Means: I am brave.
Motive: I want to kiss her.
Opportunity: She bends her head forward to meet my lips.
3
Brotherly Love
Carter heard the stories before he met the man: Thomas Igniss, the new contentment technician manager for Apricity’s Santa Clara office. The position was a top spot, a notch above Carter’s job as manager for the San Francisco office. Santa Clara was where it happened, down there in Silicon, working shoulder-to-rump with the boys in R&D. Carter hadn’t even known the job was opening up, not until after it had already been filled. And Igniss an outside hire! Skrull’s people must have tapped the guy, like the recruit for a secret society. Carter imagined a whiff of cigar smoke, the feel of a stately finger on his own shoulder, a tap, tap that spelled out, Yes. You. Carter’s own shoulder remained unfingered, the air around him disappointingly clear of smoke. It crossed Carter’s mind that he should feel envious of Igniss, but since the promotion had been lost before it’d even been coveted, his envy came out miniaturized, not a punch in the gut, more a pimple on the earlobe.
Shortly after Igniss’s arrival followed the lore. That Thomas Igniss hadn’t come gimlet-eyed from the East Coast, like most managers, but had been forged deep in the Midwest, from the twang, from the heartland. That Thomas’s people (not his “family” or “relatives,” but his people) worked livestock, going back three generations. That Thomas himself had hay-bucked through college. (Carter had looked this up, this bucking of hay, to see what it entailed and had found pictures of leaning, heaving men, the sun pitching spears of light across their broad shoulders.) That even with his salt-of-the-earth background Thomas Igniss was no bumpkin. That his Adam’s apple rested on a perfect four-in-hand knot of jacquard silk tie. That he spoke fluent Italian; that he spoke fluent Korean (and which language was it? Did the man speak both?); that he’d carpentered the office conference table himself out of sustainable wood; that he’d briefly dated Calla Pax before she was famous; that he was currently dating a burlesque-dancer-cum-bike-messenger named Indigo.
Carter had no such stories. He was the son of an electrical engineer (father) and a kindergarten teacher (mother). He’d grown up an hour away in Gilroy, notable only for its garlic stink. His childhood had been a pastiche of evenings watching popular sitcoms, the couches the actors sat upon in their fake living rooms a nicer version of his family’s own couch. Carter’s mother collected cow figurines, Holsteins and heifers on every table and shelf, and for no reason the woman could articulate. Have you ever even touched a cow? Carter had recently asked her. She’d looked so confused. Why would I touch a cow? she’d said. That was his mother all over, and his father with his tatty books of Sudokus. But that wasn’t Carter. Carter had made it into a top B-school, made it out of a lingering childhood pudge, and, in quick succession, scored Angie and a job at Apricity. From there it had been up and—to Carter’s simultaneous astonishment and vindication—up some more. Carter considered himself a self-made man, not that it’d been easy when he’d been given such shit materials to work with.
* * *
—
CARTER AND THOMAS FINALLY MET at the spring team-builder in Napa. The “TB,” everyone called it. It was supposed to have been just Carter’s office at the Napa TB, but then two days before go-time, Santa Clara’s TB had fallen through (a foible with the required waiting period for hang-glide certification), and it was decided that the two TBs should merge.
“It’s a regular TB outbreak,” Carter said to Pearl, who someday was going to laugh at one of his jokes.
In reply, Pearl coughed. Carter couldn’t tell if she was continuing the TB joke or if she simply had a tickle in her throat. They were standing in a Napa winery tasting room. He tried and failed to catch her eye, but she’d turned her head, so he could only see the back of her neck. She’d cropped her short hair even shorter than before; now the ends curled around her earlobes. He wanted to tell her it’d looked better long, but he’d wait for the right moment so as not to offend her. Pearl swished her wine and spit in the barrel.
