Certain older women regress to infancy in their style of dress. Soft, stretchy blue pants with giant pink flowers; blouses adorned with pretty little filigrees or teddy bears, puppy dogs or flowers. It’s as though they are signaling to the world their return to innocence, their abandonment of adult sexuality, and foreshadowing their eventual senility and dependence—the opposite of motherhood.

I had just reached the bus stop on 42nd Street and Bryant Park when a cacophonous throng of high school kids marched by. Then there seemed to be two groups—the first headed east, the other west. Maybe a larger group had just divided. They were laughing, jostling each other, gossiping without restraint—it was a parade of raw, exuberant youth; beautiful, unself-aware. I peered at them, trying to understand where they came from and where they might be going.

A thick-set man in his late forties paced jerkily at the stop. His patchy, long, blond curls were matted to the side of his head. He wore a multicolored leather jacket.

“Pack a fuckin’ assholes!” he shouted.

The boys and girls continued to stream by, oblivious. The man turned on his heels and stomped around by the curb, looking over his shoulder.

“That’s a pack a fuckin’ assholes!”

The Enterprise - 38

The ax fell along the lines of seniority for the most part. Jared the IT guy, ingenuous, assiduously business casual, was out on his ass after a tenure of two weeks. Hippie Allison was gone. Newspaper Lisa. My department lost Dave, the assistant graphic artist. He had recently purchased a top-of-the-line Mac PowerBook G4, all sleek aluminum, sinking an entire paycheck and the better part of another, and today he folded the thing back up, gathered up his earbuds and skulked away with a queasy look on his face.

I was among the lucky ones.

The following day Sam drifted in at around noon bearing a large cardboard box which he plonked down on one of the recently vacated polished-steel desks in the middle of the room.

“Everyone gather ‘round, OK? Everyone take a break from what they’re doing for a minute? Please?”

We assembled, bleary-eyed but curious.

“I just want to let everyone here know something, OK? This is the group,” Sam declared, and let his statement hang in the air a moment.

“This is the group! You guys are the guys I want to take into battle We’ve come a long way. We still have a long, long way to go. Clearly we have a ways to go,” he continued, smiling broadly. “But this is the group that’s going to get there. I can feel it!”

Some smiled, a bit sheepishly. It was tempting to believe what Sam was saying. A cough or two were heard from among the throng. I stood with my arms crossed, shifting foot-to-foot.

“And I want to mark this occasion with a gift. From me to each of you,” he continued, cutting open the box with a scissors blade. He lifted the flaps and reached in to retrieve two T-shirts off the top, which he then held aloft.

“Everyone gets a shirt!” Sam exclaimed triumphantly.

We gazed at the silkscreened design and text, each of us seeing, reading, trying to understand. There was a picture of our beloved robot, the Product’s avatar, the very same one Bob had drawn for the blastoff site and for all our marketing materials since, our support site, the brochures and the leave-behinds, the novelty stickers, the downloadable wallpaper, the coffee mugs and shot glasses and messenger bags and all the other merchandise that had been produced and distributed to employees and had found its way to their boyfriends, girlfriends, mothers and fathers. In this version he—he always seemed to be a he—bore three stripes of face paint, a feather in his hair, and a rudimentary spear in his hand. He stood on an unmolested, paradisiacal beach, palm trees heavy with coconuts. The text curved below him in a sort of Polynesian tiki-bar font. It read:

SURVIVOR: INTRACTO 2001

The Time Report

Each week someone from HR sends out a mass email listing all those who have not submitted their billable hours in a timely fashion. If you’ve been on the list two weeks in a row, your name goes up in red.

I scan the email for names of people I might know. For my own name. Even though I haven’t been delinquent. You see a list with names on it in red, you check for yours.

It’s long enough so you have to scroll—maybe fifty or sixty names, from practically every department of every agency. The red ones glow with shame. What dramas lie behind them? What pathologies, what turmoil? What does it take to put a name up on the list in red? Divorce? Mental breakdown? Drug addiction?

