The Fearsome Particles (27 page)

“Bishop,” he managed through his mouthful, “that awful.”

“I don’t actually know she’s dying,” his boss clarified. “But given what the doctors in Denver are saying I’m starting to think the worst.”

Gerald, swallowing, thought it best to set the doughnut down. “What are they saying?”

“The worst kind of nonsense.” Bishop watched two men in construction vests settle on stools at the counter. “They’re talking about ‘amplifying the fields of opportunity.’ ‘Exploring discretionary scenarios.’ Which all sounds like ‘Expanding our pay-cheques’ to me. But it’s clear enough they’re mystified. They’re talking, if you can believe it, about sending her to Phoenix.”

“Phoenix,” said Gerald.

“What the devil Phoenix has to do with anything I have no idea.” He grabbed his cup by the handle and then slammed it down again. “I told them on the phone, if you people in Denver can’t fix the problem what makes you think it’s going to be any better in Phoenix?”

“What did they say?”

“They said Phoenix has a new clinic with new equipment.”

“That sounds good,” said Gerald.

“So I called the damned doctors in Cincinnati.” Bishop had sloshed coffee onto his saucer and the laminate table around it, and Gerald slid his napkin across the table and cosied it around his boss’s dish as he talked. “I said to them, ‘Why the hell did you send my wife to Denver when they’ve got a new clinic in bloody Phoenix?’ ”

“I’ll bet that felt good.”

“Hell, no,” Bishop grumbled. “I felt like the most impotent fool. And the Cincinnati doctors said the Phoenix clinic specializes in something entirely different from the problem my wife has, and they can’t understand the Denver doctors’ thinking.” He shook his head as if all doctors and the medical system itself had gone mad.

“What problem is it exactly? If I’m not intruding.”

“Hmm?”

“Susan’s problem,” said Gerald. “We’ve never actually talked about it.”

Bishop sighed even more heavily than before, as if a great sacrifice were being demanded of him. He glanced up at Gerald and then focused on his two furrowed hands, the fingers of which he began to entwine. “It’s a kind of …” His face grew strained and pink as he knotted his hands tighter and made faint, throaty sounds of struggle, until Gerald reached out and laid a hand on his wrist, and Bishop’s shoulders slumped. He looked up, helpless. “It’s hard to explain.”

For a while, the two men drank their coffee, and accepted refills when the waitress brought a carafe to the table. Then Bishop set his cup down with finality.

“So I’ve decided to go,” he said. “I’m heading to Denver first thing tomorrow and then flying with Susan to Phoenix.” He looked at Gerald with a face so vulnerable it was as if he expected some rebuke. “You’ll wonder why I didn’t go before, to be with my wife.”

“No.” Gerald shook his head. “I wasn’t thinking that.”

“Somehow I had it worked out that leaving the office and flying down there made it official, that things were serious.” He turned his face to the window, and his voice seemed to choke and submerge. “And so she’s been traipsing thousands of miles, from one set of doctors to the next, facing it all alone, while I’ve been here keeping myself comfy and safe like a goddamned mouse in the wall.”

He glanced back at Gerald and gave him a rueful smile.

“And I’ve been letting the company go to hell while I’m at it.”

“No, Bish. That’s –”

“Goddamned market share’s pissed down to nothing.”

“That’s my fault,” insisted Gerald. “I should have been on top of that sooner.”

Bishop seemed to absorb that notion and twitched his mouth as though he thought it might be true. “You’re operations though. Wasn’t really on your plate.”

“Still, I should have seen what was happening and come to you. If as you say …” Gerald stopped himself from completing the thought,
If as you say I’m
CEO
material
, because now wasn’t the time to throw his own ambitions into the mix, and he didn’t want Bishop, in his disappointment, to contradict him.
Sorry to lead you on there, my friend, but…

“Well, whatever the case,” said Bishop, “the board’s not happy about it.”

“What are they saying?”

Bishop looked down at Gerald’s doughnut and pointed. “You going to finish that?”

Gerald glanced down at the bitten doughnut. He associated it with shame now, guilt over putting his own trivial needs first, and it was ruined for him. He pushed the plate across the table. “Be my guest.”

