Brainstorm Page 8

  The elevator door opened and he stepped inside. Leon gave him a solute. Then jerked his head towards the waitees, as if one of them might try to make a dash to the elevator before the door closed. (It had happened.)

  At this hour, the elevator did a milk run, pretty well stopping at all the floors. Connie cringed every time someone got on. But he couldn’t ignore what they jabbered at him. Not in such a confined space. Their words were all about Hal and his disappearance. Which were followed up by various explanations about what had happened to Hal.

  Hal had run off with Tamara who also hadn’t shown up for work in the last few days. (He was known womanizer.)

  Hal had run off with money he had stolen from the company. (He often complained that he and his wife couldn’t afford the home they had just bought.)

  Hal had a heart attack and was lying somewhere in a ditch. (He had begun to look pale for a while. Dark circles under his eyes and a pasty complexion.)

  Connie could only shake his head at their comments. He had something more disturbing to worry about.

  After the tenth floor, he was left alone with these thoughts. Eleven belonged to the suits. And you needed a special security ID to go up to the twelfth.

  But his thoughts weren’t clear. The migraine overwhelmed him. Revolted his stomach. Made him so lightheaded that his thoughts became sensations. Not words. Unreasonable fear. Of falling. Of someone’s hand on his shoulder. He looked down at the floor. It seemed ready to rush up and meet his face.

  Then he shivered. Shook with a sense of dread. And suddenly he knew. Knew what he dreaded. Why fear had begun to stalk him.

  It had begun again.

  His head began to pound. Jack hammers on his skull. He put his hands on either side because it felt like it was going to explode if he didn’t. “God, help me,” he heard himself say. The words torn out of his mouth.

  He leaned against the wall of the elevator to keep his balance. But he mightn’t have worried. About losing his balance. For when he struck the wall, it was if he had struck a wash of glue. Something sticky and thick attached itself to his back. And even though his legs seemed to give out on him, the wall kept him propped up. Only now what had been a wall had become a fetid mass of softness. Revolting. Pulsating. Picking at his body with poking jabs. The smell made him dizzy. The wall writhed and bubbled and began to suck at him. As it had tried before. As it became a quicksand of gelatinous mass. His will felt like quicksand, too. Sucking the life out of him. Only his arms had any sense of determination. They wanted to be free while the rest of him ─ though shaking with terror ─ had become resigned to be consumed. To be absorbed. As if that was what he had been waiting for all along. For all of his entire existence.

  And consumed he was becoming. His back now indistinguishable from the mass that had once been the elevator wall. Only his arms and hands seemed to care that he was disappearing. While the rest of him waited for the jabbing shocks of fear to paralyze him.

  And just as it seemed that his arms had given up the fight to escape, the elevator suddenly came to a stop. The door opened. With that motion, his arms fell to his side. He staggered forward away from the wall. And for a moment. For a very long moment. He had no idea where he was. Or even who he was. While he stared at the faces staring at him from outside the elevator. Not recognizing any one of them. Looked into their startled faces until the elevator door began to close.

  Marlene’s hand stopped it from closing. Behind her was Vicky, along with several members of the team. Both their faces looked worried. He wondered why. Wondered until he could put names to all the faces. And a name to himself.

  12

  “We got to talk,” Marlene and Vicky said in stereo.

  The urgency of their voices shook him back to reality. And that helped him shake off their urgency. He wanted to be alone. He ignored them and the other concerned faces and walked towards his office. (All the Eureka’s had offices. The worker bees put up with carrels crowded among aisles, printers and copiers.) Marlene followed him. Vicky hung back. Melding into the rest of the team members. They lined the aisles between the carrels like they were watching a parade. Marlene and Connie the floats. Only the serious frowns on their faces made it seem more like a funeral march.

