Jonathan Tropper Read online

  “It’s mine,” Mike whined, cowering behind Tommy.

  Rael ignored him, his eyes never leaving Tommy’s. After a few seconds, Tommy said, “Whatever,” and tossed the two halves of the photo disgustedly to the floor. “Let’s go,” he said to Mike. “He probably wants to beat off to his father’s whore.”

  After they were gone, Rael handed me the pieces with a sympathetic frown, and then leaned against the door as I tore furiously at the photo until it was scattered like confetti at my feet, hot tears running down my face in a steady stream. Who the fuck said anything about a divorce?

  This is what happens. Your father shreds the family with his repeated infidelities and then takes off for parts unknown, leaving you and your siblings to stumble into a new philosophy as to what life is all about. You’re the oldest and therefore feel the greatest sense of betrayal as you witness the extinguished eyes of your mother, the sullen glare of your younger brother Matt, who denies that he’s crying himself to sleep at night even though you can plainly hear him, and Pete, whose lack of comprehension should be viewed as a blessing in this instance, but in whose uncompromising, sweet demeanor you see only a reminder of the depth of your father’s transgressions. You see the members of your family floating in their own separate orbits of misery, and you vow to replace your worthless father, to provide the strength and guidance your siblings need, to take what weight you can off your mother’s shoulders so that maybe the light will return to her eyes, the easy laughter and affection you’d always taken for granted. Maybe Matt will start smiling again, and stop playing alone in his room with his action figures, and maybe it will feel like a family again, instead of an ongoing funeral. You’re twelve years old, and you don’t yet know that you don’t know shit. You’re just determined to be everything your father wasn’t, for them and for yourself, and it takes a while for you to understand that it’s not within your power to undo the damage that Norm did, that the injuries go much deeper. By then, your determination not to emulate him has become something of an obsession, and it’s a point of pride whenever you can point to the ways in which you’re avoiding your progenitor’s defective character. I’m not like him becomes your mantra, and while you would never cop to it, it may very well have become your universal philosophy boiled down to its absolute essence.

  Chapter 4

  I ride the subway in misery, my thoughts condensed into a chain of four words repeated in an endless loop to the beat of the rhythmic drumming of the subway car. Blood in my urine–blood in my urine–blood in my urine. I disembark at Times Square and head east to Sixth Avenue, arriving at work only a half hour late, tense and distracted, the dash of crimson against white porcelain still haunting me. What does it mean?

  I work for the Spandler Corporation. We are a three-hundred-million-dollar business, with offices in twelve states. We have over five hundred employees. We are known throughout the country as a leader in the industry. Our customers rely heavily on us. We produce nothing. We sell nothing. We buy nothing. If we didn’t exist, Kafka would have to invent us.

  We call ourselves supply-chain consultants. We call ourselves outsourcing specialists. But our true vocation can be summed up in one word. We are middlemen.

  We service the world’s largest companies in the overseas manufacturing of their products. We know where to go for everything you need. We have relationships with every possible type of manufacturing facility you can imagine, and many that would never occur to you. We might order ribbons from China, fabric from Italy to be upholstered in Canada on diecut metal from Los Angeles, injected molded plastic tags from Korea, acrylic trays from Taiwan, brushed-aluminum signs from Providence, custom wooden hangers from Slovakia that will be silk-screened in Weehawken, New Jersey. We know who’s reliable and who isn’t, who’s expensive and who’s cheap. We know what to watch out for, the pitfalls to avoid. You can try to do it yourself, but if you want it brought in on time and under budget, you’d be well advised to call us.

  I am a middleman. I hate my job.

  I am the conduit between the client and the vast, stratified world of design and manufacturing. I translate abstract needs into reality, concept into construct. I am the voice of reason and experience. I bring to the vendor much-needed work, and to the client desperately sought product. I get yelled at a lot.

  When you’re a middleman, everything is always your fault.

