Gain

by Richard Powers

Deb walks him the rest of the way back to her office, through the customary cubbies and cubicles of Organizational Man. But even here, the layout is more airy than usual. Communal space is almost rashly generous. No desk is more than six yards from a window. And for every three networked computers, there is still a wing chair and a table for chance gatherings. More an irrepressible clubhouse than continental nerve center.

  “I want to pitch the new library fund, Deb. This is really the perfect thing for Clare to be in on. Very visible. Research equals breakthroughs equals unbeatable return on investment. Everything you stand for. Exactly the folks you want to impress. I’ve brought you the new materials that we’ve just printed up.”

  “Don.” A little shyly. It goes right through him. “Don. You could have mailed these, you know.” She looks at him wide-eyed. “You came all the way out here, in zillion-below weather, without calling, to give me . . . ?”

  “Figured I might try my luck.”

  All he can do is play the ambiguous word, and hope for the best. He’s worked with six or seven people at Clare over the years. She’s the best they have. And not just because of this—what?—chemistry between them. She’s just good. She knows people. She likes them. Knows how to make them like her, without laboring it. Always welcoming. A good, professional flirt. Perfect Business Casual.

  “Luck?” She smiles. “Gimme those. These I will pass on to the higher authorities. I’ll be sure to put in a good word for you, and fail to make any mention of surprise attacks. Meanwhile, can I buy you a drink?”

  “What do you got?”

  She smiles. “Let’s see. Nutrifruit kiwi–Concord grape. Nutrifruit melon-mango. Nutrifruit . . .”

  “Can I ask you something? How come everything has to come in twos? I mean, isn’t one flavor by itself good enough anymore?”

  “Throwback,” she taunts him. “Reactionary.”

  She gets them both bottles, plasticized glass wrapped in a thin jacket of plasticized foam. Single slam-back servings. Certainly the package costs more than the contents. The lid pops out when opened, so you can see if the thing’s been tampered with since shipment.

  She opens hers and starts to play the popped dimple like a castanet. “So are you still seeing that jailbait? Toni?”

  “Terri. Actually . . . Well, it’s a long story.”

  “Good. We love long stories. Especially with sequels.”

  It always amazes him, how much gets talked about in public, in places this size. “How much time do you have, Ms. Pierson?”

  She bats her eyes. “Why do you ask?”

  He slugs at the melon-mango. “Well. You guys are probably hopping these days. Must be totally nuts.”

  “What? Oh. You mean that lawsuit stuff?” A little wave of the hand, like she’s trying to remember what she’s read about it. She’s better than good. She’s presidential.

  But he is no slacker either. He started in Development before this woman had even heard of a master’s in human behavior.

  “Yeah,” Don adds. “I’ve been thinking about you, every time I see one of these stories. I hope none of this is coming down on your desk?”

  “Not really.”

  And in a syllable, everything changes. She misses no beat. Just as funny, just as warm, just as welcoming. But it’s like a little layer of friendly gauze has come down between them.

  “I’m not really current with it, yet. There are two different things going, right? A class action, and a, a . . .”

  “Civil,” he supplies.

  Unbelievable. They’ve worked together for over three years. She’s paid out tens of thousands of dollars for his various college drives. She’s flirted outrageously with him. Even bad-mouthed the company, indirectly, after hours. Don and Deb. Two people who like each other as much as you can like each other and still work together.

  It’s not like she’s desperate for this job. She’s told him how often she gets head-hunted, even about flying up to Minneapolis to scope an offer she turned down. She can’t possibly feel loyalty toward this blob, this amorphous jellyfish of fifty thousand people who don’t care if she lives or dies. She can’t possibly like that Nutrifruit shit.

  But it’s not even a contest. It’s over before he can even ask her to make a choice between Clare and him. Over, and the amorphous blob has won.

  “I sure hope there’s nothing in it,” she says, earnest.

  “Me too.”

  “And I hope those people get better,” she adds, her eyes moist around the rims.

  They exchange a half-dozen more idle topics: kids’ snaps, plans for Christmas. To get the timing right. To pretend that nothing just happened.

  “I’ll get that material to the right people,” she says, handing him what might as well be his hat. “I’m sure we’ll be there for this library. Those plans look awfully pretty, Don.”

  He finds himself standing inside the double doors, the last barrier between himself and Midwest bitterness. He wraps his coat back around him and prepares for a race to the car through air that is now both forty below and midnight at 4 p.m.

  He arranges his scarf to cover as much skin as possible. As he fastens his coat buckles—last year’s stupid fashion—his glance plays over the dedication plaque. Right there at eye level, in front of him, eternally unread except by accident. The site’s christening slab lists the architects. It sucks up to the company president, proclaims the date and circumstances of the dedication as if the place were the damn Capitol, and sends all pilgrims back out into the pitch-black vacuum by quoting Churchill: We shape our buildings. Thereafter they shape us.

  A Message from Clare North American Agricultural Products Division

  CLARE INTERNATIONAL

  December 17

  For Immediate Release

  Recent and somewhat misleading media coverage of the Environmental Protection Agency’s annual Toxic Release Inventory has generated concern in those communities near Clare’s three downstate Illinois agricultural chemical facilities. While public concern over health is never unreasonable, we would like to take a moment to address these concerns and to reassure the residents living near our plants of their complete and unqualified safety.

