Gain

  W O R L D ’ S

  F A I R

  NIGHT PAGEANT

  GRAND TABLEAUX AND FLOATS

  GRAND COLUMBIAN CARNIVAL

  THE WORLD UNITED AT CHICAGO

  GRAND REUNION OF THE STATES BY YOUTHS AND

  MAIDENS

  MONSTER CONCERT • GRAND CHORUS

  MOST GORGEOUS DISPLAY OF FIREWORKS EVER

  SEEN IN AMERICA

  Forming in its entirety the most

  Significant and Grandest Spectacle of Modern

  Times

  The lake out front is weirdly free of ice. Glaciers lock the whole town in permafrost, except for the damn landscaped puddle in front of Clare.

  The thing never freezes. In all the years he’s lived here, Don has never once seen so much as a wafer crust the surface. A classic joke around town. The kids at the college talk about some massive marine mammal throwing off body heat, skulking around down there in dripstone grottoes, grazing on aromatic hydrocarbons from underground sluices connected to the R and D labs. He and Laura walked down here to the waterside the night they got engaged, all giggling and silly, watching for the thing by flashlight until a squad car spotted them and shagged them off.

  Years ago, he used to wonder about it. Did heat from the plant keep it clear? Proximity to all those people and machines? Some kind of thermal runoff? Flare stuff, flash powder, magnesium milk shakes—just add water. He wanted a little sprinkle of whatever it was, to keep the driveway from turning to tundra when the cold rolled down from Saskatoon around about Presidents’ Day.

  Every time he drove by, he’d think “exothermic,” maybe the only term he remembered from college chemistry. There had to be an explanation. A town-sized tropical-fish bowl full of macabre calories. Maybe they used the lake as some kind of cheap coolant, pumped it through conduits to bathe the blistering machinery before flowing back outside, where it chilled just enough to do its sweep of waste heat all over again.

  He liked to come up with different explanations, each more ingenious than the last. But nobody could tell him whether he was getting warmer or colder. At some point, he simply stopped wondering about it.

  Don turns off Resolve Road and puts his car in the visitors’ lot. It’s all the way out by the lower-echelon, assembly-line parking. He walks alongside an inlet toward the main entrance, disconcerted all over again. How could anything liquid not freeze, in a week like this? Forty degrees below zero, counting windchill. Where’s global warming when you need it?

  His index finger froze to the lock while opening the car door this morning. He has to breathe through a paper napkin while hustling from G-13-Yellow to the Barnard Building, to keep icicles from forming in his bronchioles. The radio aired a piece last night, about a retired assembly line worker found dead in his apartment. The power company had shut off his gas over a two-month delinquency. And the lake still out there, rippling, the edges lapping away like it’s high June.

  Just behind the lake, everything tapers and glides. Half a million square feet of buildings tumble together in what always reminds him of a group grope of grand pianos, their lids flung open in pleasure. From across the executives’ lot, he looks up and sees the place the way he saw it ten years ago. It’s a softened, rounded Habitat ’67, that urban-renewal dream he so loved as a kid. A flurry of curves and angles, rewriting all the architectural rules.

  He thinks back a few years before Ellen was born, to when Clare decided to move its entire North American Agricultural operation here. From a regional factory to a divisional headquarters, overnight. How thrilling that skyline was, in the newpaper artist’s conception. Limitless promise. Little hick town, going from prairie grass to this. And still only starting out, a mere beginner in the history of future boomtowns.

  The skyline still says that, from miles down Route 47: tomorrow is the best toy set people could ask for. The splashes of teal and peach all over the dwarfing entrance still feel like an invitation. Come on in; help discover the next necessary thing. Like the whole complex is a package, an ad for itself. Better Living inside.

