TheCorporation Page 7

  When Michelle found out she was pregnant she was thrilled. Her outlook began to change when her parents weren’t as enthused about the pregnancy. “You aren’t going to have it, are you?” her mother asked . By then, Michelle had moved out of her parents’ house and was living in an apartment in Jersey City. Michelle was stunned by her mother’s use of the word it in reference to what would be her first grandchild. It was then that Michelle saw her parents for what they were and she realized something for the first time: her parents never really wanted her. She realized she’d been a burden on them, that her own arrival had been unexpected, but back in those dim days before abortion was legal there wasn’t much they could have done about it. They’d put up a good front, had provided food and shelter for her and that was the extent of it. Emotionally they had been distant and unavailable.

  No wonder Michelle had sought solace in all things artistic. It was in the arts that she found love and acceptance and nurturing. Something that was absent at home.

  That phone conversation had been the second to the last one she’d ever had with her mother. It had ended in harsh words and tears and Michelle called back a few days later in a desperate attempt to prove to herself that her mother really wasn’t the cold, callous person she was, that she really didn’t mean the things she’d said. (“A baby is going to destroy your future, Michelle. You need to focus on your career when you’re in your twenties, and a baby is just going to take all of your focus away from that and then where will you be? A common housewife with no use and no skills except for breeding.”)

  But her mother had meant what she’d said.

  Everything changed after that turning point. As her pregnancy moved along, Michelle’s entire outlook on life changed. She saw life as a precious thing that you only get one chance to make the best of making yourself and your loved ones happy. She hadn’t really been happy growing up, she hadn’t been happy that she made the decision to forsake pursuing a career in art, and she wasn’t happy working as a Junior Executive for All Nation. When Michelle found out she was going to have a girl, her heart swelled. Her daughter was not going to undergo what she’d went through. Her little girl was going to be loved, nurtured and taken care of. She was going to grow up loving life, and she wanted to share her daughter’s joy when she discovered new things for the first time. Knowing that she was going to bring forth new life in the form of her daughter, whom she named the day she found out she was going to have her, changed Michelle’s entire outlook on life forever.

  She continued going to work and she cut back on her hours. Her supervisor was very understanding and gracious, telling her she could have three months of maternity time after the baby was born. As the months passed she felt joyous as her belly swelled. She began shopping for maternity clothes with her girlfriends from the office and buying things for the baby that she would set up in her one bedroom apartment. When she first saw Alanis’s heartbeat through the ultrasound she remembered the sense of awe that came over her. She remembered learning from the technician during her eight-week visit that he believed she was having a girl. One of her close friends at the time, Catherine Berman, was concerned about Michelle’s ability to support herself as a single mother but Michelle already had it planned out. “I’ll be fine,” she’d said. And she would have been. Everything would have been fine. After Alanis was born she would have plenty of money saved, would have paid maternity leave, and that would give her enough time to seek residence outside the city and set up roots somewhere else, out in the country, away from the urban jungle. She wanted to raise her daughter in more tranquil, peaceful settings, somewhere where she could still make a decent living and still raise Alanis without having to worry about the two of them becoming a victim of a violent crime or being too far from her daughter’s daycare provider.

  She lost Alanis in her seventh month.

  Even now she still remembered that awful day, and reliving it brought back the tears every time. The abdominal cramping that woke her out of a sound sleep at three a.m.; the heavy vaginal bleeding that soaked through the first tampon she applied within an hour. Even then she didn’t want to believe it was happening, kept telling herself that this just wasn’t happening even as her rational side kept telling her it was. She remembered dialing 911 with shaky hands, remembered being strapped to the gurney when the ambulance arrived. She remembered taking her purse with her before they left, not knowing when she’d be back, hoping against all odds that the doctors would fix it. She remembered being hooked up to IVs and strapped to monitors. She remembered the dread that filled her as the contractions started, as the doctors worked feverishly to save her baby as the night wore on. She kept hoping the nightmare would go away, kept telling herself she would do anything to save her child. She remembered the doctors telling her the next morning that despite all their efforts the condition was advancing, that they were going to induce labor; she remembered thinking no, this isn’t right! This isn’t happening!; she remembered the intense pain, the gut wrenching cramps in her lower belly; she remembered the warmth that spread through her lower body as Alanis was expelled from between her legs, remembered the flow of blood and amniotic fluid and her loud sobs as she saw her child, forever a seventh-month old fetus, so tiny, so little, a beautiful little face, eyes closed forever, adorable feet and hands, skin pale and gray; a tiny baby who never took a breath or opened her eyes or felt her mother’s loving touch.

