can’t say penis,” Cliff was saying as he cleaned off the screen of his small calculator, “but you can say penal colony.”
“You can’t say insert,” Julie was saying as she passed out reports to everyone, “but you can say insertion.”
“No,” Whitley said, voice returning to its normal tone. “You can say insert.”
Julie shook her head. “Not around me.”
Our stock price was up. Sales had quadrupled. We’d just bought this building. I now owned this view. These were the days after electronic commerce, after e-business and the dot-com layoffs, after the double burst in the market’s bubble. The days when the market, the business press, day traders and the most level-headed of investors all looked at Core and saw a real company, a real product, real sales, real profits.
Ours was the bulletproof stock, they all said. Ours was the company without real competition or strategic threats.
That few of these outsiders actually understood what we did—this was unimportant.
“Planning for the next annual meeting has already begun,” Julie was saying. “There will be insightful 3D bar charts. We have prepared color bullet points. Leonard will conduct a tour of the redesigned Web site.”
Four of the brightest people, thirty to forty years old, all sitting around me, leaning heavily on the metal conference table or pushed back from the group, teetering effortlessly on the rear legs of their chairs. All caught in the spreading sunrise, each cast against a simple background of steel and glass and birch and sisal.
And all of them tired. Each silently carrying the accumulated exhaustion of the three years spent building this company. Seventy-hour weeks, separation from their families, stress beyond boundaries none of them could find time to see.
I’d slept just two hours before arriving in this office. I’d gotten e-mails from all of them at two in the morning, or three.
“Cliff, you’ll play the role of cost-conscious CFO,” Julie was saying, “sprinkling your glowing financial projections with penny-pinching jokes about the excessive use of tape.”
Cliff nodded quickly. “Check.”
“Whitley, you’ll play the role of the demanding yet creative COO,” Julie said, “the strategic spirit for us all who humbly portrays herself as nothing short of the life and mind behind our ongoing expansion and evolution.”
Whitley blinked twice in affirmation. “Prepare yourselves for a generous overuse of the word interactive.”
Julie nodded quickly. “Check.”
I spoke for the first time in fifteen minutes. “And I assume,” I started to say, words seeming to flow as slowly as my intermittent journey over the rooftops nearby, “that I will play the role of the vaguely mysterious, elusively appealing, yet charmingly effervescent CEO?”
Julie cocked her head, squinting her eyes, smiling with a warmth so artificial as she said, “As long as you keep using words like elusive and effervescent.”
Soothing, calming, steady. Aimless but important banter at the start of a week. Deceptively meaningless. Functionally critical. Our Monday meetings were a microcosm of the disjointed culture rampant in the company around us, our detailed assessment of current operations always balanced against a constant array of offhand asides. The company’s most productive meetings were inevitably filled with half-wrought reviews of movies seen that weekend, with musical interludes marked by an almost karaoke-like fervor, with vague but enticing insights into each other’s personal lives. For us, on a Monday, this was what settled the senior staff into its shared rhythms, it was what we relied on to set the tone, to get us ready, to prepare us for another week of this life.
And it was a phenomenon that would be repeated all morning in departments and groups companywide.
“Sioux City confirms they are six months ahead of schedule,” Leonard was saying.
“Omaha sees no hurdles to the pending acquisition,” Cliff was saying.
“Cincinnati is ready for an internal expansion,” Whitley was saying.
“Bellingham is poised to start its Asian production,” Julie was saying.
I nodded. I agreed. I rejected. I deferred. Yes, I said. Good, I said. Absolutely not, I whispered. Please, tell me, I asked carefully, tell me this is not for real.
The three years had passed at a frightening speed, forming a connection among us all that seemed to have been built over a decade or more.
“We use St. Louis to shift cash into Omaha, right?” I asked.
“Clearly,” Whitley said. “Like Chicago to Cleveland. It’s the same.”
“Whose group is watching for another false start on the lock boxes?” I asked, starting to point at Cliff, and Julie was already nodding.
“Cliff’s,” she answered. “But the real concern is the last-minute changeover of outdated networking.”
“Yet when it’s done you’ll write your sexcapade,” Cliff said.
Julie leaned toward Cliff. She smiled wide. She said quietly, “Fiction to be read with one hand. An underappreciated genre.”
Cliff shook his head seriously. “You can’t say genre in a meeting.”
Cliff really did seem like some sort of salad. Leonard really was pudding on the verge of becoming mousse. Julie was unquestionably the smoothest, purest cream. Whitley was nothing if not well-done beef.
What food am I?
I floated toward the high, dim ceiling. The sunrise was spreading from the sky to the shore to our windows and walls. Like always, the sun seemed to offer the only light in the building.
“He’s disarming and confident,” Whitley said.
“He’s focused and sure,” Cliff said.
They were talking about me. It’s not that they’d realized I had floated away—the senior staff had long enjoyed addressing me as if I were not there, once again deflating the unreal aura surrounding me inside and outside the company.
“He’s energized and engaged,” Julie said.
“Our confidence in his leadership grows every minute,” Cliff said.
“He’s salmon cooked rare over an open fire,” Whitley said, and the rest paused. Pictured it. Then all began to nod.
I smiled. I thanked them. After a moment, I stood to leave.
Once more I remembered that I would bankrupt them all. Cliff with his six kids. Julie with her newborn. Whitley, who’d just turned down top jobs at the largest software and telecom companies in the world. Leonard, whose father had been with my father, back when the company had employed just thirty people. All four of them with their homes and families and futures leveraged completely against their share of the company’s stock. Like hundreds
