Helen's muscles seemed to tense at the command. She did not stop it. “Oh, please God, no! Not now. Please, please, please . . .”
From her vantage, Gloria could see the roof of her mother's mouth, surrounded by white dentures, like a pink canyon bordered by towering pearl cliffs. A groan broke from Helen's throat like moaning wind from a deep, black cavern. A chill descended Gloria's neck. She could not mistake the expression worn by Helen nowâit was the face of agony.
“Nooooo!” The sound reminded Gloria of a woman in childbirth. “Noooo . . .”
“Mother! Stop it right now! You're frightening me!” She jumped up from the chair and rushed over to Helen. Up close she saw that her mother's whole face held a slight tremor. She dropped to her knee and grabbed her mother's arm.
“Mother!”
Helen's eyes snapped open, staring at the ceiling. The moan ran out of air. Her eyes skipped over the white plaster above. She mumbled softly. “What have you shown me? What have you shown me?”
She must have found herself then, because she suddenly clamped her mouth shut and dropped her head.
For a moment they stared at each other with wide eyes.
“Mom, are you okay?”
Helen swallowed and looked over to Spencer, who was now watching intently. “Yes. Yes, I am. Sit down, my dear.” She shooed Gloria back to her seat. “Go sit down. You're making me nervous.” Helen was obviously scrambling for reorientation, and the words came out with less than her usual authority.
Gloria stood, stunned. “Well, you scared the living daylights out of me.” She retreated to her chair, trembling slightly.
When she faced Helen again, her mother was crying, her head buried in her hands. “What
is
it, Mother?”
Helen shook her head, sniffed loudly, and straightened. “Nothing, Honey. Nothing.”
But it was not
nothing;
Gloria knew that.
Helen wiped her eyes and tried to smile. “Did you hear the laughter?”
Gloria glanced at her son, who was nodding already. “Yes. It was . . . it was incredible.”
Spencer grinned at her. “Yeah. I heard the laughter.”
They held stares, momentarily lost in the memory of that laughter, smiling silly again.
The contentment came back like a warm fog.
They sat silently for a while, numbed by what had happened. Then Helen joined them in their smiling, but she could not hide the shadows that crossed her face. Still, the laughter consumed Gloria.
At some point a small thought ran through her mind. The thought that they were leaving for Paris soonâto celebrate. But it seemed like a fleeting, inconsequential detail, like the memory that she'd brushed her teeth that morning. Too much was happening here to think of Paris.
ACROSS TOWN, Kent, light-footed and as carefree as he could remember feeling, walked up the broad steps leading to Denver's main branch of the multinational banking conglomerate Niponbank. It was an old, historic building with a face-lift of gigantic proportions. Although sections of the original wood-frame structure could still be seen on the back half of the bank, the front half appeared as grand and as modern as any contemporary building. It was the bank's way of compromising with elements in the city who did not want the building torn down. The stairway flared at street level and narrowed as it ascended, funneling patrons to three wide glass doors. Behind him eight lanes of Thursday morning's traffic bustled and blared obnoxiously, but the sound came as an anchor of familiarity, and today familiarity was good.
He smiled and smacked through the glass doors.
“Morning, Kent.”
He nodded to Zak, the ever present security guard who meandered about the main lobby during business hours. “Morning, Zak. Beautiful day, isn't it?”
“Yes sir. It surely is.”
Kent walked across the marble floor, nodding at several tellers who caught his eye. “Morning.”
“Morning.”
Mornings all around. The long row of tellers readied for business to his left. A dozen offices with picture windows now sat half-staffed on his right. Hushed tones carried through the lobby. High heels clacked along the floor to his right and he turned, half expecting to see Sidney Beech. But then, she'd already left with the others for the bank's annual conference in Miami, hadn't she? Instead it was Mary, a teller he'd met once or twice. She stepped by with a smile. Her perfume followed her in musty swirls, and Kent pulled the scent into his nostrils. Gardenia blossoms.
