The Cookbook Collector

11

Information was currency, and Jonathan understood this better than most. After all, his company encrypted Web transactions. Credit-card numbers, personal data, customer preferences—these were valuable, but other bits shimmered as well. Information about rival companies, hints at future trends, insider tips. In graduate school Jonathan had studied cryptography. In business he sold electronic Lockboxes and ChainLinx fence, but in life, his instinct was to trade on secrets, not to keep them. Therefore Emily’s information about electronic fingerprinting tempted. Alex’s idea was dark and clever, and while Jonathan was not sure exactly how such a scheme would come to market, he sensed its value. He had a strategic mind, and he could already envision a world in which some spied with electronic fingerprinting, and others tried to defend themselves against it with new ISIS products. What if ISIS developed an encryption service of its own? He could almost … but he loved Emily, and he would not violate her trust.

He had grown up in Nebraska, where he and his brothers rode the school bus an hour and a half each way. His parents, Dan and Jeannie Tilghman, had been farmers, and raised him to be smart, ambitious, and unsentimental about country life. When it came to living off the land, his mother told him, “Don’t even think about it.” And when it came to school, she said quite seriously, “You’re smarter than anyone there, including the teacher.”

By fourth grade Jonathan was working independently, whiling away the hours memorizing digits of pi. In fifth grade he studied bookkeeping on his own. He was known as a math genius, but he was also the fastest runner in his class. He could beat anyone in the sixty-yard dash, even Scott Livingston. In revenge for this, Scott lured him into a game of Crack-the-Whip at recess. Watching his classmates holding hands, tugged by the leader in a snaking line whose tail moved ten times faster than its head, Jonathan was tempted by Courtney Cahill, the girl everybody knew Scott liked. She was freckled, her eyes copper-brown with long lashes, her hair streaked gold from the sun. Jonathan stepped between Scott and Courtney and took her hand, the first girl’s hand he’d ever held, and as the line whipped back, he felt her soft palm against his, a rush of delight, and the next moment, an explosion of pain on the side of his face, smack against his nose. Scott had stepped out of line and thrown a roundhouse right. Jonathan fell to the ground with blood gushing from his broken nose. Kids swarmed, girls screamed. The teachers were coming, but Jonathan sprang up and sprinted after Scott all the way across the playground. Heart racing, shirt drenched red, he chased his enemy down, caught him from behind, and slammed him to the hardtop. He punched Scott in the face until he was bleeding on the painted hopscotch squares.

Jonathan returned home with a week’s suspension.

“How does the other guy look?” his father asked.

“Bad,” said Jonathan.

Then Dan was satisfied.

Jonathan’s mother wanted to take him to the doctor, but Dan said he would heal better naturally, and so the break mended on its own, into the bold and busted nose Emily insisted she loved anyway.

He skipped two grades, read Ayn Rand, and planned to go to Harvard and become president of the United States, and make a gazillion dollars. Harvard didn’t work out. He hit a speed bump at Woodrow Wilson High, where he was too bright and warlike to get along. He got into trouble in his senior year, a brawl involving alcohol and school property, and he was not allowed to graduate—a fact he enjoyed telling interviewers. He could have done time in summer school, but he took the GED instead and enlisted, serving in Desert Storm, after which he attended Dartmouth, where he became a rugby player and confined his scuffles to the field. He had not yet explored politics, but the gazillion dollars went without saying. He had enormous confidence. He simply knew what to do. Was this good judgment or the extraordinary financial moment? History had never been his subject.

Investors fought to place large sums in Jonathan’s hands. He seemed a new breed, part genius, part industrialist—a game changer—and Jonathan did not disabuse them of this notion. But Emily never looked at him this way; she knew his moods and saw through his stratagems. She understood his business as well, because she’d blazed the trail. Long before ISIS, Jonathan had heard of Emily and Veritech. Back in 1996, when he was still pursuing his Ph.D. at MIT, he caught his first glimpse of her. He had been at Orion’s place, and Molly was flipping channels when Emily materialized on television—cool, slender, bright-eyed as she explained to an interviewer why she did not pursue an academic career in computer science.

“That’s the CEO of Veritech?” Jonathan exclaimed.

“Why are you surprised?” Orion asked. “That’s Emily Bach. Who did you think it was?”

“You know her?”

“I’ve known her forever,” Orion said.

“Introduce me,” Jonathan said. “I’m serious.”

He’d turned back to the screen. She had the longest neck, delicate and white. Just the sight of her stirred him, but what she said next changed his life. She expressed exactly what he was feeling and had not yet put into words.

“I did think about a Ph.D. in computer science, but this is a time in industry where theory and practice are coming together in amazing ways. Yes, there’s money, but what really interests me is that private-sector innovation happens faster. You can get more done and on a larger scale and have more impact. With all the start-ups out there, I think this is a time like the Renaissance. Not just one person doing great work, but so many feeding off one another. If you lived then, wouldn’t you go out and paint?”

If you lived then …? Jonathan remembered those words when he entered MIT’s 50K business-plan competition with Orion, Aldwin, and Jake. Wouldn’t you go out and paint? The four of them took the T downtown to Filene’s Basement and bought cheap suits and bad-ass ties—screaming purple, scaly green like lizard skin. In those nasty clothes they presented and fielded questions from the judges. When they won their 50K seed money—pocket money, really—they drank all night and dropped out of school to found ISIS in the morning.

Jonathan abandoned MIT without a backward glance, foregoing orals, academic conferences, third-floor potlucks, and staid job prospects at Microsoft or PARC or IBM Almaden. Cannily, he convinced his advisor to come along for the ride, naming the eminent cryptographer, Oskar Feuchtwangler, Senior Scientist. As a finishing touch, he proposed stealing Mel Millstein, the best of the computer-science administrative assistants, and naming him Director of Human Resources.

Jake had balked at this idea and suggested that hiring Mel away might alienate the department.

“You were fine with Oskar,” Jonathan pointed out.

“He’s just taking a leave of absence,” said Jake, “and he’ll come back. He’ll always be around. Once Mel is gone, he’s gone. We’d be stealing him.”

“It’s his choice if he wants to leave,” said Jonathan.

Jake shook his head. “Maybe we don’t want to burn our bridges.” He had always been the most academic of the four cofounders, the most theoretical, as he was also the hairiest, with a wild mop of brown curls and thick unruly eyebrows. Dark-eyed, driven, shy, he was an idea man, a Westinghouse finalist in high school, and a gifted pianist as well, a former student in Juilliard’s pre-college division. Lockbox had been built from Jake’s algorithms. ChainLinx came about as a series of answers to Jake’s questions. The others needed him and his exceptional mind. Technically they were formidable, but Jake was creative. He pointed out, “We might want to go back to school eventually.”

Jonathan raised an eyebrow. “What fun would that be?”

He liked a good time. His idea of a corporate Christmas party was paintball. His highest praise, uttered without an ounce of irony: “You guys are animals.” His rough edges never failed to impress.

“The guy’s a natural,” the VCs whispered to one another, and shook their heads at Jonathan. Oh, brave new world that had such creatures in it. And yet he had a thoughtful side; he recognized and pursued excellence in every form, particularly in the shape of Emily. He loved her brilliant, principled mind. Why did she test him then, tempting him with Veritech’s secret project? How could she, knowing him as she did? He was not high-minded on his own, and he looked to her to model what his soul might become, once he got exactly what he wanted. When he was rich and eminent, a policy maker and philanthropist, Emily would be his wife and chair the family foundation and they would have daughters delicate like her, and athletic sons like him—and all their children would go to Harvard and major in math and play rugby and take up sailing. This was how Jonathan would live when he lay down his arms and beat his sword into time-shares. But not yet! Emily’s behavior baffled him. She had set up a kind of competition, trusting him like that, and demanding a secret from him in return. Did she doubt he loved her? Did she want some expensive proof?

After Thanksgiving, when he met with ISIS CEO Dave, Jonathan kept electronic fingerprinting to himself. This was not difficult. Dave was rich and he was experienced, with his years at IBM and BBN behind him. He was a sport, approximating native dress at ISIS, so that where Jonathan wore jeans, Dave wore khakis, and where Orion wore a Grateful Dead T-shirt, Dave wore an Oxford button-down. Dave knew about marketing and goals and five-year plans, but even in his shirtsleeves, he would always be a suit. Dave just barely understood what ISIS was doing now, and could scarcely intuit coming trends. He had his silver-gray hair styled in a salon and he lived in a Cambridge mansion, a brown Victorian on Highland Ave. That wasn’t even his first mansion. His first had been companies ago, along with his first wife and first set of kids. Retro CEO Dave carried a fountain pen. He even played golf. The man was like a car with fins.

Jonathan sat in Dave’s office overlooking redbrick Kendall Square. The company was about to go public, but it was newer than Veritech, and in keeping with the accelerating market, its rise had been faster. ISIS had yet to build a leafy campus out in Dedham, or renovate a funky mill. ISIS squeezed into an ordinary flat-pack office building off Broadway, starting with the top floors, and working its way down until the company leased the entire building. Electricians and carpenters had just renovated the first floor, finishing the space as a control center with a bank of monitors displaying Secure Web Traffic across the globe. The control center had a space-age look, part NASA, part flight deck from the Starship Enterprise. If the control center was designed to impress visitors, Dave’s office was built to reassure them. New hire, designated grown-up, the CEO held court behind an actual mahogany desk with family photographs in frames.

“Where do you see us in five years?” Dave asked, philosophical as always when he sat down with Jonathan.

“Five years?” echoed Jonathan as he fiddled with his BlackBerry. “Let’s talk about five weeks from now.”

Dave smiled and refrained from asking Jonathan to put his new toy away. At times Dave bridled at Jonathan’s manners, but no one could argue with his results. The ISIS client list spoke for itself, and to watch Jonathan pitch ISIS to a new company—the kid could give a clinic. Dave was full of admiration for what he called the growing ISIS family, and often said that he learned more from his young colleagues than they could learn from him. Jonathan readily agreed.

“I want you to take the long view,” Dave said.

Jonathan nodded. “After the IPO, I want to see ChainLinx adopted by every Fortune 500 company, and Lockbox standard for every transaction, so no one dares to buy anything on the Web without seeing our logo guaranteeing the site’s secure. And I want at least fifty more programmers working on new products….”

