Bodies Electric

by Colin Harrison

  Dolores twirled flirtatiously on one heel. “I’m looking for a man in a suit.”

  “You look terrific.”

  “Yes?” She was pleased.

  “Well,” the Chairman exclaimed, the cigarette in his mouth going up and down as he glided over, all ease and grace, “now I know why Jack has so much trouble concentrating on his work.” He held out his hand to Dolores, and introduced himself, as did she. Like all old men who wanted to possess young women, the Chairman acted as if I were not there, as if Dolores were my woman only as a result of his beneficence; he flirted with her as compensation due him. “Are you the mother of this very clever child?”

  “She’s mine, all right.”

  “This is Dolores Salcines, Maria’s mother.”

  “I am truly pleased to meet you. She’s a sweetheart.” The ashes of the Chairman’s cigarette broke off and fell onto the carpet.

  “I’m glad she behaved, that’s all.” Dolores laughed nervously.

  The Chairman glanced at my shoes, thinking to himself suddenly, and for the life of me, I could swear that he’d just thought of something unusually clever. “Jack, I want you and Dolores to come out to my place, this weekend. Sunday. It’ll be informal. I do hope you can come, Dolores. How’s your game of tennis?”

  “Uh—sorry, I never played it.”

  “Then you can swim and enjoy the sun.”

  “Can I bring Maria?”

  “Of course,” the Chairman beamed. “We’ll have scads of children there.” He turned and eyed me directly, the tone of his voice just different enough that he made it clear that he wanted me there, just cold enough not to indicate how he had been affected by what he had seen. “Mrs. Marsh will provide you with the directions, Jack. And thank you for this interesting demonstration.” He smiled at Dolores and then bowed to shake Maria’s hand. “Good-bye, Maria. I have very much enjoyed my time with you. And, if you’ll excuse me, now I must go.”

  That afternoon Morrison waved me into his office. “We’re moving quickly,” he said. “They’ve come around. Samantha and Waldhausen have really led this deal. We’ve got a lot of agreements roughed out now. We make a preliminary announcement in less than a week is my bet,” Morrison said. “I’m going to start calling board members, loosen them up on the idea.”

  I told him about my meeting that morning with the Chairman. Morrison played with the wooden duck on his desk. “Maybe he actually will go along with the merger idea,” I said.

  Morrison returned his eyes to me, and could not help but smile. “He’s an old man, Jack, he’s over seventy, his time is over.”

  “So you assumed all along he wouldn’t change his mind, right? You decided to waste my time on that basis?”

  “These aren’t questions you should worry about,” Morrison replied. “We’ve got other stuff to think about. We’re going to have a lot of activity around here soon. I brought Waldhausen over yesterday to show him around. We’ve been talking about carving out a suite of offices for them in the building, maybe a floor or two below.”

  “Sounds good.”

  “But I need you to do something for me.”

  “What?”

  “Get rid of Robinson.”

  “Get rid of him?”

  “Fire him. Get him out of here.”

  “Nobody seems to mind—”

  “I mind. I mind a lot. Waldhausen was telling me at lunch yesterday how bad race relations have gotten in Germany lately, and how he was afraid they were going to become like this country. And then we’re in my office yesterday and in comes Robinson. He’s got the baseball game in one ear and he asked me if I wanted a shine. Mrs. Comber missed him, she was in the ladies’ room.”

  “What did Waldhausen say?”

  Morrison reacted angrily. “He didn’t have to say anything. Saying nothing was saying everything. Just get him out of here, for good. It’s racist just to have him around, it’s fucking embarrassing, like we’re running a plantation.”

  “The guy needs the job—”

  “Don’t push me on this, Jack. It’s a small thing. Robinson is just some old guy. You’re gonna fire a lot of people in your time. Believe me, I’ve done it. This is just one lousy old black guy who shines shoes.”

  But this was not what I was hired to do and I told him so. We had two whole floors of personnel people downstairs sitting around on their asses, filling out forms and doing not much else. They had nice women with clean fingernails who specialized in firing employees. I told Morrison that, too.