  She remembered being allowed to cradle Alanis to her breast. She remembered the medical personnel leaving the delivery room to give her some time alone with her baby. And what she saw when she looked down at that stillborn baby broke her heart so badly that it never completely healed. She still felt the pain, even now after all this time had passed. She remembered crying, holding Alanis to her tightly, unmindful now of her nakedness and the blood caking her inner thighs. All she wanted to experience was the feel of Alanis’s tiny body against hers, the feel of her skin against hers. She remembered caressing the oh-so-tiny fingers, kissing them, sobbing uncontrollably, not believing that this nightmare could happen to her and not knowing how she was ever going to get through her life now that the only thing she had ever really loved—for she had loved Alanis even before the moment when she first learned she was pregnant—was now gone from her. Forever.

  At some point the medical personnel had come back to the room and gently taken Alanis from her and Michelle didn’t remember much after that.

  The next few days were a blur. She was in the hospital for two nights. She remembered being monitored by the nurses. She remembered speaking with a grief counselor. And she remembered empathetically nodding her head when she was asked if she would like memorial photographs of Alanis before she was cremated. In fact, she was overwhelmed at the thought. She remembered going home in a cab, bundled up in a set of spare clothes her friend Catherine had brought for her, clutching the envelope of photos in her hand as the cab made its way over the Hudson River to her apartment in Jersey City. And then she remembered the arrival of her daughter’s ashes and picking out the nice little urn where they continued to rest on a bookshelf along with one of the photos from the batch of memorial photos. They still sat on the top shelf in the living room of the house she shared with Donald and not a day passed when she didn’t think about Alanis, and how much her daughter meant to her and how much she still loved her.

  She didn’t leave All Nation. She returned to work two weeks later a broken shell, no longer caring much about her work the way she thought she had. Her demeanor was immediately noticed by her superiors and friends. She confided in her friends that she was crushed by losing Alanis, that it was a hurt she had never felt before. She tried explaining that losing a baby through miscarriage was like losing that same child through something else—crib death, a car accident, some dreadful disease. Just because Alanis never breathed or lived outside the womb didn’t mean her death was less worthy. Her friends said the same meaningless words in an attempt to make her feel better: “You’ll get bett
er in time,” and “You need to get past this,” and that old chestnut: “Someday you’ll have another baby.”

  She wanted Alanis!

  And because she’d wanted Alanis so desperately, because her passing had wounded her so deeply, because she grieved over the death of her baby the way one would mourn the death of any child, her friends and co-workers shook their collective heads and clucked disapprovingly, not understanding the level of her grief. She knew what they thought: Alanis had been stillborn, premature; she’d miscarried her baby so her child was never, really, technically born. She had never really been alive, so there was no sense in mourning over the death. This mindset infuriated Michelle more than it saddened her, and she’d tried explaining her feelings to those who she felt were her friends but they merely humoring her and said the same meaningless words of comfort. They didn’t get it, they didn’t understand Michelle’s pain and grief and they didn’t want to understand it. By then the corporate wall that had been built around Michelle’s life by her parents had been all but shattered and Michelle saw the people she thought of as her friends for who they really were: blind, soulless parasites who’s only interest was for their own self-image and worth.

