Walter Williams - This Is Not a Game

The restaurant had about twelve different kinds of iced tea, and Dagmar asked which one of them had caffeine. The waiter just stared at her, as if no one had ever asked about caffeine before.

No caffeine, she thought. Check.

“Never mind,” she said. “I’ll have the French press.”

The waiter had barely gone to place their order when Dagmar exploded.

“Fucking Charlie,” she said, “has sent me an email telling me he’s going to screw with the game again. But he hasn’t told me how or why or when, and now I’m going crazy.”

BJ looked at her intently through his spectacles. He had arrived in worn blue jeans and a T-shirt so old that its original blue had turned to purple. He hadn’t shaved in several days.

He smelled of lavender soap. That was nice.

“What did Charlie say, exactly?” BJ said.

“Hardly anything, just that he had another idea. That’s what’s making me nuts.” She waved her hands. “We may as well stop working. We’re going to have to change it all anyway.”

BJ gave a shrug. “All I can say is that he’s behaving true to form.”

“I went to his cabana at the Roosevelt and found he’d left. He’s gone to Chicago!”

Surprise passed across BJ’s features. “Chicago? Did he say why?” “No.”

“No.”

He rubbed his chin. “Do you think he’s still hiding from the Maffya? ”

“I don’t know what to think!”

Dagmar wished she still had the steering wheel in front of her so that she could punch it again.

BJ pursed his lips, looked thoughtful. “Do you think he’s testing you? ”

Dagmar blinked at him. “Why would he do that? ”

“To find out if you’re-I don’t know-really loyal? ”

Dagmar considered this.

“That doesn’t make much sense,” she said. “I’ve never had any tension with him till now. He has no reason to think me anything other than a loyal employee.” Frustration bubbled in her veins. “He picked me, for God’s sake!”

“He’s under pressure now. His backers, or the Russian Maffya, or whoever it is that’s giving him trouble-he can’t lash out at them. It’s got to be the people around him.”

She looked at him curiously. “Did he do that to you? ” she asked.

BJ shrugged his big shoulders. “Now and then,” he said. “Little ways, mostly. He’d demand that I abandon my own ideas and adopt his, that sort of thing. It made no sense, but it was his way of controlling things, and early on I agreed with him against my better judgment. It was when I began to stand up to him that he decided I was disloyal, and then he barely spoke to me.”

“It’s got me so crazy.” She made claws of her hands and rent the air with her nails.

“Well,” BJ said, “I wish I could help.”

“You are helping,” she said. She put her hand over his. “You’re the only person I can talk to.”

His blue eyes looked into hers. “It’s the same with me,” he said.

The waiter arrived with their drinks, iced tea for BJ and the French press for Dagmar. She reached for the pot and pushed the plunger down, then poured.

“Not bad,” she judged.

This much coffee this late, she knew, she’d be up to 3 A.M.

Not that she didn’t have plenty of work to do.

She looked at BJ. “Something I’ve always wondered,” she said.

He raised his eyebrows. “About Charlie?”

“About you.”

A dubious look crossed his face.

“If you don’t mind,” Dagmar said.

He spread his big hands. “Ask, if you want.”

“You went down with AvN Soft, okay,” Dagmar said. “But you were still smart. You still had talent. You had experience.”

He nodded.

“What you want to know,” he said, “is how I ended up at a place like Spud LLC?”

“At the very least,” she said, “you could be working as a programmer, earning a lot more money than doing customer service.”

“I hate to say this,” BJ said, “because it sounds paranoid. But I got blackballed.”

Dagmar was surprised. “By whom?”

“Charlie and his friends. Austin in particular.” Before Dagmar could protest, BJ held up a hand.

“When Austin moved back to California,” BJ said, “I went to him to start a new company. My idea involved creating a peer-to-peer network for cell phones, so they wouldn’t depend so completely on cell phone towers.” He leaned toward her across the table. “When Hurricane Katrina hit,” he said, “the cell phone towers in New Orleans went down. People couldn’t call out. Maybe thousands died because they couldn’t tell emergency services where they were. If the phones had been connected with a peer-to-peer network, so that they could talk directly to each other instead of to a tower, the messages could have chained together until they reached an intact tower.”

Dagmar was impressed. “That’s a great idea.”

“It would be ideal in any emergency situation-California’s natural for it, because of the earthquakes. So I went to Austin with the idea of developing it.”

“He turned you down?”

“No. What Austin did was try to saddle me with a partner to handle the business end. He insisted I had to follow the guy’s orders whenever it came to a business decision.”

Dagmar remembered Austin on the phone to his client, insisting that the business plan be followed. Dude, we’ve had this conversation.

“What did you do?” she asked.

Anger burned in BJ’s eyes. “I turned Austin down. I wasn’t going to have some stranger telling me what to do.” He spread his hands in a gesture of helplessness. “But then whenever I went to some other venture capitalist, it turned out he had the same stipulation. Turns out that Charlie or Austin had been there ahead of me, telling everyone the official version of how AvN Soft went down, and everyone believed them instead of me.”

“Come on,” Dagmar said. “I can’t see them calling everyone in the industry just to get back at you.”

“Believe it how you want,” BJ said. There was belligerence in his tone. “I’m just telling you what happened.”

Dagmar decided to skate away to another subject.

“But why Spud, then?” she asked. “There must be a thousand better jobs.”

BJ gave a bitter little laugh and took a sip of his iced tea.

“I decided that rather than take a crap job, I’d take a shit job.”

Dagmar found herself laughing.

“Perhaps,” she said, “you’d better make that distinction clearer.”

He scratched his chin. “Okay,” he said. “When you know a job is shit going in, then it’s a shit job. It’s honest about being a shit job. That was my job at Spud.”

“Okay,” Dagmar said.

“But a crap job is a shit job with pretensions. You get paid more, maybe, but it’s only because you have to work twelve-hour days in a cubicle doing work that’s beyond tedious, all with fuck-wit managers on your case every minute of the day. Crap jobs aren’t for bright people, they’re for Dilberts. And I’m not a Dilbert.”

Dagmar looked at him and shook her head.

“No,” she said, “you’re not.”

Their dinner arrived. Dagmar’s omelette was fluffy and moist, and her home fries had a surprising, delightful herbal taste.

“These are the best home fries I’ve ever had,” she said.

BJ grinned. “There was a reason I recommended this place.”

She tried the candied pepper bacon. It was very good.

“I didn’t think you could improve bacon,” she said.

“Told you it was good.”

They talked about jobs through their meal, trying to distinguish shit jobs from crap jobs. BJ had endured many worse jobs than the one at Spud. Dagmar had experienced plenty of both, working as a teenager in Cleveland, where she had dealt in addition with the hazard of a father who would steal her money and valuables.