Keep Thee
David, who stood listening to the discussion in the break room, at once hated and admired Kevin. Kevin had accomplished a great deal already in his short life, and yet didn't appear particularly smart. Perhaps that was the surest sign of wisdom and knowledge, not having to work so hard. Kevin knew thousands of computer commands, but he had grown up around computers, like the son of a diplomat speaking five languages. David, on the other hand, had grown up around televisions and could recite from memory the dialogue of every Hogan's Heroes episode.
"If you haven't already heard," Laury announced to Julie as she came into the break room, "the company's been sold to Data Network Systems."
"Who the hell are they?" Julie asked.
"Some Milwaukee box pushers," Kevin said. "But they don't know squat about networks or servers."
Kevin was among the youngest, yet he had the most training; knew everything about UNIX, the internet, web servers, Microsoft™ Windows®, firewalls, and data communications. He probably made more than any of them, maybe six figures, at least. That was a lot of money for Madison. He was generally liked but they all envied his knowledge. And they envied his money.
"I didn't know we were for sale," Greg said. His flaccid face was like that of a frowning, unpainted clown.
Julie sighed. "I'm just afraid they're going to lay a bunch of us off," she said. "Namely me."
"What can you do though?" Laury asked. "They're buying the company. It doesn't matter that they don't understand the business or that all their customers hate them. They'll own the contract and the State can't cancel it. I've seen the language. If they buy us they buy the contract."
"That's why you need transferable skills," Kevin said. "You've got to learn a trade."
"I really don't care though," Julie said. "I'm getting married in two months and then my doctor husband will take me away from all this."
Lina walked in and everyone fell silent, staring at the table or the wall across from them. She went to the sink and rinsed out her cup, taking her time about it because for once she had all of them feeling awkward. She poured herself some coffee and carefully measured out the powdered cream and sugar, stirring it, then rinsing off the spoon with excruciating care.
She couldn't help but smile as she left. David smiled back, suddenly finding her attractive, and risked a quiet: "How's it going." Lina winked with conspiratorial gleam.
Laury glared at David.
"I know," he said. "She's a bitch. But she's always been nice to me."
"That's because she wants something from you," Laury said. "You'll have to tell us one day what it is and if she really liked it."
"I'm a happily married man."
Jim, one of the salesmen, laughed. "I never let my wife know I'm happy," he said. "She'll suspect me immediately.
"I never let my boss know I'm happy," Kevin said. "If they think you're always about to quit you never have to worry about raises."
"Same thing with my wife but with her it's sex."
"You're sick," Laury said.
"Not everyone has job offers every week," David said to Kevin.
"Or has sex with their wife," Jim said, thinking he was funny.
"Actually," Kevin said, "everyone does have sex with your wife."
Paul, the service manager, came into the engineer's room looking for Kevin.
"He's at the Department of Social Services," David said.
"No he's not. They just called. He hasn't been there today and now they really need him."
"Where else can he be?" David asked.
"Are you serious?" Paul asked. "You don't know?"
"I guess not."
"The son of a bitch is running a dozen deals on the side. He's got customers all over greater Madison. Every time I send him out on a job he takes the rest of the day. I'd fire him if I could just replace him."
Paul pulled at his hair and looked at the three empty desks. "Guess I gotta' send you."
"Do you think I can handle it?"
"I hope you can, but, regardless, get your butt down there. They have a down server."
As he left the office, David stopped in Paul's office. "What do you think is going to happen with the new owners," he asked. "I heard that if you don't have a lot of skills they lay you off."
"This is America," Paul said, averting his gaze from David's face. "We just go out and find ourselves another job when it happens. People do it all the time. Besides," Paul added with a smile, "if you get that server running you'll show how much you know. Maybe Kevin gets the axe, not you."
Lina was smoking around the corner from the back door. There were several butts at her feet as if she had been there quite a while. David ventured a wave and was surprised when Lina smiled broadly and motioned for him to join her.
