Читать книгу Skyfisher - Dan Dowhal - Страница 8

Article updated Sunday 2 November 11:13

Man, I’m an idiot. It didn’t even register with me that I wasn’t on the grid anymore, and had to conserve my power. I was so cold when I got here two nights ago that I turned on the electric heaters, and ran them all night and all through the next day ... until I drained the trailer’s batteries. It’s taken a while to recharge them from the solar panels, and during that time I’ve taken stock of things. I appear to have about half a tank of propane, which I’m only going to use for cooking and hot water, so that will last me for weeks. And I’ve stocked up on firewood for the little wood stove that does a dandy job heating the trailer, although I had to wake up a few times during the night to keep it stoked. If I’m frugal, the solar panels will provide all the juice I need for powering my laptop, for lights, and for running the fridge.

When I went looking for the cause of my power outage yesterday, I found labels and notes in Stan’s handwriting in the battery bay, including one on a circuit-breaker that said: HEATERS—HIGH POWER CONSUMPTION. USE SPARINGLY. That’s so typical of Stan: to provide that kind of detailed instruction, even though his folks could barely read English. Or maybe it was just his way of reaching out from beyond the grave to help out his technologically-challenged buddy Brad. God, I miss Stan.

Back to the task at hand. I was writing earlier about how Fisher quit his job the very next day after we hatched our internet scheme, and how Stan and I were waiting to hear from him. Around 3 p.m. I got a text message from Fisher saying to meet him at Macbeth’s after work.

When Stan and I showed up, Fisher was ensconced at a corner booth, scribbling away alternately in three different hard-covered note pads. He quickly spotted us and earnestly waved us over, before I even had a chance to order a drink from the bar.

I’ll never forget the unsettling expression on Fisher’s face. He’d always had this somewhat superior look about him (not unusual for a top gun in a major ad agency, I suppose), but now his lips seemed twisted in a self-satisfied smirk, as if everything that was going to pass from them was undiluted wisdom. I admittedly have the advantage of hindsight as I write this, but I mention it because it made such an impression on me at the time. It’s important, too, because you need to know Fisher is a manipulative, two-faced bastard, and it’s so easy to be taken in by him. Maybe you’re one of his followers, and as you read this, you’re fuming because the only look you associate with Fisher (the one he struck for the cover when he made Time’s Man of the Year, for example) is one of compassion and benevolence. Trust me, he’s been rehearsing that one in front of a mirror for years.

Stan and I slid into the booth, and Fisher began spouting a detailed report of what he’d been up to all day, and wow, had he ever been busy, especially when it came to making good on his word to liquidate all his assets in order to accumulate working capital for our venture.

“So, which one of you two am I moving in with?” he asked. A lump appeared out of nowhere and took up residency dead center in the middle of my throat (and me without so much as a beer to wash it down with.) I had a flashback to the time in college when this chick I was screwing suddenly announced I’d knocked her up, and proceeded to begin taking control of my life. The pregnancy turned out to be a false call, and I dumped her immediately after learning the blessed news, but the conversation I was having with Fisher had the same your-ass-is-mine vibe.

Fortunately (for me, not for him) Stan jumped right in and eagerly volunteered to share his place, a rundown but spacious two-bedroom down in Tribeca. I could tell, however, that my reluctance did not go unnoticed on Fisher’s part, even if he did not so much as murmur a single overt syllable of criticism or complaint. Neither did he press us about our own promised financial contributions, or insist that we had to quit our jobs too. He had the patience of a spider.

Once again, Stan was at the front of the line when it came to showing his loyalty. “I’ll serve my two weeks’ notice at work tomorrow,” he volunteered, practically jumping up and down in his seat. “The best part is that I’ve got like a month’s vacation coming to me, so there’s a couple extra thousand bucks for the kitty.” I’m convinced Fisher hesitated just long enough to be able to get a read on what I was going to say next, because the second I opened my mouth to jump on the bandwagon and say I was willing to quit too, he interrupted.