“You’re thinking about more people,” Dave mused in his deliberate way.

“Of course.” Jonathan glanced at the smooth-shaven face on the other side of the desk and marveled at the way Dave missed the key words—new products, code for fingerprinting, scramblers, all the possibilities in the strange new realm Veritech was poised to enter. Dave didn’t even ask.

“We need to have a conversation with Mel,” said Dave.

“Okay.” Jonathan turned back to his BlackBerry.

Dave marveled at the way Jonathan missed the key word conversation. Attached to Mel, possibly even loyal to him for old time’s sake, Jonathan didn’t realize that conversation meant they had to let Mel go.

Yo Mel, Jonathan was texting. Find more people your slowing us down.

“Maybe we could set that up for Monday,” Dave suggested.

“I’ll be in San Jose,” said Jonathan, “but you can meet with him.”

“I think it would be good for you to be there.”

“I just talked to him,” Jonathan reassured Dave. “He knows what to do.”

Mel was finding people as fast as he could. He didn’t know how to hire faster without pulling programmers off the street. Quality did matter. “I have a process,” he told Dave.

“I respect that,” Dave assured him.

But Jonathan said, “Just speed the process up.”

He had never worked like this before. Résumés haunted his dreams. Aldwin talked about opening two new groups, and Jake demanded more support staff. Suddenly Mel was trying to hire HR people to help with all the hiring. With so much money flowing through ISIS, and so much demand for ISIS services, Mel had become the human bottleneck. “You look frazzled,” Barbara told him.

Oh, frazzled was not the word. Fragile. Dazzled. Fraggled. He woke in the morning sick with anxiety—certain that at any moment Dave would call him in for the talk. He thought about that meeting constantly: I’m sorry, Mel. It’s just not working out; you have not met our expectations. How he dreaded those words—and also longed to hear them. He was in over his head, and far too old. ISIS flew at warp speed, and as for competitors, Odin snapped up prospective hires if Mel so much as blinked. Green Knight and Akamai were always in there hustling for talent, and those were just the local companies. Mostly young and single, the programmers Mel stalked thought nothing of moving to Mountain View or Berlin or Austin. He suffered from motion sickness every day on his commute—not from the train, from the economy.

And yet … and yet, Mel had never been part of something magical before. He had never inhaled the fumes of such success, and although every fiber of his body rebelled against the insane pressure of his job, his soul rejoiced. Thirty years toiling in support services at MIT, but Mel had not been so ordinary after all. He was part of the world other people read about in newspapers. He had been one of those people, reading The Boston Globe each morning on the train, and now he was in the Globe himself—not mentioned by name, of course, but by association. He had ascended to a realm where companies were named for gods: ISIS, Inktomi, Janus, LOKI. ISIS was already the stuff of legend. “One of the most highly anticipated IPOs of the year” was just twelve days away, and Mel felt like Marco Polo, seeing firsthand what others might have written off as myth.

In the past year, he’d watched in awe as his young bosses auditioned VCs twice their age. One morning Mel arrived at work to find Jonathan scribbling the names of venture capitalists on his whiteboard under the headings “Bozos,” “Morons,” “Losers,” “Sharks.” Was this the same kid who had borrowed quarters for the vending machines at the department? There were no vending machines at ISIS. All snacks and drinks were free.

Alas, the faster ISIS grew, the more troublesome Mel’s fifty-seven-year-old body became. Nausea, insomnia, diarrhea. At first he blamed the lunches Barbara packed for him. Then he blamed the Middle Eastern food truck that pulled up each day behind the building, but everybody ate there and no one else got sick. He went for tests, and the doctor found nothing. Reluctantly Mel admitted the cause of indigestion was anxiety. As soon as he arrived at this conclusion his stomachaches subsided, and his back went out.

“What did you do to it?” his young coworkers asked him wonderingly.

“Nothing. I did nothing!” he replied.

Of course he remembered the day, the hour, the very second he threw out his back. Tuesday, October 12, 1999. Three forty-five in the afternoon. Sitting at his fifth-floor desk, he had been discussing health plans with a new hire on the phone. Carpenters were snapping cubicles together. Cardboard boxes containing workstations stood stacked against the walls, and all was quiet—except for the whoosh of programmers batting a birdie with badminton rackets.

Mel was finishing the routine medical-benefits conversation when he glanced up and saw an electrician grinning at him from a square hole in the ceiling where he’d popped out the acoustic tile.

“Yoo-hoo,” the electrician said.

Mel bristled. Carpenters didn’t bother him, nor did the badminton or the unpacking. He almost enjoyed the drag and pop of box cutters slicing cardboard—the long rips crisp and promising, like autumn and fresh school supplies—but he couldn’t conduct business with electricians wisecracking from above. “You can’t go wrong—they’re both terrific,” he explained to the new hire, as he gestured at the cable-dangling electrician to disappear. “And we do offer dental.” He stood, pulling the receiver with him, but the cord wasn’t long enough and his phone slid off the desk. Too quickly, he turned to scoop it up. A prickle, like an electric shock, raked his left side, an agonizing spasm. Pain held him in its vice.

That had been six weeks ago. Now Mel had bad days and worse days. There were mornings he stood on the train, all the way from Canaan to South Station, because sitting was too painful. He took the Red Line to Kendall Square and counted stops. Just get me to Charles / MGH, just get me aboveground, he pleaded silently, trying to bargain with his back. All he had to do was make it until the train emerged from its tunnel to rattle over the bridge. Then he could look out at the icy river and dark trees, the boathouses rosy in the brief winter light. When the train descended again, he held the metal pole and told himself, Only one more stop and then the music, and he would try to hold on until Kendall Square Station where long levers in the wall were wired to chimes hanging between the inbound and outbound tracks. Like a parent trying to appease a child, he would treat himself to a gentle pull of a lever, and listen for the soft chime like temple bells in the midst of rushing trains and chattering students and the buskers playing amplified guitars.

The commute was bad enough. One morning he could not get out of bed. If he lay perfectly still, he felt no pain, but the moment he shifted his weight, his muscles seized up again.

“Barbara,” he called out, “I can’t move.”

She rushed in from the living room.

“You’ll have to call and tell them….”

“It’s Saturday.”

“Oh, good. Thank God.” The reprieve relaxed him just a little. He could breathe, and even turn slightly.

“Don’t try to get up,” Barbara warned.

“I’m not. I can’t,” he said. He closed his eyes, and she brought his Motrin and a glass of water with a straw.

“Don’t move. Relax,” she ordered, in what the children used to call her nurse voice. She reverted to crisp professionalism when anyone was hurt or sick. Mel used to tease her that she enjoyed their children’s illnesses. “I do not!” she had protested, but he knew she loved a damp, hot, docile child.

He didn’t blame her. He’d loved the children that way too, and he missed them. Nostalgia overcame him as he lay pinned, and he longed to see Annie and Sam, not as they were now, but as they had been years ago, before their potential had hardened into the ordinary shell of adulthood.

He had always hoped his children would be extraordinary. Wasn’t it nine-year-old Sam who had announced he would be an entomologist? How had he become a government major at Amherst? Annie was out in the Bay Area at the epicenter of the high-tech revolution. She had been so good at math. Why was she teaching kindergarten? Absurd that in late middle age Mel was about to make a fortune. Where were his kids? Couldn’t they see that the future belonged to their generation? True to the accelerated business cycle, Mel lay in bed and worried, even while his ISIS shares were still a gleam in his broker’s eyes, that his children lacked the initiative to achieve as he had done.

Everyone gave Mel advice. Dave recommended a chiropractor. Jonathan suggested that he hit the gym.

“I think,” Barbara said cautiously, “you might want to talk to Rabbi Zylberfenig.”

“Zylberfenig! Because he knows so much about back pain?”

“He knows a lot,” said Barbara.

“How old is Rabbi Zylberfenig?” Mel demanded.

“He’s got six children.”

“And what’s that supposed to mean?”

“He’s older than we were at his age.”

Everybody had a guru. Even Sorel Fisher, his newest hire, insisted, “I’ll give you the name of my Alexander teacher.”

“Alexander teacher? What did he teach you?” Mel asked, wary.

“Nothing,” Sorel said, bouncing slightly on the green exercise ball at her desk. She was a twenty-three-year-old programmer from London, a performance artist, and a chanteuse. “He was brilliant. He barely even touched me.”

Meanwhile, he had to keep advertising and interviewing and issuing ID cards. Everybody loved the new ones he had ordered. You clipped them to your belt and pulled the card out on an elastic string so that you could swipe and unlock doors or elevators after hours. The new fleeces were a big hit as well. Navy with ISIS embroidered in gold. Mel was good with merchandise. Proud, not loud. That was his motto. But the week after Thanksgiving when Dave asked to meet with him “to strategize,” Mel understood that this was it.

A small voice inside whispered: Let Dave set you free; your back is breaking from the stress. But no. Mel could not imagine leaving. Not now, before his shares were vested. He didn’t want to miss what he knew would be a meteoric flight.

On the day before his appointment with Dave, he took tiny steps to Jonathan’s office, traversing what seemed like miles of drab rust-red carpet, raveled at the edges. Mel stopped, clutching the top edge of a cubicle. The pain was worse. After three months, he had come to think of it as the pain—not his pain, but a larger, impersonal force. The pain—the way opera singers speak of their instrument, the voice.

“Mel Millstein,” chided Sorel as she passed by, “you need to go to Alexander class.”

I need to stay employed, thought Mel.

“The trouble with you,” said Sorel, “is you’re misaligned.”

Feet on the desk, Star Wars action figures lining the windowsill behind him, Jonathan was typing with his keyboard in his lap. “What’s happening?”

Mel hesitated. He had planned what to say, of course, but scripts didn’t work with Jonathan—none of the scripts Mel knew.

“I need help hiring,” Mel said. “I sense that HR needs restructuring, and I’d like to make that happen sooner rather than later.” Now, he added silently.

“Okay,” said Jonathan. “What do you want?”

My job, Mel thought. My life. Existence without pain. “Well, I have Zoë and Jessica right now …,” he began, “and I’m trying to get …”

Jonathan considered his hapless HR director. At the computer-science department, Mel had been the go-to guy, straightening out green cards and foreign visas, grappling with bureaucracy. When Jonathan was jockeying for attention from professors, Mel had actually taken the time to ask, “How are things going?” To say, “Let me check his schedule. Maybe I can get you in.” Jonathan did not forget old kindnesses, nor did he forget how little he liked MIT, where cryptography profs favored students more theoretical, more purely mathematical.