The spit barrels were the only things Carter liked about the wineries, which made the flimsiest attempts at refinement—the sommeliers’ blouses a shiny acrylic, the words Tasting Room in big brass letters over the door, the branding absolutely everywhere. At the last one, they’d been selling polo shirts with the winery’s name embroidered over the tit. “Something-or-other & Sons.” Carter didn’t understand why you would wear that on your chest unless you were either the Something-or-other or one of his sons.
He was already regretting the wine tour, which had been whose idea? Not Carter’s. Owen’s? Izzy’s? Not Pearl’s. Pearl had, in fact, tried to get out of the TB, something vague about her teenage son. Carter had told her no dice. After all, wasn’t he leaving Angie alone with their baby daughter, and she barely three months old? The TB was only two nights, he’d told Pearl. Required.
At this point in the afternoon, it was certainly feeling required. The group was at its third winery, and the grapes, both literal and figurative, were withering on the vine. There’d been a campaign in San Francisco that year asking people to drive north and support the wineries, which were struggling because the weather had become too hot to harvest the traditional grapes. Instead of Pinot Noir, the wineries were now bottling something approximate and calling it, with a wink, El Niño Noir. Carter called it Pi-not Noir. (Pearl hadn’t laughed at that one either.) The new wine tasted thin and sweet and awful, like the saliva of someone who’d been sucking on a grape lollipop. Pi-not.
By the middle of their fourth, and final, winery of the day, Carter wasn’t sure if he was disappointed or relieved that the Santa Clara office had yet to show up. He posted himself by one of the barrels, watching his employees swish and spit. He kept an eye on Pearl, the only one out of the group sticking to white wines. He wanted her to try a red. He wanted her teeth to stain purple and for her not to know it. Why couldn’t she so much as smile at him?
Just then an arm wrapped around Carter’s neck in a way that simultaneously unsteadied and stabilized him. A voice murmured in his ear, “Let’s taste this swill.”
Carter turned to find Thomas Igniss’s grinning face inches from his own, looking exactly like the picture on the company website. Who looked as good as their company headshot? No one, that’s who. Thomas Igniss, that’s who.
“Swill we will!” Carter rejoined, a line of Angie’s that he’d never liked, but it must have been decent after all because Thomas Igniss’s grin cracked wider and he slapped Carter on the back, pushing him forward.
Carter stepped up to the counter. “Miss? Two glasses please. We’d like the opportunity to spit in your barrel.”
Behind him, Carter heard Thomas chuckle.
Thomas and Carter spent the rest of the trip together. They partnered for the useless trust and communication exercises that the dithering HR women forced upon them. They hobnobbed in the hotel bar, the center of a spinning pinwheel of employees vying for their favor. They stayed up late in Carter’s room, allowing room service to drain the last of their per diems. They were thick as thieves. They were thick as good wine. They had legs.
Here, after hours at the TB, Carter became privy to the real stories about Thomas Igniss. The truth of the man. He verified that Thomas could indeed speak both Italian and Korean, though the Korean was something that Thomas dismissed as “tourist’s Korean.” The conference table, Thomas had built it, true story. Carter even heard the dirty details of the burlesque-bike-messenger girlfriend, whose name was not Indigo, after all, but Martha. Which made her all the sexier somehow.
In return, Carter told Thomas that he’d had a thing going with Pearl (which wasn’t true, but might have been), but that he’d called it off when Angie told him she was pregnant. He explained how he felt that the affair had actually been a good experience because it had helped make him into a better father than he otherwise would
’ve been. Thomas nodded at this; he understood.
The two men talked about work as well, about how difficult it was to manage people, their endless needs and complaints, how you could never really be with your subordinates.
“But then who’d want to be, right?” Carter said.
Thomas gave a nod. “We’re where we are for a reason.”
“We are!”
“It’s an act of courage,” Thomas went on, “to admit that you are indeed better than other people.”
At these words, Carter felt a frisson down his spine. Yes. You, it said.