The surprise was more like fear, in truth. Lina wasn't an intimidating beauty, that wasn't the problem; David was shy with all women, even Debbie, his wife, who had had to pursue him as if he were a fugitive. And David, having only dated one woman in his life, simply didn't know how one became friends with women.
"Want a smoke?" Lina asked.
"I don't smoke," David said. "My wife won't allow it in the house."
"I didn't ask you to smoke in your house. I asked you to smoke here with me, without your wife." She put a second cigarette in her mouth, lit it from the first and handed it to David.
"Thanks. I've always been curious." He noticed her stains, a quarter circle on the lower edge of both the front teeth. She blew smoke in his general direction and winked.
"I needed a hobby. Something to keep me busy, you know, out of trouble."
David took a cautious drag. It was definitely smoky. Burned a little. Nothing to take joy in.
"That's it," Lina said. "Start slow. Don't want to overdo it."
David leaned one shoulder against the brick wall. He was just a few inches from her. She met his gaze; he blushed and turned away.
She laughed. "You're alright," she said. "Not like the other assholes."
"Did you and Laury have a fight?" he asked.
Lina shrugged. "She thinks I'm a bitch and I think she's one too. Some people just don't get along."
David shrugged.
"Just like some people are attracted to each other. You can't figure it out so don't fight it."
David blushed again and found the silence and her gaze uncomfortable. "I'd better go," he said. "Paul needs me over at DSS."
"See ya' later," Lina said, smiling with her yellow teeth.
David found Mike, the customer contact, in the wiring closet, where they had shoe-horned in an expensive computer because they'd run out of space in the server room. It was cramped and hot, too hot, which was the cause of the problem.
"I rebooted it myself," Mike said. "I couldn't wait for you guys any longer. But the file system was corrupt. It didn't come up."
"Don't you want to fix the ventilation first?" David asked.
"Let's just get it up. I can't move it now anyway. We need the union guys to change the wiring. That won't happen until next week."
"Do you have the backup tapes?"
"We have to restore from backups?" Mike asked. "That'll take hours."
"We may have to." David struggled to maintain the calm look on his face, the only aspect of systems support he had mastered. The customer expected you to know your stuff and, if you merely never gave them cause to doubt you, they would believe.
The anger left Mike's face, replaced instead by a steely look of determination. "Then you'll have to do it yourself," he said, slipping into the role of a government employee who really doesn't care. "I leave at four-thirty."
"That's fine," David said.
"Then I'll get the tapes."
David began to sweat. He really didn't know what he was talking about, but the heat was abundant, too. There were three racks full of switches, hubs, and routers. Above the routers were the CSU/DSU units that created the DSS's wide area network. They all generated heat. Wedged between two of the racks was a UNIX box, on but not functioning, adding to the heat.
David had no formal training with UNIX. It had no GUI, which he could at least explore, but only a colon prompt (":") on a bare line at the top of the green VDT. No mouse to click, just the prompt, waiting for input, a command to resuscitate the machine. What command?
Kevin walked in and David jumped to his feet.
"What are you doing here?" Kevin asked.
"Paul sent me but I don't know what I'm doing. I don't even know who to call."
"He sent you to fix one of my customers?" Kevin looked in the hall. "Mike knows you're here?"
"Yes. He's getting the backup tapes."
"What for?" Kevin said with contempt. "All you need to do is f-s-c-k the root file system. It'll probably recover itself."
"See," David said. "I didn't even know that."
"But if Paul sent you I'll let you fix it." Kevin turned and walked out the door.
The sweat exploded on David's face, running in rivulets around his cheeks and soaking his collar and Tshirt. He ran after Kevin and caught him at the elevator.
"You can't do this," David said. "Help me. At least tell me what to do."
Kevin smiled, relishing David's discomfort. "I already did: f-s-c-k it."
"F-s-c-k what?" David insisted.
"F-s-c-k yourself," Kevin said, laughing as he stepped into the elevator.
David came home at three the next morning, bleary-eyed from the long hours, exhausted because of the tension. Debbie was asleep but snapped awake as he collapsed on the bed.
