Authors: Christopher Hebert
“Would you mind getting Mr. … Mr. … would you bring a cup of coffee please, and make it black.”
And then it was quiet again.
“Tell me, Mr. …”
“Fitch,” the young man said, clearing his throat of the word, as if it were the first he’d spoken in days.
“Is that your last name or your first, Mr. Fitch?”
The young man seemed vaguely panicked by the question, and she watched his fingers walk across his shirtfront, tugging nervously at his top button, and she saw with perfect clarity that it was one he normally left undone. It disappointed her to think he had mistaken her for someone who cared about proprieties of dress.
“It’s what people call me,” he said, and that bright white smile of his returned.
“I see.” And just as Mrs. Freeman was opening her mouth to say something more, to ask a question she hadn’t yet formulated, Tiphany appeared at the door with a cup of steaming coffee in her hand. The appearance of her administrative assistant, and the all-too-obvious way Tiphany checked her watch, reminded Mrs. Freeman—as it was undoubtedly calculated to remind Mrs. Freeman—of the board meeting that would be starting in nine minutes.
Tiphany lingered there another moment, and Mrs. Freeman found herself wondering if, under different circumstances, this might be the sort of young man Tiphany would have wanted to bring home to her parents, someone handsome and tall and sturdy, someone genetically predisposed to tack and jib. Of course, Tiphany would have preferred the suited variety of this Mr. Fitch, one of those Boyle boys, for instance, who could already afford to pay cash for the sorts of cars that came in only silver and black.
“Thank you,” Mrs. Freeman said as gently as she could, and as soon as Tiphany closed the door behind her, the old woman added, “She’s a wonderful girl. I truly would be lost without her.”
And in truth she meant it, because despite everything that came
between them, Mrs. Freeman preferred to believe the girl had good within her, and perhaps the fact that Tiphany tended toward the destructive was a reflection of Mrs. Freeman’s failings as much as the girl’s own. After all, Tiphany had come to her young and impressionable, and if she had been blown off course, perhaps Mrs. Freeman was to blame for that prevailing wind.
The young man, for his part, seemed to have taken little notice of her administrative assistant, or of much else for that matter, notwithstanding the coffee, and when at last he lowered the mug, setting it back on her desk, it was half empty, and Mrs. Freeman wondered how he had managed to drink it so quickly without flaying the delicate skin at the roof of his mouth.
“Perhaps,” Mrs. Freeman said, “we’ll be more comfortable over there.” And she rose and led the young man to the sofa against the far wall. When they were both seated, she leaned toward him, and in a voice just above a whisper, she said, “You know, she tried to talk me out of meeting with you. Tiphany doesn’t believe I should be talking directly to the press.”
“But you’re—” He lowered his eyes into his hands, as if the answer were written there. “Aren’t you the director? Director of corporate communications?”
“I suspect she had the board meeting moved up on purpose,” Mrs. Freeman said, “just to limit our time here together.”
“Your secretary?”
“Every time she comes in, I can see her rearranging the furniture in her head.”
“Why don’t you fire her?”
“Her greatest fear,” Mrs. Freeman said, “a fear she shares with a great many of my colleagues here, is the truth. Tiphany believes the truth is something dirty, that honesty is a sign of weakness and capitulation, that one cannot speak from the heart without losing some advantage.”
“You don’t agree?”
In that moment, Mrs. Freeman’s own greatest fear was that she had overestimated this young man, that he might not be, after all, the sort of man she thought he was, and Mrs. Freeman found herself confronting the fact that the majority of the people in the world, at least those she had met, especially those she worked with—and not excluding those she had married—never turned out to be the sort of people she hoped they would be. Mrs. Freeman wondered if she hoped for too much, or simply for the wrong things.
“Have you heard of Carl Norden?”
The young man shook his head.
“He invented the bombsight,” Mrs. Freeman said. “He figured out how to make one that worked.”
With some effort, the young man reached down and popped the clasps to his briefcase—a task with which he seemed almost entirely unfamiliar—and pulled out a small spiral notebook, which Mrs. Freeman could see in a glance had never been opened beyond the first page.
