Concrete Underground (2010) (7 page)

He continued, "That's an interesting name you have."

"It's short for Dedalus, but try going through elementary school introducing yourself as that," I explained.

"I see. Were your parents mythology buffs?"

I shook my head. "My dad had a hard-on for Joyce."

"Ah, of course," he said, tilting his head back. "I should have guessed from your sister's middle name, Jennifer Bloom." I was a little surprised by the mention of my sister, but I reasoned that it made sense for them to know of each other.

Max lifted his hand and casually pointed his index finger at me - not accusingly, but in the easy-going manner of someone accustomed to using his hands while speaking. "I read your article."

I couldn't help but crack a proud smile. "What did you think?"

"Loved it. I laughed so hard that I started crying." He replied with a good-natured smile. "I think it might have been above some people's heads though. I've heard that you've caused a bit of an uproar. But that's the true artist's burden, I suppose, to be unappreciated and misunderstood."

I wasn't sure if he was toying with me or if genuinely thought my article was supposed to be funny, but I decided to take advantage of the topic. "Well a lot of people don't believe your company actually confirmed that the e-mails I cited were real."

"Well, some people have just been around long enough to know you can't believe everything you read in the paper," he answered in a way that was dismissive without seeming like it was, very polite and personal. He gave me a wink, then turned away, clearly feeling he was done with the conversation.

I realized I was going to have to do something stupid to keep his attention. "You know, while we're on the subject, I recently read something funny in the paper myself," I blurted out. "It was a story in yesterday's
Morning-Star
that said a dead woman was found on the side of Highway 77."

Max stopped in his tracks - casually, not abruptly, keeping his posture relaxed and unconcerned. "I must have missed that one," he said, the practiced evenness of his voice not betraying anything. "What was funny about it?"

"Well, they kept saying she was found in a ditch, but there wasn't anything about how you found her three days earlier in the cabin of your private jet," I ventured in an increasingly adversarial tone. "You'd think that would be the kinda of detail a good reporter would mention."

Max paused, allowing time for that Cheshire Cat grin to creep slowly back into his face. "But that's assuming there are any good reporters left at the
Morning Star
." He broke out into laughter and slapped his hand against my back like we were old friends. In spite of myself, I cracked a smile. I wasn't sure if I wanted to take this guy out for a beer or punch him in his smug, pretty-boy face.

"Let's get out of here, and I'll show you where the real party is." Max turned to Columbine and continued, "How does that sound, Col? Are you ready to go backstage?"

7. No One Wants to Toil in Obscurity

Dylan Maxwell (Max to his friends) was the president/CEO/founder/whatever of Abrasax, one of the most successful dot-coms in the world and therefore one of the valley's largest employers and bona fide tax revenue cash-cow. This in turn made him one of the most powerful and influential people in the city. An active political fundraiser, patron of the arts, and venture capitalist - if you wanted to get anything done in this town, at some point you'd find yourself on hands and knees kissing those old red Chuck Taylors.

But all that was really just incidental - the thing that truly defined Max was his rock star mystique. Young, good-looking, charismatic, unconventional, and not afraid to say exactly what's on his mind, he had built up a strange cult of personality around himself that was as much about style as it was about the substance of Abrasax's business.

Anyone who ever wrote about the company said the same thing - Max ruled Abrasax with an iron fist. He personally oversaw everything from user interface and QA to design aesthetic and marketing campaigns. Employees evoked his name in debates like parish priests citing chapter and verse. The question wasn't
good-or-bad
,
right-or-wrong
- it
was
what will Max think?

As we got to know each other, he explained the situation to me like this: "It's not that dissent isn't tolerated. It just simply doesn't exist."

He gave me an example. "Say I pull some new concept out of my ass at the weekly executive meeting, some gem like 'user behavioral metrics' or 'achieving psychosocial harmonization' or whatever nonsense springs to mind. By the end of the day, you'll hear that same phrase echoing the halls throughout the entire campus. Everyone will be parroting it from the lowest mail room intern to the CFO's mistress."