  “Yes, and because he’s been around thirty years and everybody loves him and will want to have a retirement party or something, it’ll be a month before they do it,” he said. “I don’t want to have memos written, I just want the guy out today so I don’t have to worry about it when Waldhausen and the other V-S guys come around in the next few days and weeks.”

  “Let me work out something,” I offered. “Get him to take a little vacation so he isn’t around.”

  “No. Just get him out.”

  “What about a pension or something?”

  Morrison turned toward the window and contemplated the haze of apartment buildings to the north of Central Park. “If he begs for money, give him something . . . I don’t know, something like—”

  The phone trilled. Morrison picked it up and I watched him talk without thinking, hear without listening. He was keeping his thoughts to himself and he was appearing to keep his thoughts to himself. I’d noticed him having breakfast in his office the last few days, before heading over to the Plaza for the negotiations, sipping orange juice, pouring cream from a small silver pitcher. He was drinking more coffee. The new stance was internal as much as external. He was telling himself that soon would come his finest hour, that he had lived fifty-three years and endured innumerable abuses and detours and idiot cocktail parties and plowed through roomfuls of paper in order that he might find himself poised on the moment of greatness. The vanity had a long root. It went back to that original military cockiness, maybe further. He had lost a bit of weight, perhaps ten pounds, which in corporate executives, as it is for politicians, is a sign of ambition for higher office. Morrison felt that he had been anointed by fate, that the gods only give to those who give to themselves, and he did not intend to screw up this opportunity. He did not intend to be standing in his rose garden twenty-five years hence, retired and forgotten and wearing a floppy hat to keep the sun off his face and realize what his wrong move had been. He would, he felt, play chess with all of them at once—the Chairman, the board, the V-S guys, and all those whom he commanded—like a grand master who plays a dozen matches at once in one room, looking at a particular chess board for a moment, angling defensively, setting up a coming attack, or even suddenly making the perfect brilliant coup de grace, and then moving onto the next match. A situation in which the greatness was not in one game but in the ability to play a dozen or more games simultaneously and win. To be good at this, one must keep one’s own counsel. There is one side and all else is the enemy, including one’s advisers, because although they might mean well, they are capable of error. Even I, his trusted lieutenant, was his enemy, or at best, a piece on his chessboard, tactically disposable in the right moment. He had measured my words and offered little response. There was a plain coldness in his face, and in the hallway recently his laughter sounded purposefully fraudulent, laced with some extra tone of irony, as if he was laughing at those who would try to make him laugh.

  “Hang on a second,” Morrison said into the phone. Then he turned toward me. “Out by the end of today.”

  He returned to his call. I’d have to get rid of Robinson and I hated Morrison for that. But he didn’t care. He had come, now, into a season of ruthlessness.

  In upstate New York, my father was chopping at the earth with his hoe, thinking of the slender green tomato seedlings he would set into the earth as soon as the nights were dependably warm, perhaps thinking about his son in Manhattan, yet not knowing that same son was about to fire
an elderly black man. I had Helen call building services to find out where Robinson was and he came through my door about thirty minutes later, pushing his sad little cart.

  “Listen, Mr. Robinson, I have to discuss something.”

  “What’s that? My Mets? My Doc Gooden?” he said with a smile.

  “No. It’s not that.” Better to get to the hard part, I figured. “Listen, you’re going to have to leave us.”

  “What? I’m okay. I’m good.” He thumped his chest with a fist. “Don’t you worry about Freddie Robinson. He’s all right.”

  “No, it’s not that,” I said. “You can’t work here anymore, Freddie. You’re going into the wrong offices at the wrong time.”

  He stood there.

  “What’d I do?”

  “You’re going into the wrong offices when you shouldn’t, Freddie. That’s all.”

  “You know I’m honest.”

  “Nobody said you weren’t, Freddie.”