Probably nothing. But you never know.

You’ve done nothing wrong. A vehicle follows you. A man with a gun gets out and chases you, shouting. He does not seem to have any official authority but he acts as though he does. You try to escape, but he’s got you cornered. As you cry out for help he shoots you dead. When they arrive, the police do not arrest him.

Is this Kafka, Orwell, or Florida? It is certainly a vision of thuggish, oppressive dystopia. Isn’t this exactly the sort of nightmare that gun-loving Tea Partiers are constantly warning us about?

Conference Call

Ashley always looks like her hair’s a little wet, like she got out of the shower in Paterson, New Jersey 15 minutes ago and somehow now she’s here, in this venerable Midtown office building distantly overlooking the East River. She wears jeans and jogging sneakers and form-fitting shirts. She had to have been a field hockey player.

She leans across the conference-room table and types a number from a printed-out email, which contains a message advising the reader to consider the environment before printing this email, into the Polycom speakerphone. Everyone is here. Everyone is watching.

“You have entered an invalid access code,” the voice intones again. This happens all the time.

“Fuck,” Ashley mutters. She checks the number and tries again.

“You have entered an—”

“Dammit. This happens all the time.”

Outside the window, sixteen floors down and across the street, Occupy Wall Street protesters are clamoring in front of the world headquarters of a very important pharmaceutical manufacturer, this agency’s biggest client. Police form a loose periphery on horseback and on foot.

“You have en—”

“Dammit, dammit, dammit,” she says, and tries again.

This time it works.

I read over the shoulder, some girl on the West Fourth Street platform, her pamphlet on how to market your iPhone app. Funny it was on paper. One sentence stuck out, on the topic of keeping it simple: "Remember: this is an impulse buy the likes of which the world has never known."

The other day as I was out getting lunch a flatbed truck bearing an enormous clasical bronze statue rounded the corner from 42nd Street and proceeded gingerly up Third Avenue, its warning ribbons flitting in the breeze. Passersby held up their phones to take pictures, without thinking, without interrupting their conversations with each other.

OK?

In the vast lobby of the Art Deco building where I work there’s a giant globe on the left, seated in a backlit, hemispheric cavity in the floor that’s ringed with steps whose purpose seems to be to allow the janitor, at eight o’clock each night, to sweep them with a dust mop, one after the other, as the benighted half of the world looms over his crouching form.

On the right, two security clerks sit about fifteen feet apart behind an enormous, U-shaped marble desk. One morning I walked in to hear one speaking to the other.

“James Coburn,” he said. “James Coburn was a student of Bruce Lee. OK?”

I must walk the long hallway down past cubicles on either side to get coffee or to go to the bathroom. To go to meetings, notepad in hand for no good reason. Along the way I’m sure to cross paths with a colleague. Probably someone I know. Maybe someone I don’t. If it’s the former, a salutation is required upon first encounter. It can be curt. No one likes to elaborate much. Today, I found myself saying Hello.

“Hey Pat!”

“Hello!”

Or:

“Hi!”

“Hello!”

Sometimes I’d take the initiative:

“Hello!”

“Hi Pat!”

I wondered why I said Hello. Not Hi. Not Hey, what’s up? Did anyone notice? Did it strike them as odd—perhaps a little formal—that I chose to say Hello?

When you pass the same person again, you don’t say a word. What’s expected then is a sour little smile, just over a trace, not wide by any means but unmistakable, at least. It says this: We passed each other by before, and we said hello. We don’t have to now. Isn’t that kind of funny? Or, alternatively: Work is funny, isn’t it? Here we are again. Walking past each other. At the place of work.

This subsequent, wordless smirk exchanged with an acquaintance is related to the expression one must provide in each instance to a work stranger. But this smile is feebler, more labored. It says: We share the intimacy of the workspace, day after day. Yet we’ve never met and maybe never will. That’s a little funny, too. Or: I hope to God I never have to speak to you.