He had wanted only the best for Mel when he plucked him from his desk at the department. He’d never intended to kill the poor man.

“Mel,” said Jonathan, “you don’t need help. You need a better attitude. Put on a happy face! This is not a submarine. This is a big fun start-up with a severe shortage of programmers, and all you need to do is go out there and say, ‘Hey you guys, come on over.’ Is that hard?”

“There are a lot of other—” Mel began.

“But, no, there aren’t. You don’t think about them,” Jonathan cut him off. “We’re better. It’s all attitude, man. You’re smart and talented, you’re meticulous—and you’re going to have zillions of dollars next year. Did you forget that?”

Ah, yes. Mel remembered the conversation well. When Jonathan had offered him the job at ISIS, Mel had asked delicately about compensation. “Here’s the thing,” Jonathan replied, and he spoke in all seriousness. “We’re all going to be gazillionaires.”

“You know what you’re doing—you just have to show your stuff to the prospective hires,” Jonathan explained now. “Be cool. Be confident….”

“I don’t feel confident,” Mel confessed. “I feel that my position here is …”

“Is what?”

Mel couldn’t find the word. No, he knew the word, but couldn’t say it. He had to force himself. “Tenuous.”

“Tenuous!” Jonathan looked at him as though he’d begun speaking in another language. “What are you talking about?”

“You know what I’m talking about. Dave wants to meet with me.”

Jonathan looked at him almost tenderly. “No one’s firing you.”

“I’m not so … I don’t feel so …,” Mel spluttered.

Jonathan reassured him. “No one’s firing you right before our IPO. That would look terrible!”

“I think Dave has a plan,” said Mel.

“Yeah, he’s got lots of plans. Don’t worry about Dave. I’ll deal with him. You just do your job, okay?”

“Okay.” He realized that this was Jonathan’s way of reaching out. “Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me. Get out there and kick ass! I want twelve new programmers, and I want you to go out there and hire them with a smile on your face.”

“I will,” Mel answered, stunned. He tried to smile without moving any other part of his body. He was afraid to jolt his standing equilibrium.

“And I’ll tell you a secret,” Jonathan added, just as Mel was leaving. “We’re going to tell everybody at the end of the day, but I’ll tell you first. We’ve signed Yahoo! for premium ChainLinx protection.”

“Yahoo!” Now Mel really was smiling.

“Yeah!” Jonathan swung his feet up on the desk and resumed typing.

Mel returned to his cubicle full of hope. ISIS had Yahoo! in the stable, their biggest client to date. This was huge, and Mel knew first. There was no greater sign of favor.

He stood in the back as Jonathan made his announcement. All the employees in town packed the fifth floor near the windows. Outside, a light snow was falling. Inside, programmers perched atop desks, stood on chairs, and the whole company whooped and cheered.

“This is your work,” Aldwin said.

“You guys are super,” Dave chimed in.

“You guys are animals!” Jonathan shouted, punching the air, and all the animals roared.

Afterward the programmers milled together talking motorcycles, debating which were fastest and which were overpriced—not that it mattered anymore! They spoke of vacations. A company camping trip in the High Sierra. No, a voyage down the River Nile, a cruise to see the Pyramids. They were about to be gazillionaires. Yahoo! As Mel walked to the T station, he came upon Orion, hatless, walking his bike through heavy snow.

“Hey,” Orion said.

“Amazing night,” Mel said.

“I guess so,” Orion said laconically.

The kid was too young, Mel thought, to appreciate the situation. The snowflakes were wet and heavy, double flakes and triple flakes. Mel could almost touch the zillions in the air.

12

Orion had grown up in his father’s poetry, and because Lou Steiner was famous, Orion’s younger selves had been published and widely anthologized. Orion, naked wader, minnow-trader lived on the page, alongside the sleeper with the tiny fists. He didn’t take any of this too personally, not even his father’s collection, Star Boy. Growing up in Vermont, he knew many other poets’ children who had been immortalized. When it came to publicity, Orion thought his father’s wives and girlfriends had it worse, and he had often wondered how they liked word portraits mentioning birdlike physiques, small breasts, sad eyes. Orion tried to avoid Lou’s love poems, because he could put the name to each description, and then afterward he felt as though he’d seen his father’s lovers, including his own mother, naked. His father found this amusing, but he was entirely unself-conscious on and off the page.

Lou’s fame was riverlike—deep and narrow in some places, then broadening unexpectedly into shallows. His books sold a thousand, maybe twelve hundred copies each, but schoolchildren everywhere studied his villanelle “Where Are the Bees?” His later style, increasingly aphoristic, had inspired critics to call him a new minimalist, and at seventy-five, with his unrepentant hippie politics and eloquent Forest Cycle, Lou had become an icon to environmentalists, who printed his verse on T-shirts and posters—usually without permission. Like Matisse cutouts, Steiner’s late pared-down poems were all space and edges on the page. The best-known was his found poem, “Tree.” One line, which read simply:

Here I stand. I can do no other.

Molly was honest. She said Orion’s father scared her. Over the years, Lou had grown shaggy, rambling, slightly unhinged. Orion’s mother, Diane, thought perhaps Lou was suffering from early Alzheimer’s. The idea frightened Orion, who preferred to think late-night rambles, naps on park benches, and tirades to writing classes were existential rather than neurological symptoms. End-stage poetry. Reading Shakespeare obsessively, drinking heavily, a man like Lou was supposed to turn Learlike when his hair went white.

As a boy Orion had avoided Lou. Naturally, he’d taken his mother’s side in the divorce, and lived with her in run-down farmhouses where they grew tomatoes and trained pea plants up strings to the porch roof. He tried to comfort her by staying out of trouble and entering science fairs. His childhood sweetheart, Emily, had been his mother’s sweetheart as well, the daughter she had always hoped for, and even now, so many years later, Diane asked after Emily with a certain wistfulness—although she liked Molly very much. Then Orion felt a twinge of guilt, although he knew it was irrational, because he hated to disappoint his mother, even in imaginary ways. In college, where he might have grown wild, he’d settled in with Molly, and stayed with her.

Orion didn’t avoid his father anymore, but spent time with him when he could. As Diane said, “He is your dad, and he isn’t getting any younger.” Lou was charming in his fashion, his countercultural effusions refreshing now that Orion made his way in the material world. True, his father had recently been called to the dean’s office to explain an incident in a poetry workshop when he’d ripped up a student’s manuscript, dashing the pieces to the floor and stamping on them “like Rumpelstiltskin” as one witness averred in The Middlebury Campus. There was also Lou’s troubling history with young women poets, his musettes as Diane called them. But he had slowed down in this regard, and if his clothes were wrinkled and his beard untrimmed, he was an original, and it felt good to have a parent who worked in pencil and called Otter Creek his office. Lou had no idea what ISIS did. He had never owned a computer, and the one time he had met Molly’s parents, at Harvard graduation, he’d told them a long dirty joke, to see if they would laugh.

He chortled when his son phoned one bright December Sunday. Orion was explaining that Molly’s parents had come up to visit and they were all having brunch that morning. “Who brunches these days?” Lou asked.

“I guess I do,” Orion said.

“Brunch when you’re old, sleep when you’re dead” was Lou’s advice.

Orion glanced at the closed bathroom door where Molly was showering. Postcall, she’d come straight from Beth Israel Deaconess and had had no time to rest.

“True story,” Lou said. This was how all his jokes began. True meant “Jewish.” “Three old ladies in Miami, poolside, brunching at the Fontainebleau. They see someone new: Velcome, velcome. How are you? Then one of the old-timers says, Nu, ve don’t have time for small talk. Let’s get some things out of the vay. Money? Money you have, or you vouldn’t be at the Fontinblow. Granchildren? You got? Show. She opens up her wallet and, you know, fans out the pictures on the table. Sex? … Vatvas, vas”

“You think I’m living like an old lady.”

“I leave you to extrapolate.”

“You think youth is wasted on the …”

“I do like a wasted youth,” Lou mused.

Molly emerged in a cloud of steam and began searching for clean clothes. Wrapped in her towel, she glanced at Orion and took in his fisherman sweater, worn to threads at the elbows.

“Why do you like a wasted youth, Dad?”

“Listen, it’s like the man with his face pressed against the glass at the Ferrari dealership. If you have to ask …”

“I should go,” said Orion, as Molly pointed at the clock-radio, but he did not get off the phone. “What are you doing today?”

“I’ll be walking at Abbey Pond,” Lou replied. “You remember, don’t you?”

Of course he did. In springtime Lou used to take little Orion to look for lady’s slippers. Double petals hanging from springy stems, flowers rising from mossy, mulchy ground. “I don’t think they look like lady’s slippers,” Lou had told Orion. “I think they look like lady’s something else.”

“Drive carefully,” Orion said. “And take it easy out there.”

Molly’s cell phone was ringing. Her parents were waiting downstairs to take them to Henrietta’s Table.

“The ground’s uneven,” Orion reminded his father

“Old and infirm as I am,” Lou intoned, “it’s so crowded in the woods these days that if I fall, I’m sure somebody will find me.”

“Can we go?” Molly asked.

“I was just waiting for you,” Orion replied, and then into the telephone, “bye, Dad.”

“Farewell. And good-bye, Molly.”

Molly’s father was famous too, in an entirely different way. Carl Eisenstat was a physicist, and not the garden-variety kind. He had been in one of Orion’s college textbooks as the Eisenstat Principle of something or other. Matter? Motion? Orion could not remember, although it was assumed that he knew which. The Eisenstats assumed many things. The last time they’d come up from Princeton, Carl had announced, “I take it the two of you are planning to get married.” Orion had started back, offended that Carl would touch on a matter so private and confusing, but Molly’s father pressed on implacably: “And I make that assumption because you’ve been seeing each other for so long.”

Of course they had talked about getting engaged. Orion and Molly had lived together in their apartment off Putnam Avenue for three years. They had a routine; they had a life; they had a lot of stuff. Their third-floor warren opened onto a ramshackle but surprisingly large roof deck where they entertained. They kept a hibachi there, aluminum lawn chairs, and a camping table they had found on the street. On summer nights when friends came up for drinks, they passed around a pair of tweezers for the splinters that split off the sun-warped railings.

