With a Little Help (39 page)

"You look like you're ready to do some gardening," he said.

"My shift at the club," she said. "I'll be trimming the lime trees and tending the mint patch and the cucumber frames all afternoon." She smiled and stopped him with a gesture. She bent down and plucked a blade of greenery from the untidy trail-edge. They were in Central Park, in one of the places where it felt like a primeval forest instead of an artful garden razed and built in the middle of the city. She uncapped her water bottle and poured water over the herb -- it looked like a blade of grass -- rubbing it between her forefinger and thumb to scrub at it. Then she tore it in two and handed him one piece, held the other to her nose, then ate it, nibbling and making her nose wrinkle like a rabbit's. He followed suit. Lemon, delicious and tangy.

"Lemon grass," she said. "Terrible weed, of course. But doesn't it taste amazing?"

He nodded. The flavor lingered in his mouth.

"Especially when you consider what this is made of -- smoggy rain, dog piss, choked up air, and sunshine, and DNA. What a weird flavor to emerge from such a strange soup, don't you think?"

The thought made the flavor a little less delicious. He said so.

"I love the idea," she said. "Making great things from garbage."

"About the jetpacks," he said, for he'd been thinking.

"Yes?"

"Are you utopians of some kind? Making a better world?"

"By 'you,' you mean 'people who work for Buhle?'"

He shrugged.

"I'm a bit of a utopian, I'll admit. But that's not it. You know Henry Ford set up these work-camps in Brazil, 'Fordlandia,' and enforced a strict code of conduct on the rubber plantation workers? He outlawed the caipirinha and replaced it with Tom Collinses, because they were more civilized."

"And you're saying Buhle wouldn't do that?"

She waggled her head from side to side, thinking it over. "Probably not. Maybe, if I asked." She covered her mouth as though she'd made an indiscreet admission.

"Are --
were
-- you and he...?"

She laughed. "Never. It's purely cerebral. Do you know where his money came from?"

He gave her a look.

"OK, of course you do. But if all you've read is the official history, you'll think he was just a finance guy who made some good bets. It's nothing like it. He played a game against the market, tinkered with the confidence of other traders by taking crazy positions, all bluff, except when they weren't. No one could outsmart him. He could convince you that you were about to miss out on the deal of the century, or that you'd already missed it, or that you were about to walk off onto easy street. Sometimes, he convinced you of something that was real. More often, it was pure bluff, which you'd only find out after you'd done some trade with him that left him with more money than you'd see in your whole life, and you facepalming and cursing yourself for a sucker. When he started doing it to national banks, put a run on the dollar, broke the Fed, well, that's when we all knew that he was someone who was
special
, someone who could create signals that went right to your hindbrain without any critical interpretation."

"Scary."

"Oh yes. Very. In another era they'd have burned him for a witch or made him the man who cut out your heart with the obsidian knife. But here's the thing: he could never, ever kid
me
. Not once."

"And you're alive to tell the tale?"

"Oh, he likes it. His reality distortion field, it screws with his internal landscape. Makes it hard for him to figure out what he needs, what he wants, and what will make him miserable. I'm indispensable."

He had a sudden, terrible thought. He didn't say anything, but she must have seen it on his face.

"What is it? Tell me."

"How do I know that you're on the level about any of this? Maybe you're just jerking me around. Maybe it's all made up -- the jetpacks, everything." He swallowed. "I'm sorry. I don't know where that came from, but it popped into my head --"

"It's a fair question. Here's one that'll blow your mind, though: how do you know that I'm not on the level,
and
jerking you around?"

They changed the subject soon after, with uneasy laughter. They ended up on a park bench near the family of dancing bears, whom they watched avidly.

"They seem so
happy
," he said. "That's what gets me about them. Like dancing was the secret passion of every bear, and these three are the first to figure out how to make a life of it."

She didn't say anything, but watched the three giants lumber in a graceful, unmistakably joyous kind of shuffle. The music -- constantly mutated based on the intensity of the bears, a piece of software that sought tirelessly to please them -- was jangly and pop-like, with a staccato one-two/onetwothreefourfive/one-two rhythm that let the bears do something like a drunken stagger that was as fun to watch as a box of puppies.

He felt the silence. "So happy," he said again. "That's the weird part. Not like seeing an elephant perform. You watch those old videos and they seem, you know, they seem --"

"Resigned," she said.

"Yeah. Not unhappy, but about as thrilled to be balancing on a ball as a horse might be to be hitched to a plough. But look at those bears!"

"Notice that no one else watches them for long?" she said.

He had noticed that. The benches were all empty around them.

"I think it's because they're so happy," she said. "It lays the trick bare." She showed teeth at the pun, then put them away. "What I mean is, you can see how it's possible to design a bear that experiences brain reward from rhythm, keep it well-fed, supply it with as many rockin' tunes as it can eat, and you get that happy family of dancing bears who'll peacefully co-exist alongside humans who're going to work, carrying their groceries, pushing their toddlers around in strollers, necking on benches --"

The bears were resting now, lolling on their backs, happy tongues sloppy in the corners of their mouths.