Certain roles are exempt from the protocol. Support staff. IT. Not giving a fuck is among their few privileges, so they indulge in it as deeply as they can. Today I passed by a man who carried two disemboweled hard drives in his right hand like a gruff, old butcher might hoist a liver to the scale.

The Enterprise - 37

Brett returned to work quietly, unceremoniously, in a newly invented role: Special Projects Director. In the morning he’d drift into the office ghost-like, with the slightest shuffle of his bad foot. He’d exit periodically, looking down, pulling out a Marlboro. There was no more bluster, no more shouting, no more strumming of the guitar. He labored in isolation, on a spinoff product that was to offer users their own configurable, interactive avatars. It seemed dubious. Everyone was a bit embarrassed for him, as though he’d been chastened, emasculated. Tom, his best friend and erstwhile bandmate, was officially named his replacement. I wondered how Tom felt.

It was crowded in the office. We had grown, both here and out west. Vague new people were brought around for introductions before disappearing to their cubicles. Marketing people. Database administrators. An IT specialist named Jared was hired, finally allowing Peter to focus full-time on his domain.

One morning, Derek was holding court on a chair at the head of my cubicle row. He wore penny loafers with no socks, a blazer over a white T-shirt. He never did seem to do much. He imagined himself a visionary. An ideas man. He was fond of PowerPoint. One day he gave me a presentation to revise. It was some sort of appeal for strategic partnerships. One slide had the following words across the top:

Intracto Is Vetted By Top Brands

The rest of it contained the full-color logos of a bewildering assemblage of big-name companies: Vivendi Universal, Intel, Johnson & Johnson, Continental Airlines, Hewlett Packard, Coca-Cola, Viacom, ETrade and Frito-Lay. Their whimsical arrangement on the page produced a dizzying, non-sequitur effect, suggestive of a high school girl’s locker festooned with words cut out from magazines. I asked Derek what these brands had to do with us. He shrugged and smiled.

Today Derek was telling a rambling, elliptical tale about bringing a polo mallet wrapped in plain brown paper and twine to a friend who lived in Spanish Harlem. He clapped and laughed, rocking back and forth in his chair.

“So they’re all sitting on their stoops, whatever. They’re all like, look at this guy! I’m a little nervous, like, what am I gonna do? So I open up my trunk and I, I...” He slapped his knee, hard, as though to beat back his own hysterics. “I... take out the polo mallet! And it’s wrapped in brown paper, and it looks like this!”

He leaned back and made like he was pointing a shotgun at the ceiling. He held the pose as long as he could before dissolving again in shuddering, quaking mirth.

“Can you? Can you imagine?” he gasped. “Can you fucking imagine what a polo mallet wrapped in butcher paper looks like to someone on the street?!” He convulsed and hissed with laughter. Everyone else laughed, too. We had to.

I considered what it was, exactly, about guys like this. I could never be a guy like this, I thought. I could never tell a group of people a story that made me laugh so hard that tears were pouring down my face. And there he was doing it. He didn’t care. He was perfectly serene. I envied him for his unselfconsciousness. What might it even feel like to be such a person?

Derek’s story finally coasted to a stop and we returned to our monitors to find an e-mail from Neil. It read as follows:

Dear Fellow Intractos,

You’ve always known me as a straight-up, put-up-or-shut-up type of guy, so I’ll be candid here and will try not to waste your time. Certain external circumstances—this probably doesn’t come as much of a surprise to any of you—have put us in the position where we have to make some decisions that we had hoped we wouldn’t have to make.

We continue to anticipate an increasingly dynamic technology landscape in which our Product is positioned to be among the most disruptive, transforming and ultimately impactful innovations. The vision is clear. Sadly, our enthusiasm for ramping up resources has outpaced market realities.

The long and the short of it is this: I cannot tell you how much I appreciate the input and energy and commitment that each and every one of you have poured into our beloved Product. While some of you will be embarking today on different life paths, and some will remain to see our dream fully realized, know that we are not making any comment on the quality of your work nor the depth of your devotion.

