Snitch World (8 page)

“It took all the persuasion this girl could muster to get
them to bump it from Saturday night. I bought you twelve hours.”

“Twelve hours,” Phillip repeated numbly.

“Aren’t you going to thank me?”

“I’m …” Phillip toasted the air in front of him. “Pulverized with gratitude.”

“Mere gratitude will get you nowhere,” Marci pounced. “What I need is results. What I need is code that doesn’t crash. What I need is the Phillip I went to college with, the Phillip who was too shy to sleep with me, the Phillip who wrote the code that caused our class robot to chain-saw MIT’s robot in half and, when the contest committee disassembled our code, the first thing they discovered was seventeen bytes in the credit header that spelled out
I
Marci Kessler
, including the extravagant three spaces, and the second thing they found out was that there wasn’t an unoriginal thought in the whole twenty-five thousand instructions.”

“But Marci,” Phillip protested, “that was a robot. This is a fucking secondary app for a lonely hearts site designed to filter out date-rape potential.”

“
So?
”

Phillip downed the second half of the first half-glass, set the empty down on the table next to him, and picked up the second half-glass. “So robots are not people,” he pointed out.

“What’s that got to do with anything?” Marci screamed. If they’d been video-conferencing, Marci could have seen Phillip shrug as he switched the phone to his other ear and downed the first half of the second half-glass of wine. “What it’s got to do with, Marci,” he said as he lowered the glass, “is cache. People algorithms need bigger caches than robot algorithms.” He burped. “It’s—excuse me—that simple.”

He could hear Marci taking a deep breath. “Phillip,” she finally said. “How much is Corazonics paying you?”

“You know damn well how much you’re paying me,” Phillip told the phone. “To the penny.”

“That’s right, Phillip. To the penny. But I want to hear it from you.”

“A hundred and twenty-five dollars an hour,” Phillip said wearily. And it used to be worth it, he annotated to himself.

“That’s right,” Marci told him. “How often do you bill?”

“Every two weeks.”

“And the last invoice?”

“Well I’m glad you brought that up, Marci,” Phillip said, assuming the role of aggressor. He took a look at the screen of his phone and paged past the newly arrived pdf along with several recent text and voice messages until he’d accessed his cloud-based consultancy spreadsheet: “$18,375.”

Despite her considerable crust, Marci gasped. “A tidy sum,” she finally managed to point out.

“I earned every fucking cent of it,” Phillip said evenly. “Do you know how much of my life that bill represents?”

“I’m sure it’s on the invoice,” Marci hedged.

“One hundred and forty-seven hours,” Phillip told her. “Two seven-day weeks of ten-and-a-half-hour days. And just in case forty thousand lines of C-plus-plus don’t verify that I was at least near the job if not on it, your brand-new and totally insulting electronic pass-key system will. I was on the job and on the case—compiling, debugging, running … On fumes, I might add, though I would stipulate they were high-octane fumes. As a matter of fact, Marci, I’ve been noticing something lately.”

“Don’t change the subject,” Marci said quickly. A little too quickly.

“Well, Marci,” Phillip said calmly, “I’m not changing the subject. Not really.”

“Phillip …”

“When we got into this deal,” Phillip interrupted, “I was promised equity.”

“And when there is some goddamn equity,” Marci came back, “you’ll be the first to know.”

Phillip took a beat. He looked at his pasta. Without even tasting it, he knew it had gone as cold as the untouched salad. Cold as the heart on the other end of the phone. Too cold for nourishment. Now he said, as if offhandedly, “I been hearing about an IPO.”

Marci said nothing.

“Marci?”

“Phillip?”

“Well?”

“Well what?”

“I-P-O.”

“That’d be sweet,” she hedged.

“Especially if we had something written down.”

Silence.

“My bad, of course,” Phillip said simply. “For not getting something in writing, I mean.”

More silence.

“My badder,” Phillip continued, still with the calm voice, “for trusting you.”

Silence.

“Know how I found out about it?”

No response.