  Marlene followed him into his office and closed the door behind her. Connie glared at her. He wanted to be alone. “What the hell, Marlene. Get out of my office. I got things to do.” He thought of Vicky. Of what he had told her. Marlene had that worried, mother hen look. A what-am-I-going-to-do-with-you look? Damn it, he thought. Vicky’s told her. So ─ here it comes. Acting crazy was a sure sign of burn out. He was seeing Mr. Suzuki in a few minutes. That sealed the notion for him. He’d be gone before the end of the day once the suits knew what was happening to him.

  “You haven’t heard, have you?” she asked him.

  He didn’t know whether he should answer yes or no. Heard? Heard what the suits thought of him now that Vicky had tattle-tailed on him?

  He turned his back on her. Didn’t want her to see the pain in his face. Hell, he didn’t know how much more he could take. If he was cracking up ─ and that seemed very likely ─ he needed to see someone and quick. But if he got fired, he’d be off the company’s medical life support system. He couldn’t afford to pay for the kind of help he needed.

  “Connie?”

  For the life of him, he’d never understand women. He had told Vicky all that in confidence. Stupid of him, he realized now. She obviously had some kind of grudge against him about what she thought he had done to her sister.

  “Connie,” she said in her most mature voice. “We got to talk.” She put a hand on his shoulder. But it was a friendly hand. And he wasn’t startled. This time he knew where the touch had come from. If only it would just go away.

  “Suzuki is thinking of making Nabil team leader,” she said in the breathless tone she used whenever she talked about something stupid the suits had done. “He came to me for advice and I told him that was ridiculous. But he only shook his head and smiled. You know that smile of his. You poor mortals don’t know the half of it.”

  Nabil was VP of marketing. One of the suits he had seen in the lobby. A friend of Evie’s. A one-time worker-bee coder on the auto-app team. Not a brilliant coder. Just a brilliant talker. Like Hal.

  “At least Hal left us alone to do our work,” she went on. “Nabil won’t. You know that. And he’ll screw things up. And when he does, it’ll be our heads. I think that’s why Suzuki wants him in. He’s been against the project from the beginning. If it wasn’t for the Board backing us, he’d have closed us down long ago.”

  Connie sat down in his chair in front of his desk. Marlene paced. He didn’t know what to say. (Oh, she was right about Nabil.) He had so been prepared to defend himself over what Vicky might have told her. Ready to be on the offensive. All he could do at first was to stare at her. Then he smiled. Or tried to smile. The way a person might who had just escaped a near-death moment. Relief. Of sorts. Even if it didn’t crowd out what else was going on in his head. No one but Vicky knew.

  “He’s not going to choose Nabil,” he eventually managed to say.

  “You think so?” she asked, not thinking so.

  Connie shrugged. He had to agree with her. “Listen. Just give me a few minutes to myself. Will you?”

  “You’re going to meet with Suzuki.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I have my spies.”

  Leon, he thought.

  “You got to ask him to make you team leader.”

  “Me?”

  “Yes, you. If you ask him and he doesn’t give it to you but gives it to Nabil, the Board will hear about that. I’ll make sure. And then he’ll be in hot water. There are a lot of Board members that would like to see him gone.”

  “Marlene, I don’t want to be team leader. You know that. I’ve already said no.”

  “It’s not what you want, Connie. It’s what’s best for the team. For the project.”
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  “This is not a good time for me. I can’t chair meetings or speak at conferences.”

  “Why in heaven’s name not? It’s not as if you’re speaking to the UN General Assembly. You’re talking to a bunch mathematicians and computer geeks. Even if you mumble, they’ll think you’re great. That’s what everybody thinks of you around here. Bask in some of your goddamn glory, honey. All you have to do is write out what you’re going to say and read from your paper. How hard is that? But that’s not important. What is important is keeping Suzuki’s and Nabil’s hands off of us. You know you couldn’t get Hal to agree to half of your suggestions even when he was leaving us pretty much alone.”

  She paused to talk a breath. To give him her mother-hen look. And at that moment, he did feel like one of the chicks. Like he’d just been hatched in a world he didn’t understand.

  “I don’t know. I’ll think about it.”

  “You don’t have too long, Connie.”