"You smell like cigarette smoke," she said. "Were you at a bar?"
"Nope," David said. "I was right where I told you I was."
"Are you going to tell them you don't like working these hours?"
"Now is not a good time to tell them such things. I'm probably going to get laid off as it is."
"I don't like you working late," she said. She pulled the covers up and rolled on her side, away from David.
In the morning, David arrived late and was greeted by the unfeeling stares of the new and former owners who sat together in the conference room. It was the closest David had ever been to the former owner, T.P. Smith, and David took brief solace in the fact that he, David, was probably less familiar to Smith than the janitor. If Smith wanted to fire David for being late he couldn't name him.
All the engineers were chattering about the takeover and hardly noticed when David entered the room.
"They're just a PC shop," Greg, the NetWare engineer, said. "They don't know a damn thing about networks."
"They sure as hell don't care about engineers," Ray, the Microsoft engineer, said. "They don't have a single certified engineer."
"That's why they need us," Kevin said. Kevin had every major certification in the industry, Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer, Master Certified Novell Engineer, and Sun Enterprise Engineer.
There was a moment of silence and the thought occurred to everyone that none of them with certifications had very much to worry about; there were plenty of jobs around. Kevin, Greg, and Ray all looked at David, who had no formal training and no certifications.
"So how late were you there?" Kevin asked. "Two?"
"Three," David said.
"You reinstalled?"
"What else could I do? By the time I got a hold of Paul to get me the tech-support number for SCO and our ID, it was after five, and we don't have support with them past five."
"You could have called Compaq. They have their own engineers." Kevin laughed. "Besides, something is still wrong with system. You probably didn't restore everything correctly so I'm going out there in a minute."
The former owner made a farewell appearance in the engineers' room. He had built a small data processing firm into one of the largest value-added resellers in the state and was cashing out for undisclosed millions to the wannabes from Milwaukee, who were on a spending binge, buying up small firms like they were corporate sharks, nostalgic for the eighties, and who didn't mind taking on millions in debt. Now he approached each engineer with his hand extended for a shake.
"Good luck," Smith said to each of the them in turn. "Thanks for everything," he added.
To David he smiled from across the room. "Nice working with you," he said. David shrunk as if slapped in the face, but smiled bravely, not knowing what else to do.
"He sure seems happy," Ray said.
"Of course he's happy," Greg said. "He's a millionaire."
Carol, the office administrator, came in and announced that everyone was scheduled to meet the new owners that day. "If you have to make a service call let me know. They want to meet everyone."
"What are they like?" Greg asked.
"Like big-shots from Milwaukee," Carol said. "Talk like Chicago, but sound like Wisconsin."
The certified engineers were scheduled first. David was late in the day, after the salesman and clerical staff. Only Lina was later.
The early feedback was all positive and mostly as expected: it would be business as usual, stay the course, grow the business. Get our ducks in a row and get with the program. Plan to work, work the plan. All the engineers were reassured and they strutted about the office as if they owned it.
"We'll form the core of their new technology group," Ray explained to David. "You just have to get your certification, any certification, and you're in."
"You mean I won't be otherwise?" David asked. "Will they train me or do I have to pay for it myself."
"I didn't ask. I'm sure they'll pay for the training. Don't worry: we need you."
As the time for his meeting approached David grew increasingly anxious. He had been nagging to get training in the four months since starting, but Paul had been reluctant, stringing him along with promises and assurances. Always there was something important looming, or one of the real engineers had vacation, and David would be needed locally, couldn't be spared for training. But the most important thing he had ever done was to replace a failed CPU. Most of the time he was swapping hard drives and then packing the failed ones for return to the manufacturer. He knew Compaq's, Seagate's, and Maxtor's return merchandise phone number by heart, and was on first-name basis with most of their shipping clerks.
David was at the bottom of the food chain and certainly he would be the first to go. Well, maybe Lina, who didn't seem to do anything, would be first; but certainly he would be next.