When he got home from the TB late on Friday, he repeated the sentiment to Angie, who wrinkled her nose and said, “An act of courage. What does that even mean?”
Carter took his fussing daughter from his wife’s arms. Angie smelled sour, like something the baby had left behind. But he was grateful to her, after all, for suffering the indignities of pregnancy. Carter held the baby above his head, where she balled her little fists triumphantly at the ceiling.
“Really, Carter, what’s that supposed to mean?”
Carter didn’t bother answering. He had known she wouldn’t understand.
* * *
—
THE CALL CAME ON THURSDAY, Thomas asking Carter if he could come to the Santa Clara office that night. The time Thomas named was after hours, after dinner even. “Once the grinds and scolds have fled the premises,” he said, adding cryptically, “Bring an Apricity.”
Carter wound through the dark campus and thumbed himself in at the door Thomas had specified. He walked down a long, empty hallway, the security lights like a corridor of heralds, flaring at his arrival and dousing in his wake. There were voices up ahead, a bright chirrup of group laughter. When Carter finally found the occupied room, the placard on the door read Lab 7A.
Thomas was inside the lab, seated at a table with four other men. Two of them were coders; Carter could tell by their age (younger) and their dress (whatever was on the floor by the bed), though these metal-studded, smirking specimens seemed superior to Carter’s own coders, who carried the oily nocturnal look of stale coffee. The third man had to be in communications, and senior at that; you could see it in the rubber of his smile and in the graying temples of his faux-hawk. And the fourth man was, improbably, a custodian. Coveralls and the whole shebang. Had the fellow been invited? Or had he simply wandered in and sat down?
“Carter!” It was, bizarrely, the custodian who greeted him by name.
The others all turned as one, and Carter knew how he must have looked to them: wide-eyed and half-crouched in the doorway, as if about to bolt.
“Carter!” Thomas Igniss echoed. “This man here!” he said of Carter, and the others nodded, though the sentence was left unfinished. This man here . . . what?
Thomas waved Carter in. There was a spare seat, next to one of the coders and across from the custodian.
“Did you bring an Apricity from your office?”
Carter slid the machine from his bag and set it on the table. Thomas nodded to the coder seated next to Carter, who got up and unlocked a cabinet in the corner of the room, returning with a second Apricity. Carter looked between the identical machines. Well, almost identical. Theirs had a tiny dent in the upper-right corner of the casing.
Carter said the obvious. “Two 480s.”
Thomas and the others grinned around at one another. The coder spoke up: “This one’s only a 480 on the exterior. The interior has certain modifications.”
“You made it better?”
“Not ‘better,’” he said. “Just different.”
“Noooo.” Thomas wagged a finger at the coder. “Carter’s right. We made it better!”
“How?” Carter asked. “Accuracy? Processing?”
Thomas gestured at the machines. “Try it and see. Yours first, then ours.”
“What? Me?”
The custodian pointed at him. “Yes. You.”
The men were all watching him.
“Go on,” Thomas said. “This is why I invited you.”
Carter complied. Of course he did. He swabbed the inside of his cheek and swiped his cells on the computer chip, and the Apricity gave him the same contentment plan it always did:
STAND UP STRAIGHT.
DON’T WORRY ABOUT STANDING UP STRAIGHT.
ADOPT A DOG.
SMILE AT YOUR WIFE.
“Project it!” the custodian shouted. Sheepishly, Carter did, the dratted list floating at the center of the table for everyone to see. He’d always felt embarrassed by his contentment plan. Apricity tested what the company called deep happiness; its recommendations did not speak to the daily annoyances of an empty stomach or a traffic jam, but to the depths of self and soul. So while your contentment plan wouldn’t change frequently, it would change over time, as you changed. Except Carter’s plan never did. Maybe because he’d never tried to follow it.
“‘Stand up straight’ and ‘Don’t worry about standing up straight’?” Graying Faux-hawk read loudly. “I find it perpetually surprising that people buy into this shit.”