  My computer monitor tells me that I have fifty-seven new e-mails. I delete the spam and the forwarded jokes from associates with too much free time, and now I’m down to eighteen. I dash off a few quick reports to a handful of my clients, updating them on the progress of their ongoing projects, and then call some vendors to remind them of impending deadlines. At the Spandler Corporation, we spend our days making three kinds of phone calls. We call our vendors to hound them about schedules and late deliveries; we call our clients to reassure them that everything is on schedule or to get blamed because it isn’t; and we call potential clients to kiss the asses of the people who will one day blame us for everything. When you’re a middleman, the only good phone call is no phone call, and there are never no phone calls.

  Craig Hodges, my contact at Nike, has already left me two urgent voice mails. I am manufacturing a quarter of a million acrylic versions of the Nike logo, referred to reverently as the “swoosh,” that will be mounted on the top of a new sneaker rack Nike will be rolling out to shoe stores across the country. Craig had asked to see a preliminary sample before we shipped the order from China, so I had them FedEx him a boxful. According to his messages, something is wrong with the samples.

  “The color is off,” he tells me when I call him back.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean it’s the wrong color,” Craig says testily. “It’s supposed to be blue, and these pieces are purple.” Craig is a few years older than me, tall, angular, and uptight as all get-out. I took him out to dinner once, and he drank too much and told me how lonely he was. Nike has him doing the job of three men, and he always sounds inches away from shouting.

  “Hang on a second,” I say, leafing through my file. I find Craig’s spec sheet, on which he’s listed the PMS color, and then look up that number in my Pantone color chart. It’s purple. I check again and am flooded with a sense of relief as it becomes apparent that the fuckup wasn’t mine. “Craig,” I say. “You specified PMS number 2597. According to my chart, that’s purple.”

  “What are you talking about?” Craig says, his voice flying up a few notches on the hysteria meter. I hear the frantic shuffling of papers on his desk. “Holy crap,” he finally says, having located his copy. “That’s not the right number.”

  “It’s the number you gave me.”

  “This won’t work,” he says. “The fixture is done in blue. The entire rollout is done in the blue. The swoosh has to be blue.”

  I remain silent as I check the ship date of the order. It’s this coming Friday, which means a quarter of a million purple swooshes have already been produced in Qingdao, China, packed into custom cartons, and loaded into four containers, which may still be sitting on the factory grounds or may have already left by truck to the port. The fact that the order is on time would normally be great news, would be cause for goddamn celebration, but today it is nothing less than a catastrophe. Somewhere there will be a quarter of a million sneaker racks unable to ship because the crowning swooshes are the wrong color. Late racks mean no product in the stores, which means lost sales for Nike, which means Craig is fucked. There is ironclad documentation, in both hard copy and e-mail, that this is clearly not my fault, but now it’s definitely my problem.

  “Where are you in production?” Craig asks. It’s a stupid question. We both know the order is scheduled to ship this week.

  “I’ll have to check with the vendor,” I say. “But based on the ship date, I would have to say that they’re either shipped or waiting to be processed at the port.”

  “Fuck.” A silence grows between us and I can almost hea
r Craig’s mind racing, not for a solution but simply to come up with a way to make the whole thing my fault. “You know,” he says after a bit, and I can feel his sweat dripping through the phone, “the whole point of getting a sample is to be able to approve it before the production run. I never would have allowed production to go forward if I’d seen this earlier.”

  “You asked for an accelerated lead time,” I say. “You got your production sample less than two weeks after placing the order. That’s standard. The only reason you can’t make changes is that you moved your ship date up by three weeks.”

  Thrust and parry, but all very pointless. The middleman can never win these duels. If I stick to my guns, I’ll never do business with Nike again.

  “Zack,” Craig says, adopting a false tone of rationality. “Get in touch with your vendor and see what you can do for me, okay? There’s a lot more business behind this order, but the first one has to be a home run for me to keep you in the system here.” Translation: Craig will blame this on me when he speaks to his bosses, I’ll lose my largest account, and the Spandler Corporation will be blackballed.