And certainly the way he screwed up last night (which wasn't his fault, but who ever asked such a question?) would put him on somebody's shit list. There was nothing worse than to be an untrained, out-of-work PC technician. Once they knew you needed the work, the starting salary plummeted. May as well go to truck driving school. Only Carol, the office administrator, would be more vulnerable.
At lunch, he bought Marlboros from a gas station. It was his second pack, in fact; the night before, as he waited for the installation script to spin files off of the CD-ROM, he had wandered down the road to the package store to buy a Coke and heard himself asking for cigarettes. He smoked two before going back inside and began to fantasize about Lina. Then, as the first of the backup tapes was being restored, he went back outside and smoked four more.
It gave him a headache and a touch of nausea but the time passed more quickly. He finished most of the pack off later when he realized he had made a mistake in the order he'd restored the tapes and had to start over. He smoked the last one leaning against the back of his car in the parking lot outside of his apartment building.
Sneaking around the corner of the building with the cigarettes, he hoped to find Lina waiting for him. Not that he wanted to be unfaithful; mentally undressing the women he worked with was not an abnormal thing (unless it was Carol, which he never did). He had read somewhere in a magazine that men think about sex eighty-five percent of the time, and fantasize about nearly every woman they meet. But when he lipped the cigarette he realized he didn't have matches and went back to his car to use the lighter.
Returning with a dread of what the afternoon might bring and his lit cigarette, he found Lina around the corner, just lighting a cigarette, as if she were conjured from the wish of a secret desire. She regarded him casually, then brightened with an inviting smile.
"How's it going," she said. "Had your talk yet?"
"I'm not very confident," David said.
She nodded, taking David in with her eyes. "We should go out some time," she said. "Maybe get drunk together."
David hesitated, searching in his heart and his mind for what he should do. But neither his heart nor his mind had little to do with what he said.
"I suppose having a drink would be okay."
"It'll be fun," she said. "No harm in that."
"Yeah. Fun."
"You want my number?" she asked.
"Sure."
She reached toward his chest, and David, already numb and with a buzzing in his ears, froze. Lina took a pen from his shirt pocket, then grabbed his hand confidently, pulling it close. She wrote a phone number on his palm, then, smiling as if this were a very common way of exchanging phone numbers, capped the pen and put it back in his shirt pocket.
David scrubbed his palm to wash away the ink. There was no danger of his forgetting the number; it was as if the numbers had entered his blood stream through his skin, and now his brain could think of nothing but that phone number.
Carol found him wandering the halls aimlessly.
"Your meeting's been cancelled," she said. "They went back to Milwaukee."
"Who?"
"The new owners." Carol regarded him curiously. "Are you alright?"
"Yes." David put his hand, that hand, in his pocket. "They cancelled?"
"Yes. You and a few others. They didn't really say why."
"When do they want to meet me then?"
"They didn't say. I get the feeling they don't. They seemed bored with it after a while." Carol saw the disappointment on David's face. "Sorry," she added.
The week dragged on without further word from the new owners. Laury was convinced they had made a pact with the devil as nothing else could explain how such imbeciles could afford to buy a company such as their own.
David continued to smoke but was careful to avoid Lina, afraid of what he might start to think. He was grateful for the grind of computer service calls: a hard drive for Transportation, memory upgrade at Community Health, and some network interface cards at Civil Service. David took as much time as was reasonable in order to avoid the office, where he might meet Lina.
Paul reassured him that he was a valuable and contributing member of the company, and that he shouldn't worry about his job. Still, he worried.
David's wife attributed his moroseness to concern for his job, which was partially true. But she didn't excuse him.
"Everybody has to worry about their job," she said. "This is America: everybody is expendable."
He accepted her harsh words as an invitation to remain distant. They had been married three years, having met at the community college. With some help from their parents they were getting along just fine. There was nothing wrong with their marriage. So why couldn't he stop fantasizing about Lina?
On Thursday Debbie suggested they go out. "Let's find the gang and get drunk," she said. "Have a few laughs."
"I don't feel like it," David said.
"Well then I'm going without you," Debbie said, thinking she would shame him into it.
