Shimmer (10 page)

I only want the best thing.

But he knows, also, that he wants to see it. Wants to see Shimmer. Again. Wants to see the system he built, then lost. The server at the heart
of all the connections, the ones he can see and the ones he can't. Robbie's server now.

How much more he could see with Shimmer. So much more.

He smiles. Because he misses Shimmer. And it's a silly thing to miss.

And he smiles because he thinks that, with Shimmer, he'd see as much as Fadowsky.

Almost. Because no one saw as much as Fadowsky.

But he thinks that maybe, with Shimmer, he'd see all the parts of the Fadowsky Formula. He thinks that maybe, with Shimmer, he could write his own solution to the Fadowsky Formula. A solution like the ones he hears about almost every week, these rumors of lost journals, a lost Fadowsky journal that finally solves the formula. That finally gives everyone like him an answer.

How did Fadowsky do it?

How did Robbie do it?

He hears someone walking across the floor above him. Knows the motion of the building will soon begin. Knows he should head to his office. Pull clean clothes from a drawer there. Wash up in the bathroom. Start his day.

But he's not quite ready.

Not quite.

There is an architect. There has to be.

And there is good and bad.

And there is this sunlight. And there are these mornings. And there are these times, like now, when he feels so tired, feels so far past exhausted, when it's as if he's never slept and will never sleep, and in those moments he feels something wonderful.

He feels good.

Someday, maybe, I'll tell someone about this.

He'd like to hear what they might say.

I'd entered a day of half-finished projects. Wednesday afternoon, and my notes on draft reports were ending on page two or three. Partially completed e-mails waited in my outbox for another revision. Files with titles like
InvestorOverview
—
DRAFT1
and
PerformanceAnalysis
—
UNFINISHED
littered the desktop of my computer.

I knew it had been caused by Trevor's appearance the day before. And by the firing I would have to do in Omaha. One more sales team. Sixty people.

I would have to leave for Omaha this afternoon.

You take away a part of someone's self when you fire them. You tell them they are not as good a person as they thought they were.

I sat at my desk, unable to finish anything. I clicked aimlessly on my mouse. I restacked the papers in front of me. I stared at the ceiling, then floor.

I'm sorry, but I have to let you go.

I closed my eyes. I saw their faces.

I have to tell you that you aren't what you wanted to be.

There was nothing I hated more.

And so the answer, as always, was to visit Perry.

“So much of my life was being conducted from the sitting position,” Perry was telling me now, as I sat in his office. “Even when I stood it seemed to be in preparation to sit down again. And so I decided that, during working hours, I would forgo lateral movement of almost any kind.”

I was sitting in a child's wooden school chair in Perry's very dimly lit office on the eighth floor. There were no windows, no lamps, only the glow from four computer screens. Five more small chairs like the one I sat in were positioned around a very low butcher-block table that served as a conference table. Perry himself was in a full-sized desk chair with arms, but one positioned low to the floor, like both his desks.

“And sitting's been made so much better,” Perry said now, voice taking the tone of a late-night infomercial announcer, an unprecedented performance made more disjointed by the fact that he was speaking directly into his screen, “because of the addition of this wonderful children's furniture.”

I shook my head slowly. Maybe, I thought, this is what it's like to be a parent, looking at these people I've brought into the company, that I've enjoyed and spent so much time with, but who continually make me wonder what I've done to cause them to turn out this way.

The children's furniture was a new addition to Perry's office. However, an office without light had been Perry's normal environment since he'd started our R&D department two and a half years earlier. “All successful R&D,” he'd told me then, “must be conducted in the absence of light.”

In truth, the darkness was just one more sign of Perry's deeply scarred state of mind. Perry, who had joined Core just weeks after Trevor and I sold our first Blue Box, was an almost mystical figure within the company. Having worked in, started or run virtually every
department in the company—Technical Development, Strategic Planning, Network Support, Human Resources, Accounting—Perry was now an enlightened burnout hiding quite publicly from the pressures of the company, an internal savant resting quietly in a darkness he'd created for himself. Longtime employees sought out his advice on the most vexing of problems. New employees were told stories of how, when we started the expansion of the company, Perry went weeks without leaving the office, how he wrote and tested software, generated press releases, created marketing campaigns, hired and trained new staff.

When Core went public, Perry knew I was ready to give him any job he wanted. Instead, he'd told me he would have to quit. “I've left something behind,” he whispered to me as he lay on the floor of my office, his thin frame looking gray and light and fragile after three days without eating, six days without sleep and two weeks without leaving the building. “And whatever I've left behind,” he whispered, “I don't think it will come back.”

I immediately sent him to the Virgin Islands for a two-week stay. I bought him a new co-op on the upper West Side. I sent him to a therapist with the best of reputations. In total, it was enough to keep him working at Core. But he refused my offer of a position on the senior staff, finally saying he thought a comfortable job in R&D would suit him best. He'd been hoping for a quiet, almost clerical position. “I want my job to follow a linear path,” he told me then. “I do A, which combines with B to form C. I do it over and over, every day. No uncertainty, no anxiety.”

Instead I made him senior vice president of the entire R&D department, where Technical Development, Production, Marketing and Operations all converged in an unclean mix of competing priorities and constantly shifting goals.

He didn't speak to me for two months. But he didn't quit.

“I can go five hours, sometimes six,” Perry was saying now, “and still not have to stand.”

“Are you alone all this time?” I asked.

“They just come to me,” he said, his fingers moving fast on the keyboard, hand moving the mouse in slight, fluid bursts, yet the rest of his body somehow absent of motion. “They bring questions, they bring reports, someone orders me food, others bring me coffee. There is always coffee.”