The older man broke off a peaty hunk and lifted it to his mouth trailing a primordial ooze of cream filling. “It’s good,” he said, after a minute. “Sure you don’t want the rest?” When Gerald shook his head Bishop pulled away a second bite and held it ready as he washed down the first.

“What did the board tell you?”

“Well, it’s Gwyn, really.”

Gerald had never more than shaken hands with the board’s short, stocky chairman, but Gwyn Doremond’s reputation as a humourless Welsh prick was firmly established. Bishop had brought him in as a director three years ago, hoping his experience in fasteners manufacturing (high tensile nuts and bolts, pop rivets, and socket screws) in Cardiff during the downsizing phase of the early nineties would improve Spent’s image among materials industry analysts. Within fifteen months, Doremond’s coal-browed ferocity had overawed enough of his fellow board members to get him nominated as chairman. After that he’d become an ever-tightening band around Bishop’s neck.

“I’m told Gwyn’s been on the phone to a number of the board, saying if we don’t get the market share up to double digits by the next quarter, he’s going to call for a vote on me.”

Gerald worked very hard to keep the involuntary thoughts of purging at bay. It was like walking along the curb of a busy roadway and trying not to think about tripping and falling into the path of an onrushing truck. In other words, nearly impossible. “I’m sure you’d win that,” he said.

For a moment there was a stillness to Bishop as he studied the dregs of his coffee. He seemed more saddened than angered. “I don’t know that I care,” he said finally. “I think this company needs somebody to take it by the scruff of the neck and shake it hard. But this thing with Susan …” He rubbed the rim of his cup with a puckered finger. “Not sure I’m that somebody any more.”

Gerald distracted himself with motions – he pulled a napkin out of the tin dispenser and pressed it to the corners of his mouth, then laid it on the table and began to fold it into progressively
smaller halves. There were coffee spots on the laminate that needed his attention, and he worked against them with the dry corner of the tight napkin bundle he’d made.

“What do you think?” Bishop asked.

“Well …” He attempted a chuckle, to suggest how much less than seriously he might be taking the notion of Bishop leaving the company he’d founded and built. But to his chagrin the chuckle came out somewhat squeakily, somewhat tiny chipmunkily, which seemed to signal to a precise degree how very seriously he took it, in fact. “That’s hard for me to answer, Bish,” he said. “Only you know how you feel, but, I think the company needs you.”

“Company needs somebody,” said Bishop. “Doesn’t have to be me.”

The purging fears that had been creeping up the walls Gerald had erected began to trickle over the top. He caught his first glimpse of a headline:
CHANGES COMING AT SPENT
. Ghostly images started to form of board-appointed auditors trooping in to examine books in search of excuses to “achieve economies” in the costs of personnel.

“What would you say,” Bishop continued, “if I were to recommend to the board that we begin a succession process with a view to naming you chief executive within the year?”

Suddenly the purging waters receded. The spectres vanished. The newsprint under the headline began to fill up with type in which the name “Gerald Woodlore” appeared in the vicinity of adjectives such as “capable” and “promising.” He searched the older man’s eyes to make sure this idea of
succession –
which as a word sounded remarkably close to
succeed –
was not
some ephemeral fancy akin to “What if the sky were orange?” but actually something thought through and solid. He tried to think of the most ideal response to a hypothetical question that used as its central assumption the idea that he, Gerald Woodlore, was so well-regarded as an executive that he could be considered a viable, indeed, the
preferred
leader of a nationally traded company.

“Are you serious?” he said, regrettably.

“Absolutely.” Bishop’s weary face acquired a new keenness. “I’ve been meaning to talk to you about this for a while, Gerald. It’s hard to find executives who are committed to the slow climb in an old industry. You’re what I like to call ‘a good soldier.’ Most talented people want the quick splash, big money, star-making jobs.” Bishop snapped his fingers at each kind of job Gerald evidently didn’t want, or have. “Hard to find smart, experienced, trustworthy people like yourself willing to attend to the small stuff and wait for their opportunity. How long have you been chief of operations now?”