Molly’s plan had been to get married when Orion finished graduate school, and he had always liked this idea—keeping marriage at an indeterminate distance, along with his degree. At the time, Orion’s professional and financial prospects had been pleasantly vague. Now, however, they were unavoidably bright. Five months after Orion broke Lockbox, the system was up and running, or as Jonathan put it, “running better than ever,” and ChainLinx was huge. Projected earnings were shooting through the roof, and this was not lost on Molly’s father. Nothing was.

“You’ve been getting a lot of press,” lanky, white-haired Carl informed Orion in the buffet line at the restaurant, and Orion ducked his head, something between a nod and a shrug. Orion, Jonathan, Aldwin, and Jake had just appeared in Fortune magazine under the heading “Tycoons in Training.”

“I liked the photo. I recognized the steps of Building Thirteen.” Carl loaded his plate with lox and whitefish, eggs and sausages.

Orion watched Molly’s mother pause wistfully at the waffle station, and then settle on yogurt, fruit salad, and a bowl of Irish oatmeal. The resemblance between Deborah and Molly was striking: dark eyes, a heart-shaped face, lovely from the front, less so in profile. Molly had her mother’s slight bump in the nose and tiny chin. They were both petite, but Deborah was also zaftig, a short, wide gerontologist who wore tunic-length sweaters and long necklaces—silk cords hung with unusual pendants, a tiny woven bag or a many-hinged locket, a miniature kaleidoscope bouncing like a buoy on her vast bosom.

“Well, this is nice,” said Deborah when they reconvened at the table.

“Tell us about the IPO,” said Carl.

How different Molly’s father seemed from the man Orion had first met, almost eight years before. The Eisenstats had driven up to see their daughter, and she’d brought her new boyfriend to breakfast. On that occasion, he and Molly had shared one side of a booth like brother and sister facing their parents. Orion’s wet blond hair had fallen in his eyes, and Molly’s short curls had been damp. They’d looked a little too clean to be entirely innocent, having just come from Mather House, where they’d shared a shower, but they sat straight with the seam of the upholstered booth running up between them. Molly’s mother had tried to make conversation, but Professor Eisenstat kept his eyes on Orion, who had tried not to bolt his food or gulp his juice, or think about the night before, lest some memory of warmth and nakedness flash across his face.

Still, Carl had gazed at him with a grim, penetrating look. “I have a question for you.” Carl’s voice had been taut and slightly amused, as though he were sharpening cruel ironic skewers and looking forward to running Orion through. “How is it majoring in an auxiliary field?”

“Auxiliary? You mean computer science?” Orion had been so busy guarding against attacks on his character that at first he didn’t recognize Carl’s scientific gambit as such.

“Right. Auxiliary in that computer science is not a true science in itself, but a handmaid to math, physics, chemistry….”

“I like CS,” Orion said stoutly.

“But that’s my question,” Carl pressed. “What exactly do you like about it?”

Orion paused. “Programming.”

“Hmm.” Carl sipped his coffee.

Twenty years old, Orion had gazed across the table at Molly’s father with a mixture of resentment and misery. He was good at math, of course, but he excelled at building little computer systems piece by piece. Orion had always loved to tinker. He was a puzzle solver, no deep-thinking puzzle maker. He had done well in his CS courses: programming, distributed systems, hardware, algorithms, and graphics, for which he’d rendered a faceted crystal vase filled with water and a single red rose so that it cast an accurate shadow on a wood-grain tabletop. Were these exercises at all important? In Carl’s presence he’d felt acutely that computer science lacked a certain—he would never say the word aloud—but, yes, the field lacked a certain majesty.

Now, in the glass and farmhouse restaurant with its baskets and bouquets of chili peppers, Carl seemed thrilled with Orion’s programming habit. He actually whipped out that morning’s Boston Globe and read aloud. “Asked about his heroes, company cofounder Orion Steiner cites computer pioneer Donald Knuth, and maverick free-software activist Richard Stallman.”

What a strange effect money, or even the idea of money, had on people. Orion could not avoid wealth, or Carl either. How could he put off shopping for a ring? In six months, he could afford any ring or bracelet or necklace; he could afford anything. Orion looked at Carl’s smooth, close-shaven cheeks and his hawkish gray eyes and he saw what wealth would mean: not just traveling the world and buying toys, but paying huge complicated taxes and living in a house with Molly forever—not forever in the romantic sense—forever like her parents, with a loud dog and yellowing houseplants. Molly would gain a hundred pounds, and Orion would have to start collecting ugly paintings. They’d have a three-car garage and seven bathrooms, and they would sit around at night and debate whether it was better to time-share or buy planes.

“How many employees are you up to now?” Carl asked.

“I think we’re at …,” Orion hesitated, distracted by the cell phone in his pocket, buzzing against his leg. “Eighty-three?” he ventured, checking the caller ID. “Ninety-three?” It was Jonathan, but Orion ignored the call.

Deborah focused on Orion with a look of quiet pride. Carl leaned forward, keen and curious. Only their daughter paid no attention. Molly had closed her eyes and left him to entertain her parents’ expectations on his own. Exhausted, she was still sitting upright in her chair, but she had fallen fast asleep.

Carl and Deborah were driving home immediately to beat the traffic, and they dropped off Molly and Orion on the way. He helped her up the stairs, and she leaned against the wall as he unlocked the apartment. Then dropping her bag just inside the door, she bolted for the bedroom.

“Wait,” Orion said. “Molly?”

Fully clothed, she lunged for the bed and seized her pillow. Gone again.

“Aren’t you going to take off your shoes?” Orion tugged at one shoe and then the other. Her legs were dead weights in his hands. He reached around her waist, unbuckled her belt, and unzipped her pants. “Ouch,” he murmured. Her belt had cut into her soft stomach and left red marks. He tried to unbutton her blouse, but she clung to the pillow, and he couldn’t get it off. “I give up,” he said.

The dressertop was strewn with bills and mail, bank statements from Fleet. Orion didn’t bother opening them. Despite his huge equity in ISIS, he had, of course, no money to speak of in his account. Molly’s damp towel lay in a heap on the floor. She had good reason to avoid inviting her parents up to the apartment.

Orion scanned his e-mail. Seventy new messages, two from Jonathan. Subject: URGENT. Message: Get your butt over here now. His cell phone rang again. He didn’t have to look. His bike had a flat, and he knew he should get moving if he was walking to Kendall Square. He stuffed his computer into his backpack.

“Okay, Molly, I’m going.” He bent down over her curly head. “Bye.”

She turned, her face tender with sleep. When she reached out and wrapped her arms around him, she was warm, her skin smoother than the silky blouse that she was wrinkling. Her eyes opened. Her lips parted, and he was about to kiss her, when suddenly she spoke. “Get milk,” she said.

“Where the hell have you been?” It was uncanny, as if Jonathan had been standing in front of the elevator the whole time. He played laser tag like that, appearing suddenly, bearing down on you.

“I was having brunch,” Orion said.

“Brunch?” Jonathan echoed, as if he’d never heard the word before. Lou was right, Orion thought. Brunch when you’re old.

They were walking through what had recently been the second-floor wilderness of the company. At one time, Jonathan and Orion had played a form of indoor badminton here, but new cubicles had been installed to pack more programmers together. There were private offices here as well, for Aldwin the CFO, and Jonathan the CTO. Jake was the chief programmer. Only Orion wasn’t chief of anything. That had been his choice. They’d offered him some sort of vice presidency, but at the time, the whole thing had sounded too ridiculous, like aspiring to Communications Minister of the Duchy of Grand Fenwick. Of course, Orion had been wrong about this. ISIS was a cash-rich powerhouse, no fictional Grand Duchy. The CFO and CTO were, in fact, piloting the company, along with Dave, who was much given to navigational language, along with Mission Statements, foam-core credos posted throughout the building like slogans from Orwell’s Ministry of Love. We are a community. We value excellence. We believe in the capacity of each individual to make a difference….

Jonathan marched to the conference room, while Orion followed slowly, looking in on the programmers, who were writing Lockbox 2.0. Clarence was typing away, as were Umesh and Nadav, and there was the new girl, Sorel. He was always conscious of her, working among the guys. She was tall, long-limbed, lithe, and kept a guitar under her desk. She wore odd black clothes and she had fair skin and strawberry-blond hair almost as long as his. She had the palest eyes he had ever seen; he wasn’t sure of the color—they were like water.

Her first day, Mel Millstein had brought her in and introduced her in his fussy way.

“Let’s welcome Sorel Fisher. I’m sure everybody here will do their best to help her feel at home.” He’d pulled out a swivel chair. “This is your desk,” Mel told Sorel.

“Thanks very much,” she said, and Orion had been surprised by her English accent.

“What’s your name again?” he’d asked after Mel left.

“Sorel,” she said. “Like the plant.”

Her accent was wonderful, and her voice as well, which was lower than you would expect, and at the same time a little breathy. Sometimes Orion talked to her, just to get her to say words like corollary, which she pronounced with the stress in the middle, a little bump and then a rush of speed at the end: “corollary.” She glanced at him quizzically now as he passed by.

“I’m going to the conference room,” he told her with mock gravity.

“Oh.” Sorel suppressed laughter as she turned back to her computer. “I won’t be seen talking to you, then.”

He knew everyone would see him with Jonathan, however. The conference room cut right into the open-plan programmers’ space, and the walls were glass, another of Dave’s brilliant ideas.

Jonathan and Aldwin perched atop the oval table with the Globe strewn before them.

“I’ve been getting e-mails all morning from investors,” Jonathan informed Orion.

“About what?”

“About this.” Jonathan shook the newspaper at Orion.

“You cite Richard Stallman as your hero,” Aldwin said.

“I happen to admire Stallman’s ideas about sharing information.”

“Not now, you don’t,” said Jonathan. “Not one week before our IPO.”

“Are you really that nervous?” Orion asked.

Aldwin folded his hands on his knee. With his baby face and mild manners, his well-groomed curly hair, clean clothes, and matching socks, he seemed, literally, best suited of the founding four for corporate life. Jonathan was the star, but Aldwin was Dave’s favorite. Everyone knew that. Of course the idea of Dave’s favor was strange, to say the least. The four of them had hired Dave, and at the time, Jonathan had privately conceded Orion’s contention that Dave wasn’t particularly bright. “You do see that we’re in business?” Aldwin asked Orion now.

