The Third Bear (15 page)

So it came as a shock to me that day when he said, "I'm moving to Human Resources," as the landing beneath us undulated like a tongue.

"What?" I said. "You can't do that."

"Don't worry. It won't matter." He stared through his roving binoculars up the twisting stairwell for a hint of flutter, of flight. "Everything will be the same."

"Will it?" I asked him in a moment of candor. "Will we still be friends?"

Mord smiled, the binoculars still clamped over his eyes in a possessive grip. "Of course. We'll be friends like we're friends now."

"And Leer, too?"

Mord laughed. "Don't worry. That will never change."

In a weird way, I think Mord meant it. And this at least is true: in my mind it never changed, and that was part of the problem.

We never found a sparrow, or any other bird, that day, so when we got back to the office Mord and Leer made a bird. It was a strange elongated bird with a tail that looked like a wisp of smoke.

They set it free in the stairwells and for months we would catch teasing glimpses of it. For some reason, it made me happy every time I saw it. But, eventually, I found it on a step. Someone had crushed its skull.

Confusion Due to Continued Degradation of Processes

Before the hiring of Scarskirt, when Leer was still my friend, we used to, as I mentioned, assign projects through a hierarchy. When this practice ended, we found ourselves locked in endless meetings in the cavernous meeting rooms on the forty-fifth floor. The rooms were more like the mess halls for refugees that I remembered from my teens. The windows provided an excellent view of the dying city, for those who wanted a reminder, but this was offset by the fact that we had to wear the slugs on our spines almost continually, and a herd of Human Resources people had to be ready to escort us at a moment's notice.

Mord walked among them, but only to supervise, and at first he was quite friendly.

The reason for the meetings was a new "fish" project. Our main client had asked for more products aimed at helping students. The latest project required the design of a grouper-like fish five times larger than the average nine-year-old child. By our various and immersive processes, we were to make being swallowed by this fish an educational experience. The student would be swallowed and subjected to sensory deprivation deep in the fish's guts. Then the student would be introduced to a number of neural stimuli, some to do with proper social adjustment, but most further enhancing their math/science skills.

We worked from the flesh-and-blood scale model I had made in my office, which was linked to a chart on the meeting room wall that showed the fishas-blueprint, almost like the schematic of a ship's hull.

The team had to solve numerous technical issues. For example, would the fish be terrestrial or aquatic? We could create it to move on land using hyper-muscular fins while it sucked air like a mudpuppy. If we went with this approach, the fish could be summoned to the classroom so the student could be engulfed during class sessions. Otherwise, each school would need a communal tank into which the student would dive. I liked this solution because the children could change into swimming gear and thus not ruin their school clothes. It also provided more privacy.

In addition to the need for including defensive bioweaponry, we had to consider many other important issues. What shape and size should the fish's jaws be to cushion the child and minimize trauma? Should the fish talk in a reassuring manner to calm the child's fears of being eaten alive? Should it remain silent and allow the burden of providing reassurance to fall on the teacher?

The meetings to answer these questions while developing the basic concept now involved the entire creative team. Everyone was ordered to contribute, and to this end the Manager issued us all brainstorming cockroaches. These were the tiny burrowing variety, suitable for inhaling through the nose, with only a whiff of sulfurous decay. A slight, scrabbling discomfort and then they released their calming pheromones and you could see more clearly than ever before and ideas came out of your mouth almost faster than you could speak them.

This method worked fine in moderation, but not when everyone was issued the brainstorming cockroaches. The meetings became a babble of tongues, hours and days filled with circular thinking and unproductive repetition.

"I-think-we-should-have-it-walk-on-its-fins-and-talk-with-a-gravelly-oldgrandfather-voice-like-my-grandfather-had-when-we-visited-him-in-the-home," Leer would say and I would say, "My-father-was-a-terse-man-but-a-depth of-feeling-often-welled-up-in-him-beneath-that-made-me-think-of-himas-generous-and-so-this-fish-should-be-all-efficiency-of-motion-but-deepdeep-deep" and Scarskirt would say "I-think-it-should-have-my-face-andmy-voice-whether-it-walks-on-land-or-just-swims-because-people-will-likethat-a nd-it-will-re assure-them."

