Eddie. A hurricane somewhere out in the Atlantic was sending twenty- to thirty-knot winds across the East End. The Little Peconic was a roiling stew pot of gray-black water and off-white foam. The winds were warm and smelled of their tropical origins, all wrong for the autumn light and red-yellow days of October. A windsurfer was out on the bay skimming across the chop like a lunatic water bug. I envied his foolish abandon.
That afternoon I took a long run. I needed the oxygen, and the endorphins. And whatever blessings the windswept Peconic was willing to bestow.
SIX
THE COMPANY I worked for created wealth out of thin air. We owned giant processing plants that sucked in atmosphere and pumped out freight cars full of pure oxygen, nitrogen and helium. We made hydrogen from water. Fertilizer from natural gas. Converted crude oil into gasoline additives, road surfaces and plastic housings for TV sets and microwave ovens. Though fundamental in our use of natural resources, we needed highly refined technology, research scientists and applications engineers to maintain a competitive advantage over the other monstrous corporations who made the same stuff we did. This technical support was so vast and sophisticated that the managers of the corporation began to view it, correctly, as a valuable product in its own right. We began by licensing proprietary processing and manufacturing technology. Then technical services and on-site support. Eventually we unbundled almost everything we did and peddled it to anyone who didn’t directly compete with our core operating divisions. The cross-pollination of ideas was an unexpected side benefit. While we were selling them ours, we’d pick up a few of theirs. This further strengthened our ability to develop new technology for the home front and stimulate development of products our operating divisions could never imagine, much less produce. We sold instruments, robotics, software, training programs and combustion-efficiency enhancers like the SAM-85. And a lot of sheer technical know-how. I kept a small stack of CDs in my right-hand desk drawer that held data people paid $100,000 just to look at on my laptop. If they wanted the disc, that was another $900K.
This was my part of the corporation. It wasn’t a simple job, but they paid me a lot of money to do it.
Eventually, people began to notice our division had gone from overhead expense to self-funding enterprise to major profit center. Even better, we proved that a hundred-year-old company living off God’s own air, water and light sweet crude could also be in the vanguard of high technology. Since I’d helped conjure all this, I was one of the few in the company who knew how to do it. This gave me a healthy share of cachet. That was a good thing for people’s careers in our company. Many had far more cachet than me, though they’d often caused the company more harm than good. That was because you could acquire cachet through means other than producing profits or good will for the firm. This is often called corporate politics, but the truth is bigger than that. It’s something more essential to the chaotic dynamics of large-scale social behavior.
Some people tried to share the success of our division by association. Others undermined us at every opportunity. Most of the people in upper management who weren’t threatened found a way to slip under the halo. A sidebar article in
An elderly woman who’d been handling appointments for each successive Chairman of the board since the early fifties wrote to me through interoffice mail. Never e-mail. She said I was on the agenda for the monthly board meeting at 7:30 a.m., Tuesday. This stood as an invitation. The boardroom was on the top floor of corporate headquarters on Seventh Avenue. At that altitude, you could literally conduct business among the clouds.
After passing through a metal detector, you took a special elevator run by a man who pushed the floor button for you. He wore a tiny earphone and a blank expression. The inside of the elevator cab was lined in stainless steel so you had to look at a vaguely distorted image of yourself as you took the long ride up. Vivaldi was playing through the speaker overhead. I could feel the acceleration collect around my feet, then lift up through my body as we came to a soft stop. The operator ushered me into a foyer with a dark gray carpet and wine-colored walls trimmed out in hand rubbed and oiled Honduran mahogany. Somehow they got the Vivaldi up there, too. There were a few recognizable Impressionists on the walls and two gigantic vases decorated with dragons and nicely dressed Chinese people. A very tall, very white young woman with dark hair cinched up at the back of her head appeared out of nowhere and asked me if I wanted a cup of coffee. I said sure and she disappeared again. The elevator operator was still there waiting with his elevator, one hand on the open button, the other resting comfortably just inside the front of his sports jacket. I wondered if they were playing Vivaldi through that earphone. There was no place to sit, so I paced the foyer until the woman showed up with a crystal mug filled with
“We keeping you awake?” he asked as I walked past him into the boardroom.
“Seven-thirty is kind of barbaric,” I said to him.
He actually slapped me on the back.
“Always the comeback,” he said in the avuncular way a professor talks to a favorite student, which in a way it was.
The boardroom had floor-to-ceiling glass walls on three sides. If you walked straight into the room you’d be at the end of a long table facing the chairman, George Donovan, who sat a mile or two down at the opposite end. To either side were all the inside directors and the few outside directors who thought they ought to show up for form. In front of each was a maroon leather folder, closed. Inside was the agenda they’d covered before I came into the room. They looked at me with the benign disinterest of recently fed carnivores. I fought the urge to give my name, rank and serial number.
“Hiya there, Sam,” said George.
“Hi, George.”
“Why don’t you find yourself a chair and sit down. They get you coffee?”
“Thanks. All set.” I held up my half-empty cup.
I walked around to the right and sat in the first chair I came to. Louise Silberg, VP, Finance & Administration, was on my right. Jason Fligh, president of the University of Chicago and the only black man on the board, on my left. They both shook my hand and smiled pleasantly. I liked Jason; Louise was very scary. Even split.
“How’s Abigail?” George asked.
“She’s good. Thanks.”
“Lovely girl.”
“Yeah.”
Big time corporate guys are geniuses at this—remembering the names of your wife and kids. I couldn’t remember a damn thing about his wife, assuming he had one. I didn’t ask about her. He didn’t care.
“We’ve been reviewing quarterly figures,” he said, and on cue all the board members flipped open their maroon folders and pulled out a single spreadsheet. “Before the meeting I asked Joe Felder’s people to do a lookback of the last twelve quarters, and run comparisons of the performance of Technical Services and Support against the adjusted norms of the other divisions.”
He looked up at me over the top of his plastic-rimmed half glasses.
“Wanna guess how you did?” he asked, and looked around the room to see if anyone was ready to chance a position. Nobody bit. I could hear Jason making humming noises to himself, as if struck by a revelation. I didn’t think George wanted me to say anything, so I waited him out.
