The Bend of the World: A Novel (19 page)

20

By this time, news of Global Solutions’ pending acquisition by Vandevoort had been reported in the business press and the local papers, and I’d recognized, in these stories, my own words reported back as coming from high-ranking insiders and employees close to the decision-making process. It occurred to me that I was actually embroiled in a conspiracy. Meanwhile, I’d received a series of texts from a number I didn’t recognize that talked about participation by Vandevoort NV in the Holocaust in the Netherlands and in smuggling Jewish scientists to the United States as part of a trilateralist war agenda, but when I tried to call the number, I just got a message that the phone was not in service. I looked up the number online; it was registered to a pay-by-minute company. Johnny, obviously. I tried calling his regular cell, but that had been disconnected, too. Then suddenly the V’s, having asked their questions, written their reports, made their blandly worded, scorched-earth recommendations, departed; the twenty-third-floor hive was gone; the offices mothballed again; the conference rooms locked. I was hauled up to the executive offices on twenty-seven and given a new office, which looked at the ass-end of an air exhaust on the building behind ours. We began firing people and suppliers.

I mean, they blend together; they were all so similar. Like, we’d haul up some poor sucker whose West Virginia company made some tiny part for some incomprehensible gadget for some massive water pump produced by some company that had at some point hired Global Solutions to get them a better deal on expensive thingamajigs. The poor guy would be balding but handsome, with a face that showed a youth spent outdoors and an adulthood of regret at having given that up. The guy would be in a nice but unimpressive suit, and I’d be sitting there with Mark and Sylvia and Swerdlow—John Bates had already been fired; it is with mixed emotions, said the email, that we say goodbye; a visionary and loyal presence at the company; moving on to new challenges and opportunities; yeah yeah; whatever; amen—or, actually, they’d be sitting there at the table, and I’d be wedged on a chair in the back, wondering what I was doing, pretending to take notes or something, and the guy, mustering his most intimidating mien, which maybe even worked with his unions back home, would say, It seems to me that you all are trying to fuck us over. No offense.

Mark would say, None taken. We’re here for frank discussion. Open and honest dialogue.

Swerdlow would say, Don’t worry about my delicate ears. I’m a lawyer. I’ve heard worse.

Sylvia would say something about changing economic realities and a mutually agreeable and fair mechanism for winding down a reorder and compensation schedule in the best interests of all the parties involved.

The guy would shake his head and say, I don’t understand what’s broke here. I don’t see what you’re trying to fix.

Mark would say, As you’re probably aware, Global Solutions is entering a period of transition. We’re seeing increased competition in our sector. The global economy is slowing down. The European crisis isn’t helping. We need to streamline certain aspects of the business.

Do you even work for Global Solutions? the guy would ask, because Mark was still wearing that fucking
VISITOR
sticker.

Mr. Danner is an important part of our transition process, Swerdlow would say.

You don’t work for them, either. You’re just the goddamn lawyer. No offense.

None taken.

Do
any
of you work for them? the guy would say. I mean directly.

I do, Sylvia would answer. Peter does.

The secretary, the guy would say, and he’d glare at me. How’s that writing hand doing? But I would never reply. Look, he’d say. Look. What’re we trying to fix here? You’re talking about unilaterally altering a contractual agreement. We don’t see the need. We like things the way they are. You say mutual agreement, but we already agreed to all this. We hashed all this out years ago. None of you was there, so maybe none of you remembers. But I was there and I remember. What’re we trying to fix? Hell, you promised us that this whole thing would make us so rich our damn janitors would retire to Hawaii, and that hasn’t exactly come to pass. Like I said before, I’m not unreasonable. But you’re asking for a concessionary agreement on our part. We’d go up in smoke if we agreed to this.

Well, look, Mark would say, and he’d get this bored expression, the distracted look of a priest who’s said the same liturgy a thousand times before, if you’ll just turn to page seven of your vendor agreement, section three-d, under the heading Termination upon the Occurrence of Certain Other Events . . .