  I sigh. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  “Thanks, man.”

  “Don’t thank me yet.”

  “Thanks, man,” Craig says firmly, and hangs up.

  It’s deep-fried fuckups like this that keep the burnout rate so high here. Just last week, Clay Matthews, who sat three cubicles down from me, became the latest casualty. First we all heard the screams. Motherfucker! You fucking bastards! Will you just fucking die! By the time we’d all gotten off our conference calls or e-mails, the demolition had begun. Clay’s phone came flying out of his cubicle at a fearsome velocity, leaving a cone-shaped dent in the plasterboard wall before it hit the floor. Then he came charging into the hall, crazed and red-faced, his comb-over flapping maniacally behind him, stomped on the phone until it lay in barely connected pieces, and then kicked those pieces down the hall. If he noticed the lot of us rubbernecking, he didn’t let on, but stormed back inside, yelling “Fuck!” at the top of his lungs. Who knew Clay had such range? He ran the office football pool with such calm efficiency. His computer monitor soon followed, and that made a hell of a noise, a small explosion really, when it hit the ground. Bill, our boss, was too economy minded to spring for flat-screens, so Clay had the full benefit of a forty-pound Dell monitor to punctuate his fury. When the HP LaserJet 2200d followed a few seconds later, the mild, crumpling sound it made as it hit the floor paled by comparison. After that, Clay disappeared into his cube for a bit, and all we could do was listen to the mayhem as he tore up files and threw framed pictures at the wall, kicking and overturning his furniture as he went. Finally, he stepped into the hall, sweat-stained shirt untucked, tie wildly askew, face dripping and throbbing, and sank down to the floor, leaning against the wall, head in hands, quietly sobbing. He had calmed down somewhat by the time security arrived to escort him from the building, and actually appeared happy and relaxed as they led him to the elevators, nodding his head as if he could give a shit.

  Clay had it coming. He broke the 80/20 rule and he broke the lead-time rule. There are many principles we live by here at the Spandler Corporation, and you can maybe bend a few of them when the moment demands it, but there are some rules that can’t be bent at the same time, or they’ll bury you. Clay depended on less than twenty percent of his client base for over eighty percent of his revenue. He allowed his largest client to become his only client, and he compounded that error by allowing his client to pressure him into a lead time he couldn’t live with. Poor schmuck was living on borrowed time.

  I shook my head and pursed my lips solemnly like everyone else, but the truth was, I envied Clay. I envied him his violence, his release, and most of all his escape. He needed to get out, to alleviate the pressure that was closing in on him from all four sides, and goddamn if he didn’t do just that. Clay lost it, Clay was insane, Clay went postal, but the bottom line was this: Clay had stepped out of the middle. He was free.

  I go through my papers and schedules in a futile attempt to come up with some miraculous solution to the Nike problem, but I already know the score. Craig fucked up, but I’m the one who’s screwed. I can still see the expression on Clay’s face as they led him away, surprised and unsure, but maybe a little exultant as well. When you start envying people their nervous breakdowns, it’s probably time to start examining your own life a bit more closely.

  Then this: I have to pee.

  The light tickle in my bladder is no doubt the same as always, but now it’s also a symptom of something as yet unidentified, filling me with dread even as it demands release. I distractedly navigate the maze of cubicles, the hushed sounds of commerce emanating from behind the upholstered walls buzzing in my ear like an insect, and enter the restroom, where I find the unfortunately named Bill Cockburn, our group manager, scrupulously scrubbing his hands, looking every inch the head honcho, in a blue striped oxford, burgundy tie, and matching suspenders. “Morning, Zack,” he says crisply, eyeing me in the mirror.

  “Morning,” I say.

  “How’s it going?”

  “Super.”