David waved without enthusiasm at her disappointed face and she left without saying goodbye. He really had wanted to go: getting drunk was probably just the thing. Forget your problems and worries for awhile. Instead, he went to the white pages and looked up Lina's address.
Lina, it so happened, lived in the same apartment complex, though several buildings away. It was enough to make him sick. Thinking he had gone mad, he dialed her number, then hung up when he heard her voice.
The phone rang back immediately, and, ashamed of his cowardice, he answered reluctantly.
"Cat got your tongue?" Lina asked.
"I don't know what to say."
"You want to have that drink?"
"I'd better not." David prayed that she wouldn't insist because he was certain to accommodate her.
"I'll see you later then," Lina said. "Thanks for calling."
On Friday, Paul was off in Eau Claire, so David ignored his service calls to work on his resume instead. There wasn't much to add, however. He visited the internet job search sites, sending his resume to all postings regardless of their requirements. Ray and Greg saw what he was doing but said nothing out of respect for the dead.
David lingered past five, not job searching, but just surfing, following the advertisement hot-links to wherever they may lead. At six his wife called.
"Come home," she said. "The hell with them. Besides, tonight's bowling."
"I want to stay a while longer," he said. "I may find something yet. I'll meet you at the alley."
Kevin came in with several empty boxes and began packing his desk in a terrible hurry.
"Were you fired?" David asked.
Kevin laughed. "Hell no. I'm starting my own business. Terry Smith and I are going to do web sites now. Consulting. One-hundred fifty dollars an hour. Two-hundred for Java programming. No more of this service call shit for me."
David saw a glimpse of sunlight through the dark clouds gathering in the distance. "Take me with you," he said. "I'll do anything to help."
"You can help me with these boxes," Kevin said.
"I'm serious. I hate this service shit too."
Kevin stopped his packing for a moment. "Do you know HTML or Java®?"
"No."
"Do you know IMAP4, POP3, TCP/IP, HTTP, SMTP or SNMP stuff?"
"No."
"ODBC, JDBC, SQL, ActiveX® or Visual Basic®?"
"No."
"Done anything with Microsoft® Internet Information Server, NCSA, Netscape Enterprise Server®, or Apache?"
"You know I haven't," David said with deep hurt in his voice.
Kevin busily packed the boxes, cleaning the desk as if the Feds were about to swoop down upon him and use anything left behind as evidence.
"Help me take these out to the car."
David fetched the hand truck from the shipping room and together they piled on the boxes heavy with manuals and books. David held the back door open and then helped load the boxes into Kevin's pickup.
"See ya," Kevin said. Then, as an afterthought, he said: "Tell Carol I'll e-mail my resignation tomorrow." He tossed David his pager. "Give her this, will you?"
Lina was waiting for David when he came back inside, surprising him as he lingered in the doorway watching Kevin drive away. "I was hoping I'd find you," she said. "I need a ride home."
"You do?"
"My car's in the shop. Transmission, I guess."
David looked back in the parking lot seeing that his was the only car left. "What if you hadn't found me?"
"I would have found a ride." Lina reached past him and pulled the door shut. "I always find a ride; that's never an issue."
David felt the blood rush to his face. He should call his wife, let her know he'd be home soon, and that he loved her. He recalled that she was at the bowling alley.
"We're the only ones left in the building," Lina said. "You know what that means, don't you?"
"No. What does that mean?"
"It means we can smoke our brains out in here, and no one'll know." She pulled out two cigarettes and lit them from a Zippo lighter. David noticed that it was the sort of thing a man would use, this Zippo, an affectation like an ear ring on a man.
She kissed him full on the mouth then stuck the cigarette in his lips.
"Let's go to my office," she said. Then she led him down the hallway by the hand.
David was crushed by the guilt and wished he were Catholic so that he might tell someone about it in confidence. As a consolation, he confessed to his wife that he had taken up smoking, explaining that it was the pressure of uncertainty regarding his job. Debbie showed little mercy because he had stood her up at the bowling alley and she had felt awkward without him.