This high-volume stream of babble continued without end and without resolution while we remained euphoric within the cramped quarters of our own skulls.

A Relevant Note on Office Culture

I didn't know Scarskirt's background; nor did I know Mord's or Leer's background. We had all come to the company fleeing something in the city. People had to be hard to survive, and of necessity you looked past this to what the person was in the current moment. When I found my apartment, I brought with me only what I could carry from the disaster that lay behind me, and I furnished my apartment only with what I discovered already in it and immediately outside the front door. I started with the clothes on my back, an old dead stuffed dog from my childhood, some books my father had given me, half-rations in packets, three memory eels, and a few worthless coins that kept changing colors as their batteries ran down. I had to do many things I was not proud of to hang on to even those few possessions before the company accepted me under its protective aegis.

My point is, records these days are terse, vague, or imaginary. Scarskirt could have been anyone - and was. For the one truth of working for the company had become this: whatever you had been before, you could be someone else now.

My mistake, if I can call it that, was trust - to think a smile was a smile and not a show of teeth. I thought that the point of being part of a team was to be trusting and trustworthy.

I was wrong.

Conflict Due to Continued Degradation of Processes

As the months progressed, it became clear that no one had the ability to make a decision on the fish project. My Manager did not attend enough meetings to be useful. We had meeting minutes, of course. They were taken by a veined slab of purpling meat whimsically shaped like an ear. This minutes-taker lay in a far corner of the room, on a raised dais, and printed out its observations on the usual paper that reflected mood, tone, and intent. Alas, in this particular case, the minutes came out thick, viscous, and smelling sickly sweet. Very little could be intuited from them.

The design of the fish on the meeting wall, indigenously linked to the results of the meeting minutes, changed for the worse. Sometimes we would enter to find that it was missing a fin. Sometimes it had transmogrified to have the attributes of a bear, a dragon, or a whale. Once, it had become a girl in a sunflower dress huddled in a dark corner of the room. She had the eyes of a fish, but she was not a fish, and something in her posture reminded me of familiar paper and plastic.

The day we entered the meeting room and the fish had the head of my Manager, I knew I had to change the paradigm.

I drove a knife into the quivering slab of recording material, which relaxed into senility with a sigh, and thus froze the fish design in place on the wall. It might have had the Manager's face, but the rest of it was much closer to completion than we'd been in months.

"From now on, I will lead these meetings," I said to Leer, Scarskirt, and the others. "Some of us will use the brainstorming cockroaches and some will not. We will design the fish, by hand, on the meeting table, using plastics and self-regenerating bits of fish flesh. There will be no more endless meetings or Manager-headed end results."

"Is that wise?" Leer and Scarskirt both asked, words intertwined. Scarskirt said it with a hint of disdain in her voice. Leer said it in a clipped tone. She had a worried look on her face. Scarskirt seemed more amused than concerned. She picked dirt and beetle feelers out from beneath her painted fingernails with a knife that seemed too robust for the delicacy of the task.

"Is that wise?" Leer said again while Scarskirt fell silent. "I mean, ultimately it is the Manager's project."

Leer was always changing her body, but could never set her mind on what she should change it to, as if restless. I could almost imagine her tossing and turning in bed, transforming with each abrupt movement. When she asked the question, Leer had the dynamic skin coloration of a parrotfish and the mouth of one as well.

"It may not be wise," I said, "but I don't think any of us can survive months of meetings like this. My back is sore from the slugs and I'm weary of the journey."

"You may or may not be right," Leer said, "but regardless the Manager will not approve."

"That is my responsibility," I said, confident in my many years of experience.