But Max's professional life was only one part of the intricate personal mythology that had built up around him. The tales of excess and debauchery in his personal life were legendary. Max fucked the most beautiful people, ate at the most expensive restaurants, thoroughly trashed the most exclusive hotel rooms, and puked up the most exquisite liquors - all within conspicuous range of the camera's lens. He was like Keith Moon reincarnated with Bill Gates' bankroll in the age of
TMZ
. Tabloids and local bloggers ate his shtick up, further propagating and embellishing the myth.

Even his back story morphed and evolved to service the myth. The canonical version went like this:

Dylan Maxwell was a native of the city born into a solidly upper middle class family. His mother was an orthodontist, his father an accomplished composer who experimented with electronic music and had scored a few moderately successful films. He showed an interest in computers from an early age, encouraged by his father who was himself quite the technophile and always had the latest equipment for his son to tinker with. By the time Max entered high school he already had a lucrative part-time business designing web sites and software applications for local companies. He quickly expanded this gig to include security consulting by hacking into the sites of several major banks and government agencies, then telling them about it and offering to help them fix the vulnerabilities.

At the age of 16, Max passed the equivalency exam and dropped out of high school. This allowed him to devote himself to his computer work full time. He tried taking a few college courses but lost interest in them quickly. By the time he turned 18, he had turned down multiple offers for jobs and scholarships and instead decided to travel abroad. This was where the official record got hazy.

There were a number of outlandish stories of his two years overseas; talk to a dozen different people who profess to
know
, truly
know
Dylan Maxwell, and you'll get a dozen different accounts, each more preposterous than the last. From what I could deduce reading between the lines, he first spent half a year backpacking through Europe, then spent the rest of the time in southeast Asia where he studied for some indeterminate period in a Tibetan monastery.

Aside from that, the story was a
Choose Your Own Adventure
. Turn to page 23, Max loses his virginity to a window hooker in Amsterdam while tripping on LSD and mushrooms, and the experience is terrifying to both parties involved. Turn to page 32, Max falls madly in love with a teenage ladyboy in Bangkok. Turn to page 42, Max gets in a bar fight in the eastern side of Berlin with a group of skinheads and ends up slicing open one's throat with a broken whiskey bottle. Turn to page 66, Max joins up with an underground sect of Kali worshipers and participates in at least one ritual killing. At a certain point, I began to suspect that Max was deliberately leaking misinformation, but he vehemently denied this, instead preferring to compare the retelling of his life story to a game of Japanese Whispers.

In the end, all that really mattered was that the Max who returned to his home town two years later was no longer the shy, introverted kid who would rather stay inside pouring over lines of code than go outside and play baseball or talk to girls. The new Max wasted no time in making the rounds to potential investors to pitch his new startup, Abrasax.

Initially just a search engine, the company quickly expanded its reach to include e-mail, social networking, online storage and hosting, software development, and finally the web-based operating system Envisage that moved the user's entire computing experience onto Abrasax's servers. Max promoted it as giving users the freedom to access their documents and run their applications anywhere, any time, and on any computer. Critics complained that Abrasax would share user's data with advertisers to help target their marketing and in the process drive up Abrasax's own fees. However, the company's overwhelming surge in users and ad revenue ensured that critics were swiftly marginalized.

---

Max led Columbine and me to a remote part of the warehouse through a confusing series of twists and turns that I couldn't have possibly replicated. I would have sworn for a while it felt like we were just going in circles, except we never passed the same point twice. We finally arrived at a dead end wall - a real solid wall, not just more black curtains. It had three doors, each a different color - red, black, and white. There was a small white plastic placard affixed to the wall between the first and second doors, which read:

Gallery of Locked Doors

Or, Bell Out of Order

In the lower right corner was the same small crown and globe symbol from the back of the rave card.