  Especially in winter, he feels like a questing cripple approaching a cathedral. Some kind of promised sanctuary, and a little warmth, enough to catch one’s breath, anyway, for the long trip home. He tries not to breathe at all now as he hustles past the garden parterre. Another few months and the whole sculpted hillside will be nuts with petunias. Laura’s always hated that stand. Cheap and blowzy, she says. Can you really trust anyplace that would plant that many petunias? No, he decides, belatedly. No, you cannot.

  Ropes click against the four flagpole stands. The clicks echo dull and cold enough to snap the fibers clean or crack the pole. Four canvas flags whip back and forth, as brittle and harsh as interplanetary space. The Stars and Stripes flaps in position one. It strikes Don as a bit of handy nostalgia. How transnationals love to play the citizenship card whenever they’re looking for a protective break. But Clare is just like elites everywhere: the company keeps so many residences that it has no fixed place of abode.

  On the second pole, Illinois’s eagle nibbles on a red tapeworm streamer. Don only places the thing because the college flies it, too. But the banner next to that is much more recognizable and sovereign. He’s known it since childhood. Like Betty Crocker, though, the company logo has had a half-dozen face-lifts over the years, various plastic surgeries to keep it looking newer than next week. Get tomorrow’s style out early: that’s Marketing’s trick. Longer shelf life, like those newsmagazines dated ten days after they’re printed.

  But the logo he grew up with still hides out in the incarnation he now hurries past. The original design persists, like the Kennedy forelock or the Hapsburg harelip. It’s gotten a little simpler maybe, more spare and inevitable. But Don is suddenly struck by the continuity. The boy of forty years ago would have recognized this one. Any shopper from the thirties through the nineties: name your commercial epoch, and they’d name this image.

  The funny thing is, he has never been entirely sure what the shape is. They fought about it once. Well, not fought. Laura said it was a bird lifting off. He held out for some kind of atom or molecule, the company’s chemical erector set. They finally agreed that it didn’t matter. The thing said Clare, even if it stood for nothing at all.

  The fourth pole is for special interests. He’s seen it fly dozens of different flags, depending on who’s in town. Today, it sports a black MIA–POW standard, silhouette bowed.

  Above the line of flagpoles, high-tech gear thrusts itself up as lofty as possible, looking for maximum throw range. Helicopter deck, weather station, microwave relay, satellite dish: spires lift over Lace-wood like Mont-Saint-Michel over its tidal flats. They never did get to France, he and Laura. Had to settle for this.

  The metaphor’s right: an old castle keeping watch over its village, spires towering over a civic jumble. Two office complexes, an indoor-outdoor mall with skylit promenade, a research facility, corporate theater, and conference center. He comes out maybe once a month on some fund-raising visit or another, and he still gets lost every time.

  You grow up with a divisional headquarters in your backyard, and you think everyone does. Ellen, Tim: like little French kids growing up under a medieval tower whose shadow they’re never out from under. They see it on the postcards and posters. They drive past it on their way to the Best Buy. A permanent and universal fixture that they hear about daily without registering. Naturally, they assume there’s one of these in everyone’s hometown.

  He makes it inside just before he has to eat the ponies. He stands in the foyer, waiting for his frostbitten skin to revive. He kicks the snow from his shoes and loosens his coat. He has stepped from Siberia into a developer’s dream of Tahiti.

  Light flows everywhere. Day rebounds and ricochets, levered all over the place by louvers and polished metal surfaces. Even the sculptures and paintings pick up the brightness and distribute it free into all corners. In blocked spots, hidden sconces fill in. He’s never noticed before h
ow clever this cheer is. Ten times better and brighter than the real thing.

  He passes through the range of foyers into the main terrarium. From canopy to floor, one tiered rain forest envelops the other. Whole communities of flora and fauna regulate their own heat and humidity, building up microclimates with the aid of tunable super-windows. He looks up, four open flights, at the famous clerestory, with its double-glazed glass that darkens in the summer and lightens in winter to yield net gains in energy. Three glass elevators sweep up and down the walls, over his head. He’s read somewhere that even their motor heat is recovered and put to useful work.