Beginning at 2:30 pm, Dennis and I will meet with you individually to discuss your futures or lack thereof. I caution you all to be respectful of each other in this difficult time.

Peace,

Neil

The windowless room where I work sits apart from the main space, through a door off the foyer, opposite the hallway most everyone else takes to their cubicle or office. One morning a few weeks ago, a man entered and sat at one of the open desks. Ordinary, clean-cut. He brought with him a stinging waft of cologne. He was an accounts freelancer, he said. Jim.

An IT guy soon arrived with a handful of cables to set him up. There was some discussion regarding his preferred desktop, Mac or PC. His flatscreen was connected and properly adjusted. There seemed to be some problem getting his e-mail up and running. The IT guy did all he could do and left. Soon Jim got on the phone with someone who appeared to be his boss.

“Larry, Jim. Listen, I just want to let you know. I’m set up on 16. ... Yes, I’m sitting here on 16. I’m not getting any mail right now so if you have anything for me, please give me a call. Any meetings, anything. I don’t know if you already tr... I don’t know. I don’t know, better loop me in by phone. I’m here on 16. … What? Let me have a look. 8027. 8027.”

Jim hung up and scrutinized his screen, occasionally tip-tapping on his keyboard. Adopting the posture and gestures of an office man at work.

I saw him every day for a few days. Just another worker at a nearby desk. Ostensibly working. Doing.

We arrived at around the same time one morning and had small talk between the elevator and the door.

“Cold, right?” he said.

“Yup, we’re finally getting some cold.”

“Yeah.”

“It’s gonna get worse before it gets any better,” I offered.

“Really?” he asked, incredulous.

“I think so. It’s January.”

“So February’s pretty cold?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said. “February’s cold.”

I saw him a couple more days after that and then he never appeared again.

The Enterprise - 36

Melissa lived on the Upper West, in a grand old Manhattan building with an awning and a name on it in cursive. In those first, giddy weeks of spring one of us would cross the park to see the other nearly every day. One morning I watched her from the Fifth Avenue bus as I rode to work and she walked home. She couldn’t have known I did. She angled up a little path that led into the trees and toward the meadow. She walked slowly, deliberately. No one and nothing awaited her on the other side. She seemed beautiful. I could not believe my good fortune.

We clasped hands across the table at Big Nick’s. She said, I’m so in love with you. For a moment I thought to myself: I’ve never been this happy. In the next my soul was shot with dread. How could I ever justify what she had said?

As our relationship progressed I discerned within myself a growing obsession to please her. I adopted an ingratiating persona. Why not? Was this not what she expected? Was it not what she deserved? Things seemed to be going well. Still, the effort to please her, to charm her, to seduce her left me exhausted, sometimes nearly out of breath. I became exquisitely self-conscious in her presence. When I opened my mouth to speak, I calibrated every word of every phrase, running a nonstop, internal commentary: Is this funny? Is this interesting? Is it what she wants to hear?

Deep down inside I apprehended a dark, dark truth: The harder I try, the worse it gets.

The Enterprise - 35

My old colleagues from Riot.com remained in contact via an online user group dubbed Laugh Riot. It was animated with chatter at first, people signing up and saying hello, dressing up what they were doing now as best they could, poking around for jobs. Then it ebbed, as these things always do. But now and again there’d be a burst of conversation. On one such occasion it was suggested that the old gang get together for drinks.

We met at some nondescript happy-hour joint in Midtown. It was good to see people. Some more than others. We stood around in a circle, grinning mindlessly. Conversation proceeded in fits and starts.

Finally, the crowd thinned out. Melissa remained, alone at the bar, leaning over the dregs of her Maker’s Mark. I sidled up and offered her another. We began to talk. We’d practically never spoken before. Had we, in fact, ever spoken at all?