  “What they sayin’ about me, then? Last time I talk to you, you ask me what they sayin’ about you and now here I am asking what they sayin’ about me. Everybody likes Freddie Robinson. Everybody here smiles at me and I smile back. I like people, Mr. Whitman. I’ve been in this building since it was built and now you’re going tell me I can’t work here no more?”

  The fingernail of a corporate dictator, cut with idle detachment, falls to the floor, killing a man. Robinson’s fate was Morrison’s whim, nothing else.

  “I want you to give Helen your address and we’ll get you a check, help you out.”

  “I don’t need no check, I need to see my people every day,” Robinson said, with greater agitation. “Some people in this building and me go way back. These people my family, Mr. Whitman. It came from up top, didn’t it? I don’t have no grandchildren, Mr. Whitman, my own son got killed twenty years ago. I’m a old man. I’m sixty-eight years old. Gotta do something. Can’t go shine down Penn Station. That’s all them Brazilian kids. Take me years to get in there. I can’t go shine outside Port Authority. Not Grand Central neither. Weather’ll kill this old man, summer and winter. I can’t do it.”

  I stared at him, admiring his courage and eloquence, and considered going back to Morrison. But that would aggravate him and be useless. It would demonstrate that I would question his directives. He had once been a good manager, not reactionary, soliciting advice from all. But conciliators do not become kings. Robinson stood in front of me, with his sad beaten little cart. He deserved better than an ignoble end to his work, and I knew that Liz, for one, would have been shocked that I had gone along with Morrison’s irrationality. But life, and business, is a sequence of transactions. Morrison was trading Robinson’s livelihood for his own peace of mind. I was trading a percentage of my conscience for Morrison’s approval and Morrison would be back on the floor within half an hour, expecting that Robinson would be gone. It was that simple, that ugly.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “The decision’s been made. That’s it.”

  I thought he would leave then. But Robinson frowned in bitterness. “You think I don’t know what all is goin’ on around here?” he said combatively.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I been around the block. I see what’s happening.”

  “What?” I asked.

  “Don’t you be fresh like that. If you goin’ to fire me outa here then I got to say my fill. You know better’n me what all’s goin’ on. You part of them.” He looked genuinely aggrieved. “I thought you was a nice fellow. I thought you was going to help out my Chairman.”

  This shocked me. “What?”

  “I told the Chairman you a fine young man. I told him how they killed your wife some years back.”

  “He asked?”

  “Sure he asked! He asked all kinds of things about you! How you think he know what’s going on around here?”

  I drew a breath. Some kind of higher game was being played. I basically didn’t know what the fuck was going on.

  “Now you still gotta go fire me outa here?”

  “Yes,” I told him.

  Robinson checked my expression for a flickering of reprieve.

  “You sure about that?”

  “Sure.”

  He turned and set his hand against the handles of the cart, pushing it out of the room, the small bottles of shoe polish clinking softly as he went. His silence confirmed what a bastard I was.

  Janklow, the vice president at Big Apple Cable, called that afternoon.

  “You get the file?” he asked.

  “Looks okay?”

  “Looks fine.”

  “Thought it would get to you faster.”

  “It’s fine.”

  “That’s it?” Janklow asked hopefully. “I mean, if there’s anything else you guys are looking for . . .”

  Schmoozing me, looking for the open door, a special assignment, a handle to grab hold of. It occurred to me I could probably have Hectorfired, just by saying the word. But that would mean he’d have more time on his hands, would feel greater desperation. And he would suspect, naturally, that I had ordered it. And then I would have unfairly fired two men in one day and my soul would be worth about as much as a scrap of old tire littering the West Side Highway. I wondered if I could maybe make Hector’s life a little easier, take the sting out of losing Dolores and Maria.

  “How many positions are at the next pay grade?” I asked Janklow.

  “Maybe four dozen. Field supervisors.”

  “They work hard?”

  “They supervise,” he grunted. “Supposedly. They train the new installers and make sure the work orders are carried out quickly. That kind of stuff. Pretty simple.”