  In order to understand fully the EPA’s routine inventory figures, one first needs to look in greater detail at the government-directed reporting procedures. Manufacturers are required by law to supply the EPA with information about a wide variety of substances, including some that have never been proved unsafe in any clinical trial. The inventory itself makes no statement about any risks posed to health by these substances.

  Concerned residents should conclude from this annual report that Clare is once again well within the stringent limits imposed by both state and national regulations. Some chemical emission is an unavoidable by-product of any vigorous and viable economic activity conducted on so large a scale. The important factor to consider is not the existence of a trace substance but rather its concentration. The levels of hazardous material coming from Clare’s plants are negligible and pose no significant risk to anyone living in the vicinity.

  We welcome the added safety that a system of government review can supply. But our own internal guidelines are even more stringent than those required by law. Our team of scientists and chemical engineers constantly monitors flue output at all three area plants. Monthly levels of emissions at these sites have not changed for the last four years. Regular samplings of both water and soil reveal no concentrations of either toxic or carcinogenic substances that merit concern.

  Misunderstanding over the EPA results has resulted in inappropriate alarm in some quarters. In particular, suggestions of systematic health problems among our workers are unfounded. We are not aware of a single worker who has been exposed to a dangerous chemical or who has suffered adverse health effects as a result of such on-the-job exposure.

  We at Clare remain as committed as ever to a safe and healthy environment, both for our own workers and for those with whom we share this region. We will strive
to work closely with the area’s news sources to ensure a complete and accurate understanding of the impact of our operations here.

  We deeply appreciate the support and appreciation that the people of the Sawgak Valley have always shown us, and we will continue to do everything possible to remain a valued and respectful neighbor.

  Lucky it had been, and it had lived right. But not even Clare could dodge the same bullet forever.

  For half a century, the economy had pitched and yawed between boom and bust. Oversteering had become a standing feaure of American capitalism. Three generations of Clares weathered half a dozen such cycles. And every time through the millrace, they watched their competition make the same mistake.

  A rival factory, failing to keep up with orders, would go in hock to build a machine base that quickly flooded the public in goods. With the market glutted, the bosses would start laying off workers. Unemployment crept up and disposable income vanished. At this point, the bank that had extended all the initial expansion loans would panic. The creditors would harry the plant into failing. All the shiny new machinery then went to ruin, bringing down another chunk of economic activity with it. Recovery took years.

  Panics and depressions grew so frequent that bad times now outnumbered good. Advancement seemed a matter of eternal contraction and collapse. Industry began to resemble those cities situated in an earthquake zone, constantly rebuilding from their own rubble. Throughout the century, the business failure rate topped the three-quarters mark. Even in good times, death was more likely than survival.

  Every cataclysm, every descent into wholesale misery produced its economic theory. Boom and bust were self-correcting cycles. Massive layoffs and the collapse of industrial production were but inefficiencies weeding themselves out by trial and error. Its ponderous boom coming about, each tack of the full-sail system unavoidably knocked some unseaworthy soul into the deep.

  While the world went to Chicago to gaze on its future, across the entire continent the present rose up visible. Strikes set off others. The victims of competition demanded redress, with all the violence that competition had taught them.

  For a precarious moment, all society hung in the balance. Chicago’s answer—the reaffirmed American system—was to stay the course. There were four thousand millionaires now, in contrast to the fifteen when Ennis had taught the Clares how to make soap. Did that not mean the odds of breaking into privilege had vastly improved?

  No matter that one in five lived without means and that the top one percent controlled more assets than the bottom 99. Forced to pick between liberty and equality, the market had no choice. Production was already a sealed contract, the factory a foregone contest. Wealth’s job was to make more of the same, let the chips fall where they may. The best people could do was get out of machinery’s way. No turning back now, short of a second flood. But year by year, that flood drew closer to its return engagement.

  The race went to the fit, the fitness of those who survived. Clare pulled through ’37 and ’57 and ’73 and the other panics partly on dumb, industrious luck. A Yankee skinflint temperament kept the Clares from getting caught with somebody else’s bills in their pockets. Their slow ascent unfolded with lucky timing, expanding in step with productivity. They kept down their fixed capital costs, the equivalent of carried debt. They made their product panic-proof, selling soap as an answer to recession and hawking economic recovery as the proper reply to good hygiene. Not all could afford riches yet, but everyone could be clean.

  Mostly, they had learned how to make more for less. Advances in production made up for retreats in economic confidence. Soapmaking had changed beyond recognition, boosted to unbelievable yields on the shoulders of its forebears. Cadres of mechanized steel kettles boiled in one night what had once taken a whole month and twenty men, although it still required a kettle man tasting a finger’s worth to tell when the brew was done. Each 150,000-pound charge filled fifty semi-automated frames. Steam-powered conveyors now moved the items along each step of the process, from the boiling house to the framing house to the wrapping girls and the stock-hauling boys, on out to the rail-drained shipping docks.