“It’s your job to sell it to them,” one of the coders snorted.
“Aw, man, that last one?” the other coder said. “That sounds like it belongs on your wife’s con-plan, not yours.”
Carter shrugged. “It’s never made much sense to me either.”
“And that’s why you’re here,” Thomas said. “We around this table share your skepticism.”
“You mean . . . you think Apricity is wrong?” Carter nearly whispered it. After all, it was sacrilege. And from the mouth of a manager!
“Not wrong per se,” Thomas said slowly. “More wrongheaded. This here is correct.” He reached out and dragged a finger through the projection so that it wavered in the air. “If you did these things, you’d likely be happier. But let me ask you this: just because it’s correct, does that mean that it’s right? What I’m saying is: is happiness what you want, Carter?”
“Well. Sure. What else is there?”
Thomas Igniss raised his eyebrows. “Luke,” he said, and the custodian passed Carter a fresh cotton swab.
Carter wheeled the cotton along the inside of his cheek, thinking of the wine tasting, thinking of the spit barrels. One of the coders put his hand out for the swab, dabbed it on a chip, and slid the chip into the machine: the same process as always. Except it didn’t feel the same. Around the table, the men had all, ever so slightly, leaned forward. Carter found that he was leaning forward, too, his mouth suddenly dry, as if the swab had absorbed more than his saliva and a few cheek cells, had sucked up something from deep within him.
When the screen lit, the coder didn’t project it, but handed it to Thomas first, who read it and nodded once in approval. He passed the screen around the table in the direction that meant Carter would see it last. The other coder chuckled; Faux-hawk murmured, “That would do it”; the custodian smiled beatifically. When the screen came around to Carter, he saw that there was only one recommendation listed:
REMOVE ALL CHAIRS FROM YOUR OFFICE EXCEPT YOUR OWN.
“What is this?” Carter said. “I always get the same thing. I always do! Stand up straight, don’t worry about standing up straight, smile at Angie, adopt a dog.”
“It’s not a con-plan,” one of the coders said.
“Yeah, it’s no ‘con,’” the other repeated. And how had Carter not noticed before that the two coders were twins, identical but for their slightly different constellations of facial piercings?
Thomas spoke. “It’s not telling you what will make you content.”
“Then what’s it telling me?”
“You’re a smart guy,” Faux-hawk said. “What do you think it’s telling you?”
“I don’t know.”
Thomas smiled. It was a different smile th
an the one in his picture on the website, than the one he’d thrown at the other men at the table, a smile just for Carter. “What’s more important than happiness?”
Carter knew that there was an obvious answer, and he also knew that he didn’t know it. An image came into his head, his baby daughter, her fists pounding the air.
“Power, Carter. The machine is telling you how to be powerful.”
* * *
—
CARTER DID EXACTLY what the machine instructed. He removed the two chairs that faced his desk, leaving only his leather swivel. His employees would enter and spin in a slow circle.
“Where are the chairs?” some would ask.
Carter decided a simple response was best. He patted his own chair. “Right here. Here’s the chair.”
Others stood precariously, not daring to ask for a seat. Sometimes Carter took pity and told them they could perch on the edge of his desk, which was even better. Grown men in suits, haunches hoisted like 1950s secretaries! Pearl, of course, refused to perch, though Carter offered her the surface multiple times. Well, her choice.
At first, it was difficult to carry out the machine’s plan. Carter had always striven to be well liked. But that hadn’t worked, had it? And when he thought of the sly looks he sometimes caught his employees sharing when he spoke, it became a lot easier to watch them teeter and shift in the middle of his office. By the next week, Carter noticed a change. No more covert tapping on screens during the Monday meetings, no faint sniggers from the workpod he’d just visited; instead, dropped eyes and reports handed in on time. The chair directive was simple. It was elegant. It was managerial jujitsu.
Tell the Machine Goodnight Page 6