“Does he work here at HSI?”
“Carl Norden,” Mrs. Freeman said, “thought he was doing God’s will.”
The young man bent over his pad, taking notes.
“They were using his sight,” she said, “when they dropped the bomb on Hiroshima.”
The young man’s pencil abruptly stopped.
“Can you imagine the bombardier,” she said, “punching in altitude, velocity, wind speed, coordinates? As if any of it mattered.”
Mrs. Freeman pushed herself back a bit on the sofa, allowing more air to come between them. “But I won’t bore you with any more of my prattling.”
The young man appeared about to object, but Mrs. Freeman didn’t give him a chance. “There were some questions you wanted to ask?”
The young man looked at her nervously.
“And which paper,” Mrs. Freeman asked, “did you say you write for?”
The young man swallowed deeply. “Well—” He tried again to flash one of his expensive smiles, but it was thinner this time.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said, and the color returned to his cheeks in a rush of gratitude. “I will tell you,” she said, folding her hands atop her knee, “whatever you want to know.”
And yet her declaration strangely seemed to have the opposite effect of what she’d intended, peeling away even further at the young man’s confidence. He was fumbling again with his spiral pad, turning back to the very first page, upon which it appeared something had already been written, and in blue pen, not pencil. Even with the pad upside down from where she sat, Mrs. Freeman noted something strikingly feminine about the penmanship.
“I want to ask you about these protests,” he repeated, but stiffly this time, reading from the page.
“I must say, I’ve grown to admire their persistence.”
The young man’s pencil remained poised above the pad, quivering slightly in his hand. At her words, his clear blue eyes seemed to focus in on her face, and Mrs. Freeman wondered whether she had interrupted his thoughts, or whether he’d been listening to her abstractly, from a distance. And then her own thoughts returned to a cigar box and a granite-faced man with a moustache offering her her first job.
Finally the uncertain movement of the young man’s lips resulted in words. “You don’t, uh, dispute the facts? The drone … that is, I mean the school—”
At that, the tent of Mrs. Freeman’s folded fingers collapsed. “It’s the nature of facts, Mr. Fitch, to be correct, and there is nothing I could say to make them less so.”
In Mrs. Freeman’s mind flashed thirty years of meetings like these, all the petty conspiring about things that didn’t really matter, all the silly memos, the secret dealings, the strategic planning. Over the years, all that changed was the quality of her chair. And it occurred to her
that had her first husband respected her just a little more, she might have spared herself all this and found aggravation domestically instead. But to say she would not have missed it would have been disingenuous. She was not sorry. Not even a bit. To get here she had needed to work ten times harder than Arthur or any of the other men around her. And after all that, even with Tiphany’s attempts to undermine her, what fun it was, at sixty-eight, to see her orders dutifully executed, not out of sentimental reverence for the aged but because after all this time she had become something like a sun, the center of gravity within her own universe.
“So you don’t deny you blew up a school?”
Gazing down again upon the young man’s hands, she saw a streak of sweat upon the pad. “How could I?”
“How long have you known about the problems with the drones?” He looked up from the page. “Or is it this bombsight you were talking about?” He seemed more comfortable going off script.
“No one has ever blown up anything,” Mrs. Freeman said, “except in desperation.”
“There must have been tests?” The young man sounded hesitant, almost apologetic. “You must have known there were … glitches?”
“Do you know what happens,” Mrs. Freeman said, “when you try to bang in one those tiny, skinny nails—those finishing nails—with a full-size hammer?”
“I’ve never tried.”
With a glance at his hands, she could tell it was true.
“You smash your thumb,” she said. “And you bend the nail.”
“I see,” he said.
But she wasn’t convinced he did. “If we really were in control,” she said, “we wouldn’t need bombs to make such an unholy mess.”
“Maybe you’d prefer to speak off the record,” the young man offered, reading once again from the page. “If there’s information that’s … sensitive …”
Mrs. Freeman felt an urge to reach out and pat his knee.