“ISIS is not the local branch of the Free Software Foundation,” Jonathan said.

“You do see how our investors are hoping to make money here?” Aldwin continued.

“Free Software is free as in freedom,” Orion retorted. “Not free as in free lunches. I never said I don’t want to make money.”

“What the hell is wrong with you?” Jonathan exploded. “We are selling a proprietary security system. You are going to reporters, scaring our investors, talking about giving stuff away.”

“I never said anything about giving stuff away. I mentioned Richard Stallman’s name.”

“He’s a nut case.”

“He happens to be a visionary,” said Orion, “and I find his questions very interesting. Like, when you think about it, the whole notion of intellectual property is an oxymoron. How can you own something intangible? It’s like, you can’t own souls, can you?”

“Are you trying to make me angry?” Jonathan asked.

“Maybe you should take your name off our patents,” Aldwin suggested.

“I said I admired him. I never said I wanted to be him. Jesus.” Orion turned away from the CTO and CFO, once his closest friends, and he looked through the glass wall at the programmers in their cubicles. Several guys were crowded around Sorel’s desk. Had she got the new high score in Quake III? She was keeping her head down. “I happen to have my own ideas,” Orion murmured. “I have my own opinions.”

“Your ideas are—occasionally—great,” Jonathan told him. “Your opinions suck.”

Orion sighed and turned back to listen to the rest of the tirade.

“Aldwin and I have been in Mountain View all week,” Jonathan continued. “Jake is still in London. We are taking care of customers and signing partners. We are preparing for the biggest IPO of the year. The three of us have not been home. We have not had brunch. And we do not want to come in here and find that you, with your two million shares, have been …”

“Just don’t talk to reporters right now,” said Aldwin.

“Do not talk to anyone.” Jonathan pointed his index finger directly at Orion’s chest, but Orion didn’t flinch. He had been an athlete too, although his sport was skiing and involved no contact, only swift descents.

“When you get phone calls, refer them to Vicki,” said Aldwin. “That’s her job.”

They were ganging up on Sorel. Orion could see the guys spinning her swivel chair around, forcing her to look at them.

“And another thing …,” said Aldwin.

Orion strode out of the conference room. Under his breath he murmured, “Fuck you.”

Clarence, Umesh, and Nadav were standing over Sorel.

“Lockbox went down again,” Umesh told Orion.

“She crashed the system,” Clarence said.

“What—the new version?”

“She checked in buggy code,” Umesh said.

“She gets the rubber chicken.” Menacingly, Nadav swung the rubber chicken in Sorel’s face. It was the sort of plucked rubber chicken you found in joke shops, its limp body yellow and gelatinous.

“Oh, stop,” said Sorel. She sounded indifferent, almost bored, but Orion could see that she was upset.

“You crash the system,” said Clarence, “you get the chicken.”

Nadav pitched the rubber bird directly into Sorel’s lap.

“Put that chicken nicely on her desk,” Orion ordered.

Clarence hesitated for a moment. Orion acted like one of the guys, and now he pulled rank on them.

“Now,” Orion said, and he waited until Clarence pitched the chicken onto Sorel’s desk. “She’s going to debug the code now,” Orion announced. “Party’s over.”

When the little crowd dispersed, Orion pulled up a chair next to Sorel. He watched her long fingers on the keyboard as she scrolled through code on the screen. “I break stuff all the time.”

“I know.” She smiled.

“So let me help you.”

“Aren’t you busy?”

Orion thought of Molly sleeping after thirty-six hours at the hospital. He considered Jake in London and Jonathan and Aldwin, who didn’t brunch. “Not really.”

Slowly, line by line, they combed Lockbox 2.0. He took the workstation next to hers, and they worked in parallel on separate computers. As they searched, they turned up little items and oddities: missing comments, obscure bugs, strange bits of circuitous reasoning, the dust bunnies in the code. Hours passed. They didn’t speak, but mumbled to themselves. “What happens when this line executes?”

“And what happens here?”

“What’s the value of the variable now?”

They worked until numbers seemed to imprint themselves on Orion’s eyes. The chambers of the program drew Orion and Sorel deeper and deeper into the software’s formal logic. They counted their steps as they descended into dark passageways. The voices all around grew muffled, the ambient light on the floor began to dim. Orion’s phone rang, but he didn’t even glance at it.

Night came. Programmers departed, and others took their place. Jonathan and Aldwin were long gone. Still, Orion and Sorel kept hunting underground, watching for errors, listening for rushing water, tapping walls.

“Why are you smiling?” Sorel asked at one point.

“I’m just concentrating,” he murmured, half to himself. Then he confessed, “Actually I love doing small repetitive things.”

“I don’t,” she confessed. “I need fresh air.”

“You can go home if you’re tired,” he told her. “I’ll finish.”

“No. I can’t go home. I’m responsible. I’m just going out for a minute.”

Suddenly he realized that she was going down alone into the dark. “Wait!” He ran after her. “I’ll come down with you.”

“No, don’t,” she said. She stepped into the elevator and as the doors closed she confessed, “I just want to smoke.”

How could she smoke? She was so beautiful. He hated that she smoked. While she was gone, he raided the company kitchen for salt-and-vinegar potato chips and jelly beans. He took four cans of black-cherry soda from the fridge, and lined them up on her desk. He wasn’t sure why he did that. They looked silly. He brought them to his own desk and kept working. When he heard the elevator bell he kept his head down, pretending he hadn’t been waiting for her.

“You like working all night,” she said.

“I’m good at it.” Orion was showing off a little, but he was also telling the truth. He had an eye for detail, a grasp of the small picture, the obsessive game-playing mind of a superb hacker.

They shared her computer now, and the monitor glowed before them as they found their way back inside the code. They made their way without a map; the program was their map, spreading in rivulets before them. Their hands hovered over the keyboard and overlapped. Her wrists were delicate, her skin fine as rice paper, but he pretended that he didn’t notice when their hands brushed. She pretended as well, even when she felt his fingers close reflexively on hers. The task before them made pretense easier, because they had to concentrate. They were like diviners, searching for the source of her mistake.

Suddenly Sorel found the bug. “Stupid, stupid,” she groaned. “Over there. I forgot the bounds check.”

“Aha!” cried Orion. She had neglected to specify enough memory for the number of items in her piece of the Lockbox system.

“It’s not even an interesting mistake,” she griped as she typed in proper array bounds. “Wait, why isn’t it working now?”

“Be patient.” He took over the keyboard.

“No.” Gently she pushed his hands away. “Let me.”

By the time they got Lockbox up and running, the sun was rising, shining through the floor-to-ceiling windows, drenching East Cambridge in liquid gold.

“Got it.” Orion basked for a moment in accomplishment. “We got it back up,” he announced to the nearly empty room.

“Cool,” somebody said faintly from across the way.

Orion extended his hand to Sorel, and she shook it. He felt joyous, masterful after the all-nighter. “I knew I’d get to the bottom of this.”

“You!” she said. “Give credit where credit is due.”

“You found the bug,” he admitted.

“And don’t forget that I created the bug too. I created a monster!” She picked up the rubber chicken and told it sweetly, “I’m going to murder you.”

“Let’s go down to the river and drown it.”

“Yes!” She hunted for the black heap that was her coat. As she turned it here and there, trying to figure out which end was up, her pack of cigarettes fell from one of the pockets. She didn’t notice.

“I can carry that….” Orion took her guitar. “What kind of …” He was about to ask her what kind of music she played, when everything faded. The lights dimmed, the computer monitors darkened. The constant whirring of machines ceased, and only the EXIT signs remained illuminated.

“The control room,” Orion said, and they sprinted downstairs to the new ISIS nerve center with its monitors covering the entire wall, illuminating the world in all its time zones. There on that map, green dots indicated servers for the ISIS global security network. At desks in the control room, as at NASA, at least two ISIS programmers monitored the ISIS network at all times.

Clarence and Anand were watching that night, and they saw the power fade, even as Sorel and Orion burst through the door. The overhead lights died, and for a moment only the wall of monitors illuminated the space in wavering blue.

“Are you still online?” Orion asked Clarence.

“The network hung.” He typed frantically.

“But what about the generators?” Sorel asked.

“Nothing,” Anand said.

For a moment ISIS went dark, and its vast network, all its points of light, disappeared. It was as if the stars themselves had vanished from the sky, the whole fabulously rich ISIS enterprise, the solar system, the galaxy, the entire Milky Way had vaporized. And then power returned. Overhead lights blazed white again. The electronic map glowed, the ISIS security network restored itself onscreen in all its particulars. The soft whirring of the building’s myriad machines resumed, replacing harsh silence to reassure the ear.

“Just a brownout,” Sorel murmured. Like all brief frights, this one was instantly forgotten.

They walked outside between the half-built laboratories and biotech offices of Kendall Square. Orion carried the guitar as they picked their way around the slushy puddles.

“Did you ever see such ugly code?” Orion asked her.

“Disgusting,” Sorel said. “I suppose Jonathan thinks there will be time to straighten out Lockbox later on, but by then everyone will be too rich to care. I know I will.”

“Don’t say that.”

“Don’t you want to be fabulously wealthy?” she asked him.

He considered a moment. “I think I’d like to buy my mom a new car. And I’d buy my dad a house. He probably wouldn’t stay in it, but …”

“Funny, I was thinking just the opposite. I’d buy Mum a car if she promised to leave my dad.”

“You don’t like your father?”

“Well, he’s just my stepdad, really. Why wouldn’t yours stay in a house?”

“Oh, my dad’s a little bit … Sometimes he falls asleep on park benches,” Orion said. “He’s a professor at Middlebury, but since he doesn’t dress that well, sometimes he looks kind of—homeless. Once he fell asleep on a bench, and when he woke up, he found two dollars in his hat.”

“Oh, no!” She laughed, and as she looked at him, sidelong, her cheeks were pink in the chilly air, her long hair spilled red-gold over her black cloth coat. She was so tall. He didn’t have to bend down to look at her. The light caught in her eyes.

“Wait, stop a minute.” They stopped walking, and right there on the sidewalk, he looked into her eyes. “Green.”