“I think you guys should hang on to your jobs,” he said, surprising us both. I do remember, however, that it was Stan he locked his eyes on as he explained why. “This thing will take too long to come together if we just do it by ourselves. That’s what the money is for ... to buy the talent we need.”

“But I wanted to build this myself,” Stan said. “I don’t want someone else to have all the fun.”

“And you will build it,” Fisher said soothingly. “You say you’ve got a month’s vacation coming, right? Well, how much work do you figure we can get done in that time ... I mean if we work around the clock, and only take time out for sleep and meals?”

We both puckered up our faces in contemplation. Stan was clearly weighing the problem at hand. As for me, I was wondering what the hell I had gotten myself into, and was silently saying goodbye to life as I knew it. Little did I realize how true that really was.

“I can’t code it all in a month,” Stan finally concluded. “There’s just way too much work for one programmer.”

“You have to stop thinking like a worker bee,” Fisher chided. “You’re management now. Your job is to architect the system, especially those cool features we talked about the other day, and delegate the grunt work to others—maybe offshore to some bargain-basement coders in India or Russia.” At this point he pulled out one of the notebooks he had in front of him and handed it to Stan. “I’ve allocated seventy per cent of the budget for the technical development ... that’s like 300K. Figure out how many people you’ll need on your team, and we’ll hire them.” Fisher flipped open the book to the first two pages, where he had sketched out everything we’d talked about over the past two days, using exquisitely rendered multi-color bubble diagrams and flowcharts. “I’ve started it off with the big picture ... you’ll have to fill in the rest.”

Stan was clearly impressed. (Diagrams will always do that for a geek.) “Yeah, yeah, I get it,” he was saying, and immediately pulled out a pen and started to add notations of his own. “Of course, there are some parts I won’t trust anyone else with,” he commented as he worked, “but you’re right. There’s no reason someone else can’t do the low-level shit.”

I now understood that one of the other notebooks Fisher was fingering was meant for me, and I must admit I was dying to know what my role was going to be in the new order.

Fisher had read my mind. “As for you, Brad,” he said, sliding over my black-bound notebook, “you need to write all the copy and scripts ... everything the users read, see, and do, from the first welcome messages they get when they log on, to the advanced religious dogma we’ll be offering to the hard-core devotees. I don’t see the actual wordsmithing as the hard part for a hot-shot writer like you, though—that’s why I don’t think you need to quit your job, especially given your financial situation.”

Fisher’s patronizing tone was rubbing me the wrong way, but I was so relieved to learn he wasn’t expecting me to resign from my position at Warren & McCaul, I let his bossy attitude slide. When I started to flip through my own pages, however, most of which consisted of nothing more than a heading atop a blank page, I was suddenly struck by the enormity of the challenge facing me.

“You claim the writing per se is not going to be hard,” I said, “but there’s a hell of a lot of major blanks that need to be filled in.”

“You got that right,” Fisher agreed, with a condescending smirk, “and most of it’s not the sort of stuff we can really trust a subcontractor with, is it? I mean, we’re talking our most secret and sacred doctrines.”

I think that was the very first time it actually hit home what we were truly attempting to do. I’d been thinking of our idea like it was going to be any other web-based diversion, albeit one in which I had a financial stake. Now, laid out in front of me in Fisher’s ornate, design-school hand lettering, was an entire concocted belief system we were going to try to get people to buy into—literally.

“Don’t worry,” Fisher said, “we’ll work out the details of our doctrine together. That’s going to be my prime focus for the next month.” He reached under his chair to haul out a knapsack, and began placing a pile of religious texts on the table. There were books on Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Judaism, Hinduism, and Taoism, plus a number of other more general ones covering mysticism and mythology. “It’s basic marketing, boys–you start by evaluating the competition. Our religion is going to have to be the real deal, providing all the answers for those confused, seeking souls that come to us. Oh yeah, and we’re also going to need a cool name and a kick-ass logo.”