There was another group of people looking at the gallery - two couples, visibly drunk, laughing hysterically as they tried unsuccessfully to open the doors, twisting and yanking on door knobs and knocking repeatedly. They straightened up as they saw us approach and started to walk away.

As he passed me, one of the men said, "Good luck."

Once they turned the corner, leaving no one in sight but the three of us, Max pulled out an old-fashioned bit key made out of red metal. He slid it into the lock of the red door and turned the knob. It opened, and he stepped to one side to let us through.

"Who needs luck when you've got a key?" I said as I passed him.

"Precisely," Max said, tapping the butt of the key to my chest.

The door led to a descending flight of stairs. As we started down, I asked Max, "What's that symbol about on the placard out there?"

"That's the symbol for the Highwater Society. It lets us know where to find each other," he answered.

"And what exactly is the Highwater Society?" I pressed.

"You're about to meet them."

The stairs brought us into a large, dimly-lit room adorned lavishly in reds and blacks. One side was a lounge area with a wet bar where about twenty people were hanging out - all young, beautiful, and immaculately dressed, drinking and talking too loudly in the way that only people who are desperate to be noticed can, like they are daring you not to eavesdrop.

Brian was there. So was Lily. Neither seemed happy to see me.

Columbine walked over to the bar and greeted Lily with a hug. Max exchanged brief greetings with a few of the other guests before being approached by a short man with prematurely thinning hair in an ostentatiously expensive suit.

"It's getting late. When do we start?" he asked testily as he tapped his watch.

Max reached out to pinch his cheek and cooed condescendingly, "Patience, Peterman. I have to be a gracious host and show my guest around."

"We've been waiting here for two hours," the other man responded.

"Then I'm sure you can wait a little bit longer. In the meantime, why not try enjoying yourself a little? Everyone else seems to be," Max replied, and then added with a vicious grin, "And if you get really bored, I'm sure Lilian will be happy to entertain you."

"How am I supposed to do that?" Lily asked.

Max formed his lips into an "O" and held his right hand up in front of his mouth, curling his fingers into a circle and jerking it back and forth rhythmically while digging his tongue into the inside of his cheek to mime a blowjob. Lily fumed silently, not daring to fire back at her boss.

Max let out a small chuckle and led me by the arm to the far side of the room, which was dominated by a wall of video monitors, mixing boards, and other heavy-duty A/V equipment. The monitors displayed feeds from the surveillance cameras in the main art galleries. Six people sat in a row in front of the monitor bank, each wearing a pair of headphones that were plugged into the mixing consoles and presumably wired into the microphones upstairs.

Three of them were clustered in a group, obviously drunk and having a laugh. They giggled and commented back and forth playfully on what they were seeing and hearing.

Another was a serious young woman who was watching with a furrowed brow and scribbling notes furiously. Venturing a guess, I decided she looked like an anthropologist or sociology grad student doing research for some kind of dissertation or whatever it is that people who actually went to college do.

The man at the far end was obviously getting his jollies off. All of his monitors were tuned into cameras showing young women, and he had one hand buried discreetly under the mixing desk.

The man at the central console was older than the rest, with salt-and pepper hair and a strange blue birthmark on the bridge of his nose that was shaped kind of like a question mark. He sat back in his chair as if to take in as much as possible; he looked like a king surveying his kingdom. I stepped in for a closer look. His eyes darted to and fro quickly, jumping from one screen to the next in a seemingly random sequence.

I felt Max move in behind me. "That's Ben Garza. You should step back. Watchers rarely like it when they're the ones being watched."

I picked up one of the free headsets, which was plugged into a jack labeled
Confessionals
, and raised it to my ear. A woman's voice came through sounding raw and sullen, as if she had been crying. There was something familiar about it. She said, "I wonder if I ever even had a chance of being happy. Like if I had made different choices, if I hadn't fucked things up so bad, would it have made a difference? I wonder if there's some other world out there, some alternate universe where I ended up happy."