh managed to fund the whole enterprise.

There was no reception desk, just an electronic keypad where you could enter your security code and come in off the street to a minuscule lobby containing a staircase to the business upstairs (which I suspected was some sort of shady enterprise, since nobody ever seemed to come or go there) and the door leading to Vladima's inner sanctum.

I keyed my code into that door, entered the bat cave, and let my eyes adjust to the gloom. The décor of the place was undoubtedly inspired by the subject matter created there.
The walls were painted dark gray, and I wasn't sure if the mottled concrete floor was a pricey interior designer's reference to an oil slick or evidence that the building had once actually been a garage. There were posters of Vladima everywhere, alongside various other superheroes and assorted children of the night. Pride of place was given to an original movie poster of the silent classic
Nosferatu
, autographed by the director F. W. Murnau himself. It was kept under glass, and more than once when deadlines had been close I'd seen candles burning under it. The staff took their work very seriously.

The office area was barely big enough to contain twelve cubicles for Vladima's minions (their term, not mine) and one glass-walled office for Josh. The cubicles were constructed out of something that looked like gray burlap. The only windows letting a little natural light into the place were made of a thick wire-reinforced glass that left the place pretty murky, which is just how the inhabitants liked it. I'd once commented on how dismal it was and had been given a lengthy lecture on eyestrain suffered by computer artists and how soft indirect light was best for them.

It certainly didn't do much for anyone's complexion.

I could see Josh was on the phone, so I wandered through the aisle of cubicles, heading for the break room at the opposite end of the building. The minions all wore headphones and were pretty much glued to their monitors, pushing pixels with intense concentration. It would take more than one mild-mannered voiceover artist to disturb their concentration.

And that's what I was in Vladima's world. My role in the process was to show up when the script was written and record Vladima's dialogue. Other people, most of them
actual professional actors, came in at different times to record the rest of the characters.

Josh wrote the scripts and created the storyboards for the animation. He'd started out with Vladima by drawing her in comic book format, and that's what the storyboards still looked like. After the voices—audio assets—were recorded, he farmed out the production of the animated films to the minions. Some did backgrounds, some did characters' illustrations, some did the actual programming of the animation and coding of the Web site.

When the whole thing was put together, it was usually necessary to come in and rerecord some of the dialogue. That's where we were with our latest offering,
Daemons of the Night
.

In the break room, a large wall-mounted plasma screen was running the most recent version of the feature. I entered in hopes of making a nice cup of tea and was confronted with my animated alter-ego sinking her pointy teeth into a very nasty-looking creature in a red velvet cape. Then she looked up, and I heard myself say “
Mmmm
. There's nothing I like more than French food.”

Uh-huh. So the creature must have been the murderous Richelieu, who was a sort of right-wing time-traveling political assassin. Lovely. I watched as the battle between good (me—um, Vladima) and evil (Richelieu) drew to its predictable conclusion.

“What do you think?” Josh stood in the doorway behind me, his attention on the screen. He was dressed unsurprisingly in black jeans and a black dress shirt with the tails out. He was just over six feet tall and needed to put on a few pounds. If the shadows under his dark eyes were any indica
tion, he also needed to get more sleep. Onscreen there was a sort of slurpy sound. He winced and ran a hand distractedly through his mess of dark hair. “I'm still not happy with the sucking.” He shifted his gaze to me. “How are you?”

I resisted the urge to say “sucking” and opted for “peachy.”

He gave me a critical look. “Things that bad?”

“You don't even want to know.”

His eyes met mine for a minute, then he looked down at the floor and nodded as if he was deep in thought. “Cup of tea before we get started?”

“You read my mind.”

We caught up for a while before heading for the sound booth. Josh had been working too hard (not unusual) and trying to recover from some staffing changes. He'd lost the woman who specialized in sound effects a few weeks ago and wasn't happy with her replacement.

“It's not just the bloodsucking,” he told me, stirring a cup of Darjeeling. “It's everything. The footsteps on gravel sound too hollow now, and the
thwannng
of the crossbow is just lame.”

“There's nothing lamer than a lame
thwannng
,” I commiserated.

“And I still don't get why Amy left like that,” Josh went on. “No notice or anything. Just that e-mail.”

“Amy got a call from George Lucas,” I reminded him. What I didn't say was that it was stunningly obvious to everyone else in the studio that Amy had been in love with Josh for at least two years. Two years is a long time to go unnoticed by a dark brooding poet of the undead. “Shall we get started?”

“Might as well.” He led me down the hall, away from the cubicle farm, past a horrifically cluttered conference room to the small sound booth at the back of the building. I stepped into the booth and thanked heaven once more that I wasn't claustrophobic.

The room was about the size of a small walk-in closet, with walls covered in (surprise) gray foam that looked as if it had once had giant eggs packed in it. There was a thirteen-inch monitor where I could watch the movie play. Aside from that, we're talking a stool, a microphone, and a set of headphones.