  “Could this guy Hector Salcines do this job?”

  “I never met the guy. But field supervisors aren’t exactly brain surgeons. It’s just guys who have run cable for more years than the other guys and got tired.”

  “Longer hours?” Maybe a promotion would distract him, too, keep him busy.

  “Maybe longer hours but easier, too. More paperwork in the office, checking the accounts by computer and stuff.”

  “I want you to promote this Hector Salcines to the next level, to supervisor.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes. Don’t tell him why, just promote him.”

  “And may I ask why such a strong imperative is coming from the thirty-ninth floor all the way out here about some guy who makes maybe eleven bucks an hour?”

  I didn’t say anything. This is an effective technique in conflict.

  “Just promote him? Just like that?”

  “Yes.”

  I had another call coming.

  “Just do it,” I said, sounding like Morrison, switching lines. The new call was from DiFrancesco.

  “Got some more stuff,” he wheezed. “You want to come get it?”

  “I don’t have time. What is it?”

  “Looks like more of the same. It’s coming in to that second number you gave me.”

  “Which number?”

  He read off the digits. It was the Chairman’s fax, in Mrs. Marsh’s office.

  “I don’t understand,” I said.

  “I don’t either.”

  “Fax them to me here.”

  “I don’t fax things, it leaves an audit trail.”

  “C’mon. I don’t have time for your paranoia.”

  “No faxes.”

  Everything irritated me. “We’re paying you to provide the service!”

  “No trail.”

  “Fix it up to that fake New York Telephone line you told me about. Couldn’t you do something like that?”

  There was an appraising silence. “Won’t work.”

  “Then go the fuck around the corner to a copy shop and fax it from there, you fat, lazy bastard! This is what we are paying you for!”

  Five minutes later the sheets came spilling out of the machine in Helen’s office. I plucked them from the machine as they scrolled out and looked them over.

 
; I called DiFrancesco back. “You said these came from that other number I gave you?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “You didn’t screw it up somehow?”

  “No chance.”

  “But some of these are substantially the same—they are the same English documents that went out from the Plaza Hotel a couple of days ago.”

  “It looks that way.”

  I examined the other documents coming and going from the Chairman’s fax machine, all mundane stuff: a real estate deal involving one of his children, a letter from an old friend.

  “I think you screwed it up,” I told DiFrancesco. “All the other stuff makes sense.”

  “Wrong.”

  “But this is exactly what was sent from the Plaza to Germany. It’s the stuff that was provided by our people to their people in meetings. There’s no reason why it would be sent back the other way—”

  “There is a reason, you just don’t know what it is,” DiFrancesco answered in anger. “Because I never make mis-takes.”

  At six, I took the elevator to the lobby. Frankie the guard stopped me. “There’s a guy been askin’ for you. He didn’t have an appointment so we didn’t send him up. He’s over on the other side of the lobby—there—he’s not lookin’ now—”

  Hector. Standing in jeans and baseball jacket, watching the wrong bank of elevators, the one that only went up to the twenty-fifth floor.

  “You don’t want to talk to him you could go right now,” Frankie said. “Right now.”

  So I did, slipping into the river of workers headed for the subway, walking quickly, weaving unnecessarily to make it harder to follow. After a hundred yards, just to be sure, I looked back.

  Hector was there thirty yards back and I suppose he’d seen me turn around because he was looking away from me, cap pulled low. I turned quickly and accelerated my pace. I could go above ground and try to catch a cab, but the traffic crawled at this time of day. I passed through the turnstile and proceeded quickly to the downstairs track. The D train was on one side and the F train on the other, both Brooklyn bound. Hector was behind me and would be down the stairs in an instant. The D train’s doors chimed and I jumped on, hoping that the train would leave the platform before Hector could get on. It started to move. Was I safe? Hector arrived at the spot where I’d boarded, looking through the train window to find me. He ran alongside the train, dodging other commuters. He saw me.