her inappropriate jokes, an accounts manager had downloaded a virus-infected pornography file onto his work computer that immobilized our entire system for two days, a field representative had been arrested for buying a child bride in Indonesia, and of course there was my squad’s own ill-executed trip to Chicago—but such a stridently antisex message seemed farcical and doomed to fail with the men of Couvade, whom I’d seen at bachelor parties and after-work clubs and company retreats to Florida.
The rest of the day’s content, however, was more effective. After Shoale’s talk we watched a documentary about sex crimes and one about the ravages of sexually transmitted diseases that featured disturbing footage of a syphilitic man having his nose surgically removed. Then we had lunch and came back to form small discussion groups and role-play exercises—when alone with someone we found attractive, we were to talk only about work-related subjects, even if that person tried to make things personal—before concluding the day with a lecture from Shoale that took a more positive, empowering tone than his first: “You have the ability to be as great as anyone who ever walked the Earth,” he said. “Gandhi, Buddha, and even Jesus suffered the same temptations and trembled from the same desires that you do. What made them different—what can make you different—is that they heeded the call of their best selves. They made the choice, as you can, to rise above the squalor of desire.”
Several men around me nodded thoughtfully while gathering together their things.
From there I raced back to the office and finished Danforth at four A.M. Then I went home, slept for three hours, and by nine the next morning was seated at my cubicle, where I opened an email from Mr. Raven. I felt a burning sensation in my right wrist and popped two homeopathic pills that went on to have no effect.
“Mr. Raven?” I knocked lightly on his door.
“Come in,” he said, pushing aside his keyboard. Commemorative posters of marathons and charity races covered the wall space not taken up with shelves of corporate histories, mambo primers, and presidential biographies. Through the window I could see latticed scaffolding in front of a former hotel being converted to office space. Mr. Raven patted his gelled gray hair, which lay frozen across his scalp like a winter stream.
“Sit down,” he said, moving things around on his desk—a box of chocolate mints, a pair of Mongolian relaxation balls, a penknife—and fingering a reddish birthmark on his chin. “I assume you know why I want to see you.”
“Is it about Danforth Ltd.?”
Mr. Raven appreciated candor about painful or difficult subjects, as well as when bold action was required. We’d discussed Harry Truman once and, while acknowledging and finding fault with his faults, we’d approvingly measured the strength of his character—its unflinching directness—because of which he could say without hypocrisy that the buck stopped with him. A true leader saw, identified, and accepted mistakes while learning how not to repeat them.
“Please tell me why it was late.”
“I first sent it to you on Tuesday and didn’t know that you hadn’t received it until yesterday morning. I would have done it again right away except that the sensitivity training seminar was about to start.”
“Which your actions largely occasioned.”
“That’s—”
A questioning look settled on Mr. Raven’s face.
I drew my left ankle up onto my right knee and pulled at the pant leg material. “As you know, there were four of us in Chicago. I didn’t see the credit card Juan used and figured it was his personal one, and we’d pay him back later. This isn’t to say I’m blameless—the whole thing reflected bad judgment, including my own—but I’ve already had my wages garnished to make up my quarter of the expense account item, and I formally addressed the Employee Conduct Board last week and volunteered to do community service as well as—”
Mr. Raven leaned forward with a hard, penetrating look and said, “Let’s cut the folderol.”
“Excuse me?”
“We both know you’re a sick man.”
“Excuse me?”
“Your performance at Couvade has been greatly compromised lately, and you now have a choice. You can take a leave of absence and get healthy. Check into a sex addiction clinic like the PASE Wellness Center in Daly City. Work on this problem and beat it. Or you can accept the ten demerit points I’ll have to issue you for Danforth Ltd., which combined with your ten demerits from the Employee Conduct Board would total the twenty required for me to fire you.”
I swallowed thickly and felt the beginning of a sinus headache, of my tear ducts opening and throat constricting. Mr. Raven pushed a box of tissues toward me. I rose and then sat back down.
“The Board is giving us ten demerits?”
“You’ll get a copy of their written decision.”
“I don’t understand.”
Mr. Raven’s voice softened and his forehead relaxed, lowering his hair a quarter inch. “It’s going to be okay. You’ll undergo treatment and then, following a probationary period of not less than eighteen months, I’ll review your case and consider your coming back to work for Couvade.”
“No, this is wrong. Danforth was a mysterious accident, and I’d like to appeal to the Conduct Board for a reduced penalty.”
“It’s too late for that.”
“You’re telling me this for the first time right now!”
Mr. Raven, still holding the base of the tissue box, pulled it away from me and then picked up his phone. “Don’t make me call security.”
“But I’m being railroaded. You can’t—What if you call the system administration department and ask them to recover my Tuesday computer profile and they’ll tell you that I’m not lying about Danforth? In a situation this serious, you have to!”
I quit yelling and Mr. Raven set down his phone and we stared at a midway point between us for the seventy-three seconds it took two building security officers to arrive and lift me to my feet. I weighed a thousand pounds in their arms.
Following my meeting with Ms. Anderson at the Wellness Center, the escorts took me to the dining hall, a high-ceilinged oval room with rectangular metal tables, where, arriving as the others were finishing, I ate a four-egg omelet with sausage links and home fries. Nothing tasted as good as it looked, being made of the sort of low-fat, low-cholesterol ingredients that I’d bought after my surgery and then never again, but I took comfort in the act of eating and didn’t get up from the table until my escorts said that the orientation meeting was about to start in the Celestial Commons building. I would have argued that I didn’t care about missing the beginning—or the middle or the end—if I thought they’d care that I didn’t care; instead I followed them out.
Having felt like an animal caught in a steel trap during my conversation with Ms. Anderson—when I discovered that I lacked the strength to chew off my own foot—just then I felt calm and self-possessed. I walked steadily between my escorts. This was all temporary. Conrad must have understood PASE’s role in my being shot and taken away, meaning either the police