Perry's thin legs were stretched out easily below his low desk, his bare feet crossed near a small bank of plugs, his toes wrapped absently around two black network cables.

I'd heard women say that Perry was the best-looking man in the office. It was a realization each had come to not immediately but only after years of seeing him walk quietly through the office, tall and thin and boyish in the simplicity of his dark features and uncombed hair.

“And so what do you do while you're here?” I asked.

“I answer questions. I dispel rumors. I offer context to various employees' apprehensions. I'm like some kind of priest, really, ministering to a wayward band of directionless youths.”

“Powerful.”

“Surprisingly so.”

“And everyone who comes here,” I asked, crossing my legs now, eyes fully adjusted to the dim light, the pale glow of the screens, “everyone sits happily in these tiny chairs?”

“Absolutely,” Perry said. “There's something therapeutic about those chairs. A return to innocence and simplicity.”

“My elementary school normally kept the lights on,” I said, tilting back just a bit, front chair legs lifted from the dense carpet.

“So it's a mixed ambience,” Perry said, shrugging easily, eyes so bright and white as he blinked, blinked from one screen to the next, blinking slowly, easily, the fluid, simple shifts of Perry. “And actually, I'd like to mix it up even more, adding blacklights, mirrors, maybe one of those smoke machines. There's talk of raising my office a foot or two, then building an outer office where the people wait before entering my chamber.”

I found myself tilting my head to the side. I picked up a paper clip,
a shining silver line just a foot from my low seat. “Your description of this suggests it is more than a joke.”

He shrugged again, a slow and easy motion paired with another blink, another shift of screens, another pass at the mouse, another rapid, silent flurry across his keyboard. “The Facilities people are actually considering the request much more seriously than I'd anticipated. They sent up an engineer. Two men measured my desks. I'm told I'll have draft plans for review by the end of next week.”

“Will you please join the senior staff?” I asked, a question I posed to him so frequently that it had become a kind of incidental segue in our communication, an empty filler phrase like
let's see
or
so anyway.

He waved me off, turning to face another screen. “Please. We've discussed. We've decided. It's not for me.”

I nodded slowly. I glanced out the door. Young men peered toward us from the openings of their workstations. Young women walked slowly along the aisles near Perry's office. All had clearly manufactured a reason to look in on us as we talked.

“You're a rock star,” Perry said, although he seemed not to have looked out his office door or even to have noticed that I was looking out at the people. Actually, he'd yet to turn and look at me.

“They try to touch me,” I said. “In the hallways. In meetings.”

“Relish it,” he said.

“I hate to be touched.”

“Seek therapy,” he said. “I've got a good person in mind.”

“No time.”

“You could give up whatever sleep you're managing to get.”

“Join the senior staff,” I said.

“But then they'll start to touch me too.”

“No, they won't. No one touches Cliff. No one touches Whitley. No one touches Leonard or Julie.”

He waved me off. He turned to another screen. He tilted the monitor toward me, his finger tracing a long line of numbers and accounting codes. He said quietly, almost to himself, “Do you see how payroll is growing faster in Advertising versus the PR group?”

I scanned the numbers. “Isn't that because we're adding people faster in Advertising?”

He shook his head. He clicked a mouse. A color chart appeared. “It's not people,” Perry said. “It's raises. Apparently the ad people are lobbying harder and, most notably, more effectively for raises.”

“Surprising,” I said, nodding as I studied the numbers. Then I turned to look at him, raising my voice slightly. “Are you supposed to have access to this information?” I asked him.

“Me?” he said, still staring into the screen. “Absolutely not. It's some kind of loophole from the old days, when I ran Accounting, Advertising and PR. No one's ever taken me or my password out of this system.”

“Get the hell out of there,” I said, voice rising.

He waved me off, turning to another screen. “Whitley and her SWAT team are so worried about rogue sections and outside intrusions, they'll never find me.”

“I'm not worried about them finding you,” I said. “You're not allowed in there, so you shouldn't be in there.”

He nodded slowly, once more looking at the payroll information as he built a color graph on the screen in front of him. “So it's an ethical issue,” he said carefully.

“Right and wrong.”

“Basic principles.”

“Fundamental questions.”

“By the way,” he said, “I want a raise.”

“Don't you have to pee?” I asked suddenly.

“Now?” he responded.

“While you're here in your office. Five or six hours without standing. That's what you said. But don't you have to get up to pee?”

He shook his head. “I've trained myself not to be distracted by the needs of the outside world.”

“Freak.”

“Okay, so I sneak out sometimes,” he said, thin shoulders rising easily, falling in a slow and thoughtless shrug. “But only when I'm sure no one's looking.”

“As long as the spell isn't broken,” I said.

“Exactly,” he said.

“There are some things I'm worried about,” I said. Leaning back in my chair again. Carefully placing the silver paper clip back on the floor.

“Such as?” I heard Perry say.

“Join the senior staff,” I said.

“If you're saying that joining the senior staff means sharing in your worries, then you're a worse salesman than I already thought.”

“I am definitely a worse salesman than you already think.”

“How is Trevor?” he asked.

“He's in town.”

“I thought I saw him. I often think I see him, actually. Turning a corner into a conference room, stepping into an elevator as the doors close, disappearing down a hallway leading to Unoccupied Territory. He's a phantom.”

“Trevor likes you,” I said.

He paused, finger poised above his mouse. I thought he might even turn to me. “That makes me worry,” Perry said, then carefully swiveled his chair to another screen. “I don't want Trevor doing anything for me. No special treatment. No favors.”

“Pact with the devil,” I said.

“Pact with the devil,” he said.