He was so much fun, thought Jake. Otherworldly, mused Orion. Egomaniacal, Jonathan protested silently.
Jonathan was slightly out of sorts, annoyed with Orion for coming late, jealous of Jake’s easy brilliance. As CTO, Jonathan did the most on a day-to-day basis to build the company. He did the most and cared the most, and yet, in Oskar’s office, Jake’s ideas were the best. Jake did not work for those ideas; he did not have to travel or negotiate or fight for them. He was original. And Jonathan was smart enough to understand the value of everything Jake said. The businessman he was becoming rejoiced and looked for ways to capitalize on Jake’s gifts, but the boy in Jonathan felt differently.
“Don’t you think it’s good for you to fall short sometimes?” Emily had suggested once, a question sweet and also cutting as she lay folded in his arms.
“No,” Jonathan had retorted. “I don’t think it’s good for me at all.”
“This may be possible.” Oskar delivered the verdict on Jake’s drawing. “This is slightly faster.”
“I don’t think slightly faster is really what we’re after,” Jonathan said. “We want more than incremental improvements.”
Oskar spread his hands. “What you want,” he said, “is not always what you get.”
“Then we need a different paradigm,” said Jonathan.
“A paradigm is not a dime a dozen,” Oskar pointed out.
“I never said it would be easy,” Jonathan said. “We need new products, and we need to start developing them now.”
“You have a proposal?” Oskar’s challenges were all the more potent because they were so gentle, always so bemused. “Tell us!”
And that was the moment of temptation. That was when Jonathan wanted to pull out electronic fingerprinting and say: Look, surveillance is where we should be going. Record every touch on every piece of data, know its security status at every turn. Other companies are starting to pursue this. We need to move into this space too. He knew Oskar would turn toward him, fascinated. He would say, Ah, now this is interesting. And in his pride and his frustration, in the heat of the moment, with Oskar calling his bluff and Jake standing there, and Orion daydreaming in the corner, Jonathan struggled against the impulse to shock them all.
“I see you have not yet decided on your new paradigm,” Oskar taunted Jonathan mildly.
“I do have one.” It was against Jonathan’s nature to turn the other cheek, and yet, once again, he felt Emily near him, and remembered her voice.
“I have to trust you,” she’d told him late that night in his apartment. “I have to, if I’m going to love you.”
He had never known anyone like her. She made his previous relationships seem trivial. It was her unusual strength, the courage of her convictions that drew him to her. She insisted she was nothing like him, but he understood her differently. He saw himself in Emily—not the man he was now, but the man he could be. Sometimes he rebelled against this solemn feeling; sometimes he didn’t want to love her quite so much, and he was secretly, cruelly relieved to leave her in California and return to his less-reflective life apart. He felt unready to give up childish things like rugby and lying and beating the crap out of Green Knight. But he never stopped thinking about her; he never stopped longing for her or anticipating their time together. Being with her was still new for him, her warmth still startling because she was also so reserved. When she kissed him and wrapped her arms around him, she seemed to overcome something in herself, and he knew that he was exceptional in her life as she was in his.
“So when you are ready, please let us know,” said Oskar.
“Oh, I will,” Jonathan said, and he pretended that his phone was buzzing, and left the room.
He wished his phone really was ringing. He had to speak to Emily, to hear her steady voice.
He closed his office door and dialed. Her phone rang and rang again, and each time it rang he missed her more.
“Hello?” Emily answered at last, surprised.
“Did I wake you?” He looked at his watch. It was only seven thirty in the morning in California.
“No, no,” she said sleepily. “I’m up. I’m on the phone with Jess.”
“Do you want me to call you back?”
“No, that’s okay. I think we’re done.”
“You’re never done,” he said.
“She’s making me crazy,” Emily admitted. “Hold on….” When she got back on the line he heard her sigh.
“Where is she now?”
“You don’t want to know,” said Emily.
“Where are you now?”
“In bed with my computer. I have to get up.”
“No, don’t,” he said. “Stay there.”
“It’s getting late.”
“I left Oskar’s meeting,” he blurted out.
“Why? What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.” He had nothing to confess except a brief opportunistic impulse, and he was not about to upset her by admitting that. The uneasiness he felt required reassurance, not expiation. Perhaps his logic was circular. He followed the circuit nonetheless: He needed Emily to believe in him so that he could believe in himself. Because of this, he did not always tell the whole story about himself, or even about ISIS. That night, when she had pressed him to explain what was wrong with Lockbox, he had lied to her, glossing over the structural problems Orion had discovered, insisting Orion broke the system by willfully abusing code. He lied now, as well. “Nothing’s wrong.”
“You’re not happy.”
“I am happy,” he contradicted. “We’ve got Yahoo!”
“I know, but—”
He interrupted, “I miss your voice.”
“Just my voice?”
“Not just your voice.”
“You have my voice,” she pointed out.
He pulled down the shades. “Keep talking. I’ll imagine the rest.”
“I’m in your arms,” she whispered. “I’m kissing you and I can taste the coffee on your tongue.”
