Paper sorted, paper printed, paper copied, paper piled, paper flowing toward destinations unseen and unknown, paper sitting untouched in tall piles on bright tables, sitting dusty and still on high shelves along the wall. Paper bound, paper clipped, paper stapled and stacked and filed and sent and all of it reflecting white as it shot quietly from copiers and printers, or landing heavily as it was moved from desk to file, from file to binder, from binder to conference room. Paper was the breath, it seemed, the air we inhaled, then released.
“Core Communications,” I heard someone behind me say, “owns approximately two thousand six hundred and twenty-eight white-boards.”
Walking with the head of Human Resources, finding myself in the middle of an afternoon basketball game in the wide walkways on fourteen, the Lady Gunslingers of PR favored by ten over the Warlords of Admin. It was one of multiple events in an endless and informal buildingwide Olympics—Nerf basketball, laser tag, yo-yo face-offs, darts, pool, air hockey, marbles, video games of all sorts and kinds, poker, chess, D&D, cubicle badminton, Wiffle-bat baseball, chair races, Yahtzee!, Scrabble, checkers, elevator bingo, untold betting pools devoted to elections, births, sports and office romances, periodic foot races around the auditorium on two, broom-and-tape-roll shuffle-board, Frisbee, full-contact rollerball, Magic: The Gathering, tag-team wrestling, Sumo wrestling, paper-airplane competitions based on an arcane Italian formula gauging distance, speed and altitude, and six separate putt-putt courses, each with a rating of novice, pro or addict, that were spread through offices, workspaces, hallways and conference rooms to form a total of one hundred and eight holes of golf.
“Foul!” someone yelled, throwing their hands in the air.
As with every other group in Core Communications, the people playing basketball were not only some of the most productive people in the company, they were also the most productive workers in their professions. Outsiders never believed it. Even the board found it hard to understand. But despite the games and jokes and constant digressions, Core was one of the most productive and efficient companies in the world.
I played five minutes of basketball with the Warlords of Admin. I managed to contribute two assists and a foul shot but had three jump shots blocked by a fanatical Bulgarian intern—a lightning-quick woman with a twelve-inch vertical leap and no idea I was the owner of the company, the building and the court she so freely dominated.
It was, for me, an unlikely but welcome moment of anonymity and untainted employee contact, even as other people stood around us, watching their CEO run the court.
Walking with two financial analysts, each updating me on fluctuations in various European stock markets, the meeting soon carrying us from the eighteenth to the eleventh floor, Worldwide Network Operations, where sci-fi marathons met the complete works of Nietzsche, where junior programmers in tuxedo T-shirts worked alongside engineering PhDs and tired dropouts from Cal Tech.
Picking up Julie, the two of us walking across thirteen, a floor with a particularly large number of windows, the rooms cast in shadows from the windows around us, rooms sometimes angular, sometimes round, sometimes softened into shapelessness as the light reflected off the steel and the glass and the ducts in the ceiling.
“I’ve got a meeting with the blind,” Julie was saying, “then a review of new day care policies on the Korean peninsula.”
Julie was our goodness. Our corporate soul. It was her staff that led tours of inner-city schoolkids through the office, her staff that cost-justified employee day care worldwide, her staff that spearheaded blood drives, canned food collections, volunteer teams for neighborhood soup kitchens. She did this while overseeing the production of all Blue Boxes and hardware in over fifty facilities around the globe. Did this quietly, without once asking for praise or recognition. Did this without seeming soft or maternal. In another age, men in gray suits would have called her a kind den mother. Cliff once jokingly referred to her as dear and she turned to him and hit him, hard, in the arm. He could not rotate his shoulder for more than a week.
Yet even more than her strength and temper, what probably most prevented the senior staff from calling her dear or maternal was Julie’s endless appetite for discussions about sex.
“The head of production from that Korean company we just bought reminds me of an aging leopard,” she said to me now. “A sleepy, languid man who rises only to breed.”
I nodded. Waiting. Sure something more would come.
“He’s taking early retirement tomorrow,” she said. “He agreed with my suggestion today.”
She nodded. She turned and was gone.
One hundred and fifty e-mails by three. Suggestions from staff members. Requests from board members. Favors to be returned. Thanks to be given.
Another group of four, all in green, this time near the elevators. Already today I’d seen an oddly large number of people in green.
People saying Hello to me as they moved out of the way of another of my walking meetings, some people even whispering, a few even pointing, sometimes a group slowly spreading apart, graciously and with unintended formality, making way for their CEO.
“I’m not royalty,” I’d once said to Whitley.
“It’s not your choice,” she’d replied. “They’ve made of you what they want to believe. And they want to believe you are not like them.”
The steady sound of the ventilation system, metallic and barely audible below and between the noise of so many people in motion.
Shadows in my office I’d never noticed before.
Six hours’ sleep in the past three days.
A memory of Julie with her head on her desk after lunch, the five-minute nap of the exhausted executive vice president of worldwide production.
The spreadsheet, eight hundred pages, open on my screen. For a few minutes only. Updating the model. Incorporating new purchases of secret mainframes. Adding recent leases for yet more satellite time. Tying in the hidden cash I ran daily through acquired companies. Removing now defunct shell corporations through which I bought and sold equipment. Moving assets to newly formed shells based in Bermuda and the Caymans.
“Timeless,” I heard a woman’s voice say from outside my office, the words drifting to me through the noise on twenty, through the noise in my office, through the noise coming in from the city now caught in the windows around me. “Placeless,” the voice said. “Godless. Sourceless.”
Not till four that afternoon did I realize it was all the members of the company’s Tech Support, Network Administration and Software Development groups who were wearing green.
“I like your shirt,” I now told Leonard, the head of those groups.
“Thanks,” he said with a pleasant nod, but offering no explanation as to why his shirt matched his pants, his pants matched his sneakers, his sneakers matched his socks. “As expected,” he said, “the equipment will total two hundred twenty-nine million dollars over a three-year period.”
Somehow I hadn’t noticed Leonard’s green ensemble at our senior staff meeting that morning, or in any of our interactions earlier in the day. Maybe that’s because Leonard was one of those big people, not fat or overweight, but big in a way that was startling every time I saw him, an unexpected amount of space suddenly occupied anytime he entered the room. Big hands, big eyes, big features, big motions. He had the largest fingers I had ever seen. His size tended to overwhelm whatever it was that he wore.
But now I saw that he was all in green. I wondered if maybe he’d changed clothes at some point, inexplicably donning a costume for the fading light of the afternoon.
Unlikely.
Cliff,