Allegra Goodman - The Cookbook Collector

“So that’s over too.”

Jess hedged, “We’re still friends and all.”

“You have the strangest idea of friends,” said Emily.

“I love my friends,” protested Jess.

“That’s the problem.”

“It doesn’t matter. It’s not important,” Jess reassured her sister. “Don’t worry.”

“It’s over,” Emily reassured herself.

She tried out those words, but she did not believe them. Jonathan’s absence weighed on her, his disappearance clouded her mind. How could he vanish so completely? She longed for a body, a clue, a sign.

And yet he persisted in the world. Jonathan still worked his will at ISIS, in ways she never guessed. With share prices hovering at thirty-two cents, the executive committee met in secret in Oskar’s office in the new cheaper building. They dragged in their swivel chairs to speak of Jonathan’s pet project, his magic bullet, the October rollout, the surveillance system based on the secret Emily had told him, the plans she’d whispered for electronic fingerprinting.

“He left us with a revolutionary product,” Dave murmured to Orion, Jake, Aldwin, and Oskar. “We got it built. We got it tested. We’re ready.”

“But is this the time—would anybody notice now?” Orion asked.

“Yes! This is the time,” said Aldwin. “Think like Jonathan.”

“What do you mean, ‘think like Jonathan’?” Orion retorted.

“Think smart,” said smart old Oskar.

Dave nodded. “Exactly. If you think like Jonathan, you seize the moment.”

Aldwin explained, “Our dot-com customers are folding, but government contracts are huge. With the new antiterrorist initiatives, surveillance is the perfect space for us.”

“We’ve got the goods,” Dave said.

“And we’ve got the name from Marketing,” Aldwin announced. Standing at Oskar’s whiteboard, he uncapped a green dry-erase marker. “Operational Security and Internet Surveillance.” Carefully he lettered the new name: OSIRIS.

Hushed, they stared at the new acronym, their new god.

Jake mused, “Osiris was the brother of Isis, right?”

“Right,” said Aldwin. “The brother of Isis and her husband too.”

“I love this,” Oskar said.

“Fantastic,” Dave chimed in.

Orion sat up abruptly, and the back of his swivel chair snapped upright. “Wait.”

“We can’t,” said Aldwin. He was wearing a suit jacket with his tie folded in the pocket. ISIS was holding its memorial service that afternoon.

“Now is the time,” Dave said sonorously. “Thanks to you and your team, we’ve got the firepower we need.”

Orion protested, “We never said the surveillance tools were for government apps.”

“Oh, come on,” Aldwin said.

“What do you mean, ‘come on’? Our new customer is the Bush administration? We’re supposed to be the eyes and ears of the War on Terror?”

“Exactly,” Dave said.

“But you do see what this means. Loss of privacy, loss of civil liberties…. The Feds could access e-mail, and search everyone’s transactions—and we’d be the instrument! This is not what Jonathan was thinking.”

“It’s what he would be thinking,” Aldwin said.

Orion closed his eyes. He saw Jonathan’s playful smile at the river.

“Take a breath,” Dave advised, and Orion understood what that meant: “We all know you’re from Vermont and you went to Quaker schools.”

Orion did not take a breath. He blurted, “I built Fast-Track.”

“OSIRIS,” Jake corrected.

“Whatever. OSIRIS. I don’t want to see it co-opted for dubious political …”

“Not co-opted. Marketed,” Dave told Orion gently.

“This is what Jonathan would have wanted,” said Jake. “To take the competition by surprise.”

“To make new opportunities where there were none,” said Dave.

Orion muttered, “To boldly go where no start-up has gone before.”

“Yes!” said Aldwin.

“What about free information?” Orion asked the others. “What about free enterprise? Do you think Jonathan built this company to sell out to government agencies? You’re stealing my work for your own mercenary purposes.”

“If you believe in free exchange of information, why are you so worried about stealing?” Aldwin asked.

“I’d share my work with anyone. The point is, I don’t want you to sell it to the government.”

“Selling is what we do,” Dave said in his most patient voice.

“Do you really think Jonathan wanted to become part of somebody’s counterterrorist agenda?”

“It’s an important agenda,” Dave said. “It’s tracking killers, maybe Jonathan’s own.”

“No,” said Orion. “That’s not the way Jonathan thought.”

“Of course not. How could he have known?” Dave soothed. “But in our position, sitting here right now …”

“If he were here right now, we wouldn’t be in this position, would we?” Orion said.

“We all miss him,” Aldwin said. “We all want him back.”

“We need some time,” Dave said, “but we don’t have time right now. We’re hemorrhaging, and even though we’re hurting, we have to act.”

“Jonathan would not have done this.” Orion spoke definitely, but what he meant was more complex: The Jonathan he loved would not have wanted this. He had been too independent. “He was a researcher at heart.”

“Before he was a researcher,” Dave pointed out, “he was a Marine.”

“This is my project,” Orion reminded the others, “and I say no.”

Dave looked at him steadily. His steely eyes softened. “We want you to be ready, but if you’re not, we understand.”

We? Orion looked at the others surrounding him, and he understood that they were all against him.

“Look, this is very, very difficult,” said Dave. “We’re all grappling with this thing. We’re all emotional. We have the … the memorial service this afternoon. It’s a terrible time, the worst possible time, and Orion, you have your issues, and I understand that, so we’re leaving this up to you, whether you want to participate in this initiative or not.”

“It’s amazing to me,” Orion said slowly, “how my leadership becomes conditional, and my team becomes collective property, and Jonathan’s memory”—his voice broke—“even his memorial service becomes something you can use for your agenda, which is now and has always been solely about money.”

“This is not art we’re making here,” Aldwin shot back indignantly.

“This is my friend you’re talking about,” Orion said. “Don’t tell me what he would have wanted.”

“Orion,” Dave chided, “we loved him too.”

He would say this at the memorial service as well. Orion knew exactly what Dave would say that afternoon. We loved him. We all loved him. Oh, and Mel too. We all loved Mel too.

He was so angry, he didn’t want to go, but his father was on the program. Orion had lobbied hard for Lou to come down to read. What better voice for a memorial? Craggy, irreligious, oddly deep. And who but Lou might have anything to offer Emily? From childhood she had admired his work. Naturally Dave worried that the service would run too long, but Orion won him over, promising his father’s brief elegy “Where Are the Bees?”

Now, driving to South Station to meet the train, he hoped his father had canceled at the last minute. He had canceled readings before. He was old and shaky. A seventy-seven-year-old man descending from the mountains with his visionary cri de coeur. Jonathan deserved the tribute, but ISIS was hardly worth it.

Orion drove to Boston, and he was late, and Lou didn’t own a cell phone. Aggravated, Orion barely glanced at the white sailboats on the river, the dark choppy water, the deep-blue October sky. He arrived at the station to find his father slightly crumpled in a brown corduroy sports jacket, dark trousers, and his old fly-fishing hat. As soon as he saw Orion, pleasure lit up Lou’s dark eyes, and for an instant he was young again.