“It’s written on the back of the door of the second stall in the 27th-floor men’s restroom. That’s how.”

Silence.

“Talk about your sit-down blog.”

Silence.

“Huh, Marci?”

Silence.

“What’s the deal, here? You know and I know that programmers don’t come much better than me, and the ones that do, you can’t afford. They’re all contractually locked up—and the key to that lock is equity. As if you didn’t know. So I ask myself, Self, what’s with all this pressure? This deal sucks. All I do is work, my work’s never sufficient or good enough, there’s always more to do than any one single programmer can do, and, for the last few months, it’s always been about stupid modules that have little or nothing to do with our original mission statement, which is, get this app up and running and selling, take it public, cash out, and get on to the next thing. Am I right?”

After a long pause, Marci sighed and said, “That was the deal. It still is.”

“How many partners are there again?”

“You know the answer to that as well as I do.”

“You, Steve, Vikram, Bill, Mary P., Mary Y. Is that all of them?”

As if reluctantly, Marci filled in a blank with, “You forgot Steve’s father.”

“Ah yes. The seed money. I guess you’re not going to shaft him.” After a pause, Phillip repeated the statement as a question. “I guess you’re not going to shaft Steve’s father?”

More silence.

“Marci?” he said incredulously.

“Yes, Phillip?” came the chilly response.

Game over, Phillip said to himself. Phillip turned the stem of his wineglass between his fingers. The tablecloth beneath began to twist. One fucking year. He turned the stem the other way. The cloth untwisted. If only it were so simple. Times like these, he said to himself, it’s best not
to be drinking so much. He lifted the glass and downed half of it. Or not at all, he added, setting the glass back on the table. If you don’t watch your own back, he reflected bitterly, nobody’s going to watch it for you. Not even your own son.

Maybe especially not even your own son.

“Phillip …” Marci began tentatively.

Certainly not your longest acquaintance and best friend from technical college, the sharpest manager you’d thought you ever met, and good-looking, too—although what that latter qualification had to do with the equation, he’d long since forgotten. Why, after all, expect her to watch your back, when she’s obviously been exclusively preoccupied for a long time with watching her own?

Phillip sighed heavily, and his entire frame sagged. He’d been harboring a lot of tension for a lot of time, and he knew it, even as he denied it. Though he’d seen this confrontation coming for a while, he’d refused to allow himself to believe its subject. Marci Marci Marci. Sold out, copped out, and with a little help from the fiancé, whom Phillip had always pegged as venal, dishonest, corruptible, clutching for the main chance—mere emotional or maybe human entanglements from the past be damned.

“I’m sorry, Phillip,” Marci suddenly said.

He almost didn’t hear it. “Sorry?” he repeated.

Marci said nothing.

“Are you going to pay that invoice?” he asked.

“I’ll … see what I can do.”

“It’s not my fault it was bullshit work,” Phillip reminded her. “Work tasked to me specifically to force me to quit.” He took a beat. “Right?”

“You’ve no call to take that attitude,” Marci said quickly. “It’s not like we haven’t already paid you—how much?”

“Well over three hundred thou,” Phillip said immediately.

“Not bad for one year,” she suggested.

“One year of my life,” he agreed. “One year without even the time to pick up my dry-cleaning. Though I was looking at it as an investment.”

“Well,” she said, “what did you do with the money?” Phillip pursed his lips. Less rent on his crummy apartment, and the occasional fleeting and very modest night out, like this one, he still had most of it. “That’s none of your business, Marci. Not to mention, it’s beside the point.”

“What point?”

“You’re shafting me. You know it, I know it, all the aforementioned shitheads know it and—what I consider worse?”

“What do you consider worse, Phillip?” Marci said, suddenly coming on with the acid tone. “Darfur? Bangladesh?”

“What’s worse,” Phillip said, declining to take the bait, “is that if I knew it I suppressed it, and if I suppressed it it’s because I trusted you and your shitbird husband-to-be.”

“Let’s leave Billy out of this.”