"We made them," she said. "It was against my advice, too. There's not much subtlety in it. As a piece of social commentary, it's a cartoon sledgehammer with an oversized head. But the artist had Buhle's ear, he'd been CEO of one of the portfolio companies and had been interested in genomic art as a sideline for his whole career. Buhle saw that funding this thing would probably spin off lots of interesting sublicenses, which it did. But just look at it."

He looked. "They're
so happy
," he said.

She looked too. "Bears shouldn't be that happy," she said.

#

Carmela greeted him sunnily as ever, but there was something odd.

"What is it?" he asked in Spanish. He made a habit of talking Spanish to her, because both of them were getting rusty, and also it was like a little shared secret between them.

She shook her head.

"Is everything all right?" Meaning,
Are we being shut down?
It could happen, might happen at any time, with no notice. That was something he -- all of them -- understood. The money that powered them was autonomous and unknowable, an alien force that was more emergent property than will.

She shook her head again. "It's not my place to say," she said. Which made him even more sure that they were all going down, for when had Carmela ever said anything about her
place
?

"Now you've got me worried," he said.

She cocked her head back toward the back office. He noticed that there were three coats hung on the beautiful, anachronistic coat-stand by the ancient temple door that divided reception from the rest of Ate.

He let himself in and walked down the glassed-in double-rows of offices, the cubicles in the middle, all with their characteristic spotless hush, like a restaurant dining room set up for the meals that people would come to later.

He looked in the Living Room, but there was no one there, so he began to check out the other conference rooms, which ran the gamut from super-conservative to utter madness. He found them in the Ceile, with its barn-board floors, its homey stone hearth, and the gimmicked sofas that looked like unsprung old thrift-store numbers, but which sported adaptive genetic-algorithm-directed haptics that adjusted constantly to support you no matter how you flopped on them, so that you could play at being a little kid sprawled carelessly on the cushions no matter how old and cranky your bones were.

On the Ceile's sofa were Brautigan, Ria, and a woman he hadn't met before. She was somewhere between Brautigan and Ria's age, but with that made-up, pulled-tight appearance of someone who knew the world wouldn't take her as seriously if she let one crumb of weakness escape from any pore or wrinkle. He thought he knew who this must be, and she confirmed it when she spoke.

"Leon," she said. "I'm glad you're here." He knew that voice. It was the voice on the phone that had recruited him and brought him to New York and told him where to come for his first day on the job. It was the voice of Jennifer Torino, and she was technically his boss. "Carmela said that you often worked from here so I was hoping today would be one of the days you came by so we could chat."

"Jennifer," he said. She nodded. "Ria." She had a poker-face on, as unreadable as a slab of granite. She was wearing her customary denim and flowing cotton, but she'd kept her shoes on and her feet on the ground. "Brautigan," and Brautigan grinned like it was Christmas morning.

Jennifer looked flatly at a place just to one side of his gaze, a trick he knew, and said, "In recognition of his excellent work, Mr Brautigan's been promoted, effective today. He is now Manager for Major Accounts." Brautigan beamed.

"Congratulations," Leon said, thinking,
What excellent work? No one at Ate has accomplished the agency's primary objective in the entire history of the firm!
"Well done."

Jennifer kept her eyes coolly fixed on that empty, safe spot. "As you know, we have struggled to close a deal with any of our major accounts." He restrained himself from rolling his eyes. "And so Mr Brautigan has undertaken a thorough study of the way we handle these accounts." She nodded at Brautigan.

"It's a mess," he said. "Totally scattergun. No lines of authority. No checks and balances. No system."

"I can't argue with that," Leon said. He saw where this was going.

"Yes," Jennifer said. "You haven't been here very long, but I understand you've been looking deeply into the organizational structure of Ate yourself, haven't you?" He nodded. "And that's why Mr Brautigan has asked that you be tasked to him as his head of strategic research." She smiled a thin smile. "Congratulations yourself."

He said, "Thanks," flatly, and looked at Brautigan. "What's strategic research, then?"

"Oh," Brautigan said. "Just a lot of what you've been doing: figuring out what everyone's up to, putting them together, proposing organizational structures that will make us more efficient at design and deployment. Stuff you're good at."

Leon swallowed and looked at Ria. There was nothing on her face. "I can't help but notice," he said, forcing his voice to its absolutely calmest, "that you haven't mentioned anything to do with the, uh,
clients
."

Brautigan nodded and strained to pull his lips over his horsey teeth to hide his grin. It didn't work. "Yeah," he said. "That's about right. We need someone of your talents doing what he does best, and what you do best is --"

He held up a hand. Brautigan fell silent. The three of them looked at him. He realized, in a flash, that he had them all in his power, just at that second. He could shout BOO! and they'd all fall off their chairs. They were waiting to see if he'd blow his top or take it and ask for more. He did something else.

"Nice working with ya," he said. And he turned his back on the sweetest, softest job anyone could ask for. He said
adios
and
buena suerte
to Carmela on the way out, and he forced himself not to linger around the outside doors down at street level to see if anyone would come chasing after him.

#

The realtor looked at him like he was crazy. "You'll never get two million for that place in today's market," she said. She was young, no-nonsense, black, and she had grown up on the Lower East Side, a fact she mentioned prominently in her advertising materials:
A local realtor for a local neighborhood.