“Yes, thanks, I knew that.”

They hurried on through Central Square, with its piles of dirty snow and flattened cardboard, its closed shops and somnolent bars. The Plough & Stars, the Cantab Lounge, the Middle East.

“Coffee?” Orion asked.

“Absolutely.” They bought coffee and donuts at the Store 24 near the Central Square bus stop. Sorel devoured her donut while Orion paid. “Sorry,” she said. “They’re very small!”

Orion felt an almost overwhelming desire to kiss the corner of Sorel’s mouth. He wanted to lick the powdered sugar from her lips. The young cashier in her head scarf startled him with her question: “Anything else?”

They walked all the way down Pleasant Street to the river, icy in the middle, brackish at the edges. Sorel handed the rubber chicken to Orion, who sat on a bench with the coffee cups and guitar. He watched her fumble for her cigarettes.

“Don’t you want to throw it?” he asked her.

“I suppose.” She was a little distracted, irritated that she hadn’t found what she was looking for. Sorel walked right up to the edge of the muddy riverbank and balanced on a wobbly rock.

“You do the honors,” Orion encouraged her.

She lifted the rubber chicken like a football and then stopped. “If I get arrested, they’ll deport me.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m on a student visa. And I think there’s something in there about never throwing chickens in the water.”

“I’m sure they meant live chickens,” Orion said.

“Oh, that’s all right then.”

She hurled the rubber chicken into the air, and it sailed for an instant above the water. Then it splashed down and floated, sickly yellow on the surface.

“I’m going to write about you,” she called after the chicken. She returned to Orion on the bench, opened her guitar case, and unwrapped her instrument, which she’d swaddled in soft T-shirts. “I got it at a pawnshop. Isn’t that sad? It’s a bit scarred here, but it’s a good traveling instrument.” Experimentally she tried some chords, and then launched into song.

Ugly little chicken

Where have you gone?

Don’t you be pickin’

Where you don’t belong.

He laughed with surprise. Her throaty voice was not English or European, but bluesy African-American. “Those Folkways records,” he said, thinking of his dad’s LPs. “You listened to them too.”

“I listen to everything.” Leaning back, Sorel felt his arm on the bench, against her shoulders. “Everything American. Do you think that’s strange?”

When he looked into her lively eyes, Orion saw the possibilities before him, each spreading outward, the branches of a decision tree. He could answer her. He could keep quiet. He could make some excuse to leave. He could kiss her. He imagined kissing her. “I don’t want to go public,” he confessed.

She shook her head at him. “Poor you! When the time comes, you’ll just have to find the strength.” She strummed out a second verse.

Rich little chicken

Keep movin’ on

“Stop! I get it!” He pulled her toward him and tickled her.

“No tickling!”

He stopped.

“Hold on.” Carefully she put her guitar away, and then she turned to him, and he did kiss her, softly, on the lips.

“Sorry,” he said immediately.

“What do you mean?”

“If I surprised you,” he said.

“It’s all right.” She spoke as though she weren’t the most lovely girl he’d ever seen. Sensibly, she said, “It’s just a kiss.”

That was when he began to fall in love with her. He felt a wave of sleepiness, or possibly just contentment, hearing her calm voice, sitting there with her, sharing the illusion that they would remain nothing more than friends.

“What do you really think of ISIS?” Sorel asked him.

“I don’t like it as much as I did.”

“Just because you were fighting with Jonathan?”

He didn’t answer.

“I saw you through the glass,” she said. “And I could hear you too.”

“Useless conference room.”

“I heard you defending the Free Software Foundation and all that.”

“I happen to believe in the free exchange of ideas,” Orion said. “And the individual’s right to privacy and self-expression …”

“You can afford to,” Sorel pointed out.

“It’s not a question of affording to believe something,” Orion said.

“Well,” said Sorel, “I can’t afford to believe quite so many things. I’m just a graduate student—supposedly. I used to be, until Mel hired me.”

“What were you studying? Computer science?”

“Physics.”

“Oh, physics. Molly’s father would like you then,” he mused.

“Who’s Molly’s father?”

“Carl Eisenstat.”

She sat up straight. “You know Carl Eisenstat?”

There was Molly’s father again with Orion in his sights. There was Carl, sometimes disdainful, sometimes delighted, always examining Orion with his quick hawk’s eye.

“The Eisenstat Principle of Viscosity,” said Sorel.

“So that’s what it’s a principle of. I always forget.”

“You didn’t know?” she asked him, and then, “Who’s Molly?”

“My girlfriend.” He darted a look at her. Subtly, almost imperceptibly, the space between them had grown. “I guess I should have mentioned her earlier.”

“But she didn’t come up,” Sorel said.

“No.”

She smiled and said, “Right. I should get breakfast.”

“I’ll go with you,” he told her.

She shook her head. “Not this time.” He thought she was talking about breakfast, but she explained, “I can’t see someone who’s involved with someone else. I’ve done that.”

“I’m really sorry,” Orion said again.

“I was too,” she said. “Thanks for all your help. Good-bye, good morning, and all that. You’ll have to explain about the rubber chicken.”

“It was your idea to drown it,” he called after her as she hurried away. “You should be the one to tell them.”

She turned and smiled. “I’ll say you donated it to the Free Software Foundation. Everyone will understand.”

13

“Where’s the milk?” Molly asked as soon as Orion arrived home.

“Oh,” Orion said.

“I tried to call you.”

“I was working all night.”

“And what do you think I was doing?”

Coming in from that gold morning, he felt as though he were returning from Italy—from some far country filled with art. The apartment looked sad, neglected. Dark. He yanked on the shade in the bedroom and light poured in to reveal the pile of clean laundry on the bed.

“That’s depressing,” Molly said.

“I just got home,” Orion protested.

“So did I!”

This was their competition—to see who could stay out working longer.

“All I asked you to do was buy milk,” Molly said.

“I know. I’ll get it.”

“And when you go down you could take out the recycling,” she said.

“Okay.” He settled on the futon in the living room and opened his laptop.

“Now.”

“I said I will.”

Then she shook her head at him, snatched the recycling bin and carried it downstairs, magazines and plastic bottles trailing behind her.

“I said I’d do it.” He followed, picking up after her.

“I’m not interested in waiting until you feel like doing it.”

“Molly.” He opened the door at the bottom of the stairs, and she ran down the cracked cement steps in front of their building and heaved the bin onto the curb. Too late. The orange Cambridge Public Works recycling truck was driving away.

She didn’t say a word, but turned back, tromping the stairs to their apartment with heavy dejected feet. Orion followed her inside with the recycling bin. The city would fine them if they left it out.

“Look, I’m sorry,” he called up to her on the stairs.

“Don’t talk to me.”

“I did the laundry like you asked,” he said as they reentered the apartment.

She looked through the open door at the pile of clean rumpled clothes. “Half the laundry.”

“All of it!”

She turned on him. “If you don’t put it away, that’s half the laundry.”

There was something grand and ridiculous in this argument, but he knew better than to say so. “We need a wife,” he said lightly.

“Good idea. You can give her options.” Molly strode into their bedroom, tore off her scrubs, and went to bed. He had never imagined that pulling up the sheets could be so much like slamming a door.

Later, much later, she woke and showered and they ordered pizza and picnicked in the living room, and they talked about hiring Merry Maids to come once a week to clean the apartment, and they agreed to send out their laundry and have it all washed and folded, and they decided to buy a car for Molly to drive to the hospital so that she wouldn’t have to take the T at all hours. They didn’t have the money yet, but they would in six months. They could solve almost all their problems soon.

The next day at ISIS, Orion kept busy writing code, but he could not stay inside it. Numbers no longer printed themselves on his retina. He saw Sorel’s face instead, and heard her low voice. Her chicken song. Where was she? Her desk was bare, her cubicle empty. Was she somewhere in the building? Out on the sidewalk smoking? She was such a strange, compelling person, the only one he liked at ISIS. Why, then, had he kissed her under false pretenses? What a stupid thing to do. He sat at his desktop and typed:

Sorel: How was breakfast?

He deleted the line.

Sorel, he typed, forgive me if I made you uncomfortable.

Forgive me? Uncomfortable? He deleted again.

Sorel, how are you? Delete.

Sorel, who are you? Delete.

Sorel, you didn’t come in today. Delete. Obviously she knew that.

Sorel, where are you? The moment he sent this message, his own words returned to him in his in-box, and for a split second he imagined she was writing back. New message. Subject: Where are you?

But the message wasn’t from Sorel, it was the usual ping from Jonathan. Orion was late. The R & D meeting had started. Where are you?

R & D meetings weren’t bad—just Orion, Aldwin, Jake, Jonathan, and Oskar, their old advisor, now chief scientist. As students, Orion and his friends had gathered in Oskar’s office and worked for results worthy of a paper at STOC or FOCS. Now the aim was new product and patents for the company: more customers, fresh revenue, to build on the upcoming IPO. The stakes were higher now, the goals financial, but meetings with Oskar were the same as always. Four guys in mismatched swivel chairs, vying to impress their difficult-to-please professor.

Oskar did not acknowledge Orion when he bounded in and took his seat in the corner. He continued scribbling on the oversized whiteboard covering his office wall. When Oskar finished, he stood back and everyone gazed at his new model for a secure system. The drawing looked like an exploding star.

“What if you drew these edges together?” Jonathan asked.

“Show me.”

Jonathan took a green dry-erase marker and simplified the star.

Oskar shook his head and took the marker out of Jonathan’s hand. “This is the flaw. Do you see?”

Orion didn’t see, but Jonathan flushed a little where he was standing by the board, and tried to explain himself.

“N-N-N-No.” Oskar wagged his finger at Jonathan, shooting him down.

“What if you tried this?” Jake rubbed out half of Jonathan’s star with his hand and redrew it in red.

Long pause, as Oskar considered the board, and his students waited for his verdict. Their resident cryptographer was a lively seventy-year-old who had come to America by way of Israel. His eyes were small and gleaming, as was his bald head. He had been married “once upon a time” as he put it, and his son and daughter were both theoretical computer scientists, one at Hebrew University and one at Carnegie Mellon. Oskar’s accomplished children were nowhere near as accomplished as he, but Oskar did not lose sleep over this. He was accustomed to his superiority.

He was so much fun, thought Jake. Otherworldly, mused Orion. Egomaniacal, Jonathan protested silently.