“For years there’ve been allegations against your company. Environmental abuses, reneging on labor contracts, outsourcing.” The young man had found his voice. “The city gives you tax breaks, and in return it loses jobs and gets left with cleanup bills—”
“I have nothing to hide,” Mrs. Freeman said, and he seemed disappointed, or maybe just confused. Suddenly he was looking over her shoulder.
Mrs. Freeman realized her telephone was ringing.
Straightening her pants and blouse, Mrs. Freeman stood up from the sofa, and with what she knew to be the grace and dignity of the old woman she had become, she walked over to the desk. And even she did not know what she planned to do until the moment she pressed her fingernail against the tab of the cord, detaching it from her phone.
There was so much she wanted to say, so much that needed to be cleared up, and whatever his story, whoever he was, Mrs. Freeman wanted this young man to know, for she had decided he was someone she could trust.
But here was Tiphany, already knocking at the door. She had come to tell them their time was up. Tiphany had played her hand well, Mrs. Freeman decided, and she couldn’t help feeling a bit of pride. For decades Mrs. Freeman had held her tongue. She had quietly deferred. She had been a credit to the company but never to herself. Tiphany could be forgiven for not understanding what it had taken for her to get where she was. And Mrs. Freeman would not be the one to tell her. She envied Tiphany’s ignorance.
Mrs. Freeman would never fire her. Never.
Back at the sofa, the young man was gathering his things.
Mrs. Freeman said, “I wish I had been able to give you what you wanted.”
Some people ran into one another in coffee shops and bars. For McGee and April, it had been picket lines and rallies.
It was 1999. They were both in their second year of college, barely more than acquaintances. McGee’s plan had been to fill a bus with friends from various groups: environmentalists, pacifists, anarchists, unionists, vegans, conservationists, feminists, Buddhists, socialists, queers. But it was November, toward the end of the semester, and everyone had tests to take, papers to write, dogs to walk. McGee would’ve gone by herself, if she’d had to. She’d heard from people who knew that something big was going down in Seattle, a movement, a piece of history. She wasn’t going to miss it.
April was the first to sign on. “Why not?” she’d said. “Sounds like fun.”
McGee’s second recruit was Myles. At that point they’d been seeing each other for just a couple of months, a situation they liked to think of as casual, even though their weekends together had become
automatic. Holmes came along because Myles had asked him to, not wanting to be the only person there who found his mind wandering whenever McGee or one of her friends mentioned globalization or the evils of international free trade.
Fitch came because he liked road trips and because he was trying to book gigs for his band, whose western tour had so far stalled out in Ann Arbor. Also, Fitch was trying to sleep with McGee’s friend Kirsten (the fourth recruit), and although his efforts were pitiful and exhausting, everyone put up with them because Fitch’s van was the only vehicle they had capable of driving five thousand miles without losing a wheel.
The seventh in the group was Inez, a dour, unsmiling friend of Kirsten’s whom no one else particularly liked, but they were still glad to have her, if only because seven somehow seemed like a more substantial number than six.
They drove nonstop, taking turns at the wheel, and they arrived in Seattle on a Monday night, crashing in the house of Kirsten’s older sister, seven bodies laid out on the carpeted basement floor.
McGee had been in contact with one of the local groups organizing the protests, and in the morning they met up in a park. It was only a little after sunrise, and the paths were already choked. There were placards taped to light posts, bedsheets hanging from apartment windows.
THE WHOLE WORLD IS WATCHING
, one of them read.
The seven of them moved through the crowds as if they were rubber-banded together. Even April and Kirsten, just as experienced with protests as McGee was, wouldn’t leave her side. Myles and Holmes looked alternately overwhelmed and amazed.
On a platform at the edge of the park, a black man in a green dashiki stood above a crowd stretching farther than McGee could see.
People before profit
, he shouted into his microphone, and the crowd shouted the same thing back. Here alone there must have been a thousand people, and there were thousands more all around. The protests were expected to last five days, coinciding with a meeting in the
city of superpowers, industrial nations intent on slicing up the globe into their own private markets. People had come from all around the world to make sure that didn’t happen. There were signs in French and Spanish, Portuguese, Korean, Chinese. Alphabets McGee couldn’t even recognize.