Читать книгу Delirious - Daniel James Palmer - Страница 10

If not yourself, then who can you believe?

On a normal day Charlie could make more decisions and progress in three hours than most directors at his level could make in a week. Those decisions came to him naturally; if Charlie believed in anything, it was himself. He spent a minute trying to remember when and where he’d written that note, came up blank, then transferred it to the inside flap of his BlackBerry holder.

Recall was his strength, a gift for names, faces, and events that had served him well as his product’s ambassador. But with all that was going on at SoluCent, he wasn’t overly concerned. His meeting with Anne Pedersen was nearing, and he had little time or patience to think of much else.

Monte eventually stopped gnawing on his shoe. Charlie listened a moment, until he heard quiet snoring coming from underneath the desk. He found it comforting. Charlie made sure to change his footwear, having once forgotten to take off Monte’s chew shoe before a meeting with Yardley. He rarely made such thoughtless errors, and certainly never the same one twice. Next, he made a halfhearted attempt to answer e-mail. Most of it was a waste of time to begin with, but today was especially bleak. He shut down Outlook, grabbed a container of Lysol disinfectant wipes, and began to clean around his desk.

Charlie’s office was noticeably sparse. Some had commented that they thought it was empty or occupied by a contractor. Those who found Charlie’s militant commitment to office cleanliness excessive did not know how he had grown up, otherwise, they would have understood.

His childhood had been chaotic, unpredictable, and far from perfect. Charlie was determined that his future would not compare to the past. As part of that commitment, everything in his life had to have order. For Charlie, order equaled control and control was his secret ingredient for success. But he knew his methods came at a price—the most obvious being his failed relationship with Gwen. Thinking back on how much more relaxed he’d become since bringing Monte home, it was hard to believe Gwen and he lasted as long as they did.

If one thing hadn’t changed, though, it was his opinion of people who were out of control; those who could not place their hands on a file within seconds of a request were no closer to ascending the tops of the professional ranks than the interns still in college. As a result, he kept his office clean and tidy with religious dedication—there were no manila file folders tossed about, no pens, coffee cups, or desk toys of any kind.

While most professionals at SoluCent reminded themselves that real life existed outside the cubicle or office walls by adorning their desks with framed pictures of family, Charlie had none. He had dated a few times since moving back east, but instead of a blossoming romance, he’d found distraction and drama. A relationship wasn’t out of the question, but it wasn’t a priority, either. InVision was. Still, it wasn’t all work. His life had been here before moving to California. There were friends he saw on occasion, though less frequently as product development heated up. He made a much more conscious effort to stay in touch with his mother, who lived a few towns away from his Boston apartment. She was delighted to finally have “her boy” and “granddog” back from the West Coast, and they made it a point to have dinner together at least twice a month. He preferred they go out, as visits to her house were purposefully short and always tense. Monte, however, greatly enjoyed going there, but more to harass the neighbor’s poodle than for the change of scenery.

His mother still lived in the same forsaken multifamily house where Charlie grew up, in a not-so-nice section of Waltham. Charlie wasn’t one for grandiose gestures, nor did he easily part with his hard-earned money, but the sight of that house on that decrepit, drug-trafficked street was stomach churning. No matter how much he’d insisted, though, Charlie’s mother would not accept his offer to buy her a new house. For the past several years his brother, Joe, had been immersed in an experimental, intensive cognitive therapy program at Walderman Hospital in Belmont. Charlie’s mother had voiced concern that moving to a new house would upset Joe’s treatment and result in a setback, thus prompting her to decline the generous offer. That didn’t surprise Charlie in the least. His mother’s life had for years revolved around Joe.

Despite the five-year gap in age, Charlie had once felt close to his older brother. Joe’s adolescence had arrived the same year their father left and things changed for the worse. He’d often been moody and quick to anger. Joe would spend hours listening to their father’s favorite jazz albums in what Charlie described to friends as a deep trance. Sometimes Joe would disappear for days on end, with no memory of being gone, and while at home, his severe temper flare-ups worsened, prompting their mother to seek medical help. Months later doctors had diagnosed Joe with and treated him for a rare epileptic condition. A boy in Charlie’s school had had a seizure once, and so Charlie had asked his mother about it.

“Why doesn’t Joe shake?”

“There are different types of seizures,” his mother had explained.

“Is Joe going to die?”

“No.”

That had been good enough for Charlie. He’d been eight years old at the time.

For a while life in the Giles household returned to normal, albeit without their father around. Then Joe turned eighteen, and that year he was diagnosed with an entirely different ailment—the same one their father also suffered from—schizophrenia. Turmoil and heartache became the norm for the Giles family once again. It stayed that way even after Charlie left home to attend college, even during his years out West. It was a blessing the day Joe found the Walderman program. At last life in that beat-up old house in Waltham started to get better.