  “Okay, okay. Just give me some peace for a moment.”

  She nodded and went to his office door. It was glass as was the wall that it belonged to. Only suits had real private offices. So a roomful of expectant faces was watching them. “We can count on you, can’t we Connie?”

  He rubbed his chin and thought of the woman on the bridge. Had she counted on him to stop her? “Sure, Marlene. You know you can always count on me.”

  She gave him an encouraging smile and left his office.

  He didn’t smile back. He didn’t know what to think. If he could think at all. His head was still fuzzy. There was that sense of impending doom that seemed to linger. Some catastrophe in the waiting. It must be a brain tumor, he decided. What else could it be?

  “Shit!”

  “As bad as that?”

  Marlene hadn’t closed his door. Vicky stood in its doorway. Half in. Half out. She wore the same worried face that he had seen on Marlene’s. And on the other faces of his team. But he didn’t need Vicky’s doom and gloom. Not now. He had enough of his own. Of course, everyone was worried about whether the project would continue.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to barge in on you. I just thought. I just thought we should talk.”

  He stood up. It was almost time to go down to the suits’ floor. “Well … Marlene’s said all there is to say on the subject. And I wouldn’t worry. Since you just started here, if we do get put on the shelf, that one-year non-disclosure clause won’t apply to you.”

  “It’s not about what’s going to happen here.”

  He groaned inwardly. Then outwardly. “Hell, did you say anything to Marlene?”

  “Say anything?”

  “Yeah. You know. What I told you last night.”

  “Do you think I’d do that?”

  He saw the hurt in her face, but he wasn’t concerned about other people’s hurts. He had plenty of his own. “I don’t know. Would you?”

  The pained look on her face turned to anger. “Well, excuse me. I just came in because I found something you might be interested in.” She turned around and was about to leave, but she hesitated. Half in and half out the doorway. She didn’t want to leave him to himself. Didn’t want to be accused either.

  Of course, she hadn’t said anything to Marlene. He knew that. Marlene wouldn’t have let that lie. Not with her wanting him to be team leader.

  “I had another episode,” he said in a voice barely above a whisper.

  That stopped her from leaving. She closed his office door. “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.”

  “Yeah? I don’t think there’s much point in talking. I got to see a doctor. I don’t need your amateur psychology skills. It’s maybe something wrong in my head. Like a tumor or something. I don’t know. And now Marlene wants me to ask Suzuki for the team leader’s position. Hell, what time is it?” He looked at his watch. “I got to go.”

  “You’re not crazy.”

  “Yeah? Well, when I die from whatever I have, you can put that on my tombstone. Now, if you don’t mind.” She was blocking the doorway.

  “You’re not crazy. You got to read this.”

  She handed him a sheet of paper. Without looking at the print on the page, he put it on his desk. “Whatever you think you know about what’s happening to me, you don’t know anything. Now, I got to go.” He really regretted opening up to her. Now she was going hound him until hell froze over.

  “I found this news story about someone who had gone missing. Disappeared just like your Hal.”

  “Believe me, he’s not my Hal. Maybe Evie’s,” he added to himself. “Now quit guarding the door so I can leave.”

  “Just give me a minute to explain.”

  “There’s nothing to explain that I haven’t already thought of.”

  “Yes, there is.”

  They looked at each other. Each trying to probe the other’s feelings.

  “One minute. That’s all I ask.”

  “One minute.” He groaned. “And then you’re going to leave me alone and forget I ever said anything to you?”

  “Yes. If that’s what you want.”

  “Yes, I want … I want a lot of things. Yes.”

  “Okay.”

  But there was no way she was going leave him alone. Forget what he had told her. She picked up the paper she had given him. “Last night after I got home, I did a search of the Tribune’s database. Looking for missing persons’ stories. This is what I found. This man vanished between leaving work and arriving home. It happened a few months ago.”

  He groaned. “So?”