Jonathan was slightly out of sorts, annoyed with Orion for coming late, jealous of Jake’s easy brilliance. As CTO, Jonathan did the most on a day-to-day basis to build the company. He did the most and cared the most, and yet, in Oskar’s office, Jake’s ideas were the best. Jake did not work for those ideas; he did not have to travel or negotiate or fight for them. He was original. And Jonathan was smart enough to understand the value of everything Jake said. The businessman he was becoming rejoiced and looked for ways to capitalize on Jake’s gifts, but the boy in Jonathan felt differently.

“Don’t you think it’s good for you to fall short sometimes?” Emily had suggested once, a question sweet and also cutting as she lay folded in his arms.

“No,” Jonathan had retorted. “I don’t think it’s good for me at all.”

“This may be possible.” Oskar delivered the verdict on Jake’s drawing. “This is slightly faster.”

“I don’t think slightly faster is really what we’re after,” Jonathan said. “We want more than incremental improvements.”

Oskar spread his hands. “What you want,” he said, “is not always what you get.”

“Then we need a different paradigm,” said Jonathan.

“A paradigm is not a dime a dozen,” Oskar pointed out.

“I never said it would be easy,” Jonathan said. “We need new products, and we need to start developing them now.”

“You have a proposal?” Oskar’s challenges were all the more potent because they were so gentle, always so bemused. “Tell us!”

And that was the moment of temptation. That was when Jonathan wanted to pull out electronic fingerprinting and say: Look, surveillance is where we should be going. Record every touch on every piece of data, know its security status at every turn. Other companies are starting to pursue this. We need to move into this space too. He knew Oskar would turn toward him, fascinated. He would say, Ah, now this is interesting. And in his pride and his frustration, in the heat of the moment, with Oskar calling his bluff and Jake standing there, and Orion daydreaming in the corner, Jonathan struggled against the impulse to shock them all.

“I see you have not yet decided on your new paradigm,” Oskar taunted Jonathan mildly.

“I do have one.” It was against Jonathan’s nature to turn the other cheek, and yet, once again, he felt Emily near him, and remembered her voice.

“I have to trust you,” she’d told him late that night in his apartment. “I have to, if I’m going to love you.”

He had never known anyone like her. She made his previous relationships seem trivial. It was her unusual strength, the courage of her convictions that drew him to her. She insisted she was nothing like him, but he understood her differently. He saw himself in Emily—not the man he was now, but the man he could be. Sometimes he rebelled against this solemn feeling; sometimes he didn’t want to love her quite so much, and he was secretly, cruelly relieved to leave her in California and return to his less-reflective life apart. He felt unready to give up childish things like rugby and lying and beating the crap out of Green Knight. But he never stopped thinking about her; he never stopped longing for her or anticipating their time together. Being with her was still new for him, her warmth still startling because she was also so reserved. When she kissed him and wrapped her arms around him, she seemed to overcome something in herself, and he knew that he was exceptional in her life as she was in his.

“So when you are ready, please let us know,” said Oskar.

“Oh, I will,” Jonathan said, and he pretended that his phone was buzzing, and left the room.

He wished his phone really was ringing. He had to speak to Emily, to hear her steady voice.

He closed his office door and dialed. Her phone rang and rang again, and each time it rang he missed her more.

“Hello?” Emily answered at last, surprised.

“Did I wake you?” He looked at his watch. It was only seven thirty in the morning in California.

“No, no,” she said sleepily. “I’m up. I’m on the phone with Jess.”

“Do you want me to call you back?”

“No, that’s okay. I think we’re done.”

“You’re never done,” he said.

“She’s making me crazy,” Emily admitted. “Hold on….” When she got back on the line he heard her sigh.

“Where is she now?”

“You don’t want to know,” said Emily.

“Where are you now?”

“In bed with my computer. I have to get up.”

“No, don’t,” he said. “Stay there.”

“It’s getting late.”

“I left Oskar’s meeting,” he blurted out.

“Why? What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.” He had nothing to confess except a brief opportunistic impulse, and he was not about to upset her by admitting that. The uneasiness he felt required reassurance, not expiation. Perhaps his logic was circular. He followed the circuit nonetheless: He needed Emily to believe in him so that he could believe in himself. Because of this, he did not always tell the whole story about himself, or even about ISIS. That night, when she had pressed him to explain what was wrong with Lockbox, he had lied to her, glossing over the structural problems Orion had discovered, insisting Orion broke the system by willfully abusing code. He lied now, as well. “Nothing’s wrong.”

“You’re not happy.”

“I am happy,” he contradicted. “We’ve got Yahoo!”

“I know, but—”

He interrupted, “I miss your voice.”

“Just my voice?”

“Not just your voice.”

“You have my voice,” she pointed out.

He pulled down the shades. “Keep talking. I’ll imagine the rest.”

“I’m in your arms,” she whispered. “I’m kissing you and I can taste the coffee on your tongue.”

“And then what?”

“Then what! You tell me.”

“I’m kissing your neck,” he said. “My hands are around your waist. I’m lifting up your nightgown.” He closed his eyes, imagining her slender neck, her skin, her breasts. “Take off your nightgown.”

She was quiet.

“Are you?” he whispered after a moment.

She hesitated, and then said, “Yes.”

And he was with her, and he began to forget the meeting. “Please,” he urged her.

“Will you?”

“Yes,” he breathed, and he was not upset anymore. His company was going public within the week. He’d celebrate with her; he could hear her even now. He felt almost, on the verge, soon to be intensely happy. He was no longer lying. What were lies, anyway? Only futures waiting to come true.

14

Harvard Square glowed with artificial candlelight. Damp air misted the glass doors of Brattle Street Florist with its potted azaleas and glossy-leaved gardenias. Cardullo’s stocked Dutch licorice and Belgian chocolate, Bendicks mints, Walkers shortbread, Turkish delight. Every shop tempted with earrings and antiquities, evergreens and crimson KitchenAids. But the millennium’s end was not altogether jolly. The hungry still hungered, addicts scratched and stole. The season had its somber rites, exams and funerals. Hushed students filed into Houghton Library to view the manuscript of “Ode to Autumn” and puzzle at its wailful choir of loss and consolation.

The market dipped and rose, and rose again, and some speculated that the new economy had limits. It was popular to say, even without believing, that this time might never come again, that it was late in the day. Some said the markets had already peaked, and Wall Street wizards agreed that timing was everything. Therefore, ISIS celebrated its December IPO with equal parts relief and trepidation.

Orion noticed that where there had been banter about boats and cars, bikes and ultralights, now the talk was strictly options and derivatives, wills and trusts. Dave instituted wealth seminars. Lawyers arrived from Hale and Dorr, and consultants visited to discuss charitable giving. Shelter became the byword, replacing speed.

Programmers ridiculed the seminars, but they attended anyway in small groups, gathering in the glass-walled conference room to hear account managers from Goldman Sachs hold forth in suits of navy so dark the color could not exist in nature, except possibly in the deepest ocean, where giant squid inked out their predators. These reps from Goldman were all named Josh and Ethan, and they arrived bright-eyed, cuff-linked, trussed in ties of burgundy, and they were thrilled to answer every question, psyched to help out in any way possible, and honestly happy to talk whenever, because most of all they were about having fun and learning and teamwork and making dreams happen—not just short term, but long term, which was very much what they perceived ISIS to be about. They loved innovation, said Ethan. They lived for flexibility, said Josh. When the lockup ended, they couldn’t wait to innovate with everybody in the company. They worked with your lawyer and your accountant and your bank, but when it came to strategy, they said, Picture, if you will, myself and my colleagues as the quarterbacks of your team. This above all: They loved to communicate. Communication was the key, as in life, because at the end of the day, it was relationships that mattered. It was all about trust—just knowing that your team was there. Bottom line, that’s who they were in private-wealth management—your team, when you were worth ten million or more.

In one of these seminars, especially for the Lockbox group, Orion glanced at Sorel and saw that she was scribbling studiously, or maybe sketching. He leaned past Clarence to look, and she saw him and smiled.

Gradually, without discussions or apologies, the awkwardness between them had subsided. Their night together, or rather their all-nighter, seemed less embarrassing in retrospect, and slowly, over weeks and months, Orion had begun to cultivate Sorel’s friendship. At first he tried the smallest gestures, a glance, a word. The briefest exchanges.

“Nice snowstorm.”

“Lovely, if you like that kind of thing.”

He sent her lines of particularly bad code from the new Lockbox system:

Did you see? Orion typed.

Worst ever, Sorel replied.

Trying to solve from back to front.

Might not be possible.

Fundamental flaws?

Yeah.

Cracks in foundation?

Worse than that.

Shaky ground?

ORIGINAL SIN.

A rationing of interactions until they spoke easily again. That was Orion’s major goal these days at ISIS. He had refused an executive position, and he had no project to administer.

“Can I see?” he asked her after Josh and Ethan had distributed their heavy white business cards, and taken their leave.

“It’s nothing.” She showed him the sketch.

“They look like gangsters.” He drew his swivel chair a little closer.

“You think?” She’d turned her notebook so that the faint green lines on the page ran vertical, like pinstripes, and then she’d drawn the pair of financial advisors as suits with dollar signs for eyes.

“You could add guns.”

She looked skeptically at her drawing. “Could do. But I like to keep my sketches subtle. Either dollar signs or guns or the Angel of Death.” She began to giggle.

“Cancel the guns,” Orion said.

“Good. No guns on your financial team. We’re all about listening”—she imitated Ethan’s voice perfectly—“how do you feel about risk?”

“How the fuck should I know?” Orion said.

“Are you still planning to buy the house for your dad?”

Orion shrugged. “He doesn’t want a house.”

“It’s hard to know what people want,” Sorel mused. “It isn’t always obvious.”

“That’s a good thing,” Orion said.

He was dreaming about her. He dreamed of touching her, but just as he brushed her slender arms, she slipped away. He listened to her practice her guitar at night when they worked on Lockbox 2.0. “ISIS is my day job,” Sorel reasoned. “So if it’s night I can compose.” And she sat atop the table in the conference room, and experimented with complicated chords.