Since joining Walderman, Joe had shown remarkable progress. When Charlie first moved back to Boston, Joe couldn’t even organize his day, let alone hold down a job. Two years later and after countless hours at Walderman, Joe was working a night security detail for a downtown office high-rise. Those evening hours passed so slowly, Joe complained, but it was—as he put it—a paying gig.

From the day Joe was diagnosed, Charlie’s mother had dedicated her every waking minute to his care and well-being. Charlie had been too young to understand exactly what was happening, but in looking back, he understood that her passion had turned into an obsession. There was no blame or anger, but the family lacked closeness. It was simply how he grew up—his mother so deeply involved with his brother’s care that she had nothing left to give to anybody else. Instead of lamenting a past he could not change, Charlie put all his attention on what mattered most—how not to become like them.

Sometimes Charlie wondered what would have happened if his brother hadn’t gotten sick. Perhaps he, Charlie, never would have been as driven and successful. Perhaps he owed his brother a debt of gratitude. As for brotherly love, however, those years had proved deeply scarring and had left an indelible chasm between them.

Growing up, neither brother knew their father was schizophrenic until after he left them. His mother justified the deceit by explaining it was at their father’s insistence—he believed the less the children knew about his disease, the better.

After Joe was diagnosed, Charlie was understandably interested in the role genetics played in schizophrenia. Much that he found on that subject was unnervingly speculative. One disturbing fact Alison Giles shared was that Charlie’s father had stopped taking his medicine. It was probably the reason he’d abandoned the family without warning one rainy October so many years ago. No one had heard from him since.

Charlie sat back down after giving his desk a thorough wipe-down and tried to guess what Anne Pedersen had to say that could possibly jeopardize InVision. The thought that something threatened InVision was both troublesome and puzzling. It angered him that he couldn’t come up with an answer, and pride begged him to believe she was mistaken without even knowing what she had to say.

InVision, Charlie had been led to believe, was essential to SoluCent’s growth strategy and a key factor in sales forecasts and revenue projections. It was why the A-team from the strategic acquisition committee had been so relentless in their pursuit of Charlie’s start-up, and had paid handsomely for it, too. There was no possible explanation for why these senior executives would have misled him.

Charlie had made almost fifteen million in cash from the transaction and stood to make millions more in stock and incentive bonuses, based on performance and product success. The decision to sell his company had been a no-brainer. It had been the fastest way to go from good money to the big leagues. Yet here he was, wondering if his dream was now being second-guessed by the very people who had convinced him to sell. He silently berated himself. When would the fear that everything would vanish go away? he wondered. When women like Anne Pedersen stopped insinuating that it might.

Charlie reached for his BlackBerry to check his calendar, not waiting for Outlook to restart. There he saw the note again.

If not yourself, then who can you believe?

A mentor from his MIT days had warned him that when you reached the top, plenty of people were always waiting below to pull you back down. He’d brushed it off as a cliché. It now seemed prophetic.

People were always hungry to pull him down. He wasn’t there to win any popularity contests. He was there to make it happen, and that meant having a work ethic that few could stand. He had no patience or interest in anything that wasn’t going to advance his cause.

Since coming to SoluCent over two years ago, Charlie had never set foot in any of the five campus cafeterias. Lunchtime was reserved for Monte’s afternoon walk, not eating. With his fourteen-hour workday, he needed those walks to help keep the pounds off in an industry notorious for overweight, sedentary workers.

Today would be an exception. Today he would meet Anne Pedersen at 12:00 p.m. in the Omni Way cafeteria. Only then would he find out what was so important that it had to be confided in person.

Charlie brought Monte over to Nancy, whose cubicle was just outside his office. She agreed, and would agree to do so every day if he asked, to take Monte for his afternoon walk. He couldn’t tell who was more excited to see the other.

“He’s still your dog, Charlie,” Nancy said as Monte rolled onto his back to expose her hands to his warm belly.

“But with you in the picture, I don’t think it would take long for him to get over me,” Charlie offered.

Charlie went back inside his office and locked his computer using the Task Manager. He changed his log-on password weekly, months before corporate IT demanded it be changed. It was his private defense against hackers and unauthorized access. Nobody ever touched his files. He made sure of it. He closed and locked his office door and kept his head down as he walked the carpeted corridor toward the stairwell. He wanted to seem preoccupied and unavailable for a quick sidebar chat on some problem that wasn’t his in the first place.

He said a brief hello to Tom Connors, who was senior VP and division head for the electronic solutions consulting group, but ignored the rest of the rank and file. Tom expected Charlie to address him. Charlie didn’t much care what the others thought.