I made a mental note. We moved to eleven. My assistant continued with a list of Whitley’s plans to conduct security reviews of all backup systems in our Asian offices.
My lie, ever present, brought to the surface for a moment, once more my mind searching for ways to dodge the constant reviews and investigations that Whitley and her SWAT team were conducting.
Walking with Cliff, his thumbs twitching rapidly as we discussed the turnover rates of our German accounts receivable. We turned a corner, and a man bearing the telltale distant stare of a sleepless programmer came up to me, cutting off Cliff as he looked me in the eyes and said, “Here’s a question you can answer—if I reinstall the service pack on the Japanese Maple in Nicaragua, will I lose all config changes to my ODBC connections?”
I stared back at his heavy, glassy eyes. Clearly he’d confused me with someone else. But I started to speak.
He raised a hand. “Never mind,” he said quickly. “Obviously, I’ve just answered my own question.”
And he was gone.
And I would never see him again.
And actually I had known the answer.
Walking with Whitley once more, finding her on seventeen, Public Relations, bright-faced young professionals and darkly clothed cynics all breaking plans into parts, offering a simple spin to define the chaos, trying in all things to spread the word, the good doings and best efforts, of Core Communications.
Three hundred e-mails.
Thirty more reports waiting on my desk for review.
Four holes of putt-putt with two novice players from Finance.
The ventilation system turning on, purring above us, Whitley and I hearing it for the second time that day, when usually it blew silently above the swirling noise of people, computers, phones and copiers.
Collabra, Marimba, Domino, Exchange. Software. Satellites. A marketing push into Asia.
Nineteen, and I was alone, passing through another of the Unoccupied Territories. And this time stopping. Standing still for a moment. Seeing the walls freshly painted, feeling my feet pressing easily into the untouched carpet, looking at the desk chairs still wrapped in paper and plastic. Standing alone in this area, untouched and pristine. In some deepest way pure. And all of it waiting. Waiting for more.
Every day there was more.
My ears seemed to ring. I felt short of breath. I could see the whole day, blinking once, it was there and gone and somehow with me forever, each part disconnected, the all of it forming a solid, bright whole.
It was eight o’clock.
And at two in the morning, she came into my office. Like many nights, though not all. A short e-mail sent at one. A brief call back to me at two.
A woman in a black suit walked into the room.
She followed me upstairs to my apartment on the twenty-first floor.
A black suit, black hair. The edge of her smooth white bra just visible as she stepped close.
All my life I hadn’t slept much, even when I was a child. I can remember whole nights when I was six or five or even four and I lay in my bed, staring up at the ceiling, unable to sleep. Now, at thirty-five, instead of lying awake, I spent my nights in my office, there from nine till two, spreadsheet open on my computer, feeding more information into my secret model.
Now I was here, though. In my apartment. Six tall rooms cast in the gray light and dark shadows of lamps placed two or three or four to a room. A kitchen I didn’t use, a bed I could not find sleep in, wide windows onto the city, in every room, those windows. It seems now that I lived in those windows, raised from the wooden floors, suspended in the glass between building and city.
This black suit in front of me. The black hair long and a face beautiful and indistinct, only dark eyes, a mouth, chin, the neck and shoulders and arms and legs. The edge of that bra. The two-color silhouette of a woman in front of me.
Always somehow they were the same. Darkly perfect, quietly fit, seemingly kind, seemingly happy. This woman with the dark hair, thick, pulled lightly into a tie at the base of her neck, standing in front of me in a fine wool suit, low and simple shoes, as if she’d been pulled from a board meeting or presentation. But really she was a total stranger to me. Even the women I’d seen five or ten times in the last two years, all were strangers even if they’d been sent to me before. Because there was no banter, there were no questions, no anxious answers.
A few instructions maybe. Sometimes a guiding word.
But really I preferred no talking at all.
I did not do drugs. I did not gamble, did not even spend the money I was paid. This was my vice, dark music and gin, a woman escorted to me by my bodyguard.
There were no dim fantasies, no perversions or abuse. There was only nameless sex, steady closeness, the just quiet sounds of clothes coming off. Her participation imagined or faked, I didn’t know and didn’t care, because in all this there was acting, some play in the dark with shadows and silence, an agreed-upon game with simple rules and clear roles, much of it no different than the circling rhythms of Monday meetings or hallway games, all of us playing, all of us paid, everyone trying to leave behind each moment and role at the end of the day.
I came inside her.
Three offices to open in England and Ireland. Eight acquisitions in Taiwan and Korea. Cash soon shifting from Chicago to Omaha.
Five thousand, two thousand, six million, seven.
Collabra, Marimba, Domino, Exchange.
Messages, rogue sections, another meeting, another floor.
Every day was the same. For three years, I’d spent each day keeping the company on track toward its demise, adding pressure by the hour, all the while trying to find a way out of the trap I’d created.
This is what it meant to live a lie.
I came inside her again.
They do not have any kind of disease. They are not criminals. They are not forced into what they do. They were simply delivered to an anonymous apartment.
In New York, with enough money, you can buy anything.
These things were important to me. Because this was about the absence of any risks or possibilities or needs or cautions. This was only about the touching, the sounds and sex.
No cash exchange. No late-night cigarette as she or I broke the spell. No shared insights into her childhood or upbringing, no sharing of my weaknesses, wants and faults. It was over and she would leave and then I would finally sleep.
Masturbation on a credit card in a penthouse apartment.
And so at four in the morning on this Monday night, I did sleep. Lying on the sofa back in my office, the best place I’d found. The glow of the city, the distant glare from the waterfront over in New Jersey, all reflecting in on my high ceiling and I would sleep a few hours, till the sun came up, my mind moving through meetings and plans and expenses, finding details, concepts, tasks big and small.
In two months revenue would cross $21 billion a year.
At some point, any point, we’d be bankrupt and done.
I’d managed to keep us alive another day.
And I would sleep in that state, listing and racing and listing more, and maybe once, maybe not, would I think about the woman who’d visited me that night, maybe picturing her face, more likely her hair or clothes, some remnant memory of pleasure and silence, some memory just marked by a disconnected guilt, and now I’d be awake, never sure how much I had really slept, now only staring out the window at the morning turning gold and white and a deep, deep blue, Tuesday, and I was floating, legs quietly pulled up to my chest, so silly, so obvious, but floating,