“And then what?”
“Then what! You tell me.”
“I’m kissing your neck,” he said. “My hands are around your waist. I’m lifting up your nightgown.” He closed his eyes, imagining her slender neck, her skin, her breasts. “Take off your nightgown.”
She was quiet.
“Are you?” he whispered after a moment.
She hesitated, and then said, “Yes.”
And he was with her, and he began to forget the meeting. “Please,” he urged her.
“Will you?”
“Yes,” he breathed, and he was not upset anymore. His company was going public within the week. He’d celebrate with her; he could hear her even now. He felt almost, on the verge, soon to be intensely happy. He was no longer lying. What were lies, anyway? Only futures waiting to come true.
14
Harvard Square glowed with artificial candlelight. Damp air misted the glass doors of Brattle Street Florist with its potted azaleas and glossy-leaved gardenias. Cardullo’s stocked Dutch licorice and Belgian chocolate, Bendicks mints, Walkers shortbread, Turkish delight. Every shop tempted with earrings and antiquities, evergreens and crimson KitchenAids. But the millennium’s end was not altogether jolly. The hungry still hungered, addicts scratched and stole. The season had its somber rites, exams and funerals. Hushed students filed into Houghton Library to view the manuscript of “Ode to Autumn” and puzzle at its wailful choir of loss and consolation.
The market dipped and rose, and rose again, and some speculated that the new economy had limits. It was popular to say, even without believing, that this time might never come again, that it was late in the day. Some said the markets had already peaked, and Wall Street wizards agreed that timing was everything. Therefore, ISIS celebrated its December IPO with equal parts relief and trepidation.
Orion noticed that where there had been banter about boats and cars, bikes and ultralights, now the talk was strictly options and derivatives, wills and trusts. Dave instituted weal
th seminars. Lawyers arrived from Hale and Dorr, and consultants visited to discuss charitable giving. Shelter became the byword, replacing speed.
Programmers ridiculed the seminars, but they attended anyway in small groups, gathering in the glass-walled conference room to hear account managers from Goldman Sachs hold forth in suits of navy so dark the color could not exist in nature, except possibly in the deepest ocean, where giant squid inked out their predators. These reps from Goldman were all named Josh and Ethan, and they arrived bright-eyed, cuff-linked, trussed in ties of burgundy, and they were thrilled to answer every question, psyched to help out in any way possible, and honestly happy to talk whenever, because most of all they were about having fun and learning and teamwork and making dreams happen—not just short term, but long term, which was very much what they perceived ISIS to be about. They loved innovation, said Ethan. They lived for flexibility, said Josh. When the lockup ended, they couldn’t wait to innovate with everybody in the company. They worked with your lawyer and your accountant and your bank, but when it came to strategy, they said, Picture, if you will, myself and my colleagues as the quarterbacks of your team. This above all: They loved to communicate. Communication was the key, as in life, because at the end of the day, it was relationships that mattered. It was all about trust—just knowing that your team was there. Bottom line, that’s who they were in private-wealth management—your team, when you were worth ten million or more.
In one of these seminars, especially for the Lockbox group, Orion glanced at Sorel and saw that she was scribbling studiously, or maybe sketching. He leaned past Clarence to look, and she saw him and smiled.
Gradually, without discussions or apologies, the awkwardness between them had subsided. Their night together, or rather their all-nighter, seemed less embarrassing in retrospect, and slowly, over weeks and months, Orion had begun to cultivate Sorel’s friendship. At first he tried the smallest gestures, a glance, a word. The briefest exchanges.
“Nice snowstorm.”
“Lovely, if you like that kind of thing.”
He sent her lines of particularly bad code from the new Lockbox system:
Did you see? Orion typed.
Worst ever, Sorel replied.
Trying to solve from back to front.
Might not be possible.
Fundamental flaws?
Yeah.
Cracks in foundation?
Worse than that.
Shaky ground?
ORIGINAL SIN.
A rationing of interactions until they spoke easily again. That was Orion’s major goal these days at ISIS. He had refused an executive position, and he had no project to administer.
“Can I see?” he asked her after Josh and Ethan had distributed their heavy white business cards, and taken their leave.
“It’s nothing.” She showed him the sketch.
“They look like gangsters.” He drew his swivel chair a little closer.
“You think?” She’d turned her notebook so that the faint green lines on the page ran vertical, like pinstripes, and then she’d drawn the pair of financial advisors as suits with dollar signs for eyes.
“You could add guns.”
She looked skeptically at her drawing. “Could do. But I like to keep my sketches subtle. Either dollar signs or guns or the Angel of Death.” She began to giggle.
“Cancel the guns,” Orion said.
“Good. No guns on your financial team. We’re all about listening”—she imitated Ethan’s voice perfectly—“how do you feel about risk?”
“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 is you!” he called up to her.
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. Hello, darkness, my old friend…. Orion allowed Molly to hurry him away.
“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 t
his, 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 today?” Jonathan was amazed.
“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.