  She tendered her resignation three months later, packed up her belongings and moved as far away from New Jersey as she could get and still be within shouting distance of a major city. Central Pennsylvania seemed far enough to get away from the hurt and pain, and it was close enough to at least two major cities—Harrisburg and Philadelphia. She found a small apartment in a town called Rothsville and set up a computer graphics business, peddling her wares to local businesses, and within a few months she was designing flyers, brochures, booklets, restaurant menus and other items. It was grunt work for the most part, but it paid the bills. Her rent was cheap, and the extra money she was saving enabled her to get back into real art—portraits mostly. Within a year she was leasing an old farmhouse in the country where she set up a small art studio and soon had plenty of clients, most of them drawn from an agency in New York she’d hooked up with.

  In time she gained a passion for life she never thought she had. And she realized that even in death, Alanis was responsible for her reawakening. For if she hadn’t been pregnant with Alanis, she never would have woken up from the slumber she was in while she was so blindly devoted to All Nation. And even though she lost Alanis, she now had this tremendous gift her little girl had given her and she swore that she would never go down the path that had been prepared for her by her parents. She was going to live for herself, devote her attention to her art and her instincts and find a way to make a living with them. For a while it worked. She was able to make a living with her art for three years or so, mostly doing commercial art for advertising agencies and portraits for corporate clients that would hang in their lobbies and hallways, and even though she never rose above that, had never attracted the attention of one of the more prestigious art museums or collectors, it was more satisfying than crunching numbers on some spreadsheet in some faceless cubicle.

  And now things seemed to have returned full circle for she was once again working for another faceless corporation. She’d kept up with her computer skills as an artist and, as a result of designing her own website, became a webmaster for several consulting firms. The computer graphics work usually came hand in hand with web design and she was always able to make a better-than-average living with it. In time, her skills attracted the attention of some of the bigger consulting firms who liked her computer graphics work and she somehow wound up doing work for them. And the more the work morphed, the more she realized she was being sucked back into working for large corporations. The difference this time was that she was doing it on her own terms.

  And now she was sitting on a king-sized bed in some drab hotel room in El Paso, Texas, looking at a photo of her still-born daughter, tears streaming down her face, remembering those years with a sad sense of nostalgia and yearning. She had come so far, she thought, tracing a finger over the photo’s edges. Her vision blurred through tears. In the photo, Alanis’s sweet little face had been washed from the blood and membrane that had covered her in birth, revealing pink skin that seemed strangely life-like. She’d been dressed in a little white nightgown and placed in a bassinet with a white mattress, a white and pink blanket pulled up to her chin. She didn’t look dead; she looked asleep, as any preemie would look in the neonatal care unit at any hospital. But Michelle knew better; her daughter’s body had never breathed life, but her spirit had been alive within her these past twelve years and had never died.

  Michelle cried softly, the memories washing through her. She brought the photo to her lips and kissed it. “They said the hurt would go away some day,” she said softly through her tears. “It never goes away and I don’t want it to. Because if it does it means...it means that you’ll go away and I don’t want you to ever go away. I want you to be with me right here always...always in my heart.” She cried, kissing the photo of her daughter, one of five snapshots the hospital staff had arranged to have taken which she had since made negatives out of and duplicated numerous times in print and electronically—digital images existed on a zip disk in her bank’s safe deposit box in the event of a fire at her house. If Michelle or her place of residence were to cease to exist through a hurricane or a fire, Alanis would always exist. Forever.

  “I’ll never let you go away, baby,” Michelle said, lying down on the bed on her left side, holding the photograph close to her. “I’ll never let you go. Never let you go.”

  Her painful little memory was eased of its pain in slow degrees as Michelle sank into sleep.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  WHEN VICTOR ADAMS entered the headquarters of Free State Insurance Company in Irvine, California he was wearing a three-piece tan business suit and carrying a large dark gray briefcase.

