Oliver nodded. He’d given this enough attention. And there were bigger fish already on his plate.
—
“Something I want to run past you, Ruggs, if that’s all right.”
Forgoing small talk, or even a greeting, Oliver started in.
“This lawyer who’s been helping me, well, he pointed me to this city program. It offers small businesses employee health insurance. But get this, spouses are eligible. And in-network costs don’t have a ceiling.” Oliver waited. The silence implied consent. “Thing is, we switch Generii onto this plan, it’s going to cost. Which is kind of why I’m calling. We have some money in reserve, but there’s still a ways before the demo’s up and running. Fucking who knows when we hit market. Meaning, you know, joining this plan? On the one hand, it gets Alice that policy and that’s big. But for the business, purely from that perspective, ah—”
“Who do you need me to kill?” Ruggles answered.
When it was Jonathan’s turn to hear the plea, he said, “It’s nice of you to ask, Oli. But really?”
So the fax machine belched, pages curling out, dropped from off the tray, onto the floor.
Like that. The weight of a planet. The member will be covered fully.
They allowed themselves to breathe. He recounted for her the sequence of fax exchanges, suspense escalating through his progression, Alice clasping his hand in both of hers at the moment of truth. Cackling, she drew him to her, touched the front of her head to his, held her hand on the back of his neck.
He made copies of the fax, as Blauner had said he should for important papers. Put these copies in separate safe places.
Of course there were more fires on the horizon — aside from just figuring out which bills could wait on for another month.
First was basic and unavoidable: the chief goddamn programmer behind this whole Generii thing remained indisposed, distracted, or missing in action for prolonged stretches.
Nobody with a heart would begrudge Oliver, or question his priorities, but it was still an issue, their original touchstone deadline long in the rearview.
Second problem: while Alice was getting her consolidation, the Brow had taken over the workspace, programming round the clock, crashing on the couch. It hadn’t reached the level of young Bill Gates — who, according to legend, used to fall asleep at the terminal when writing the first Windows code, then jolt awake and, without a hiccup, pick back up where he’d left off. But the Brow was basically chained to a desktop. And progress was being made; everyone remained hopeful. At the same time, Alice was home now, and her immune system wasn’t safe around the floating biological circus of unwashed programmer detritus.
Meanwhile, every minute those terminals were vacant meant wasted time, the pissing away of definitively finite resources.
An afternoon’s search uncovered a building around the corner. On the third floor, just above a storied meat locker, a small office was available. According to lore, twice a week for twenty-five years, a navy vet staggered up the death-trap stairwell and unpacked from his leather satchel needles, inks. Rumor had it he’d once beaten a murder rap in military court, which was why he called his three machines kits or rigs, as opposed to guns, growling to those who made the mistake: “Guns kill people. That’s the diff.” Cops, firefighters, and paramedics were foremost among his steady drip of visitors, who treated the city’s ordinance against tattooing with as much regard as its laws against smoking dope on the sidewalk.
The space was cramped, dusty, hot as a furnace, its windows flooding with light from dawn to dusk. It smelled like an assignation spot for hoboes. When Oliver asked, the realtor explained that the tattoo artist had passed away at his desk, and baked in the sunlight until his assistant finally came and discovered the corpse. Workers below had thought that one of their deliveries had been left out of the freezer.
So there was a new monthly rent, fumigation and cleaning costs, and new phone lines for a new Internet connection that would allow their computers to receive streams of information at an updated, previously unheard-of rate of 54,000 bits per second. He’d also need new secondary lines for faxes and calls so their fragile new state-of-the-art Internet connection didn’t get interrupted. Electricity bills would spike. Throw in some new desks and ergonomic chairs because he employed a bunch of entitled, whining bitches. Clothespins for all offended noses.
“My fucking cousin wants to be an installation artist. What the fuck that is, I got no clue,” Ruggles told him. “Kid got into RISD though. He’s struggling but hanging in there. Know why?”
Oliver started to answer; Ruggles held up his finger.
“Kid lives on rice and air. Steals paper from Kinko’s. The whole starving artist thing. Any baby bird, like our fledgling venture here, you need as little overhead as possible, capisce?”
Oliver apologized. “Right.”
His friend’s pupils widened: Do you really?
Ruggles had spent an afternoon during Alice’s consolidation at her bedside, deftly goading her into a conversation about the upcoming Oscars. He had delivered, hands down, the best toast at Oliver’s wedding.
Indeed, Elliot Ruggleschmierr had been key in Oliver’s life since orientation weekend of their freshman year, a pair of mismatched majors joined together by their encyclopedic knowledge of Star Trek trivia. But as Oliver waited for his old roomie to render a verdict, he couldn’t tell whether Ruggles might have taken umbrage at the possibility that all he cared about was money.
Maybe Ruggles had been touched by the fiscal concerns that Oliver was showing for the company, even in the middle of this ordeal? Was he simply calculating added costs?
“It’s the worst possible time for this.” Ruggles spoke slowly.
“What?” Oliver said.
As if making a decision, Ruggles seemed to shift into a different gear. “Okay, look. I really don’t want to bring it up. I’m on your team, thick and thin. But this software thing is your baby. You’re the point man. You had me go to bat for you with a lot of people. I’m talking hat in hand to every friend I have on the brokerage floor. That’s a lot of good people, and some not so good people, too, putting hard-earned nickels and dimes into this on your word and name, because you made that presentation. Remember that?”
“I know.”
“ ‘We get this thing in shape, show Microsoft and those other bastards that Generii can go in and out of their program like mice, take whatever we want, they have to pay us to protect their borders. Otherwise, their big Windows 95 rollout is worthless.’ You were the one who stood up there, talked about free access and gatekeepers.”
“I remember, Elliot.” Oliver waited, stared; Ruggles downed a shot of Jameson, winced, pulled at his own tie.
“You fucking do what you got to, okay? Don’t worry. We’re all on board for the insurance. I already talked with everyone. Go with God. But, sahib, you got to make it right for us, too. Time to buckle down and kick shit into gear. Maybe it’ll be a nice distraction, give you something else to focus on. I fucking hope so.”
—
Alice’s mother drew a small but decent pension for the two and a half decades she’d spent teaching New Hampshire farm children to avoid split infinitives. She’d kept herself busy in retirement with her dogs, her garden, art classes, reading group, cutthroat bridge, and three days a week working the receptionist’s desk at a vet’s office. Friends had been taking care of her Weimaraners. But the staff at the vet’s office, for all their pledges of support, still needed someone to take calls and keep schedules. If Alice’s mom was going to keep her dogs out of a kennel, and maintain her pleasant part-time employment — i.e., checks that weren’t necessary but were far from unneeded — she had to get back to Putney. There wasn’t any easy solution, so Alice’s mother, in her measured and typical fashion, did the most reasonable thing she could come up with at that moment: change diapers. She doted on her grandchild. Replaced the filter in the air purifier, as she did not want that bedroom getting stagnant. She cleaned, dusted, sat bedside, held her daughter’s hand. She rocked the baby and made goo-goo noises and recounted a story: Alice, six years old, falling off a horse and breaking her arm.