A dozen circular pedestals stood parallel to the long banking counter, each offering a variety of forms and golden pens to fill them out. A twenty-foot brass replica of a sailing yacht hovered five feet off the floor at the foyer's center. From a distance it appeared to be supported on a single, one-inch gold pipe under its hull. But closer inspection revealed the thin steel cables running to the ceiling. Nevertheless, the effect was stunning. Any lingering thoughts of the building's historic preservation evaporated with one look around the lobby. The architects had pretty much gutted this part of the building and started over. It was a masterpiece in design.
Kent stepped forward, toward the gaping hall opposite the entrance. There the marble floor ended, and a thick teal carpet ran into the administration wing. A large sea gull hung on the wall above the hall.
Today it all came to him like a welcoming balm. The sights, the smells, the sounds all said one word:
Success.
And today success was his.
He'd come a long way from the poor-white-trash suburbs of Kansas City. It had been the worst of all worldsâbland and boring. In most neighborhoods you either had the colors of wealth or the crimes of poverty, both of which at least introduced their own variety of spice to a boy's life. But not on Botany Street. Botany Street boasted nothing but boxy manufactured homes sporting brown lawns only occasionally greened by manual sprinklers. That was it. There were never any parades on Botany Street. There were never any fights or accidents or car chases. To a household, the neighbors along Botany Street owed their humble existence to the government. The neighborhood was a prison of sorts. Not one with bars and inmates, of course. But one to which you were sentenced with the drudgery of plowing through each day, burdened with the dogged knowledge that, even though you weren't running around stealing and killing, you were about as useful to society as those who did. Your worthless state of existence meant you would have to park your rear end here on Stupid Street and hook up to the government's mighty feeding tube. And everyone knew that those on the dole were a worthless lot.
Kent had often thought that the gangs across town had it better. Never mind that their purpose in life was to wreak as much havoc as possible without going to prison; at least they had a purpose, which was more than he could say about those on Botany Street.
Stupid Street
.
His candid observations had started during the third grade, when he'd made the decision that he was going to be Jesse Owens one day. Jesse Owens didn't need a basketball court or a big business or even a soccer ball to make the big bucks. All Jesse Owens needed were his two legs, and Kent had a pair of those. It was on his runs beyond Botany Street that Kent began to see the rest of the world. Within the year he had arrived at two conclusions. First, although he enjoyed running more than anything else in his little world, he was not cut out to be Jesse Owens. He could run long, but he could not run fast or jump far or any of the other things that Jesse Owens did.
The second thing he figured out was that he had to get off Botany Street. No matter what the cost, he and his family had to get out.
But then, as a first-generation immigrant whose parents had begged their passage to America during the Second World War, his father had never had the opportunity, much less the means to leave Botany Street.
Oh, he'd talked about it enough, all the time in fact. Sitting on the shredded brown lounger after a long day shoveling coal, in front of a black-and-white television that managed one fuzzy channel. On a good day he might have a generic beer on his lap. “I tell you, Buckwheat (his dad always called him Buckwheat), I swear I'll take us out of here one day. My folks didn't come two thousand miles on a boat to live like rabbits in someone's play box. No sir.” And for a while Kent had believed him.
But his dad had never managed that journey beyond Botany Street. By the time Kent was in sixth grade he knew that if he ever wanted a life remotely similar to Jesse Owens's or even the average American's, for that matter, it would be solely up to him. And from what he could see there were only two ways to acquire a ticket for the train leaving their miserable station in life. The one ticket was pure, unsolicited fortuneâwinning the lottery, say, or finding a bag of cashâa prospect he quickly decided was preposterous. And the other ticket was high achievement. Super high achievement. The kind of achievement that landed people Super Bowl rings, or championship belts, or in his case, scholarships.