He opened his own notebook and began to show off some of the ideas he’d been tinkering with. But no sooner had Stan and I leaned forward to peruse his handiwork when Fisher slammed the notebook shut in our faces. I flushed with anger, convinced this was some sort of power-tripping ploy on Fisher’s part, and was just about to let the cocky bastard know what I thought of his arrogant mind-fucking games when someone spoke from over my shoulder.

“Hey you guys ... is this some kind of going-away party? How come I wasn’t invited?” a husky female voice said, and I turned to see Rita DeMarco, the hot chick from W&M’s accounting department. She was accompanied by some skinny, pimply-faced young guy I didn’t recognize, who was clearly devastated to have lost his monopoly on Rita’s attention. She may have been addressing all three of us, but her eyes never wavered from Fisher.

In an odd reversal of roles, I was the one about to tell a chick to get lost, when Fisher put on his most seductive smile and motioned for the pair to join us. He nonchalantly swept up the religion texts, and all three of our notebooks, into his knapsack, and patted the seat next to him, which was promptly occupied by a giggling Rita. Her companion, instantly forgotten, had to fetch a seat and unhappily squeeze in between Stan and me.

“I was supposed to meet someone here, but he had to cancel,” Fisher lied. “Brad and Stan just happened to run into me. Not much of a going-away party, really.”

“Well let’s see if we can do something about that,” Rita purred, leaning closer to him.

Fisher smiled back. “Excellent idea.” He turned to me. “Say, Brad ... why don’t you fetch us all some drinks?”

I was pretty pissed off at him, on so many levels—his condescending tone, the fact he was making me buy the round and, most of all, because he had this gorgeous babe hanging off of him—but, of course, I meekly complied. When I got back, Rita and Fisher had their heads so close together you wouldn’t have been able to slip a piece of paper between them.

Stan, which was typical of the lovable galoot, had meanwhile already befriended Rita’s estranged companion, and the two of them were going on about some sci-fi TV show I’d never heard of. I felt completely left out, so I headed over to the bar where I could at least chat up Bill, the bartender, given it was a Monday night and Macbeth’s was dead. As I looked over, I saw Fisher reach down towards Rita’s chest and pull up a crucifix she wore around her neck. As I watched him fondle the small gold cross between his fingers and whisper something seductively in her ear (no doubt about how he had something to offer her that Jesus didn’t) I found myself shaking with violent jealousy, even though I barely knew Rita.

I mentioned earlier how Fisher had never previously shown any interest in women while the three of us were out carousing together, despite plenty of come-ons. Perhaps I had come to think of him as asexual, and this had helped me feel less threatened by Fisher—more like his equal. Now every ounce of competitive, pound-on-my-chest, primate belligerence came to the surface and I wanted to throttle the fucker. I think I could have done it. I had four inches and at least twenty pounds on him, and he looked like the sort of guy who had never been in a scrap in his life.

Would anything have changed if I’d acted on my violent impulse? I doubt it, unless I’d actually killed or maimed him. I won’t play at revisionist history and claim I wish I’d performed that service on behalf of humanity, even if it meant going to jail. I’m too much of a wimp, and didn’t even so much as hurl an audible insult Fisher’s way. Instead, I sat at the bar, fumed in silence, and got progressively drunker ... until the rutting couple couldn’t keep their hands off one another any longer, and practically ran out of the bar together.

With the gift of hindsight, I can see now that Rita was simply Fisher’s way of rewarding himself for having taken a major step towards accomplishing his ultimate goals. This is not a man who gives up things easily, be it his secret thoughts, or his bodily secretions, but he has a megalomaniacal belief in his own destiny, and the unwavering sense of the intrinsic entitlement which that brings. Any sexual behavior I would subsequently see Fisher indulging in—and there would eventually be an epidemic of debauchery at the highest levels of his church—was simply a manifestation of his lust for power, reflecting a twisted, pathologically self-obsessed personality. I never saw so much as a glimmer of genuine affection for any of the legion of women he fucked. In fact, I seriously doubt that Sky Fisher has ever loved any living thing, despite his title as the Benign Wellspring of Universal Kindness (a title I invented, among others). And that, my friends, is the real skinny on the fat cat.