The Doodlebug War

by Andrew Updegrove

  He sat down on the bed, elbows on knees, holding the picture in both hands and examining two faces he felt he no longer really knew. Clare’s, of course, was smiling and beautiful. He was surprised to see that his was open and beaming as well. Uncomfortable and ironic was the look he would have expected, remembering what he had been like at that age.

  He set the picture back on the dresser and then paused. If he hadn’t thrown this wedding picture away, perhaps he hadn’t thrown away the letter she had left, either.

  Should he look for it? If he found it, would he want to read it again? His mind had cycled endlessly in an infinite loop of self-justification after she left, obsessively constructing an irrefutable case that put all the blame for the failure of their marriage on her. It was years before memories began to surface that ran counter to that self-serving story line.

  He turned the picture face down on the dresser, and there it was: an envelope taped to the back. So there was his sense of irony after all. He must have attached these two relics to each other back to back, like bookends holding nothing in between, to suggest there had never been anything real between him and Clare either. He broke the tape, unfolded the letter, and eased himself back on to the bed:

  Dear Frank,

  By the time you read this, I’ll be in Philadelphia with Marla. I’ve been accepted into a graduate program at the University of Pennsylvania, and my parents say I can live with them until I graduate. Philly isn’t that far from Washington and the bus fare is cheap, so we should be able to work out a way for Marla to spend as much time with you as with me. She won’t be ready for school until I have my master’s degree, so perhaps by then we’ll have worked something out between the two of us and we can all be together again.

  Frank, I’m so sorry that it’s come to this. You have so much talent—I can’t understand why you can’t apply it and make something of yourself. I’ve tried everything I can think of to help you snap out of it and get your feet back on the ground, but nothing has worked. So now I’ve got to think for myself about the future. I’m tired of worrying about where the rent will come from, and I’m tired of seeing you moping around the house with nothing to do and nowhere to go when you’re between jobs. Most of all, I’m tired of feeling like there’s nothing left between the two of us. It’s like you don’t have any room inside for anyone but yourself anymore.

  I think that I could have stuck it out, if only you’d been more open with me. When we first met, we were sure we were made for each other—we had fun, we laughed, we had good times, we talked about things for hours on end. I wish that things hadn’t gone the way they did while we were in college, and I know that was my fault. But when we finally got together again, it was just the way it had been in the beginning. It was wonderful while you were working on your paper, and then even for a couple of years after you won your MacArthur.

  But then you closed up on me. I still don’t know why. Maybe it was all the tension from trying to settle down to work on your doctorate or all the jobs that didn’t work out when you gave up on the PhD. But you didn’t leave me any way in to try and help you or even to connect with the person I had married. There was just a wall, with me stuck on the wrong side. And Frank, I’ve been so lonely.

  I don’t want Marla to live this way. I don’t want her to wonder why she can’t have the things her friends have as she gets older. And I want her to have, if not two parents who are happy and natural around her, at least one that is. I want her to grow up thinking that family life is happy and loving, the way my childhood was, and not aloof and silent, except for arguments at the dinner table over the money we don’t have to buy the things that we need.

  Maybe I should have told you what I was thinking about sooner. I only applied to one school—Penn—because I didn’t want to have to get daycare for Marla while I held down a job and went to school at the same time. It was more of a daydream than a plan when I sent the application in. But when I got the financial aid letter a few days ago saying I had a full scholarship, I felt like I didn’t have a choice. Frank, I need to do this for myself, too. I want to have a life with direction and stability, where I can see a future for Marla and me that I can believe in and where I can depend on my own abilities and resources to make it come true, rather than always being dependent on you.

  I guess I’m being a coward leaving this way, but you’ve gotten so angry sometimes lately. I didn’t want to go that way, and I didn’t want Marla to have that memory in her mind.

  Frank, I hope you can forgive me for this. I still love you, and I still want to figure out a way to make things work. I don’t think that can happen right now, but maybe with time, if you get a new perspective on your life, we could sit down and talk about it. Meanwhile, promise me you’ll take good care of yourself, okay?

  Love always,

  Clare

  Love always. That had sent him into a rage. “I’m gone. Love always.”

  It took years for his anger to abate to the point where he might have been able to talk about working things out. By then, Clare had finished her master’s program, and was well on her way to completing her own doctorate. And, he assumed, she must have someone new in her life. He, on the other hand, had continued his self-inflicted, solitary downward spiral. It wasn’t until Marla was in elementary school that he finally pulled himself together to the extent of forcing himself to beg his old MIT boss, George Marchand, for a job, and then to hang on to it, if not flourish. He’d taken a vow to save up to put Marla through college and to keep up the appearance of having a stable life for her benefit. At least he’d lived up to that vow.