  Living rivulets gurgle down the mossy wall faces and collect in refreshing oases. The handrail of a slinky ziggurat stairwell doubles as a stream bed, irrigating the gardens on each landing. Six flights of gently descending basins. The flowing rapids shock and delight him every time. And he’s not alone today. A visiting delegation in black and gray power suits stop in mid-landing, set down their attachés, and splash about in the handrail current up to their wrists.

  The babble of liquid calms Don. He finds himself shaking, and not from the cold. Best thing to do is make a beeline for the security desk, the checkpoint he will need to pass. He sets across the floor at a good clip. That genial, deserving expression comes over his face, the one he has made a career out of. Outward, appreciative, approving, privileged, at peace with the system: And how are you?

  He checks in at Reception, all recessed brass and simulated cherry wood. He chooses the youngest female behind the wraparound island. “I’m here to see Deborah Pierson,” he announces. Timing’s a little off, a little too clipped and eager. “Public Relations.”

  The receptionist looks up, appraising him. He is a graceless wad of scarf and acrylic.

  “Is she expecting you?”

  “Yep.” Trying for polite impatience.

  “Your name?”

  He coughs and tells her. She pulls out the ledger that lists all of today’s visitors. “Bodey? B-O-D?”

  He begins to regret the whole scheme.

  “I’ll have to call her,” the woman says.

  “It’s extension 1737.”

  “Yes, sir. I’ve got it right here.” A second later, she’s saying, “This is Reception. There’s a Mr. Bodey here to see you?” Another, very long second. “He says you’re expecting him.”

  The receptionist disconnects, with that look of bored skepticism that will prove a precious professional asset for years to come. “You know how to reach the Public Relations suite?”

  “Oh yes.” Don grins.

  “Shall I put you down for a vehicle?” She points toward the fleet of reconditioned golf carts in a corral to her left.

  “I’ll walk.”

  “Are you sure, sir? It’s quite a hike.”

  “Thanks,” he says, rubbing his midriff. “I need the workout.”

  He hightails it out of the main atrium before she has second thoughts and calls Building Security. West Three: he finds the right corridor anyway. He threads his way through a group of milling fourth graders on their way into the futuristic, cantilevered theater. The kids buzz in a state of high excitement, thrilled with those misconceptions still available to the very young. They love it here; the most excitement they’ve had since the sanitation plant outing. Some of them look ready to take a job interview.

  He skirts the boardroom, a glass fishbowl secured with a checkpoint all its own. It’s always struck him that the architects didn’t tuck the room away in an aerie in the South Tower. A pretense at revealing the invisible wheels, bringing it all down to the small investor’s level. Or maybe just the opposite: a better display of power down here.

  The curtains are flung wide open this afternoon. Baring their open palms, weaponless. He slows down as he passes, as slow as he can go without arousing further suspicion. He needs a look. If there are humans at the helm, this is where they steer. As close as he’s going to come to Them.

  It’s a great big empty room, as far as he can make out. A gaslit, Main Street feel, circa 1904. In the middle of the room is the largest table he has ever seen. A deep red mahogany, inscribed with fabulous filigrees and inlays. It looks as if it once belonged to some handlebar-mustached stock manipulator. Around this massive circle, two dozen deeply upholstered chairs. One for each of Shangri-La’s caretakers. Sit down in one of those babies, and you’re not going to want to get up anytime soon.

  One bomb, it occurs to him. One little envelope of plastic explosive slipped into a portfolio while court was in session. The anarchist’s dream: fifteen feet away from being able to change things forever. Then the imaginary dust settles, and it dawns on him. The board? The board’s not even close to ground zero. Nor is the CEO’s office, or the CFO’s, or the majority stockholder’s, or any other target that Don will ever be allowed to walk past.

  How little you’d take out with one erasure, even here. Even if you synchronized the detonations and managed to bring down the whole multi-building installation. One department, one division . . . One company, for that matter. What difference would it make? A little red ink, a local depreciation, while real commerce went on ebbing and flowing, out there, scattered, pressed thin past finding, in the shape that shared life has taken.