“Four years,” said Gerald.

Bishop smiled warmly. “There, you see? In a company like ours, most people can’t handle more than two years at that job. They get bored. They want new challenges. I went through five operations men in eleven years before I found you.”

Gerald nodded, not sure whether he was supposed to respond. It hadn’t sounded like the sort of thing to which a person said “thank you.”

“Yet, somehow, you manage to stay engaged in the everyday details.” Bishop seemed as perplexed by this as he was impressed.

“It’s because I’m a worrier,” said Gerald.

“A what?”

“A worrier.”

Bishop’s hearty eye contact faltered a little, and Gerald reviewed some of the many things he might have said that wouldn’t have involved giving his trusting, succession-recommending boss insight into one of the primary flaws in his character.

“Well,” said Bishop, finding his smile. “I guess I knew that about you.” Then he turned serious again. “As we go forward, that’s not something I’d let on to Gwyn.”

“No.”

“He’s more of a jam-on-the-helmet, charge-over-the-ramparts type.”

“Understood.”

Bishop smiled, and patted him on the arm.

O
nce they had arrived safely at Spent, Gerald climbed the stairs to the second floor as if new super fibres had been grafted into his quad muscles. He took the steps two at a time, hardly noticing the effort, and gripped the railing with a new superized grip. When the receptionist, the lovely, stalwart Mary, greeted him with a cheerful “Good morning,” he said,
“Very
good.” And by the time he had walked the length of the hall, past the land of offices and open-concept cubicles that would be his to lead, his newly super brain had found and prioritized all the reasons he couldn’t possibly handle the job Bishop was trying to bestow on him, and why Bishop was sure to realize it soon.

He rounded the corner with his lack of leadership expertise and found Sandy waiting for him next to the bank of filing cabinets, outside his locked office door.

“You need to move me,” she told him before he had his keys out of his pocket. “I can’t work with him any more.”

“One second, Sandy.” He jammed the key into his inability to delegate and entered his office, his assistant sales and marketing director riding his heels. She closed the door behind them.

“He says I can’t be trusted. He says I went to you behind his back.”

Gerald pointed to the guest chair with his already proven failure to respond to warning signs in ways that might have prevented the market share fiasco. “Have a seat.” He took off his suit jacket and hung it on the wooden coat rack next to his complete dearth of strategic vision.

Sandy lingered in the undefined region between Gerald’s desk and the table by the window, but when he rolled back his chair and dropped into it, she appeared to latch on to some new resolve and grasped the back of the upholstered guest chair with both hands as if it were a lectern.

“It’s an impossible situation,” she announced.

“Would you please have a seat?”

“He won’t even look at me.”

Gerald sighed with a full day’s worth of weariness, and waited. Finally she rounded the chair, drew it closer to his desk, and slipped in.

“I need my own office,” she said.

He wondered why he had deluded himself all these years,
believing that he had
CEO
potential, when now, with the opportunity at hand, it was obvious he was barely competent at the job he already held, let alone ready for the ultimate step. Every occasion of hesitation and miscalculation in his past seemed fresh to him. He was being pelted with mistakes, including the time the cutting machine went down two days before a big shipment to Alberta and the plant manager Ned Mattick called him from the site:

And what did he do? He paced. He swore. Son of a bitch, he said. Holy shit. What the fuck. He couldn’t get past the problem to the solution. The problem waggled its grotesque haunches in front of him and it was all he could see! It had taken Mattick himself to remind him that their closest competitor, in Oak Ridges, had not long before shut down an old cutting machine and that maybe they could buy some time on it until they got theirs fixed. Ned Mattick had more
CEO
potential than he did.

“Isn’t there an office in the sales area that isn’t being used?” Sandy was saying.

He reached forward and turned on his computer.

“You don’t need your own office, Sandy. I’m sorry. You and Trick are going to have to work this out.”

“We can’t,” said Sandy. “I don’t see how.”

He heard a knock on his door and called “Come in” before he registered Sandy’s desperate flurry of
No! No!
waving. A large figure appeared in the doorway.

“Oh, I see,” said Trick, setting his hands on his hips.