She’d been in marketing. That I knew. I remembered walking down the row of cubicles to mine each day, at approximately 10:15, and passing her to my right. She had a charming habit of slinking down in her chair and covering her mouth with the collar of her turtleneck shirt. As though she’d just as soon vanish. She was dark-haired, green-eyed. With an alluring little pout. Every day I’d glance at her and think: I’d love to fuck her. Too bad I never, ever will.

Now that we no longer worked together, now that I no longer saw her every day, every morning—I was emboldened somehow. Out from under the sallow fluorescence of the office, I was freed. I was someone else. And when she looked at me that night, she confirmed my transformation.

There was just a blast from a foghorn just now, a low, slow honk, all the way from out wherever it is the cruise ships dock. What could be happening at one o’clock in the morning? Is it the call for everyone to come back aboard, after a Monday evening spent touring the anti-New York City downtown: the South Street Seaport, Ground Zero, the Wall Street Bull? Then it’s hurry up to the cash registers at the tchotchke shop, you heard that siren wail.

On a late spring evening in 2000, a boat off Battery Park made a similar sound while the Ornette Coleman Trio played. We all wondered if Ornette would respond in kind. I wanted him to, of course, and anticipated it, and considered how disappointing it would be if he didn’t, and immediately thought it might be great if he didn’t—if he refused to acknowledge it, to indulge us, even as he knew that’s what we wanted—and just then, a second or two after the boat’s moan ended, he punctuated his solo with a few long, low blasts of his own.

If I’m lucky I get a clear view north out the F train window in the morning, riding high above Gowanus. I love the rows of low buildings, utilitarian, industrial. Warehouses for obscure manufacturing concerns, signs faded by the decades, graffiti all over their corrugated gates. Kentile Floors.

There’s a hot dog place down there, in the middle. Must be Ninth Street. “Hot Dogs,” it says in big, blue, glorious letters.

There are vast, weedy fields ringed by fences, elaborately tagged. Some kind of gravel factory. Conveyor belts and cherry pickers. Earth movers. Terrifying metal towers from a nightmare for no apparent reason, with narrow ladders going nowhere.

Then the train dips down and plunges underground to Carroll Gardens. You get a glimpse of whatever’s happening on the street before it does. The other day I spied a scene being shot. A man stood at the open door of a parked car, streetside. He seemed to be holding a phone to his face. A few yards away the camera rolled, the director of photography squinted into the viewfinder, the director peered over his shoulder, and along the periphery were huddled the rest of the cast and crew.

Two Unusual Things I Saw Today

There were two unusual things I saw today. At work, after walking past the enormous, illuminated globe, set halfway into the floor, in the art deco lobby, and holding my wallet over the turnstile scanner to scan my badge. Holding it. Moving it around in a tight little circle until suddenly, the two metal bars swung open with a faint little hum and let me in. I walked past the newsstand that still said “CIGARS” on a sign above the entrance. I turned left and in the middle of the row of elevators on my bank—13 to 26—there was a shock of milky brown coffee on the floor. Full cup. Still hot, maybe. The elevators were gone and no one else was waiting. I leaned across the splatter to touch the button. Up.

After work, when I exited the subway station on Eighth Avenue and Ninth Street, there was a little crowd by the top of the steps. They were gathered around a telescope, perched on a tripod, about six inches wide and three feet long. A bespectacled young man hunched over the thing, squinting in the viewfinder, while others hovered, awaiting their turn. Every passerby looked up. An airplane crossed the sky. Could they be looking at airplanes? I thought that might be funny. Maybe they could glimpse a little scene from the cozy little world inside the cabin: a man fussing with a tiny bag of pretzels. His wife wearily paging through the TV series: drama category of the seat-back touchscreen in-flight entertainment programming. The moon was awful bright tonight. They had to be looking at it. You couldn’t see much else.