"Don't let this ruin your life," she lectured, woozy from beer and with her ears still ringing from the noise of the bowling alley. "Just deal with it. Christ, you're acting like an old woman."
The weekend lasted an eternity. He knew he had to break it off with Lina, or risk ruining his life. What confused him most was how things had actually gone in the office.
They had kissed and fondled quite passionately, leaning against her cubicle wall. She surprised him by lowering his trousers (why this surprised him, he didn't understand, other than he couldn't quite believe what was happening) and reaching inside his jockey shorts. He came in her hand even before she'd gotten hold of the damn thing, his whole body convulsing with the orgasm.
He peered at her sheepishly, ashamed at his performance.
"Well, that didn't take long," she said, and reached for the tissues on her desk. She cleaned her hand, then offered him the box.
"We'd best get going," she said.
David wondered if he should try to kiss her as he dropped her off at her building but Lina was quick to jump out.
"See ya'," she said, waving goodbye with her hand; that hand.
On Monday Lina sent him an e-mail that read: "Come in a hurry. I need to talk to you."
David didn't reply, aware that e-mail was no more secure than shouting over the top of his cubicle. He caught up with her outside smoking.
Her greeting, unlike the e-mail, was friendly, with no hint of condescension or mockery. She even steadied his hand as he tried to light a cigarette.
"So how was your weekend?" she asked. David shrugged, thinking instead of how awful the tobacco tasted. His throat burned and his eyes watered and it cost nearly three bucks for the pack.
"I need some money," Lina said. "I know that sounds bad, but I got into some trouble and I really need a thousand bucks right away."
"What happened?" David asked, trying to sound more like a partner than a victim.
"My car," Lina said. She drew on her cigarette and looked away at the next building over, her face and hair catching the sunlight, so that David wanted her all over again.
"I need all this work done on my car," she went on. "I don't have the money and my parents are pissed at me and you can't live in this world without a car. I mean, what am I going to do: ride the bus?"
David laughed. "Wish I could help," he said, his heart sincere and full of sympathy.
"You have to help," Lina said.
"I just don't have a thousand dollars."
"You have to find it. You have to."
"If I could just go find a thousand bucks..."
"You have to." Lina's voice took on an edge, an intensity, a seriousness David'd never heard before.
"What do you want me to do?" he asked. "We don't even have a hundred bucks. I don't make that much."
"I'll call your wife."
"No."
"Then get me a thousand bucks." Lina ground out her cigarette against the wall and walked to the corner. "I'll call tonight. If you can't tell me about the money, I'll tell your wife about us."
"Life is a series of screw-jobs," Laury said. She was holding court once again in the break room. "We all take turns screwing each other, though some are polite about it, and others hide behind lame excuses."
Ray, Greg, Carol, Julie, and two of the salesman were crowded around the table, eating donuts and drinking coffee, apparently with nothing better to do.
"Like what? Greg asked.
"Like the new owners banning long-distance phone calls and requiring time sheets," she said. "For five years everyone uses the phone like no one cared who we called, now they want us to log the calls, the photocopies, and all time spent away from the office."
"You were never supposed to use the phones for personal calls," Carol said.
"At least Terry trusted us," Laury said.
"They should put in a policy about not stealing customers to start your own company," Carol said, referring to Kevin, and not wanting to fight with Laury.
"I kind of like it," Laury said. "It would serve these Milwaukee assholes right."
"We'll still be looking for a job," Carol said.
"Not us," Ray said pointing at Greg. "Kevin already offered us jobs."
There was a lull in which everyone seemed to be realizing that they were witnessing the beginning of the end of their company.
"Are you going to take the jobs?" David asked.
Greg shrugged. "That depends on how much money they offer."
At home, everything was quiet. David sat at the table flipping through the mail as his wife remained in front of the TV watching Oprah. One piece of mail caught his eye: an offer for a credit card with a cash advance. It was a check made out to him and which he could endorse immediately. He secreted it away into his toolkit.
