The End of the Book: A Novel

Chapter 5

42 5 Everyone wanted to work for Imego. At the main campus in Silicon Valley , where Dhara and I went on business three times a year, employees had all the perks they could imagine: cafeterias serving gourmet meals; snack rooms stocked with fresh fruit, candy, protein drinks, and cappuccino ; gyms; a swimming spa; decompression capsules; on-site masseuses and physicians; day care; language classes; laundry; dry cleaner; a twentyfour -hour concierge. Workers dressed purposefully casual and the techiest engineers got loose in Chuck Taylors and Battlestar Galactica T-shirts, and, though the sun rarely kissed their skin, cargo shorts. Imego knew that to keep the children happy work had to feel like fun, so we had fire poles and slides connecting floor to floor, foosball, pool and ping-pong tables, video games and lava lamps in primary colors, and along each wall, whiteboards where the inspired and punchy alike jotted down formulae, graphs, and assorted nonsense like the quote I could see from my office desk that day: Spandex: It’s a privilege, not a right. Dhara loved Imego and couldn’t understand why I called it The Cruise That Never Ends. On the nights when she came home at 1:00 a.m. and I was in bed struggling to keep my eyes on a novel I’d been trying to read for a month, I asked her how many hours she’d worked that day, that week. I could understand what kept the engineers haunting the hallways at three in the morning, talking embrangled algorithms. But I worried that Dhara racked up hours just to be noticed or because she preferred to be at work rather than anywhere else. When she got hired out of Ohio State’s business school she bought the apartment where we lived now, not because Harbor City was an architectural landmark or in the heart of downtown, but because all she had to do was take the elevator to the lobby, walk a single block 43 up State Street, turn left, and there she was, at the glass gates to the mother ship. I asked Dhara once if she wished she’d been around at Imego’s initial public offering, when twenty-five-year-olds woke up instant millionaires, and she said no, if she’d gotten that rich she might have cashed out early and started her own business, but it would have been a mistake to leave such a company. It’s like family, she’d said, then asked me, What would you do with all that money? And though I was pretty sure I would get a good robe and slippers and dust off A Brief History of the Fool, or begin writing a real novel, I said I’d quit and figure things out from there. What a pretty dream, I was thinking now, in our first week back to work after the New Year. If only I had that cash on hand I wouldn’t have worried about taking on another twelve hundred dollars a month. Dhara’s ultimatum left me no choice but to rent my father the apartment on the thirtieth floor of the east tower, across from our place. From our frozen balcony I could look down on his room. You wanted to keep an eye on him, Dhara said. Now you have your wish. With a pair of binoculars and a lot of time on my hands I could have played Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window. Tomorrow was the big move-in day, so I was distracted and restless at work. I’d been on the phone all morning with the rental office and the movers and my father, who would be driving the Mercury here—or at least that was the plan. I had tried to talk him into selling the car, but he said What’s next? My body for science? I wouldn’t have put it past him to get to the signs for I-55 and decide to head south toward St. Louis, then down along the great river, to Cape Girardeau, Memphis, through Mississippi, all the way to New Orleans, where someone would find him on a park bench in Jackson Square. I would have gone to Normal and driven him myself, but I was off the road that week because we were having a videoconference with the poobahs at corporate HQ, and we’d all been asked to stick around. Dhara knew I had little desire to rise...