21

That’s so creepy, Lauren Sara said when I told her about one of these meetings. She’d come over. We’d intended to go out to dinner, I think, but instead we drank a bottle of Brunello that my dad had given me for some reason or other and ordered a pizza and got stoned and watched
The Big Lebowski
for the hundredth time. I remember that night in particular because it was my weed that we smoked, which was rare, and after one hit Lauren Sara looked at me and said, No way. Is this the K2? Cool. But anyway, I was telling her about one of these negotiations, or whatever they were, and she said, That’s so creepy. It sounds like killing people. Like, and she did her Schwarzenegger impression, You’ve been terminated . . . upon the occurrence of certain other events. Your Arnold sounds like a retarded French homosexual, I told her. You’re a retarded French homosexual, she said.

22

But if I began to doubt my participation in the bloodletting, it wasn’t until we fired Ted. I mean, I fired him. Mark made me. It’s time, he said. The caterpillar becomes the stone-cold motherfucking killer. Jesus, seriously, I said. He hired me. Come on, Mark said, just the tip. Try it. You’ll like it.

I had, since my promotion, had limited contact with my old coworkers. We occasionally ran into each other in the elevators, and they treated me with a cautious politeness that made me uncomfortable but also, I’m ashamed to admit, filled at least one chamber of my heart with a vain pride, because, not knowing any better at the time, I mistook it for due deference. I was still under the impression that I wasn’t doing anything; my days had a formless, timeless quality; they passed in gusts of calls and emails and presentations and meetings, but I can recall making no decisions, recording no profit, making and doing nothing of any particular note, the difference being that in retrospect I can see the purposelessness and centerlessness as adaptive features of a very particular evolution, which had rendered as vestigial the structures of authority and hierarchy and production and replaced them with something, well, vague, insubstantial, and threatening, something from which no good could arise.

I had, of course, seen people fired, or had heard of it having happened and seen its brief aftermath, but everyone who got fired expected it; they took it with the annoyed forbearance of a person who gets stuck in the rain without an umbrella even though she’d read the forecast that morning. Except, of course, for Ted. Ted had not accepted it. Ted had not accommodated himself to a world in which getting an unexpected summons to an unfamiliar office meant only one thing. Whereas I had, in the same situation, arrived assuming I’d get canned, Ted arrived expecting to be beamed up to the mothership and made a part of the crew.

But as soon as he saw me in my big chair and Mark standing like an evil consigliere behind me and some sublegal functionary with a notepad perched in the corner, his happy round face tightened and his grip tightened on his little monographed organizer. Pete, he said.

Ted, I said. Why don’t you come in and have a seat? It was how I’d heard it done, so it was how I did it.

I’d rather stand, he said.

Well, all right, I said.

Sit the fuck down, said Mark, and Ted did.

I shuffled some papers. Look, Ted, I said. I want you to know how much we’ve valued your contribution to Global Solutions.

Oh Jesus, he said. Oh Jesus. Oh Jesus.

Ted, I said. Really. It’s okay.

His head hung. Fuck, he said. Fuck fuck fuck.

Jesus Christ, said Mark. You big fucking crybaby. He hasn’t even fired you yet.

Fuck fuck fuck, said Ted. I could already hear the snot in his nose. I want to tell you that I felt terribly, that I felt as if I couldn’t go through with it, but I felt nothing of the kind.

Ted! I said sharply.

He looked up. Pete, he said. I didn’t expect it from you.

I’m sorry, Ted, I told him, and then I shrugged and put on my best impression of that distracted look I’d seen on Mark’s face a hundred times by then. I’m sorry, Ted, but it is what it is.

That night I picked up Lauren Sara and took her to dinner. We both got drunk and went back to my apartment and I may have pushed her toward the couch as if we were going to fuck then and there. Whoa, she said. Like, what’s gotten into you? You remember Ted? I said. That moron I used to work for. The one who always fucking called me Pete? Yeah, she said. Totally. Well, I said, I got to fire him today. She frowned at me. She sat up. You fired him? Yeah, I said. Why would you fire him? she said. Because he was a worthless piece of shit, I said. Well, sure, I guess, Lauren Sara replied, but what’s that got to do with firing the guy? It’s not like anyone does anything there anyway, right? Fuck, I thought, and then we got stoned and went to sleep.