  He slowly re-folded the letter and slid it carefully back into the envelope taped to the back of the wedding picture lying face down on the dresser. Then he walked back to the living room and sat down on the couch next to the box of pictures Marla had been rummaging through. Besides the family pictures taken before Clare had left when Marla was just two, it held dozens and dozens of pictures of Marla, each one with a note handwritten by Clare on the back, telling him what was happening when it was taken. Many letters, too, telling him about Marla’s birthday parties and other special occasions, until finally they stopped. He had to admit, Clare had tried for a very long time to stay attached at some level that could have provided a bridge to reconciliation. But he had never acknowledged receiving a single letter.

  Instead, he’d communicated only to the extent necessary to manage the logistics of shuttling Marla back and forth and making shared decisions relating to her care, and then only through email. They hadn’t spoken once since the morning his father-in-law helped Clare carry her belongings and all the paraphernalia of childcare down to his waiting car. Frank wondered whether Clare’s father was already parked down the street that day, just waiting for Frank to leave for his latest short-term job.

  By the time the divorce papers arrived five years later, Frank’s anger had burned itself out. At first he’d been too angry, and then too proud, and finally too ashamed, to reach out to Clare. He simply signed and returned what was sent to him without hiring a lawyer.

  Why had he been so unrelenting in his animosity? It had been twenty-five years since he had first read the letter Clare had left him the day of her departure, and it wasn’t anything like he recalled. It wasn’t spiteful, the way he remembered it. It wasn’t final, either—again, not the way he remembered it from that single at first incredulous, and then enraged, reading. Clare had left a door wide open to get back together. And he had slammed it shut.

  * * *

  3

  We Be in Trouble

  Nate Mitty rubbed his forehead with one hand as he flipped through the implacably grim numbers of WeBCloud’s financials. For three years, he had exercised every creative and, when necessary, conniving fiber of his being to wring the last dollar possible out of the company’s cost of goods and operations. And still WeBCloud was unprofitable. Ma
ssively so.

  He flipped the spreadsheet over and gazed at the chart underneath, wondering why he bothered. He was so familiar with the company’s constant losses that he could see that slumping red line inching across that page in his sleep, and often did. Its inexorable decline depicted the rapid depletion of the company’s cash reserves. All that kept it from reaching zero every twelve to eighteen months was another enormous cash infusion from the venture capitalists and wealthy technology entrepreneurs the company had persuaded to invest in WeBCloud’s continuing rapid growth. But it had been a long time since the company’s last capital raise, and he was getting nervous. Without another big slug of cash, the game would be up.

  Like its competitors, WeBCloud was trying to persuade the world that it made more sense to pay someone else to host your software and information than to do so yourself. For decades, businesses, governments, and universities had paid millions of dollars to buy servers, house them in air-conditioned rooms in their own facilities, and hire hordes of expensive computer workers to manage them, owning all the headaches that went along with maintaining and updating sophisticated and quickly evolving technology. And all of the responsibility for breaches by hackers, too, when those inevitably occurred. Why not get out of that miserable cycle, and hire someone to do the job for you? Why not just get rid of all those servers and staff and move your software and data out of your offices into the computing “cloud” maintained a thousand miles away by a service provider like Orinoco or WeBCloud?

  All well and good for the customer. But it cost a ton of money to build the enormous data centers needed to host all that software and data, each one filled with thousands of computer servers and overseen by teams of top-notch engineers. WeBCloud’s strategy was a lot like Amazon’s had always been—fearlessly pouring more money into its infrastructure than its competitors were bold enough to invest in theirs and, at the same time, offering services to potential customers below actual cost. It wasn’t a game plan for the weak or the timid.

  He punched four numbers in on his phone. “Hey, Lou. You got a minute?”

  “Right now?”

  “Yes.”

  “Sure. Be right down.”

  Nate swiveled around in his desk chair and stared out the window at the glossy buildings of WeBCloud’s brand new, extravagant campus. Building it had sent the red line that haunted his sleep down even faster, more than erasing all the concessions he’d beaten out of the company’s cut-rate server manufacturers in Taiwan. He’d opposed the decision, of course. But the company’s charismatic and economically clueless founder was insistent, and as usual, the board of directors ended up agreeing with him, anxious to maintain the kind of façade that would make new investors want to get on the bus.

  Some board, Mitty grumbled. After the directors cajoled WeBCloud’s founder into giving up day-to-day control of the company and becoming WeBCloud’s chairman, they’d recruited Mitty to become CEO, assuring him they wanted someone who would bring fiscal discipline to the startup. But once he was on board, it quickly became obvious that the board’s commitment to financial responsibility was more aspirational than determined. Instead, they kept playing the unicorn game, pumping up the illusionary WeBCloud bubble as big as they could in hopes of going public or selling before it popped.

  Lou Marcello, the company’s CFO, waved to Mitty’s administrative assistant and paused at Mitty’s open door; clearly his boss was lost in thought. He also looked more harried than usual; his shaved head was tilted forward, chin resting on one hand. Marcello recalled that Mitty had been an athletic-looking, hard-charging executive, full of piss and vinegar and flushed with success when the board had lured him away from the company he’d led through a fantastically successful initial public offering. Now he looked worn out and slightly stoop-shouldered.

