The Glass Factory (10 page)

“Just the plain old Administration Building? No Carters?” No answer.

Only about half the ceiling lights are on, and the “Down” escalators aren’t working. Add a volcano out back and it’d be the State University of Ecuador. I find a nice, helpful guy, a graduate assistant in the Academic Vice President’s Office. He’s kind of cute, and I can see that he likes Latin women (he lets Antonia play with his computer), but I can also see the photos of his wife and two kids on the desk. He tells me the person I need to see is Phil Gates down in the Business Office. He shows me the way, leading us down the stairs to a bunkerlike suite of offices in the basement with only two windows—both in the boss’s private office—and he’s gone from my life.

The secretary’s got about four phone lines buzzing, so I lean into an office and ask who I should be speaking to. The woman jumps as if a mongoose has been dropped down the back of her dress and blurts out, “What about?” as if Perry Mason’s just caught her with a blood-soaked meat cleaver in her hands.

“About the technology incubator.”

“You’ll have to speak to Franklin Schmidt.” And she turns back to her terminal fast enough to dislodge even the most determined mongoose.

“Frank,” says the short, muscular guy in the next office. “Call me Frank. Everybody does.”

He’s got hairy arms and a raspy five o’clock shadow, and it isn’t even lunchtime yet. He looks like he’s been out of college maybe two years, where he majored in racquetball, and has connections of some kind because he’s starting at the bottom as assistant to the vice president. I tell him the company I work for is looking to try out some new production techniques, and we need affordable space and access to minds that are willing to experiment. I’ve worked enough with computers over the years to fake a pretty good line. But the presence of Antonia is putting him off. He’s still enough of a kid to regard it as highly abnormal to have one yourself. It drops my credibility from an A- to a B+.

But I get in to see the boss. I can see that Frank Schmidt got all the hair in this duo, because Phil Gates is a pudgy, balding, middle-aged guy, and he is
totally
unhelpful. He takes one look at the kid and just
knows
I can’t be a professional. I ask to see information about the companies that are already using the incubator space and he says, “Why?”

“It’s public information, isn’t it?”

“Rival companies aren’t covered by the statute.”

The fuck they aren’t.

I tell him my supervisor will be contacting him, and prepare to go. But Antonia insists on a drink of water. So I’m wrestling with the cooler when Phil Gates leans out of his office and yells, “Kate! I wanted those cover proofs ten minutes ago!”

A woman skitters out of her office clutching a dozen glossy images and hands them over to Gates. He flips through them, tosses ten in the garbage, hands back two: “These are all right. Do the others over.”

When he’s gone, Antonia looks through the garbage and announces, “I like them.” As I’m pulling her away from the garbage in front of Gates’s office, the proof-woman treads lightly up behind me and whispers, “It’s not a child-friendly office. I think the boss eats them for breakfast.”

I catch myself for a moment, and look at her: She’s—well—stunning, a few inches taller than me, thin, with a creamy Pre-Raphaelite complexion, thick jet-black hair and eyebrows and a wide, flat nose that must have come from some passing salesman or wandering Semite two or three generations back because the rest of her is purebred Italian-American. The nameplate on her door says
KATHERINA
MINOLA.

“Is that you?” I ask.

“You know, I often ask myself that,” she says, smiling, and she backsteps into her office like a kimono-clad geisha.

I follow her in and Antonia goes, “Oh my God!” at all the colors and shapes jutting from the walls and surfaces like Technicolor stalactites in an underground cavern.

“You wanna see this?” says Katherina, holding out a purple plastic tube. “Here. Look.”

“What do you say?” I perform my parental duty.

“Thank you,” Antonia performs hers.

“This end,” says Katherina, reversing the tube for Antonia to look through, then she brings her swivel lamp down and shines it right at her.

“This is cool!” says Antonia.

“She got that from me,” I explain.

“I figured.”

Antonia is going nuts over this thing.

“You have to rotate it,” says Katherina, demonstrating. Antonia gasps. Just the way I would have.

“Can I see it?”

“Sure.”

“Give mommy a turn, Antonia.” I look in. What I see is a subtle explosion of color, nongeometric, just a jumble of shapes, but the blending of colors is a slight foretaste of heaven. “Wow. What is it?”

“It’s a kaleidoscope. Only instead of mirrors and colored plastic I cut up paper-thin diffraction gratings and translucent polarized plastic and float them in a semiviscous polymer—it’s the polarized light that does it. The pattern
never
repeats. Kind of like genetics,” she says, patting Antonia’s head. “Completely nonoscillatory and aperiodic.”

“You lost me there,” I confess.

“Oh, just designer talk.”

“Is that what you do?”