  The trick with Bill is to say as little as possible. He is notorious for his long-winded lectures on salesmanship, and you never know when a simple pleasantry might trigger a mini Dale Carnegie seminar. You know Bill. You’ve seen him on airplanes, speaking too loud to the poor bastard in the seat next to him about the stock market, or about the latest PDA applications, or the flaw in Amazon’s business model, and you’ve thought to yourself, If he’s such hot shit, why is he flying coach? In his midfifties, with a fleshy, mottled complexion and an erratically receding hairline, he believes there is no problem that can’t be solved with a ten-minute PowerPoint presentation. Bill worships devotedly at the altar of corporate management, a firm believer in systems, an ardent user of buzzwords. He is forever “touching base,” “making sure we’re on the same page,” and asking to be “kept in the loop.” He is all about making the sale, closing the deal. Bill’s system of management is to dispense the myriad inspirational truisms he’s accumulated in his thirty years in the trenches, delivering these adages to us in the manner of a Zen master guiding us toward enlightenment. “Sell to the masses, eat with the classes,” Bill says. “Don’t lead with your chin,” Bill says. “Measure twice, cut once,” Bill says. “Sell yourself, then your product,” Bill says. “The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step,” Bill says.

  Bill would be significantly more convincing if he weren’t the oldest executive in middle management by at least ten years. He carries with him the smell of stale coffee and bad aftershave, and wears the haggard expression of a man struggling under the weight of his own mediocrity. He is a career middleman, and a stark reminder that I have to get the hell out of here before I become him.

  “I see from your Open Order Report that you’re shipping the Nike signage,” he says, drying his hands painstakingly with a paper towel.

  “That’s right,” I say. Bill might as well stay in the restroom, because he’s going to shit a brick when he finds out what’s going on with the Nike order.

  “What’s that, hot-stamped acrylic?”

  “Silk-screened.”

  “Ah,” he says, nodding sagely. Bill knows from silk-screening, the nod says.

  “Congratulations, Zack,” he says, grabbing another towel. “Reeling in Nike was a major coup. I’d watch that one carefully.” He looks into the mirror and all but pulls out a compass and protractor to align his necktie.

  “Thanks,” I say, desperate for him to leave so that I can pee in private. The pink, virgin skin peeking out from underneath his deteriorating scalp is making me think of chemo and radiation, and the word “cancer” floats ominously across an LCD display in my brain.

  Bill finally leaves me in an aphorismic cloud. He cautions me to stay on top of it. You have to crawl before you walk. You can never have too many caring eyes. And finally, stepping out of the men
’s room, he lobs back one of his favorites: You don’t get a second chance to make a first impression.

  I dash into a stall, unzipping as I go. My urine stream has returned to its customary vibrant yellow, and watching it, I feel my hopes soar, as I detect no traces of the faint rust coloring from this morning. I feel a smile forming in the corners of my mouth, and a great bubble of relief rises up in my chest as I zip up my fly. This morning was just a fluke, a mild physiological burp, and nothing more. But then, as I lean in to flush, my eye is caught by a tiny splash of color floating in the bowl, a red liquid nucleus with tentacles that swirl and fade into the dominating field of translucent yellow. Damn.

  Washing my hands, I find myself wondering what a tumor actually looks like.

  I spend the next hour scouring medical Web sites, searching for possible answers. The presence of blood in the urine is called hematuria. It may be caused by an injury to the urinary tract or by the passing of kidney stones, but my lack of pain seems to rule out those possibilities in favor of various vascular diseases, kidney ailments, tumors, and of course bladder cancer. My phone rings. I ignore it.

  I retrieve my doctor’s number from my PalmPilot and call his office. He’s with a patient, I’m told by the receptionist. Would I care to hold? I would. I am treated to the Muzak version of the Stones’ “Ruby Tuesday.” Ruby red, I think, and we’re back to the blood in my toilet.

  “Hello, Zachary,” Dr. Cleeman says. “How are you?”

  In no mood to exchange pleasantries is how I am, so I dive right in and tell him. He asks me a few questions. Has it ever happened before? About how much blood? Was there any pain? He puts me on hold for a minute and comes back with the number and address of a urologist.