The Candy House(31)
O’Brien is a native counter—and yet he has helped an untold number of eluders to elude our count.
O’Brien was tortured as a kid over his knowledge of wind currents—their speed and direction and seasonal fluctuations—and yet he has helped the eluders to elude us.
O’Brien joined the wind industry and thrived there as an executive, then left behind that success to join the ranks of us counters, where he moved up quickly and was well liked and an incredibly nice guy—and yet he has enabled a new generation of hermit crab programs to baffle our detection.
Clearly, O’Brien joined our ranks specifically to undermine us. From the beginning, O’Brien was in league with Mondrian.
And because of his deep knowledge of our systems, O’Brien’s allegiance to the eluders will prove disastrous, throwing off our data to such an extent that three quarters of our clients will leave us.
But none of that is the really troubling part. The really troubling part is that O’Brien, who is not even a typical, much less an impressionist, believes so strongly in enabling the eluders that he has infiltrated Harvest and brought us down.
Which means that eluding is not a notion that appeals only to impressionistic typicals who romanticize the idea of becoming someone else. If O’Brien supports it, then it must also make mathematical sense.
The day he is found out, O’Brien is herded by a dumbfounded crowd to the Shinto torii gate that marks the entrance to our campus. Avery is in tears, something none of us could have imagined. Before passing through the torii, O’Brien stops and addresses all of us:
“Hey, I’m sorry for fucking you over. You’re my friends and my family because I don’t have any other friends or family. If you consider what I’ve gained by enabling so many proxies to function undetected, and thereby so many eluders to successfully elude—that is, nothing—versus what I’ve lost—everything—you’ll understand that only one thing could justify that appalling cost-benefit analysis. That thing is belief. I believe in what the eluders are doing, I believe in their right to do it, and the force of my belief more than compensates for the fact that acting on it will cost me everyone and everything I love. I have no regrets, even now,” O’Brien concludes, “much as I will miss you.”
And then he walks out through the torii gate.
* * *
The chaos that follows this revelation takes many forms and strains. An inquiry begins into whether the man who made that speech was really O’Brien, or whether the real O’Brien was kidnapped by eluders and animated holographically beside the torii gate using gray grabs from the collective to capture his workplace tones and gestures and speech. Another hypothesis has it that the eluders somehow breached O’Brien’s skull with a weevil—a burrowing electronic device that can interfere with thought—and were controlling his behavior and speech from afar. It is difficult to disprove either of these theses, and I owe it to trusted typicals who persuade me of their unlikelihood on two bases: 1) Such actions would entail the use of the very invasive technologies the eluders abhor and are trying to elude. 2) Interventions like these are beyond the eluders’ technological range; they simply could not pull them off.
In the reductions and restructuring that follow O’Brien’s defection, 78 percent of Harvest employees are laid off, including M and Marc. I survive by a hair, I think because Avery likes me.
* * *
Eight months later, I am appointed leader of a new team: smaller and leaner than the one O’Brien led, but a team nonetheless. And while O’Brien is obviously not a leader whose example I would emulate, I can’t help but remember fondly the taco party he held for all of us when we first became a team. So I force myself to plan a barbecue for my new team at my home—an undertaking that would be simple if I weren’t dogged to the point of sleeplessness by questions like: Will people have fun? Will it be my fault if they don’t have fun? Will they hold it against me forever if they don’t have fun? Will they tell others who weren’t present that they didn’t have fun, and will that knowledge permanently reduce those others’ opinions of me? Etc. Dad got me a new grill for Christmas as an inducement to conquer my fear of entertaining, and Mom accompanies me to the supermarket over the weekend to buy meat and veggies. On the night itself, Alison drives to my house to provide moral support. I introduce her to everyone as “Alison” rather than “my sister, Alison,” because as team leader, I’d rather not have it known that I can’t throw a party without familial help.
With Alison present, I relax, as if a protective spell has been cast and nothing can go seriously wrong. The spell is put to an immediate and severe test when Tom shows up with M as his date. I heard a few months ago that M and Marc did not marry, but by the time this news reached me, a welcome layer of distance had formed between me and everything M-related, to the point that my first thought, on learning that she and Marc had broken up, was that their behavior as a couple had gone from statistically compliant to statistically aberrant. Always surprising, even to a counter like me.
To my relief, my distance from M holds fast even now, with her physically in my presence—or is it my sister’s protective spell? Alison takes my arm, and I feel her warmth and strength and calm flowing into me. She brought a keg of beer in her car, and we all drink a fair amount. I make a fire in my firepit and we sit around it and Tom holds M’s hand and kisses her cheek but I feel nothing; memories of my agony over M are like gray grabs from a stranger’s life. My sister keeps her arm around me while also pouring drinks and maintaining happiness among my guests—it’s one of her impressionist’s gifts to know when people are happy or not happy just by looking at them, whereas I’m more likely to speculate about how many hairs their eyebrows contain. I often notice that M is not smiling as we sit beside the firepit, but does that mean she’s unhappy? People don’t have to smile to be happy—sometimes they smile to hide unhappiness. But I don’t know what percentage of smiles are happy smiles versus unhappiness-cover-up smiles, and self-reporting would be inherently flawed, since a person smiling to mask unhappiness would be unlikely to admit, when asked, that they are unhappy.