The Nobodies

by Liza Palmer

  “I was one of the first people hired. Chris brought me on because we both worked for this video game company back in the day. I interviewed for one of the software engineering jobs.”

  “Why—”

  “Exactly. When he offered me the head copywriter position, he told me it was because he needed someone with my background to make sure anyone could understand what it was that Bloom was trying to do. He said I was ‘the Nerd Translator.’ But then I started seeing other software engineers around Bloom, and none of them were hired on as software engineers.”

  “I know Elise is in hardware, but—”

  “See, that’s the thing. Elise is a little older.” I happen to know Elise is, in fact, younger than me. “She just moved into town. I think she’s from Boston. I know this sounds like a bit of a jump—” Thornton looks over at me.

  “I like jumping.”

  Thornton pulls into the parking lot just across from Bloom. He shuts the car off. I curl my fingers around the door handle, but Thornton doesn’t move. I sit back in my seat.

  “Most of Bloom thinks that this job is just another opportunity to socialize, right?” I nod. “Everyone talks about everything here. Their jobs, their daily tasks, the problems with their bosses or whatever. So why would you consistently hire employees that no one wanted to hang out with?”

  I wince. “Because you don’t want anyone talking to them.”

  “Or you don’t want them talking to anyone else.”

  “Right.”

  “Bloom is a popularity contest. No one knows that better than Chris and Asher. So the best way to make it so your secret can hide in plain sight?”

  “Tell it to the unpopular kids.”

  “Exactly.”

  Thornton and I sit in silence for a few moments.

  “I don’t think CAM works,” I say.

  “What?”

  “Yeah. I think that’s the secret.”

  “Can you prove it?”

  “Not yet. But I will.” I reach for the door handle and climb out of Thornton’s car. He does the same. I slam the door shut, just as he’s pulling his workbag out of the back seat. I watch as he loops it over his head and situates the strap on his shoulder. “Do you want to help?” My voice is loud and robotic.

  “With my bag?” He walks to the back of the car and we start walking through the parking lot.

  “No … do you want to help me?”

  “I thought that’s what I was already doing?” Thornton pushes open the security gate and motions for me to walk through. I thank him a thousand times, catching myself on a thousand and one. We step out into the daylight and hurry across the street to Bloom. Well, I hurry, Thornton just walks normally.

  “Why are you helping me?” I ask. Thornton stops and pulls me off to the side of Bloom’s front entrance. He starts and stops several sentences and thoughts.

  “They think they’re smarter than everyone else.” He pauses. “And—” He is fighting his own words. “I don’t like when people think they’re smarter than me and I’m sure it’s an ego thing, but there it is.” Thornton makes eye contact with me. “Why are you doing it?”

  His simple question paralyzes me. My mouth hangs open, waiting for some neuron to fire with the right words that will somehow encapsulate the maelstrom of reasons and circumstances and humiliations that have led me to this moment. Finally—

  “I don’t know.” That’s as good as it’s going to get. In a panic, I add, “There’s something not right here. Also, it would make a good story.”

  “Are you thinking about turning this into a story?”

  “I mean, yeah—if it all checks out.” Thornton looks down at the ground. “I’m a journalist, after all.”

  “No, I know. It’s … and I know this is a very luxurious point of view to have, but—”

  “But what?”

  “Doing something because it’s the right thing to do feels different than doing something because you’re going to get something out of it.” His words knock the wind out of me. I question every impulse that allowed me to be so unguarded with this man.

  “You’re right.” Thornton looks up. “That is a luxurious point of view.” Pissed and closed off, I start walking to the door.

  “No, wait. Joan—” Thornton calls out after me and I turn around, my whole body stiff and cold.

  “Something can have impact and still sully its hands in commerce,” I say. My words hit Thornton like a bolt to the chest. “Why does me amplifying how fucked up this is—or could be, shit, this could be nothing, for all I know, even though I seriously doubt it is … If I’m right about what they’re doing, I want them to eat shit in the most public way possible. And I want them to know it was me who did it. Should I feel badly about that?”