At five past three in the afternoon as I was exiting the toilet stall in the men's room on the 16th floor, the wall-mounted TimeMist air-freshening capsule emitted its squirt of sweetly nauseating mist. I gazed at the device while the aerated compound thinned into the atmosphere. There appeared to be sticky orange residue, specked with dust, around the orifice from which the product emanated.

I turned the wrong way out the door, walked the wrong way down the
wrong hall. All of a sudden left was right. West was east and north
was south.

The Enterprise - 34

As the city thawed to reveal minutely wider cracks in the walk and deeper holes in the street, we continued our obstinate and incremental labors.

Odd events took place in our periphery. There was a race riot all up and down 25th, from Fifth to Sixth. Blacks shut out of construction work, apparently. We heard the commotion from the office—sharp cries of venomous hatred, the crack of splintering bricks.

One day on our way to lunch we found twelve hundred dollars in cash. Peter saw it first. Or was the first to point it out. To put a word onto the apparition: that.

“Look at that!”

There it was: a tight, rubber-banded roll of sixty twenty-dollar bills, green against the gray cement blotched with petrifying gum. It was a dense and powerful object, exerting a dark, magnetic force. You looked at it and you just knew it was twelve hundred dollars in cash. Had to be. You wanted to touch it but you didn’t want to touch it. You wanted to grab it. But you didn’t.

Two passersby, young men from some indeterminate European country—possibly Switzerland—or maybe Belgium—saw it too. For the merest moment we all—seven of us—stood in a circle to behold the radiant thing.

Finally Peter picked it up. He unfastened the elastic and began to count.

“Whoa,” we murmured.

“Wow.”

“Jeez.”

“Holy shit.”

The two men grimaced and gesticulated. It soon became clear that they were not laying claim per se. But they were clamoring for some kind of recognition. They had seen the money on the ground. Now here it was in this man’s hand. These were the facts. Perhaps they were due a token? A witness fee, of sorts? Peter peeled off two hundred dollars and handed it to them. They accepted the money with grandiose shrugs, Europeanly, as if to say: We’re not asking for it, you know. We’re not even really accepting it. But we’ll take it. Since you insist. They went on their way with waves and smiles.

Back in the office, we sat down to eat at the conference table. Peter had the money in the kangaroo pocket of his nylon windbreaker. He opened the discussion with a vow to respect the group’s suggestions and concerns. A subtle rift began to form between those who felt we should divvy it up right here, right now and those who felt that morality dictated some other course of action, or at least a decorous exercise in delayed gratification. I didn’t know how I felt.

“Hey Peter, keep it. Come on, you found it. Keep it,” suggested Rob, perhaps hoping to flatter Peter into sharing.

“My dad’s a minister,” answered Peter. “I should bring it to the police.”

“They’re going to put it in their pockets,” Kevin howled. “They’re cops!”

“Cops are different now,” I volunteered.

“The right thing to do is the right thing to do,” asserted Peter. “It doesn’t matter what they do.”

“You wanna give it to the cops, call the cops. Give it to them. Give it to the cops,” Kevin said. He got up and gathered his trash. “Walk over there with the money. Like a fool. Hand it over.”

Later that afternoon, by email, Peter reported that the police at the 13th Precinct barely cared. Come back in nine days, said the lady desk cop. If it’s here, it’s yours. Nine days later, Peter circulated among our desks and handed each of us $200 in cash.

Julio was speaking. Others turned their heads in his direction, looking for eye contact. Looking away the moment it was granted. Seeking it again. The way you do. Jen, a junior account manager, peered over with a pleasant smile. Her chin rested on her fist, which clenched a fine-point Sharpie.

“... and they said they have a new process in place, and we all have to adhere to that,” spoke Julio. “We all—not just us, the other agencies—we have to do it, and they’ve been educating everyone at the senior account level about it. It’s really just another form on top of the RLM form. It’s got their own proprietary layout. Their terminology. I pretty much know how to do it.”

Now the time came when it was appropriate—requisite—for someone to respond.

“Julio,” said Jen. “I didn’t understand a single word you just said.”