  “Hey.”

  Mitty swiveled around to find Marcello sitting down in a chair on the other side of his desk. “Hey, Lou. So what’s the latest from Danforth?”

  Stuart Danforth was WeBCloud’s senior account manager at Silicon Valley Securities, the boutique investment bank that was helping the company try to raise one and a half billion dollars, its largest round of investment to date.

  “Hard to tell. But reading between the lines, I’d say he’s not sure he can fill this round.”

  “What’s penciled in so far?”

  “All but two of our old investors said they’d take their pro rata share of the round. That comes to about five hundred and eighty-five million dollars. But if we don’t raise at least that much from new investors, they’ll kill us on the price they’re willing to pay this time for our stock.”

  “So what about new money? What’s Stuart got there?”

  “That’s where he starts hedging.”

  “You mean nothing? He hasn’t given you the name yet of a single new investor?”

  “Not a committed one. He’s meeting with all the funds and private investors you’d expect, or claims he is. He says that after Cloud9 and SocialYou settled for down rounds a month ago, nobody wants to invest in a unicorn without a steep discount from the last financing round.”

  And no wonder. There were over one hundred “unicorns” now—privately held startup companies with valuations over a billion dollars each—and all of them combined didn’t have fifty billion dollars in revenues. Some didn’t have any, for that matter, and only a few were profitable. It had been a long time since a unicorn had been sold at a handsome profit for its investors, and almost no startup companies had been able to go public lately, either, making investors properly cautious. Unless it was showing stellar performance, it was tough for a company to raise new money unless it sold its stock for less than it had before—a so-called down round. And lately, WeBCloud’s performance had been anything but stellar with its new customer growth slowing dramatically and its acquisition cost per customer rising.

  “Yeah, well, life’s tough all over. If he wants to make the really big bucks when we sell the company, he’d better get us an up round now. You tell him I can’t answer the phone these days without finding an investment banker on the other end who wants to help us sell WeBCloud.”

  “Don’t worry. He knows the score.”

  “Let’s just make sure.” Nate opened the drawer in his desk and rummaged around before tossing something to his CFO. Lou made the catch and looked at the name on the barrel of the pen. It read Goldman Sachs. He looked back at Nate, puzzled. “The next time you meet with Stuart, just happen to leave that pen behind. Now go find us some money.”

  “Whatever you say. Maybe StackMagic’s IPO will take off like a rocket tomorrow. If it does, we’ll be oversubscribed by the end of the day.”

  “Yeah, maybe. Here’s hoping.”

  Mitty swiveled back to stare at his expensive campus. He’d been counting on WeBCloud being acquired by now, and it hadn’t happened. If they couldn’t close this financing round, the whole house of cards would collapse. For three years now, WeBCloud’s strategy had been to acquire as much market share as it could while steadily discounting its services more and more steeply. Eventually one of its biggest competitors would have to buy the arrogant startup just to get rid of it. Then the big company could start raising prices and finally make some real money on cloud computing. Or at least that had been Mitty’s plan.

  So far, it hadn’t happened, and he couldn’t understand why. All of WeBCloud’s major competitors were enormous companies. It made no sense for an established technology company to stand by while WeBCloud turned a huge new profit opportunity into a bottomless loss pit for everybody.

  He was massaging his forehead again. Maybe they were more determined poker players than he’d counted on. Perhaps they had even privately agreed among themselves to tough it out until WeBCloud’s quasi-Ponzi scheme tumbled in on itself and then pick up its customers for free.

  That would have to be
a violation of the antitrust laws, wouldn’t it? But who was he to talk? He’d persuaded all of the same cloud service providers to join a new trade association he’d formed to lobby Congress not to regulate the industry closely, despite the fact the new data centers would constitute critical infrastructure. Bitter competitors they might be, but when it came to government regulation, they were more than willing to work together to keep their cost of doing business as low as possible. And especially so if their upstart competitor was willing to do most of the work and pay most of the bills to get Congress to play ball.

  Mitty had recruited an up-and-coming trade association executive named Benno Patricoff to lead that charge. Over the last two years, he’d also poured millions of WeBCloud’s cash into an effort to beg or bribe Congress into passing data center security legislation that would ensure WeBCloud would pull through no matter what. Congress had better hurry up.

  * * *

  Marla paused at the door of her father’s apartment before leaving. “You’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about Mom lately, haven’t you?”

  “Whoa—where did that come from?”

  “Just a couple of comments you’ve made.”

  “I think you’re hearing things. You know your mother and I haven’t spoken since you were a child. That’s my fault, not hers, by the way. I was a fool, and she did what she needed to do.”

  “Oh, Dad, you’re such a hopeless romantic.”

  “Me! Romantic! I’m the least romantic person I know.”

  “You’re teasing me, right?”

  “No. I honestly don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “How much time did you spend thinking about Josette?”

  “None. None whatsoever!”