Beginning in grade seven he divided the sum total of his time between three pursuits. Survivingâthat would be eating and sleeping and washing behind the ears now and then; running, which he still did every single day; and studying. For several hours each night he read everything he could get his spindly fingers on. In tenth grade he got a library card to the Kansas City Municipal Library, a building he figured had about every book ever written about anything. Never mind that it was a five-mile run from Botany Street; he enjoyed running anyway.
It all paid off for him one afternoon, three months after his father's death, in a single white envelope sticking out of their mail slot. He'd torn the letter out with trembling fingers, and there it was: a full academic scholarship to Colorado State University. He was leaving Stupid Street!
Some came to characterize him as a genius during his six years of higher education. In reality, his success was due much more to long hard hours with his nose in the books than to overactive gray matter.
The sweet smell of success. Yes indeed, and today, finally, success was his.
Kent walked into the hall. The back foyer was empty when he entered. Normally Norma would be sitting at the switchboard, punching buttons. Beyond her station the wide hall continued to a series of administrative divisions, each housing a suite of offices. At the hall's end, an elevator rose to three additional floors of the same. Floors four through twenty were serviced by a different elevator used by the tenants.
Kent's eyes fixed on the first door, ahead to his right, shadowed in the hall's fluorescent light. Bold, white antique letters labeled the division: Information Systems Division. Behind that door lay a small reception room and four offices. The spawning ground for Advanced Funds Processing System. His life. The division could have been placed anywhereâin a basement bunker, for all that mattered. It had little to do with the Denver branch specifically and was in fact only one of a dozen similar divisions hammering out the bank's software across the globe. Part of Niponbank's decentralization policy.
Kent walked quickly down the hall and opened the door.
His four coworkers stood in the small lobby outside of their offices, waiting for him.
“Kent! It's about time you joined us, boy!” Markus Borst beamed. His boss held a champagne glass brimming with amber liquid. A large, hooked nose gave him the appearance of a penguin. A bald penguin at that.
The redhead, Todd Brice, pushed his oversized torso from the sofa and grinned wide. “It's about time, Kent.” The kid was a fool.
Betty, the department secretary, and Mary Quinn held champagne glasses they now raised to him. Red and yellow crepe paper hung in ribbons from the ceiling.
He dropped his case and laughed. He could not remember the last time the five of them had celebrated. There had been the occasional birthday cake, of course, but nothing deserving of champagneâespecially not at nine o'clock in the morning.
Betty winked one of those fake black lashes. “Congratulations, Kent.” Her white-blonde hair was piled a little higher than usual. She handed him a glass.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Borst announced, lifting his own glass. “Now that we are all here, I would like to propose a toast, if I may.”
“Here, here,” Mary chimed in.
“To AFPS, then. May she live long and prosper.”
A chorus of “Here, here!s” rumbled, and together they sipped.
“And to Kent,” Mary said, “who we all know made this happen!”
Another chorus of “Here, here!s,” and another round of sips. Kent grinned and glanced at the light glaring off Borst's balding head.
“Gee, thanks, guys. But you know I couldn't have done it without you.” It was a lie, but a good lie, he thought. In reality he could have done it easily without them. In half the time, possibly. “You guys are the best. Here's to success.” He lifted his glass.
“Success,” they agreed.
Borst downed the rest of his drink and set it on the coffee table with a satisfied sigh. “I say we close her down at noon today,” he said. “We have a big weekend coming up. I'm not sure how much sleep we'll be getting in Miami.”
Todd lifted his glass again. “To knocking off at noon,” he said and threw back the balance of his drink.
Mary and Betty followed suit, mumbling agreement.
“Betty has all of your plane tickets to the Miami conference,” Borst stated. “And for Pete's sake, try not to be late. If you miss the flight, you're on your own. Kent will be giving the address since he obviously knows the program as well as any of us, but I want each of you to be prepared to summarize the essentials. If things go as well as we expect, you may very well be mobbed with questions this weekend. And please, leave any mention of program bugs out of your comments for now. We don't really have any to speak of at this point, and we don't need to muddy the waters yet. Make sense?”