  “No.” Thornton’s face is calm now and … almost amused.

  “What?” I ask, feeling totally exposed that I lost it on him. I wait for him to announce that I’m like a dog with a bone, and shit, Joan, why do you have to ruin everything?

  “I was wrong.”

  “What?”

  “I was wrong.”

  I … have no response to that. We just stand there in awkward silence.

  “Thank you for saying that,” I finally say. “I got it,” I say, reaching for the door.

  “I got it,” Thornton says, one millisecond after me.

  I wait. He waits.

  “I’m not good at trust,” I blurt as we stand outside the front door to Bloom.

  “Well, let’s hope I can earn it then,” Thornton says, reaching for the front door. I let him open it and finally walk into Bloom. He follows close behind. I stop and turn around.

  “Why?” I ask as Thornton walks right into me.

  “Why, what?” he asks, taking hold of both my arms as he steadies himself. A line of Bloom employees stream in just behind us. I don’t know where the guts to ask this question are coming from. I do know, however, that it feels right. I don’t feel sick to my stomach, not at all. Quite the opposite. I feel relieved that the words are out in the world and no longer clanging around inside my head like some maniacal echo.

  Maybe this is the first step on the way to asking for lunch.

  “Why do you want to earn my trust?” I shuffle a bit to one side of the entrance. Thornton runs his hands down my arms. He takes my hand in his. It’s a small gesture. It lasts maybe half of a second, but the feeling of his fingers curling around mine sends a jolt through my entire body. He lets me go.

  “I don’t know,” he says. He looks down for a moment and then back up at me. I hold his gaze and don’t feel the need to say or do anything. I like that he doesn’t know. Maybe we have more in common than I thought.

  “You’re Joan, right?” Mackenzie curls in between Thornton and me. In her hand is a bruised apple. Looks like that imperfect produce arrived pretty quickly. As I’m about to answer her, she turns from me to Thornton. “Oh, hey, Thornton. We missed you at karaoke last night. Everyone was there.”

  “Was there something you needed me for?” I ask, wanting to extricate myself from whatever conversation is about to happen.

  “Chris and Asher are ready for you. They’ve actually already been waiting for like five minutes,” Mackenzie says.

  “That meeting isn’t until 9:30?” I ask. I look around the Bloom offices. I don’t even know where their offices are.

  “Mackenzie?” Thornton tries to get her attention.

  “Hm?” She sighs, taking a long sip of her matcha tea.

  “Is Joan’s meeting in Chris’s office or Asher’s?” Thornton asks.

  “Chris’s,” Mackenzie answers him. She takes a giant bite out of the grainy apple and is about to launch into some more talk about how fun karaoke was last night when Thornton cuts her off and turns to me.

  “Remember Snoopy?” I nod. “Go up those stairs, past Snoopy. You’ll pass the Fortress of Solitude. Chris’s office is just across from it,” Thornton says, pointing me in the right direction.

  �
�Fortress of Solitude,” I repeat.

  “Good luck,” Thornton says, getting sucked back into a riveting karaoke conversation with Mackenzie.

  I hurry through the main area of Bloom, my workbag bouncing on my hip as I run. My travel mug is hot in my hand and as useless as I feared it would be. I climb the stairs past Snoopy, and find another tiny conference room with just enough room for two chairs.

  “Fortress of Solitude,” I mutter to myself. I turn around and see an open door. I walk down the long hallway and see chris lawrence in bold black lowercase letters on the door. As I get closer, I hear him and Asher talking. Nothing juicy. I step around the corner of the doorjamb and offer a weak knock on the door.

  “Joan, hey,” Chris says, sitting perched on the edge of a desk that I notice can, at the turn of a handle, be made into a standing desk.

  “You’re late,” Asher says, not bothering to turn around in his chair.