“What I do is make all the flack these guys produce look good. And wouldn’t you know—”

She must have the feel of this office down to an instinct, because at that precise instant Frank Schmidt pokes his head in the door and asks to see the page proofs for the new brochure that has to go to press by 3:00
P.M.
Katherina angles the twenty-four-inch color monitor on her Unisystems 2000 towards him and gives him a whirlwind walking tour of the graphic layout she has created for whatever drivel they have churned out in the next office. All I can say is it looks beautiful, and this woman’s talents are wasted in this place. Schmidt looks satisfied, but gives me the eye long enough for the fluorescent light to start playing tricks with me—his shirt is just so white, his skin, the walls behind him so white—that I just lose all sense of depth perception trying to focus on him.

“I’ve got to get back to work,” says Katherina. That gets rid of Schmidt. Her volume drops a bit: “Now what are you looking for?”

“I’d like to see some information about what Morse Techtonics is doing with the incubator space.”

“I don’t see a problem with that. Why?”

I’ve got three stories prepared, but somehow I don’t feel like lying to this woman.

“Private reasons.”

She eyes me.

“I’m not after his secret formula for Coca-Cola.”

Just then the shape of Phil Gates blocks the doorway and he says, “I don’t see how it can be helping you get your work done when somebody’s in here with you.”

“I was just admiring the new logo. That’s just what this university needs,” I say. “We’ll be going now.”

Gates glares at me, then walks away, satisfied.

I turn back to Katherina, lower my voice even further: “It could be a good way to get back at your boss.”

“And why would I want to do that?”

Because he’s an asshole, that’s why. But I say, “He doesn’t want to give me any information about Morse’s private use of the incubator site. Why not?”

Silence.

I continue: “Because I might find out something that’ll screw him up a little.”

She leans back in her chair. Takes me in. “Meet me in the print shop.”

“I’d walk through fire for it.”

Fire would be an improvement. Some sadistic lunatic decided to put the print shop in the windowless basement of the Administration Building. There’s a half dozen thinners, cleaners and maybe two dozen inks fouling the air, and no ventilation. But the place is crowded and noisy as only a print shop can be, so we can talk. Katherina has reduced a poster-sized flow chart to a single 8½ x 11” sheet, so it’s almost unreadable, but it’s enough to give me a glimpse of Morse’s leveraged empire. There are three tiers of overlapping company names with enough branch connections to wire a mainframe computer.

“Can I keep this?”

“Sure, just don’t tell anyone where you got it from.”

“Can we meet later and talk? The chemicals are really getting to me.”

“Sure.” We arrange to meet after work. I got less than a ten-minute dose of chemical fumes, but it’s enough to start me coughing up blood, and my lungs burn for the next two and a half hours.

For lunch we go to Jim Stella’s office. The whole gamut of emotions washed across his face: Damn, she brought the kid—no sex today—oh, shit, now I gotta pretend to love kids—boy, isn’t she cute?—just like her Momma!

He tells me my outfit would be really nice if I had it dry cleaned by professionals, and he actually gives me the business card of the place he uses.

“Best on the island,” he assures me. Apparently it has never occurred to Mr. Stella that all this
takes money.

I give Antonia her paper and crayons to draw with, and work on Mr. Stella a bit until he lets me look at his list of disability claimants who still work at Morse Techtonics. I see at least five names with addresses that I recognize as being within a mile or two of Colomba’s, but I think that highlighting them in red would be a bit obvious. Hmm, I really don’t like using my kid for a cover, but I don’t have much choice at the moment.

Antonia’s done a wonderful abstract drawing, already incorporating some of Katherina Minola’s design influences. I draw Jim Stella’s attention to it.

“What’s that?” he asks.

Antonia says, “I don’t know.”

And he says, “You don’t know what it is?”

“No.”

“It
has
to be something.”

“No it doesn’t,” I interrupt. “I’m not so hot to start making my kid put everything into a ‘meaningful’ and ‘structured’ context so soon.”

“Well, they’ve got to learn the way of the world,” he says.

“The world doesn’t set such a great example itself, okay?”

“Okay, okay.” His intercom buzzes. “Yeah?”

A voice squawks: “LaFehr on line two.”

“Oh,
not
LaFehr on line two
again.”
Jim Stella stands up, shaking his head, and goes back to his desk to take the call.

I put Antonia on my lap, with a legal pad for an easel, and start explaining some of the dialectical principles behind the early twentieth-century collapse of standard linear perspective, using Cubist and pre-Colombian motifs. Meanwhile, on a separate sheet partly covered by the drawing, I’m writing down the names and addresses of the six nearest disability claimants with a bright red crayon.