Paul Melko - The Walls of the Universe

John nodded, then sighed. He pulled out the documents and, plopping down in an old leather chair, started paging through them.

The lawsuit from Paquelli was last. John almost tossed it aside; then he saw the name of the codefendant in the suit. He sat up, his mind cold. If it had been Smith or Jones, his eyes would have skimmed right over it. But how many Charborics were there in the world?

They’d been played.

At first John was stunned; then he felt just plain stupid. It was probably his own embarrassment at arguing so vehemently for the deal with EmVis that decided him against telling Henry and Grace. He rationalized it. Grace would have confronted Visgrath. Henry would have turned inward into a dark mope. Better for all if he hid it away.

John stuffed the papers in a rusty filing cabinet in the old factory, and tried to forget about them.

But every time he saw Visgrath, every time Charboric sent an infuriating memo, every time there was a conference call on the latest sales projections, John felt the grip of their manipulation on his neck.

He stopped coming to meetings. He skipped one board meeting, then another, and when Grace pressed he told her to vote his shares as needed. John’s roost became the old factory, where he tinkered with pinball machines of the traditional kind. When Visgrath asked, John complained of a large workload at school, finals.

The phone call from Janet Rayburn was a surprise. He’d sent them a couple letters, a Christmas card, and a huge basket of apples when his first check came in from the company. But otherwise, he’d stayed away. The year with them had been too gut-wrenching. They weren’t his parents, and though they would have let him be a surrogate son, he wouldn’t allow it. His parents were elsewhere.

“How’s the farm? How’s Bill?” John asked.

“Fine, fine, he’s fine. Spends time in the barn, mending and fixing. Spring is around the corner, so everything needs to be right,” Janet replied.

They chitchatted for a few more minutes, and then Janet said, “Someone was around to ask after you.”

“Who?”

“Foreigner of some sort,” Janet said.

John didn’t ask what kind of foreigner, but he guessed the man had a Slavic or Germanic accent.

“Asked if we knew where you came from.”

“What… what did you say?”

“Didn’t say nothing,” Janet said with a laugh. “Some people should mind their own business. We never asked where you came from or what you were running from. We know good people when we see them. And this guy was no-good.”

“Thanks for that,” John said.

“Sure, but maybe you’d like to come down for Easter, bring that girl, Casey Nicholson. She’s nice.”

“We’re not…”

“Oh, right. You kids and your quick relationships. Bill was the only man I dated. Did I tell you that?”

“No, I didn’t know that.”

“That Casey is a nice girl. You should call her up, see what she’s doing tonight.”

“I’m sure she’s with her other boyfriend, Jack,” John said, harsher than he’d wanted to.

“Oh, she’s one of those girls,” Janet said. “Better done with her then.”

“Exactly.”

“Well, come over for Easter dinner by yourself then,” Janet said. “We’d love to have you.”

“I’ll think about it,” John said. He hung up the phone. He had no doubt who had been snooping around, looking for dirt on him: Charboric or Visgrath. What did they hope to find? John had a moment’s nausea, a pounding of agoraphobia that forced him to steady himself on the kitchen table with his hand.

If it got bad enough, if the tension from EmVis and Pinball Wizards, Inc., and Casey and Grace and Henry got to be too much, he could just leave. He didn’t have to be there. He didn’t have to be in Toledo or part of the board at PW. He could just leave. If he wanted to, he could leave the universe.

He paused. Yes, it was true. He could just go. This was the hundredth-some universe he’d passed through, some much more quickly than this one, but this one was ultimately transient just like the rest.

Could he leave Henry, Grace, and Casey? Why not? There were millions of each through the universes. What made these instances any more important than any other? If he wanted to he could befriend a dozen Graces, he could seduce a dozen Caseys.

With that thought he felt relief from his panic. He could just ditch it all whenever he wanted.

Charboric was just trying to keep his investment safe. He was just being diligent. No more. John chalked it up to the man’s paranoia, and his own.

Then came the lawsuit, the patent claim against their pinball machines from some company in Pennsylvania.

“This is bullshit!” Henry cried. They sat around the table of the conference room in Columbus. John and Henry had blown off classes to be there on a Wednesday. Henry had worked himself into a lather over the lawsuit on the drive down. Grace had fretted with a loose thread on her shirt, and now the string was ten centimeters long. She looked flushed and tired.

Charboric and Visgrath watched Henry’s outburst with calm.

“This is exactly what I said would happen,” Charboric said. “We weren’t careful enough with the patents.” He stared at John.

“Our machines are nothing like the machines John saw as a child!” Henry cried. “They’re head-to-head, for Christ sake! That’s nothing like the pinball machines he saw.”

“The name is the same,” Visgrath said.

“Is it a trademark? Has it been defended?” Henry said. “We couldn’t find a sign of them anywhere. They didn’t keep their trademark current, and they lost it.”

Visgrath shrugged. “We must now exert energy to defend ourselves legally.”

John had said little, and as Visgrath said the last word, the lawsuit leveled by Paquelli came to mind: the one secretly funded by EmVis. Was this not just more of the same?

“Who owns this company?” John asked.

“It’s not important!” Charboric said.

“Sure it is. We can buy them out. We have the cash. You have the cash.”

“They are too big,” Charboric said.

“How big? What’s their name?”

“It’s…” Charboric glanced at Visgrath, who remained passive. “It’s called Grauptham House.”

“They can’t be that big,” Henry said, “if I haven’t heard of them.”

“They are too big,” Charboric said. “They think they have us.”

John finally spoke up. “If they are businesspeople, they’ll take a deal, won’t they? If they’ve sat on pinball for years and done very little with it, why would they pass up an opportunity to make some money? Aren’t businesses supposed to maximize profits?”

“They won’t deal,” Charboric said.

“How do you know?”

“I know.”

“Who’s their lawyer? Who’s their CEO? What other products do they market? How many employees do they have? It seems,” John said, “that we are getting worked up for nothing.”

“It is a disaster!” Charboric cried.

“Only if we stay in the business and lose,” John said.

“What are you saying?” Charboric said.

“We can always walk away, can’t we? We have free exit, do we not?” John said.

Visgrath smiled. “You would walk away from your creation?”

“There’s always more creations,” John said.

“Such as?”

John smiled. “That’ll cost you,” he said. “You know, the last time we had legal troubles, they seemed to just fade away.”

“This is not the same,” Charboric said.

“Why not?”

“That was a small-time bar owner,” Visgrath said. “This is a real company.”

“I’d like to know exactly what this company does,” John said. “Do you have its prospectus, its filings? Anything?”