“Leave Bill out this? Gladly. Only it’s not possible. Or—hey, maybe it is possible. One thing would make it possible. One thing.”

“What thing is that?”

He was testing her attention span. He could hear the strain. She was probably already browsing the latest posts to her bridal registry. The conversation was almost over. All he had to do was quit and they could hang up and everybody could get on to the next multiplicity of tasks.

“That thing would be this: that you set me up for this from the beginning. You recruited me into the start-up, there was a promise of equity, it was a promise that you never intended to fulfill. True or false? If true, well, sure: I’ll gladly leave Bill out of it.”

“What are you saying, Phillip?” There was nothing but ice in her voice now, arctic ice, many feet deep.

“I’m saying … I’m saying …” Phillip stared at the inch of Sangiovese that remained in the second glass, which was actually his third glass. It would have been nice to throw it across the room. A mere gesture, but nice. Ditto, it would have perhaps been satisfying to turn over the table. It may even have been conciliatory to duke it out with the staff. But there was no percentage there. No equity … They just ran a modest little cucina Italiana, and they ran it well. The food was good. The wine was reasonably priced. It wasn’t their fault that Phillip was in bed with the wrong people in some other business in some other location. No. That was Phillip’s fault, and Phillip’s fault only. Phillip had only the one person to blame, himself to blame, and it was a lesson that perhaps most people who had managed to achieve the ripe old age of twenty-six had already learned but had somehow eluded him.

Until tonight.

“I quit,” Phillip told his phone.

“Submit that in writing,” Marci said quickly. “Word the document as a respectful resignation, along with a quit-claim, and send me the pdf. Include with it a copy of your final invoice marked net five and say as much. I’ll see that you’re paid in full within sixty days, and we’ll give you our highest recommendation.”

Before Phillip could point out that net five means five business days, not thirty or sixty, she rang off.

He rested his phone hand on the red and white checked table cloth. The phone was hot and so was his right ear. Both were hotter than his meal.

He stared at the nearly full bowl of pasta puttanesca in front of him.

He tugged the red and white checked napkin away from his shirt collar, dabbed his lips
pro forma
, and laid it neatly atop his salad fork.

One year, he was thinking, if he was thinking anything at all. But he’d known Marci since Computer Club in high school, which made ten years, or thirty-eight percent of his life, and that seemed a treachery no amount of cognition could rectify.

An odd noise from the phone let Phillip know that its battery was low.

Phillip drew his attention to the phone. On its screen various widgets blinked, spun, floated, came and went. Of the five of them Phillip had written single-handedly, Corazonics controlled three.

Let it die.

He dropped the phone in his breast pocket.

After paying the bill, Phillip wandered north on Kearny to the intersection at Columbus. There, at Café Niebaum-Coppola, he sat still long enough to purchase and consume a shot of Haitian rum with an espresso. But the place was too brightly lit, and the movie posters and the crowd they attracted did nothing for him. He crossed Kearny and then Washington and stepped into Mr. Bings, where he ordered a rum and coke. Before long he abandoned the drink and a ten-dollar bill on the bar because the European football game on the big screen only aggregated to the perceived sumtotal of meaninglessness. From there he drifted up the block to Vesuvio, where he lingered over another rum and coke long enough to watch a chess game. But it turned out the two players were recreating a game Samuel Beckett designed to be played in the madhouse toward the end of
Murphy
, which Phillip only divined because one of the players was calling out the moves from a copy of the novel. In the first half of the game, the pieces tentatively advance toward one another. In the second half, they retreat. What’s the point?

He wandered up the avenue. He crossed Broadway,
took a left on Vallejo, a right on Powell. At the far end of the block, where Powell comes back to Columbus, he hit an ATM for two hundred dollars, around which he folded the dwindling remains of the previous two hundred dollars, inserting the resulting sheaf of bills into the right front pocket of his jeans, beneath the skirt of the tweed jacket he’d bought at Barney’s, in New York, the year they’d won the battle of the robots. It was the only tweed jacket he owned, and it had leather patches on its elbows.