During a commercial, his wife went to the toilet, and David hurriedly called Lina telling her he'd bring a check in the morning.
"Good," Lina said. "I hope you don't think I'm a bitch for doing this. I'll make it up to you."
"That won't be necessary," David said. "You've done more than enough already."
David threw himself on the sofa and stared at the TV wondering if he was witnessing the end of his marriage.
"I was thinking," his wife said, "that you should start your own company. Maybe go in with some of the guys at work."
"What?"
"You need to be more bold. Take risk. You're never going to get anywhere working for someone else. It's the American dream, right? Start your own company."
"I could be President and CEO," David laughed.
"I'll be the Chief Financial Officer," Debbie said.
"I'm not sure I'd want to work for a company that had me for its President," David said. "Even I have standards."
"I'm serious," Debbie said. "I think we have to take some risk in life, like Oprah."
"What about working capital?" David asked.
"We sign up for a dozen credit cards, all at once, max them out, and only pay the minimum until you get things rolling."
"We'll go bankrupt."
"If we run into problems we just go to one of those credit management places. They renegotiate the interest rates for you."
David rolled face down on the sofa trying to empty his mind of guilt and possibilities. He understood a little better now that the future brought the unexpected along with the expected and that you had to deal with them both using your brains. But not right now.
"Let me just see if I can keep my job for a few more days," he shouted into the pillow. "Maybe I'll get some training, a raise, who knows?"
"What if you don't," Debbie said.
"Then we still have the credit card thing. We'll always have that. Just like we have each other."
The next morning, David found Lina waiting around the corner when he arrived. His embarrassment was replaced by anger, and so he approached her smiling.
"Been waiting long?" he asked.
She returned his smile and blew smoke. "I really do appreciate this," she said. "I know you probably think I'm a total bitch."
Not knowing what more to say, David handed over the check.
"What are you going to tell your wife?
"I'll have the credit card and bills sent to this address," David said. "Hopefully, she'll never know."
"Cool," Lina said. She put her cigarette in his lips and held it there for him. "Just remember to keep breathing."
At eleven in the morning, David noticed that neither Greg, Jim, or Carl had come in, and that the office was quiet. Paul's office door was shut, and he could make out Paul's muffled voice within.
Carol ran past in a state of agitation and into Paul's office, slamming the door behind her. A moment later she burst out again and ran mumbling back to the front desk.
"What's going on?" David asked. Carol seemed on the verge of tears. "Where is everybody?"
Carol looked at him as if he had left the toilet seat up at a Tupperware party. "Where've you been today?" she asked. "Don't you know? Haven't you heard?"
"Heard what?"
"Just about everybody resigned. Greg, Ray, Carl, and Laury. The salesmen John, Jim, and Dennis, they're gone too. Just about everybody's gone except you, Julie, me and Paul."
"I thought their desks were a little too neat this morning."
"They cleaned everything out last night, and left resignation letters on Paul's desk."
"Where did they go?"
"The company Terry and Kevin started: Digital Knowledge Systems."
"Really? Can they do that?"
"That's why Paul's on the phone. The new owners want to sue them, all of them, especially Terry Smith."
"I guess they didn't invite you either?"
"They did," Carol said. "But when I found out Lina was the office manager and that I'd be working for her, I turned them down."
"Lina? She's there too?"
"Sure," Carol said. "Didn't you know: she's having an affair with Terry. That's the reason she was never fired from here."
As David staggered back to his desk, Paul opened his door and beckoned David to sit down.
"Well, I got some good news and bad news," Paul said. "Which do you want first?"
David shrugged.
"The bad news," Paul said, "is that you're going to be busier than a one-armed paper-hanger for the next few weeks until we get some contractors and new hires on board."
"What's the good news?"
"If you stay with us through this crap you can have any and all training you want. We'll get you certified in everything out there: Novell, Microsoft, Sun, whatever you want. So what do you say?"
"Sounds good," David said. "Once I have all the certifications, I can go start my own company."
Paul nodded. "That seems to be the way things go."
Lansing, Michigan, 1998