“Good. No guns on your financial team.
“How the fuck should I know?” Orion said.
“Are you still planning to buy the house for your dad?”
Orion shrugged. “He doesn’t want a house.”
“It’s hard to know what people want,” Sorel mused. “It isn’t always obvious.”
“That’s a good thing,” Orion said.
He was dreaming about her. He dreamed of touching her, but just as he brushed her slender arms, she slipped away. He listened to her practice her guitar at night when they worked on Lockbox 2.0. “ISIS is my day job,” Sorel reasoned. “So if it’s night I can compose.” And she sat atop the table in the conference room, and experimented with complicated chords.
ISIS, which had been so bleak to him and gray, became the place he might see Sorel. He stayed late and arrived early, locking his bike and running up the stairs as his heart beat hard in anticipation. He sat at his desk and thought of her. Even as he worked, he hoped to see her. He was programming in some kind of infinite recursion, dreaming at ISIS, which was itself a dreamscape, strange, wondrous, and frightening, the tiny company growing into an earthshaking colossus, his friends now executives impatient with him, his girlfriend hurt and angry because he had not yet set a wedding date, her parents rising up in sudden outrage, and on top of all this, his own imagination now transformed and turned about, so that he worked at ISIS but thought constantly of leaving, and slept with Molly but imagined someone else. Her husky voice, her laughter, her red-gold hair, her long legs running up the stairs.
One night, as he and Molly walked through Harvard Square, he saw a tall figure standing on a pedestal in front of Jasmine Sola. An angel dressed in white and painted white from head to toe. Feathery wings rose up behind her and white robes draped her body down to her white feet. Orion had seen these living statues before: angels, brides, cavaliers, standing on their pedestals, never moving, scarcely breathing until passersby dropped money at their feet. Like coin-operated automatons the statues bowed or curtseyed, doffed hats or winked. He had seen them all before, but he stopped in front of this one.
“Come on,” Molly said, eager to get to their movie, but Orion couldn’t help staring at the angel with her outspread wings.
“Sorel?” he murmured. The ghostly figure did not move. “Is that you?”
Molly was puzzled. “Is that who …?”
“It’s someone from work.”
“From ISIS? Are you sure?”
He wasn’t sure. The figure stood so still and seemed so solid, her face layered with thick white greasepaint, her figure heavy in its draperies. Maybe he was just imagining Sorel. He saw her everywhere. Then he caught a red-gold gleam, one loose hair. “It
But Sorel was a Method angel and would not break character. She continued, calm, majestic, unblinking even as children tried to touch her feet, and other buskers covered Simon & Garfunkel in shop doorways.
“That was you!” he told Sorel on Monday, as soon as she walked in.
“That was art,” she said, sliding her guitar underneath her desk.
“Admit it,” he said. “You saw me in the Square!”
She laughed. “I admit nothing.”
“Why do you do that? Why do you stand out there in the cold? You don’t need the money.”
She conceded, “I give it away.”
“Why do you stand out there so late at night?”
“It’s personal. It’s intimate.”
“It’s intimate to disguise yourself and stand out there in a crowd of strangers?”
“Yes. Compared to this place.”
He leaned against the gray wall of her cubicle. “What if some guy starts hitting on you? What do you do then?”
A smile played on her lips. “Turn him to stone.”
“What if …?”
Sorel gestured toward the neighboring cubicles where Umesh and Clarence were already typing. “Let’s get to work, shall we? God knows this poor benighted excuse for a Lockbox needs it.”
Were Orion and Sorel the only ones who understood that at any moment Lockbox could come crashing down? Orion was convinced that latent sleeper bugs lurked waiting to hatch inside the code. Of course nothing would happen with normal use, but one day some hacker would pick Lockbox and bring it down—and every company that used the system, every transaction and piece of data would fly out into the world. Orion was sure of this, but Jonathan wouldn’t hear it.
“I’ll tell you why you’re under the impression I don’t listen to you,” Jonathan had told him the day of the IPO. “You’re under that impression because it’s true. We’re building a company and you’re off in your own world. You would rather cling to your theories of the way things should be than put your head down and work.”
“What about feasibility?” Orion shot back. “What about truth in advertising?”
“What about loyalty?”
This was after all the cheers and speeches, after ISIS rose to $133 a share and Dave confessed he was getting a little emotional via speaker phone from New York. Orion had buttonholed Jonathan at a table of brownies and precut cantaloupe and sprigs of seedless grapes.
“We need to close down Lockbox and start over.”
“You’re bringing this up
“When am I supposed to bring it up?”
Then very quietly, with so many people standing all around them, Jonathan said, “Get out of my face.”
“I will when I get a straight answer,” said Orion. “I think when I raise an issue over days and weeks I deserve some kind of response.”
Jonathan shook his head. “No. You don’t deserve anything from me. You made a choice. You stepped out of the critical path a year ago. When you leave the team, you don’t get to be the referee.”
“Who says I left the team? Who says I’m leaving?” Orion demanded. The idea was wonderful when he was alone, but sounded like defeat when he stood facing Jonathan.
“Be very careful,” Jonathan told him.
The end of the century, which was also the end of the millennium, ISIS held a New Year’s Eve blowout with a caterer, a corporate party planner, and an elaborate conceit: 2000 Leagues Under the Sea @ The New England Aquarium. The waiters dressed in antique diving gear with helmets of copper, nickel, and glass. Secretaries wore slinky dresses, while the programmers donned black sweaters with their jeans. Dave wore black from head to toe: a black suit with a black dress shirt, no tie, like an East Coast Larry Ellison. Only the fish came as themselves: the prickly puffer fish and blue-striped wrasse, the lumpy grouper and billowy eel. As the party ascended a spiral ramp around their giant tank, armored sea turtles rose from the depths along with undulating rays. Disdainful sharks circled with mouths agape, all needle teeth and pinprick eyes.
On the mezzanine overlooking the open penguin habitat, Sorel’s girl band, The Chloroforms, were performing, Sorel out front, all legs and boots, wearing what looked like a cardigan sweater for a dress.
“Is that Jonathan over there?” Molly asked Orion.
It was hard to see anything in the dark cavernous space. The great illuminated fish tanks cast watery shadows on the walls.
