Chapter 2

I woke up feeling better than I had in years. I was having some sort of pleasant dream - sleepy fingers were playing with my hair, and my head was cushioned on a willing female breast. I sighed. Sooner or later, enough morning light would filter through the blinds and cold reality would intrude, and I would get up and pee and make myself some sort of quasi-indulgent breakfast and get on with one of the two days of respite that I was allotted each week. Then back on to the hamster wheel of managing inane product design requests, and glorious chances to sit silently while the cluetrain whistled through product review meetings without even pausing. And the marketing meetings from Hell. And random phone calls from Susan demanding that I put aside whatever I was doing and commit slavishly to her bidding so that I did not lose the remaining vestiges of child custody that were eked out to me.

Still, this half-dream felt good, and I nestled into the supporting breast. More supportive than my pillow, and warmer, and a whole lot friendlier. No way it could be real. I felt the pressure on my bladder, and I let my mind drift over my concerns and prospects. They seemed to organize themselves as a PowerPoint bullet presentation: anything and everything that could be discussed and reviewed got turned into fucking PowerPoints. Scott McNealy was right. It was the opiate of the presenting classes.

Item, Susan. Susan might, just might, be coming apart at the seams. Karen, my oh-so-patient (but damnably expensive!) lawyer had assured me that we were watching the first stages of a massive psychotic breakdown. "One day, she'll go over the cliff at ninety miles an hour. You don't want to be anywhere near that train wreck - you just want to be somewhere nearby so that your kids have someone to come to. Remember, I'm a lawyer, so I can practice psychology. I warn you it may take a while, but be patient, be patient. I'm confident it will all work out." Positive lady, Karen. She was cute and sweet and positive and definitely had a nice ass, but she was my lawyer. Sleep with your lawyer, get a new lawyer. I'd spent enough on lawyers, I kept what was left of my charm tucked inside my pants. There was no way that I could afford to train another lawyer in time to keep from losing my custody battle.

Item, the Salt Mining Empire. I didn't even call my employer by their name any more. It was me in one cube, and Sanjit in the other, both of us nominally project leaders and the overpaid Engineering VP of the month calling us into the fancy office to read us the Riot Act for perceived offenses. Sanjit and I did all the work, and did all of the hiring and all of the high-level design and all of the design review and took all of the interminable marketing meetings and rode herd on the tech writers, and for that we got paid the same pittance as the rest of the engineering staff. I'd known Sanjit for what, three jobs now? His run of bad luck had started at the same time as the Susan wars had begun. He had sympathy for my disaster, but he had his own set of problems: minus citizenship, he was at the mercy of our employer: displease them and he and Raya and their two little ones would be on the next flight back to Mumbai or Delhi or wherever he was from. Two years ago his Immigration file had disappeared from its last known location, and he was afraid to breathe. Everything he made that didn't go for rent and food went to his immigration lawyer. His lawyer had found Karen for me, so either they shared a Saint Jude Thaddeus medal or they were both wizards on how to keep lost causes from crumbling. I'd had to dig around to find the proper patron saint for lost causes. Sanjit had been third in his class at IIT, and was the only guy I'd met who could design circles around me without being arrogant. We'd developed a rhythm: he'd identify the pitfalls, and I was the Bad News Bear who raised them in public. We were never seen talking about each other's projects, so there was little evidence that my arguments could be traced back to his critiques. It was getting time for me to get out, so I should polish my resume and start putting out feelers. Hopefully, I could line up something before the Grand Inquisitor of the Imperial Salt Mines would make a public spectacle of my treasonous activities. Of course, the company was trying to outsource design and support to India or China, but the engineers over there didn't have much of a feel for HIPAA and other incomprehensible Americanisms, so I figured we were safe for another few months.

Item, my kids. See the Susan item, above. Warren was holding on, but he'd traded a few blows in the schoolyard, and I had been called in for Administrator Lecture 101 Regarding Inappropriate Child Behavior. I'd probably end up having to pay for his child psychologist, some ditsy MFCC or LFCC or Ph.D. who knew everything about kids from having read six books, who would work with him about creating "appropriate expressions" or "alternative modalities" for his anger. All he needed was for his mother to butt out of his life: she'd been systematically separating him from his friends. This is Silicon Valley, kids have parents from India or China or Israel or Turkey or Nigeria or a million other places. His friends were the brainy kids, or into computers or soccer. He didn't care where their parents were from. Susan wanted him to have white friends. The all-white cliques weren't the brainy kids or the computer kids or the soccer kids, and Warren had no use for football or baseball. Sarah was withdrawing: Warren had confided in me that she cried at night.

Item, my finances. I'd caught a lucky break and got the condo for nothing down. I had a year and a half before I'd have to refi, and maybe the new payments, paying off the neg am of the purchase money loan, would match my current payments. My retirement fund had been burned at the altar of child support, and I had twenty-five years (minus the time spent paying for college) to save up a third of a million dollars so I could retire on something other than kitty tuna on toast. With a third of a million dollars in an annuity I would have a combined income with Social Insecurity that would be half of was I was currently making.

Item, the Porsche. It was one of my few indulgences, but it was getting long in the tooth, and in order to manage expenses sooner or later I'd have to trade it on some Korean or Chinese econobox that would fall apart in six years. Japanese? Not on my budget. Pushing an econobox would make me just another wageslave trying to get by day-to-day in the Valley, rather than a should-be-recognizable has-been with a glorious past and no meaningful feature.

Item, my lamp collection. My other indulgence. Time to go put the semi-clean lamp up on eBay and collect my few shekels. It was Sunday, go for a seven-day auction to catch folks next Friday. Or maybe hold off posting till Tuesday, take a five-day... There were all sorts of theories about what worked. And they did, some of the time. I was clueless. Meg Whitman got rich. I might get a few bucks. And it was time to go clean up the other three salable lamps.

The breast was comfy and I nestled back into it.

"Good morning, Master. What is your command?"

The soft voice in my ear dissolved the bullet list. Maybe I wasn't dreaming. Maybe something had really happened yesterday that would bring my list to a completion. Maybe there was life after PowerPoint.

My bladder was painful.

"I need to go pee."

"Of course."

I looked into the bathroom mirror after tapping a kidney: my face didn't look quite as haggard as it had last Sunday. Or maybe I was still dreaming. I scrubbed my face with cold water and headed back into the bedroom.

Rachel and Leah were sitting up in bed, waiting for me to return. That was their names. I hope I could remember which one was which. Maybe I wasn't dreaming. Maybe yesterday hadn't been a hope-deprived hallucination. Maybe I really had gotten laid last night.