  “So sorry,” I say, resisting the urge to launch into a tirade about their completely incompetent assistant. I walk the rest of the way into Chris’s office. The art on the walls is expensive. The furnishings are modern and sterile. No photos of family or friends. No bits and bobs on his desk. There are two straight-backed chairs in front of Chris’s desk. Asher is sitting in one of them.

  Then I notice a nearly waist-high rafter beam, running the length of Chris’s office. The giant beam divides the office and separates anyone entering from Chris’s desk and chairs. I look from the beam to Chris and Asher, then back at the beam.

  “Most people just hop over it,” Chris says.

  I take a step forward, pushing my workbag back. I set my travel mug on top of the beam. Chris has supplied what looks like a little crate to step on. I guess I’m supposed to spin around and leap to the other side, straddle it, or pole vault over it. I don’t see how anyone could hop over it.

  “You could just crawl under it,” Asher says without looking up from his phone. What I want to say is what the fuck kind of mind games are you playing? Do you need people to actually crawl or hop or be humiliated before they get to have a conversation with you? What adult professional would choose to put their office in the one place where people had to demean themselves in order to enter?

  I’m sure Asher’s office doesn’t have a beam running through it. These two chose this office, the office with the beam, for our meeting this morning and then proceeded to start ten minutes before it was scheduled. Noted.

  Fine. Fuck it. Fuck it.

  As Chris and Asher watch, I back up from the beam and get down on my knees. I shove my workbag further onto my back, push the crate out of the way, duck my head, and crawl under the beam. Once clear, I haul myself up, red-faced and winded from holding my breath in rage. I turn around to grab my travel mug off the beam, using this opportunity to collect myself. It doesn’t work, of course, because it can’t, in fact, erase that—as an adult person—I had to crawl into a meeting with the two founders of Bloom before, I might add, I’ve had hardly any coffee.

  I take a seat in the other chair, my workbag still slung around my body.

  “Please. Make yourself comfortable,” Chris says, crossing behind his desk and finally settling in at his aerodynamic, back-friendly chair. I control my temper as I loop my workbag off and lean it against the leg of my chair. I hold my travel mug of coffee, not wanting to set it on what looks to be a very expensive side table.

  “Thank you for taking the time to meet with me,” I say.

  “We like to be accessible to all employees at Bloom,” Chris says. Asher lets out a long, annoyed sigh.

  “So, the mission statement thing,” Asher says. Chris looks over at him.

  “Yes?” One of my favorite journalism tricks is letting people talk. Holding the silence. Not finishing sentences or letting them off the hook of ideas they don’t really want to say aloud. And after that little beam stunt, I’m not going to say a damn thing. Asher shifts in his chair. He waits. I smile as harmlessly as I can. Chris is silent. His face is as unreadable as mine.

  “What’s that about?” Asher finally says.

  “What’s a mission statement about?” I ask, my voice light and airy.

  “No—” Asher looks over at Chris. “You know what I mean. Can you jump in here?” I look from Asher to Chris. Chris doesn’t answer. Instead—

  “Where do you see Bloom going in the coming years?” I ask, hoping to catch them a bit off guard.

  “We want to revolutionize cloud storage. Get rid of server farms altogether,” Asher says.

  “Is that what you set out to do all those years ago at Caltech?” I ask.

  “We asked one simple question,” Chris says.

  “And what question was that?” I ask.

  “How can we get a passing grade in this class,” Chris says, laughing. Asher smiles. I read that exact quote in no less than four interviews Chris and Asher have given. It was even in their TED talk.

  “No, but really,” I say as the “laughter” dies down.

  “It was something about an artichoke, wasn’t it?” Asher asks Chris.

  “An artichoke?” I ask.

  “I don’t—” Chris starts.

  Asher cuts him off. “Yeah, we were super high and you said that you wanted to build a digital artichoke so we could eat all the butter we wanted.” Asher shakes his head. “I never understood half the shit you said.”

  “Can you tell me more about the culture here at Bloom?” I say, trying to lighten the mood and distract Chris from the digital artichoke idea Asher blurted out. I’ve never heard or read that anywhere else. That’s a breadcrumb.