  The lives of Clare’s thousand employees had grown both lighter and darker. Work grew to fill every hour of the year. Boiling-house temperatures rose an average of fifteen degrees in as many years. The heat of the works climbed with each boost in output and power. The stench of animal fat curdled in the living cauldron, dissolving in the perpetual sea of human sweat and sticking forever to the skin of the soapmakers.

  Plant mortality remained low, given the national average of one hundred industrial deaths a day. But few who worked at Clare for a year or more left with much hearing or concentration intact. Electricity, hydraulics, chemistry, and metalworking, each with its countless small improvements, combined in an environment more deafeningly hostile to life than the center of Verne’s hollow earth.

  While machines did steadily more of the work, there was, now, vastly more work to do. Every manufacturer of any size adopted the same mechanical advantages. In order for a company to remain competitive, wages per item had constantly to fall. Prosperity depended upon selling as much as possible for as little as possible above cost and keeping the human outlays to a pittance. Salaries fell to a forty-year low.

  Douglas, who had shoveled rosin as a teen, began to make his own time and motion studies of the factory. He formed crews to compete with others. He laid out shorter paths between rack and cooler. He cut the number of steps a girl needed to fold a wrapper. He invented the “spurt.” He improved and enlarged the stampers and the slabbing machines, allowing the operators to work at twice their former speed. He redesigned the rosin shovel, increasing each scoop by 7 percent.

  His men took to calling him the Nigger-Driver. Most workers left after a few months. But an endless supply of stopgap labor waited to replace the discontented. It came from other restructuring industries and from farms driven into foreclosure by mechanized harvest. The draining countryside bought Clare no end of time. Douglas’s move to Lacewood, one of the firm’s shrewdest gambles in those years, bypassed in one swoop all the evils of unions, pay raises, and coordinated strikes.

  Of the thirty thousand strikes involving several million workers in the century’s last two decades, Clare suffered only six serious stoppages. The lone appearance of Peter Clare had once startled the Walpole men out of organizing. But as Peter’s mysterious, nonspecific ailments became more pronounced and less treatable, he withdrew from corporate life, leaving no other figure powerful enough to scare up submission.

  Those who found life hard during the fat years simply gave up hope during the lean. A few generations earlier, when one had not lived by wages, there might have been some alternative labor to stock one’s table and reward one’s days. But the wage system now fenced in the entire available working world.

  On April 13, 1895, a bomb exploded in the old lard oil factory. The child of hopelessness who planted the device never surfaced. William Clare, that practical accountant, scoured the rolls of recently severed laborers who had worked in the building. But the lists were long and led nowhere. Douglas always blamed the bomb on some nameless, crazed anarchist, the kind that cared nothing for the consequences of his actions so long as civilized life suffered.

  The blast ripped through the north soap house, wounding five and killing a twelve-year-old boy. The instant that word of the explosion reached William, he telegraphed Clare’s buyer on the Chicago Board of Trade as well as agents in New York, New Orleans, St. Louis, and everywhere else that red oil was traded. Any explosion at the lard plant threatened the underground ocean of red oil in the reservoir beneath it. William moved boldly to secure a replacement stock, before world prices skyrocketed on news of the detonation.

  By fluke, Clare’s underground sea of red oil escaped intact. Furthermore, William’s quick action led to a virtual corner on the good. Clare made more on reselling its surplus than it spent to repair the damage to its plant. As far as t
he books were concerned, the anarchist bombing of 1895 resulted in a tidy profit.

  Profit was short-lived. Stirred on by that violence, over one hundred Walpole workers struck in mid-June of that year. The stoppage almost emptied the plant before the warring parties reached a shaky agreement. Another two-week walkout hit the Ohio factory in high summer.

  Not even the highest tariffs in American history helped to stabilize the situation. A worldwide Red revolution seemed just around the end of the next breadline. The fate of the firm depended upon finding a more lasting resolution to the disenchantment of its own muscle.

  Douglas proved unequal to the task. He considered the strikes incomprehensible, a moral affront. Clare had laced its works with flower gardens, bright lunchrooms, even a baseball diamond. It gave its entire force Saturday afternoon off with pay. Yet still the workers struck. They simply failed to understand that a manufactured good had to cost less to make than it sold for. It was as if labor somehow expected the waters of deliverance to flow uphill.

  Solving the labor crisis fell to William, the astronomer of cash. Perfect happiness, for William Clare, required only that the day have thirty hours. William was forever at war with the rest of the firm. His job was to hold at bay their various urgent requests for outlays: Nagel for advertisements, the chemists for research, Douglas for expansion, the newcomer stockholders for their dividends, and labor for more pay. William’s permanent crisis was to finance a company that wanted to shoot up faster than its capital allowed. He sought a way to grow the firm without venturing too deep into the quicksand of speculative credit.

  More than any previous Clare, William understood money. Money was the salt of human activity, its refrigeration. It retarded the spoilage of your day’s efforts. It deferred your lien on material experience until you elected to deal with it. It moved you from consumption to accumulation. It let you stock up not just what you could eat today but a whole, long winter’s worth of larder.