When I came in the next day, Rick at security told me all about the aftermath. How about that guy from your company? he said. What guy? I asked. The one who wouldn’t leave, he told me; the guy they fired who said he wasn’t going anywhere. He sighed. Poor SOB, he said. We had to go up and haul him out.

Haul him out? I repeated.

Haul him out, Rick said.

Why did you have to haul him out?

Because, like I said, they fired him, and he refused to leave.

Did you catch his name?

Ted, I’m pretty sure.

He was my old boss, I said.

What I don’t get, Rick said, is why anyone would want to stay here. My boss came in and said, Rick, you’re done, I’d be out the door before my seat quit spinning.

You could always just quit, I said.

And give the bastards the pleasure? No way. I intend to sit here doing nothing and taking their money.

I hope you do, Rick. You’re the glue that holds this place together.

He shrugged. Beautiful day, wish you were here, he said.

21

They fired Kevin and Tim and the Other Peter.

They fired Sylvia.

They promoted Marcy, of all people, to associate director of something to do with the Internet, but she quit.

They even fired Pandu. How could you fire Pandu? I asked Mark. He was the only one worth anything.

Why would I employ one expensive Indian when there are one billion inexpensive ones?

That’s kind of fucked up.

I’m kidding. But seriously, no one is worth anything, especially not due to their position in the old order.

Jesus Christ, Mark, I said. Are you going to fire everyone? Who’s going to do the work?

The what? he said.

Seriously, I said.

You have to pluck the feathers, he told me, before you can roast the chicken.

The only other one they didn’t fire was Leonard. Leonard, like Marcy, got promoted. Unlike her, he didn’t quit. Assistant director of corporate philanthropy, he told me when we ran into each other at the Starbucks. How about that shit?

We have corporate philanthropy? I said.

He shrugged. Who knew? The European dudes are all into outdoors and the environment and green shit. We’re giving a quarter million to help finish the renovation down at the Point.

Really? The fountain?

I know, right? But shit, I got a raise, so you know, it’s all good.

Well, look, Leonard, I said. Keep an eye out.

Will do, chief, he said. A week later the gift to the Western PA Conservancy was announced. On Friday of that same week, they fired Leonard.

24

As my company was dismantled, my old friend Johnny had fallen, quite by accident, into productive labor. I found out later, of course. It was an irony, not unappreciated, that the old model of economic productivity, in which the work of human hands, amplified by technology, produced goods to be exchanged for currency, positively flourished in our postproductive age, only it did so underground. Now, as for how we fund our little institute, Pringle had said to Johnny on his third visit. So we sell some drugs, Johnny said. I am sure the idea appealed to him. Drugs? said Pringle. Oh no, not drugs.
Research chemicals
.

Got it, said Johnny.

I don’t think this was merely a euphemism. Pringle did refer to their customers as test subjects. I suspect that he, and who knows, maybe Johnny, too, believed it to some degree. If there was something gross and unsanitary in all the usual pursuits of an entertaining or numbing or joy-enhancing or ameliorating high, then there was something much more alien and discomfiting in the people who sought out folks like Winston Pringle and the weird, powerful dissociatives that he was peddling. For all the illusions of control and tolerance within which both the most functional and the most degenerate of alcoholics or cokeheads or junkies lived, each, in their own way, in some small but ineradicable portion of their consciousness and conscience, knew that they were pursuing death; knew that they were afloat on the ocean of a flat world, over whose roaring edge was the infinite void; whereas the self-described psychonauts, the dilettantes of higher consciousness, who bragged openly about seeking out the borders and nature and experience of oblivion, they didn’t really believe in it—or they believed it was a thing that could be purchased, a ticket with an open return.

25

Then one night on our way up to dinner at Mark and Helen’s, we ran into another couple who asked if we knew what floor the party was on. I looked at Lauren Sara. Sorry, she said. Really? I said. Sorry, she said. Pretend to be surprised. It was Saturday night. The following Monday was my thirtieth birthday. Happy birthday, old man, she said, and she kissed me briefly on the lips, and she led me to the elevator.