  It had been three months since he’d stepped into the confines of the building. He recognized the security guard as he walked through. He nodded at her as he approached the booth to sign in. The guard, an attractive Hispanic woman named Elsa Valdez, didn’t recognize him. Victor was wearing dark sunglasses, was clean-shaven, and his hair was cut fashionably short. The last time he saw Elsa when he worked in the IT department of the company, he had been eighty pounds overweight, sported a beard, and had shoulder-length hair that was normally pulled back in a pony tail. He also dressed more casually; when he worked there, Free State had a very liberal business casual dress code which was nice. There was no sense in dressing up to the nines when you had to scrounge around on dirty floors under desks tracing CAT5 cables or risk getting strangled by your tie while leaning over a laser printer to diagnose its breakdown. Today Victor Adams looked like a corporate lawyer. “Good morning,” he said to Elsa.

  “Hello.” Elsa gave him a cursory glance and turned her attention back to the security monitors.

  Victor signed the false name he’d picked earlier—Randy Dubrow—jotted down who he was going to meet and put the pen down. “Thank you,” he said, picking up his briefcase.

  “Don’t forget to fill out a visitor’s badge,” Elsa said.

  “Of course.” Victor filled out the name of his pseudonym on a blue-bordered badge, peeled it off the adhesive backing, and affixed it to his breast pocket. “Thank you.” He turned and headed to the elevators near the building’s atrium.

  He recognized all of the people who rode in the elevator with him but none of them recognized him. He’d put himself through a lot to change so drastically in so short a time.

  When the elevator dropped him off at the fifth floor—the top level of the sprawling corporate structure—he walked purposefully and confidently toward the thick double glass doors of the executive suite. He had an eight o’clock appointment. The CEO, James Whitmore, had agreed to hear his presentation on how he, Randy Dubrow, a representative from the firm ValueTech, would be able to save Free State millions of dollars in helping them streamline their outsourcing initiative. Whitmore had not only been receptive t
o the meeting, he’d told Victor he’d been looking forward to speaking with him ever since his secretary, Gayle, told him about his phone call three weeks ago. Gayle had researched the company via the web link Victor had forwarded to her in his introductory email. The website, which Victor had created over the span of a week, detailed all the ways ValueTech helped save millions of dollars for various Fortune 500 companies, private firms, and small businesses by creating plans to outsource costly white-collar positions that could be performed elsewhere for much cheaper rates—largely third world countries like Thailand, India, the Philippines, and Mexico. Moderately educated people in those countries could perform light desk clerk duties for pennies on the dollar in jobs that normally paid ten dollars an hour and up at US firms. It was the wave of the future. Outsourcing Information Technology jobs had already proven to be a godsend in high stockholder returns and big bonuses for management and executive staffs, not to mention resulting in larger corporate profits. Whitmore had been particularly interested in hearing about the financial planning software the company had developed. ValueTech claimed that MoneySoft, their key product, was revolutionary in its calculations that offered the business user everything they needed to see when it came to corporate outsourcing, downsizing, and company profit. The software calculated all income levels, taxes, profits, and executive bonuses. Whitmore was especially interested in hearing about the bonuses, and he explained to Victor over the phone last week that he was sure his colleagues—the Vice President, the Treasurer, a few of the company executives—would want to hear how ValueTech could best benefit them and their year-end profit sharing. Victor was only too happy to oblige.

  Inside Victor’s dark gray briefcase were two Glock semi-automatic nine millimeter pistols with ten round magazines filled with hollow point bullets, along with extra magazines. These handguns were strapped to the underside of the briefcase lid. Nestled within the body of the briefcase was a fully assembled Tec 9 Semi-automatic rifle and ten thirty round magazines; the rifle was an imitation of the standard military-issued Tec 9 full automatic rifle. He had a Kimber .45 with a full clip of hollow points in a shoulder holster beneath his suitcoat, a Smith and Wesson .38 caliber handgun tucked in a holster that hung off the small of his back, and he had spare magazines for all the handguns stashed in both pockets and his suit pockets. Strapped to a holster on his ankle, tucked beneath the cuffs of his slacks, was a .45 semi-automatic Kimber. This was all Victor needed to make his point that ValueTech was a bullshit company, created from the fertile depths of his imagination for the sole purpose of appealing to the underlying greed of the corporate suits that comprised Free State Insurance.