Sublimation(27)

Drew Thorsson, despite being the COO of Mergebreak, and one of the investors for Condensco, and now the combined C-something for the merged entity, doesn’t have a permanent office in New York. He doesn’t have one in San Francisco, or Hong Kong, or London. He calls reception whenever he’s in town and gets a temp desk. You’ve seen Drew sitting at intern desks, at VP desks, at the big conference tables with a laptop and a secondary screen, drinking iced matcha and always wearing a hoodie that has the MB over the heart. He seems nice. You’ve never talked to him, though, other than pleasantries during meetings. Megan’s your usual buffer between you and the C-suite. Megan usually called him eccentric. Italics included.

You can deal with eccentric. Mergebreak is filled with Apple and Google refugees, Nike guys, post–Big Pharma PhDs, psychologists who realized that corporate was more lucrative than trying to get insurance to pay out. You’ve heard that Condensco was more of an after-school robotics club, mostly startup grindset freaks, but so far you haven’t made any judgment.

You swipe your card to get into the building. You don’t look at anyone in the elevator. You don’t want to make small talk. You stare at the door instead. You’re thinking about metrics. You’re thinking about Project Parachute, which had been successful, and Project Ring, which hadn’t. Parachute had been a location-tracking app that Mergebreak now sold as a companion to the MERGEBREAK. Ring had been the failed acquisition of a small startup that was working on a way to make the MERGEBREAK smaller, less a cuff, more of a chunky designer ring. You’re thinking about your lack of an MBA—was that an issue? Did Drew care? Drew had dropped out of college.

All you know is that these meetings are apparently about your performance.

You’re not nearly important enough for Drew to fire you, Yujin had texted you when he first found out. You sometimes hated the way Yujin could read your mind.

You stand outside the conference room. Drew hasn’t noticed you yet. You tell yourself you’ll get another job, if you get fired. You’re an intelligence worker. You’re white collar. You’re not the disposable sort of immigrant. This is a lie you like to tell yourself. Everyone’s disposable. You saw the layoffs, a few years ago. One of your friends was literally deported, since he couldn’t find a new job in time. You never want to be in his position.

You open the conference room door. Drew looks up from his laptop. He smiles. He has a very American smile. Broad, showing all his teeth.

“YJ! Just the man I wanted to see! Come in, come in. Sit down. Unless, of course, you’d prefer to stand. Actually—let’s go for a walk. How do you feel about a walk?”

“Sure,” you say, helpless against his scattershot speech. “Nice to see you, Drew.”

“Excellent. Leave your phone.”

He abandons his laptop, his second screen, and his papers, and weaves around you to open the conference room door. You exit. You let him take you down the glassy hallways and up the office stairs to the floor above.

“Megan says great things about you,” Drew says.

“Oh?” you say.

You’re only good at targeted conversations. You’re best when you’re selling something, when you know what someone wants. But you don’t know what Drew wants from you. He’s wearing a hoodie that has Mergebreak’s mascot instances shaking hands. He’s wearing sneakers with no socks.

“Yeah—great work with the Ring girls. Heard you were the one who almost convinced them to sell. How’d you do it?”

“But I didn’t,” you say.

“Still,” he says.

Drew’s playing with his food. You clear your throat.

“Well, I knew for sure they were going to refuse—Hannah’s independently wealthy—so I figured might as well find out why they didn’t like us. I mean, I get it. Mergebreak’s the conglomerate monster in this space. Not that I mean—”

But Drew just laughs. “Go on,” he says.

You flush. You’re saying all the wrong things in the wrong order. You should have said something about the statistics. The math. The roadmap. The way that you led a team to coordinate with outside counsel, the finance guys, how you’re good at leadership and a team player and how you can quantify success, that you like the work you do here, that—

“I don’t mean it like that. But I understood how they might see us, and I didn’t want to leave on bad terms. So, I asked if Ayumi and Hannah had time for a postmortem, and we got coffee.”

You bite your sentence off. It’s not a very good story. It had been an awkward meeting in a too-fancy coffee shop, which trailed into an awkward silence upon which you cast the weak conversational lifeboat of: Why an instancing startup?

Hannah had punctured your lifeboat by telling you, with a vicious smile, about her grandparents, and the Holocaust. How they got out right before it was impossible to get out, and how there was a second version of her grandparents, who had survived the camps, who had come and found them again when Hannah’s grandparents were visiting family. And how her grandfather, the instance, had pushed his other self off a roof rather than live with the knowledge in his own brain.

You hadn’t known what to say to that, so you had just told her the truth about your family. That an instance of your grandfather defected to the communist North, and then your grandfather in the South was disappeared by the Korean government. Everyone in Korea has a sob story like this. Hannah hadn’t laughed.