  “Just listen. On the way home, his car crashed into a store front. Thankfully no one was hurt. But when people got to the car, there was no one in it. Don’t you think that’s strange?”

  “So? Get to the punch line of your story. The guy cracks up his car and runs away and is never heard of again. That’s nothing to do with Hal or ─”

  “No one saw him run away. There were witnesses. In the store. When they got to the car, half in and out of a front window, there was nobody in the car.”

  “Like I said, so?”

  “There was no way the man could have gotten out of the car without being seen. No way. And when they looked inside, there was no one in the car.”

  “Okay. That’s strange. But what does that have to do with Hal or me? I don’t see any connection.”

  “The connection is this ─” She put a hand to stop him from speaking. “The man’s wife told police that a few days earlier, he had told her about this dream he had.”

  “Dream. What dream? You’re not trying to say ─” God, would she just give this whole thing a rest. He tried to side step around her.

  “Wait. Please listen. He was in the bathroom shaving, or doing something, when ─ and this is what he told his wife and what she told police. It’s in the news story. All of a sudden, he thought he had blacked out because he found himself on the floor of the room. And when he woke up, he had this dream in his head. Still in his head.”

  “Are you saying he had my dream?”

  “No.”

  “Oh, Hell. Listen, I’m going to be late for this goddamn meeting. Just forget this whole thing.”

  “No. Wait. The dream he had. The dream he told his wife was that all of a sudden, the vanity top had turned to mush. That was his words. And when he put his hands on it, it felt like he was being sucked into it.”

  That got him. Despite his air of disbelief.

  “When the man’s son opened the bathroom door, he saw his dad collapse onto the floor. And he ran to get his mom.”

  “And I suppose the boy had the same vision. Hallucination.”

  “No. He didn’t. At least it didn’t say so in the article. The man’s wife said ─ she told the police that after she had helped him up, he told her about this dream. She thought he had some kind of seizure and she urged him to see a doctor. That was what he was on the way to do when he crashed the car.”

  13

  When Connie was nine, the fa
mily went to Florida for the school spring break. On one of the evenings they were there, they all went to a movie. A sort of sci-fi spoof about aliens invading Earth. Not really scary but Connie always took everything imagined as literal. As did his sister who was several years older. He awoke in the middle of the night. A bad dream had ended his sleep. Space aliens chasing him. When he told his sister his dream, she admitted she had had the same nightmare. Space aliens. At the time they had thought the coincidence was significant. Maybe there were space aliens.

  But, of course, later if either of them had thought about it, they would have realized there had been no coincidence. They both had seen the same movie.

  He didn’t believe in coincidences. The phenomenon wasn’t a card-carrying member of rational thought. Similar things can happen to people in the same culture. In the same town. So ─ like Scrooge ─ he put the coincidence of what the news story had described down to a bit of undigested movie or book they had both seen. Or maybe both were going crazy and this was an archetypal hallucination of their psychosis. Or maybe they both had brain tumors. And this was an archetypal hallucination of their psychosis.

  Lots of “maybes” but no coincidence. Still. He had read the article twice. The second time not admitting to himself that he had any interest in what it reported.

  “So?” Vicky asked him.

  Connie handed her the print out. “So. I don’t know. Maybe the whole world’s going crazy.”

  “Don’t you see? It’s too much of a coincidence. There has to be a connection.”

  “I don’t believe in coincidences and I don’t see any connection.”

  He smiled. A toss-away smile. Like he just thought of something funny. Yet he couldn’t ignore her worried frown. Or her brown eyes. Sad and thoughtful. She had a pretty face, he thought. Softer than what he remembered sister Megan had.

  “Connie, something’s not right here. You said that yourself.”

  “Don’t you worry, Vicky-Victoria.”

  Yet beneath his smile ─ that was beginning to lose its grip ─ there were terabytes of fear. Unexplainable fear that went beyond him losing his mind. (And he hadn’t even told her about the woman on the bridge!) But it was easier to think that he had a brain tumor. Like maybe the guy who had crashed his car had a brain tumor, too.