  Chris launches into a long, practiced speech about what being an employee at Bloom means. On top of all the social aspects, they also offer classes in retirement funds, stock options, and even trust documents. Chris jokes that he knows his workforce can be a bit young, but that just means it’s their moral obligation to ferry these kids into adulthood with some life skills.

  I nod and smile along, happy that Chris seems to have picked right back up on his much-practiced keynote speech. To his credit, it’s actually word for word the talk he gave at a local high school that was uploaded to YouTube. Sentences here and there are verbatim from an interview he and Asher did for Wired.

  As our meeting begins to wind down I steer the conversation back to Caltech. How did they like it there, what do they think of their alumnae program, and would they consider starting an internship just for Caltech students? Chris and Asher debate that last point a bit, before Chris taps something into his laptop.

  “I really like the idea of an internship program,” Chris says, pressing Enter with enthusiasm.

  “Your guys’ class has gone on to do some pretty impressive things,” I say. Chris and Asher absently nod. “Jason Chu’s company just got bought.” I made myself memorize the names of the people who appeared the most in the pictures I pulled off social media where Chris and Asher were tagged. “You mentioned him in the Wired article.”

  “Yeah, he was a great dude. Heard he bought a resort in the Caymans.” Asher says, swiping open his phone. Chris nods.

  “And Jon Tyner—he was one of the first people who tested CAM, right?”

  “Yeah,” Chris says, pushing back from his desk and standing.

  “He’s got that start-up about…”

  “It’s like Tinder, but for animal rescue,” Asher says, swiping through his phone.

  “Right,” I say.

  “It’s where we get all our kittens,” Asher adds. I nod.

  “Once again, we really are thrilled to have you join the Bloom team. Thanks so much for taking time out of your schedule to meet with us today,” Chris says. Getting the hint, I stand, gather my workbag, loop it over my head, and mean-mug the beam. I pick up my travel mug full of the most-awaited coffee in the history of the world. “You remember that first day when I told you that you would hopefully add some much-needed age and wisdom to our team?”

  “With perfect clarity,” I say.


  “Well, I was right. You have already begun a dialogue about what is at the root of this company and how we can better connect our workforce to that vision,” Chris says, coming out from behind his desk. Asher is tapping away on his phone, answering an email.

  “You guys still in contact with Meera Rao?” Asher stops typing for just the tiniest sliver of a moment. A quick twitch of the neck and he picks right back up.

  “You know, we lost touch with Meera. She was brilliant,” Chris says, his face completely unperturbed. Mackenzie appears at the door with two Starbucks cups and holds them out for Asher and Chris.

  “The car is here, the packets for the board have been shipped, and your flight is on time, last I checked,” she says. Asher pockets his phone, stands, walks up to the beam, sits atop it briefly, and then effortlessly spins to the other side, as he hops down with a sigh. He takes one of the drinks from Mackenzie and continues down the long hallway.

  “Thank you again,” I say to Chris.

  “My door is always open,” Chris says. He looks past me to Mackenzie. “I’ll meet you in the lobby in five.” Mackenzie spins on her heel and clumps down the long hallway toward the Fortress of Solitude.

  I turn back around to Chris and notice that he has moved closer. My instinct is to take a step back, but the fucking beam won’t let me move an inch.

  “I read some of your work,” Chris says. I can feel the wooden beam knock my workbag as I reflexively pendulum away from him. “When Ria told me that an ex-journalist had applied for such a junior position, I must admit, I was suspicious.”

  “Suspicious of me?” I lock eyes with him. His ice-blue eyes are unblinking and hard.

  “We get a lot of people who think they’re going to catch us in some kind of … well, I don’t know what they’re expecting, to be quite honest.” I loop my hand around my workbag strap.

  “You get a lot of people? I don’t … like, other journalists?”

  “Thing is, for you to be a real threat in any way you probably should have worked as a reporter in the last—what’s it been … over a year?”

  I am quiet.