The actual recording wasn't hard work. It was even kind of fun, now that the animations were complete and I could see them on the monitor as I spoke the lines. For the most part, Vladima's speech was synced to what I'd already done. But script rewrites and other minor changes always made it necessary for me to redo some bits.

Josh was stationed at a mixing board in a slightly larger walk-in closet next door, separated from the sound booth by a window. He could flip a switch and talk into my headphones to give me direction. It always surprised me how intimate it felt to have his voice in my head.

“Okay, let's go.” He waited until I'd gotten as comfortable as a person can get on a wooden stool. “Take it from ‘Hello, Cardinal,' okay?”

I gave him the thumbs-up and waited for the video playback. Then I sneered “Hello, Cardinal. It's been a long time. Nice to see you haven't lost your fashion sense.”

And for this I get paid. Kind of a lot.

 

I LOST TRACK
of the time after a while and was a little surprised when Josh said, “That's it, Becks. Let's call it a day.” He was rubbing his eyes.

“Josh,” I said into the mike, “excuse me for saying so, but you look like hell.”

He gave me a tired grin and shrugged. “Then you should buy me a drink.”

Emerging from the booth, I was surprised to find that all the minions were gone; then I realized it was after ten on a Friday night. Josh locked the place up and we walked down Folsom to Wilde Oscar's, a sort of hip-SOMA-club-meets-cool-Irish-pub kind of place where they know how to pour a proper Guinness.

We took a corner booth, and the minute I sat down I regretted taking Josh up on his drink suggestion. Every woman in the place had checked him out as we'd made our way through the crowd. I was still stinging from the hostility I'd caught from Rita the other day. The last thing I needed was to feel brutally assessed by a collection of bar Bettys who all figured they'd look better sitting across from Josh than I did.

I knew that on a good day I can hold my own in the looks department. I wear my darkish hair in a low-maintenance but reasonably fashionable cut, and I work out often enough to be able to pull off most styles that didn't insist on bare hip bones. So on a good day I had no complaints.

This was not a good day. I'd been wallowing in self-pity since the disaster at PlanetCom, and to be honest I wasn't even sure I'd brushed my hair that morning. Let alone suited up in the combat gear necessary for Friday night drinks at a
South of Market bar. I decided I'd have a quick pint and get out of there.

But Guinness isn't really a quick sort of drink. So eventually I just sat back in the booth, warmed by the stout and the sound of Josh's voice. If I didn't really pay attention to what he was saying, it was all rather pleasant.

Of course he was discussing Vladima. Vladima's latest adventure and what remained to be done to finalize it. Vladima's next storyline, where she'd meet an archenemy who was finally worthy of her skills. The whole Vladima world that he'd constructed and apparently lived in.

In case I haven't made it clear, I should mention that Vladima is a good guy. Sure, she's a bloodsucker, but she kills only really bad types. In effect, she's a vampire with a social conscience. She may not suck for truth, justice, and the American way, but she does suck with a strict moral code.

From a marketing standpoint, it was brilliant. Josh had tapped into the whole Goth, disaffected youth demographic with a heroine who is very much an outcast (what with being undead and all) but who still cares enough about society's ills to rise above her own pain and save humanity's sorry ass in each and every Webisode. Sometimes twice. The fact that she wears a black leather body suit and is stacked as only a cartoon character can be stacked doesn't hurt her download statistics either.

I caught the tail end of what Josh was saying. “…I'm boring you to death, aren't I?”

I made a face. “I may be just the tiniest bit over Vladima for the night.”

He scrunched his hair with both hands. “God, I need to get a life.”

Now, that caught my interest. “What did you say?”

He shrugged. “I'm sick of spending all day sitting around in the dark getting deeper and deeper into a mythology that has no real point.”

“You're kidding.”

He gave me a lame grin. “Becks, I hope you don't think I'm so deluded that I don't realize Vladima's chief appeal is to fifteen-year-old boys who have a very small chance of ever getting laid.”

Wow. “Actually,” I told him, “I did think you were that delusional.”

He laughed. “There!” he said. “Just there, did you hear that? Do you have any idea how long it's been since I laughed?”

“I guess there's not a lot to laugh about when you're hanging out in graveyards all the time. Even cartoon graveyards.”

He nodded and took a drink.

“Josh, what exactly do you mean when you say you need to get a life? Because when I say it I usually mean I need to get a job—not that Vladima isn't fun and everything but…”

“You have a degree from Stanford,” he finished for me. He'd heard it before.

“Right. So when I say it, I mean I need to get my life back on track.”

He was regarding me with curiosity. I plunged ahead.

“But you have a job, one that seems to be your life, so when you say you need to get a life…I wonder what you mean?”

He kept looking at me and seemed to be thinking carefully about what he wanted to say. I started to get a little
uncomfortable with the suddenly intense mood. I'd given up hope that he'd actually answer by the time he finally spoke.

“I mean I'd like a reason to come out of the graveyard.”

Right. I nodded as if I understood what was going on behind those dark eyes.