  Real business doesn’t care diddly for its regional agents. Doesn’t give a squat for setback or inconvenience. Blast craters are good for it; healthy, like fires in Yellowstone. Just so long as people want what it does. Just so long as we have no real alternative. The truth of the matter is: there is no ground zero. Nothing an anarchist could ever hit, even in imagination.

  He pushes on, down through the miles of maintenance-free paint. Deb’s office seems way farther away from the entrance than you’d want, for someone in her line. She’s explained it to him: how Public Relations is not just for front lobbies anymore. A strategy for everything, and for every strategy, its floor plan.

  A fifty-foot window in one wall of the hallway opens up a view on one of the coves of production. Another strategy, Don figures. Keep the works up front and visible, so management doesn’t lose touch and labor will want to step lively. He looks down two flights onto the floor of what doesn’t seem anything remotely like a factory. Pastel earth tones, full of linen-textured castings to baffle the noise and cheer the equipment operators.

  It’s positively pleasant down there. Reminds him of a jaunty discount electronics boutique in the middle of a year-end sale. Equipment, sure; tangles of pipe and snarls of cable. Hard to tell where the supplies go in and the product comes out. But the space is agreeable, human, like the rec room in some industrious senior citizens’ home.

  Robots hum and whir on their mobile platforms. They whip busily about between their human allies, assisting and asking assistance. Together, the hive executes each step in the expert assembly. Don flirts with a world where robots got cancer. Wonders whether the machines would stage a wildcat walkout.

  Every one of those suckers down there, their abdomens accumulating daily doses whose effects no one knows for sure or will admit if they do. But what choice do any of them have? It’s rust or burn, for most of them. You’re going to die anyway. Just a question of choosing what speed.

  Don stands in the gallery window, shamed at his idiocy. Did he think he could see the leak from here? Some liquid spill back in the corner that he could photograph for evidence? He watches the steady activity, tons more interesting than any televised sport. The hum of a hundred people, helping to ensure the national harvest. Couldn’t go back now, if we wanted to. And who wants to? No getting along without the magic additives, the super-pesticides. Especially now that we’ve bred a race of super-pests with them.

  “Don,” the sexiest voice short of commercial television calls from down the hall. Deb, come to meet him halfway. Flustered, trying to head him off. He’s always wondered what this woman looks like, on days when she’s not expecting visitors. But then, there are no such days. She’s hosted a dozen visitors already since lunch. He’s lucky, real
ly, to find her with five minutes free. To find her at all.

  He pushes back his hair and turns in one smooth motion. “Ms. Pierson. Thanks for meeting—”

  “Bodey. What the hell are you doing here?” Out of the side of her mouth, mock-clandestine, but just a little flushed, and he knows he’s gotten away with this.

  “I don’t know, Deb. Seems to me you left a pretty open invitation last time.”

  “Creep. That was for out-of-office hours. Ho-hum. Some women are born to be noticed only for their professional charms.”

  “Actually, Deb. You look stunning. Like a million bucks. And I’m talking 1970 dollars.”

  “Sure, sure. I can see you drooling all over your lapels.”

  She is, in fact, one of the most oddly attractive forty-year-olds he knows. And it only increases her attraction, that she seems genuinely not to believe it.

  “Look at all your gear,” she gripes, pulling at his coat. “You’re lucky you have ears left.”

  “Neither rain nor hail nor sleet.” He shrugs.

  “So, buster. In whose name are you fleecing us this time?”

  Twice divorced. Inconceivable to him. Maybe we’ve gotten to the point where divorce no longer needs a reason. The woman is incredibly fun, upbeat, imperturbable; a light touch, perfect timing. On business hours, anyway. But then, Laura always came off pretty good at Millennium, too. Her clients were always telling him what a lucky guy he was.