ISIS, which had been so bleak to him and gray, became the place he might see Sorel. He stayed late and arrived early, locking his bike and running up the stairs as his heart beat hard in anticipation. He sat at his desk and thought of her. Even as he worked, he hoped to see her. He was programming in some kind of infinite recursion, dreaming at ISIS, which was itself a dreamscape, strange, wondrous, and frightening, the tiny company growing into an earthshaking colossus, his friends now executives impatient with him, his girlfriend hurt and angry because he had not yet set a wedding date, her parents rising up in sudden outrage, and on top of all this, his own imagination now transformed and turned about, so that he worked at ISIS but thought constantly of leaving, and slept with Molly but imagined someone else. Her husky voice, her laughter, her red-gold hair, her long legs running up the stairs.

One night, as he and Molly walked through Harvard Square, he saw a tall figure standing on a pedestal in front of Jasmine Sola. An angel dressed in white and painted white from head to toe. Feathery wings rose up behind her and white robes draped her body down to her white feet. Orion had seen these living statues before: angels, brides, cavaliers, standing on their pedestals, never moving, scarcely breathing until passersby dropped money at their feet. Like coin-operated automatons the statues bowed or curtseyed, doffed hats or winked. He had seen them all before, but he stopped in front of this one.

“Come on,” Molly said, eager to get to their movie, but Orion couldn’t help staring at the angel with her outspread wings.

“Sorel?” he murmured. The ghostly figure did not move. “Is that you?”

Molly was puzzled. “Is that who …?”

“It’s someone from work.”

“From ISIS? Are you sure?”

He wasn’t sure. The figure stood so still and seemed so solid, her face layered with thick white greasepaint, her figure heavy in its draperies. Maybe he was just imagining Sorel. He saw her everywhere. Then he caught a red-gold gleam, one loose hair. “It is you!” he called up to her.

But Sorel was a Method angel and would not break character. She continued, calm, majestic, unblinking even as children tried to touch her feet, and other buskers covered Simon & Garfunkel in shop doorways. Hello, darkness, my old friend…. Orion allowed Molly to hurry him away.

“That was you!” he told Sorel on Monday, as soon as she walked in.

“That was art,” she said, sliding her guitar underneath her desk.

“Admit it,” he said. “You saw me in the Square!”

She laughed. “I admit nothing.”

“Why do you do that? Why do you stand out there in the cold? You don’t need the money.”

She conceded, “I give it away.”

“Why do you stand out there so late at night?”

“It’s personal. It’s intimate.”

“It’s intimate to disguise yourself and stand out there in a crowd of strangers?”

“Yes. Compared to this place.”

He leaned against the gray wall of her cubicle. “What if some guy starts hitting on you? What do you do then?”

A smile played on her lips. “Turn him to stone.”

“What if …?”

Sorel gestured toward the neighboring cubicles where Umesh and Clarence were already typing. “Let’s get to work, shall we? God knows this poor benighted excuse for a Lockbox needs it.”

Were Orion and Sorel the only ones who understood that at any moment Lockbox could come crashing down? Orion was convinced that latent sleeper bugs lurked waiting to hatch inside the code. Of course nothing would happen with normal use, but one day some hacker would pick Lockbox and bring it down—and every company that used the system, every transaction and piece of data would fly out into the world. Orion was sure of this, but Jonathan wouldn’t hear it.

“I’ll tell you why you’re under the impression I don’t listen to you,” Jonathan had told him the day of the IPO. “You’re under that impression because it’s true. We’re building a company and you’re off in your own world. You would rather cling to your theories of the way things should be than put your head down and work.”

“What about feasibility?” Orion shot back. “What about truth in advertising?”

“What about loyalty?”

This was after all the cheers and speeches, after ISIS rose to $133 a share and Dave confessed he was getting a little emotional via speaker phone from New York. Orion had buttonholed Jonathan at a table of brownies and precut cantaloupe and sprigs of seedless grapes.

“We need to close down Lockbox and start over.”

“You’re bringing this up today?” Jonathan was amazed.

“When am I supposed to bring it up?”

Then very quietly, with so many people standing all around them, Jonathan said, “Get out of my face.”

“I will when I get a straight answer,” said Orion. “I think when I raise an issue over days and weeks I deserve some kind of response.”

Jonathan shook his head. “No. You don’t deserve anything from me. You made a choice. You stepped out of the critical path a year ago. When you leave the team, you don’t get to be the referee.”

“Who says I left the team? Who says I’m leaving?” Orion demanded. The idea was wonderful when he was alone, but sounded like defeat when he stood facing Jonathan.

“Be very careful,” Jonathan told him.

The end of the century, which was also the end of the millennium, ISIS held a New Year’s Eve blowout with a caterer, a corporate party planner, and an elaborate conceit: 2000 Leagues Under the Sea @ The New England Aquarium. The waiters dressed in antique diving gear with helmets of copper, nickel, and glass. Secretaries wore slinky dresses, while the programmers donned black sweaters with their jeans. Dave wore black from head to toe: a black suit with a black dress shirt, no tie, like an East Coast Larry Ellison. Only the fish came as themselves: the prickly puffer fish and blue-striped wrasse, the lumpy grouper and billowy eel. As the party ascended a spiral ramp around their giant tank, armored sea turtles rose from the depths along with undulating rays. Disdainful sharks circled with mouths agape, all needle teeth and pinprick eyes.

On the mezzanine overlooking the open penguin habitat, Sorel’s girl band, The Chloroforms, were performing, Sorel out front, all legs and boots, wearing what looked like a cardigan sweater for a dress.

Do androids dream of electric sheep? Sorel sang. Do technoids scream ’bout mission creep?

Good night….

Sleep tight….

“Is that Jonathan over there?” Molly asked Orion.

It was hard to see anything in the dark cavernous space. The great illuminated fish tanks cast watery shadows on the walls.

Don’t let the bad bugs bite …, sang Sorel, and her Amazonian bandmates rocked behind her.

“Wait for me,” Orion called to Molly. He wasn’t sure what Jonathan would say to her if she approached him all alone. She did not know about Orion’s latest run-in with Jonathan. He didn’t want to worry her, and then again, the situation was complex. Far easier to suggest that there were tensions at ISIS than to describe them.

He caught up with Molly just in time, and saw that Jonathan was smiling. “Hey,” Jonathan said by way of greeting, and he looked past Orion to scan the crowd.

“There you are,” said Jonathan, as Emily approached carrying a plate of sushi.

“Hello!” She kissed Orion and Molly. “It’s been too long.”

She stood at Jonathan’s side, slender, elegant in black tailored trousers and a pale silk shirt. Had Orion really introduced these two? They made no sense, unless Orion imagined the old Jonathan, the rambunctious, fun-loving, lay-down-his-life, wake-up-in-the-middle-of-the-night, drive-anywhere-for-his-friends Jonathan. Only Emily and the old Jonathan made sense. Orion had loved him too.

Good night. Sleep tight. Don’t let the bad bugs bite. Sorel sang with increasing urgency. But if they do … Drums throbbed underneath Sorel’s husky voice. Take off your shoe! Take off your shoe! Bam, bam, bam the drums pounded as Sorel screamed in crescendo. And beat them! Beat them! Beat them! …

Suddenly the penguins in their arctic habitat began barking to one another. Orion rushed to the concrete barrier and saw that the birds, usually so stoic, had begun diving into the water. Molly came along to look, and while Jonathan didn’t bother, Emily joined them, balancing her plate of sushi on the wall.

’Til they’re black and BLUE! Sorel howled, releasing her inner Dylan.

“The song is actually scaring the penguins off their rocks.” Emily laughed a little, imagining what Jess would say, and how she would worry about the birds’ eardrums.

“Maybe if we walk up the ramp it’ll be quieter,” Molly suggested.

“Okay. Soon,” said Orion.

“Meet me up there. I’ll try to get us some food.” Carefully, Molly began ascending the crowded ramp in her high heels.

“Are you all right?” Emily called out to Orion.

He shook his head.

“What is it?”

Sweet Emily, his dear old friend, first crush, first love—what could he say? The time and place were so absurd, with all those bug-eyed fish swimming past, and the oily penguins swimming below. “Nothing.”

But Emily would not take that for an answer, and led him away from the band, past the sushi bar, and raw bar, and the tables serving tapas, to a quieter cove with dark tanks lit by purple phosphorescent fish. “What’s going on?”

He hesitated. “I think you know.”

“I don’t,” she told him.

“Yes, you do.”

“Not from your perspective.”

So of course she did know. That confirmed it. She was only trawling for information. “Do you think it’s fair to ask?”

“Wait,” she said. “Explain.”

She took off her glasses and looked much younger, almost the girl he had once kissed. “Is it true you’re leaving ISIS?”

“Is that what Jonathan told you?”

“Were you considering it?” she pressed, and he knew she wanted to know why.

“I’m not leaving.”

“Good.” She smiled. “I know Jonathan values your opinion.”

Orion murmured, “You know he doesn’t. He values his own opinion.”

“You got along before.”

“I’m like everybody else,” said Orion. “I get along with Jonathan until I cross him.”

“Why do you say that? He likes debate. He likes discussion.”

“Why are you the one talking to me then?” He was upsetting her, but he didn’t care. “Why are you talking to me instead of him?”

“Because I want to understand….”

“What is there to understand, Emily? Jonathan and I aren’t getting along.”

“Why not?”

“That’s not a fair question, and you know it.”

“You look worried.”

“What are you worried about?” he countered. “Why don’t you talk to him?”

She tilted her head slightly, a pensive move that he remembered, along with a slight narrowing of her eyes, as though the world were slightly askew and needed further study. And at that moment Orion realized that she had talked to Jonathan. She had made her inquiries, and whatever he’d said had not satisfied her. Orion wanted to hug her around her shoulders. He wanted to say: I’m worried that Jonathan is a liar. I think he’s willing to sacrifice people for products, and trade quality for profits. And above all, he wanted to say: What about you, Emily? How is he treating you? But he couldn’t ask her this. Some diffidence or shyness or guilt prevented him, and he only said, “I’m sorry.”

“I know he has a temper,” Emily told him, “but he feels he’s given you a lot.”

“Given me!”

She nodded.

Had Jonathan warped Emily as well? Could she care for an ambitious creature like that to the point of admiration? To the vanishing point?

She said, “I’m speaking as your friend.”

“No, I don’t think so. You’re speaking as his friend. And it’s beneath you, Emily. It really is. It’s wrong of you.”