“Jesus, you really are Yoko, aren’t you?” Lester was wearing his boxers and a bleary grin, standing in the living room’s doorway where Hilda had stood a minute before. It was past 6AM now, and there were waking up sounds through the whole condo, toilets flushing, a car starting down in the parking lot.
“Good morning, Lester,” Hilda said. She smiled when she said it, no offense taken, all good, all good.
“You fired who now, Perry?” Lester dug a pint of chocolate ice-cream out of the freezer and attacked it with a self-heating ceramic spoon that he’d designed specifically for this purpose.
“I got rid of Kettlewell and Tjan,” Perry said. He was blushing. “I would have talked to you about it, but you were with Suzanne. I had to do it, though. I had to.”
“I hate what happened to Death Waits. I hate that we’ve got some of the blame for it. But, Perry, Tjan and Kettlewell are part of our outfit. It’s their show, too. You can’t just go shit-canning them. Not just morally, either. Legally. Those guys own a piece of this thing and they’re keeping the lawyers at bay too. They’re managing all the evil shit so we don’t have to. I don’t want to be in charge of the evil, and neither do you, and hiring a new suit isn’t going to be easy. They’re all predatory, they all have delusions of grandeur.”
“You two have the acumen to hire better representation than those two,” Hilda said. “You’re experienced now, and you’ve founded a movement that plenty of people would kill to be a part of. You just need better management structure: an executive you can overrule whenever you need to. A lackey, not a boss.”
Lester acted as though he hadn’t heard her. “I’m being pretty mellow about this, buddy. I’m not making a big deal out of the fact that you did this without consulting me, because I know how rough it must have been to discover that this wickedness had gone down in our name, and I might have done the same. But it’s the cold light of day now and it’s time to go over there together and have a chat with Tjan and Kettlewell and talk this over and sort it out. We can’t afford to burn all this to the ground and start over now.”
Perry knew it was reasonable, but screw reasonable. Reasonable was how good people ended up doing wrong. Sometimes you had to be unreasonable.
“Lester, they violated our trust. It was their responsibility to do this thing and do it right. They didn’t do that. They didn’t look closely at this thing so that they wouldn’t have to put the brakes on if it turned out to be dirty. Which do you think those two would rather have happen: we run a cool project that everyone loves, or we run a lawsuit that makes ten billion dollars for their investors? They’re playing a different game from us and their victory condition isn’t ours. I don’t want to be reasonable. I want to do the right thing. You and me could have sold out a thousand times over the years and made money instead of doing good, but we didn’t. We didn’t because it’s better to be right than to be reasonable and rich. You say we can’t afford to get rid of those two. I say we can’t afford not to.”
“You need to get a good night’s sleep, buddy,” Lester said. He was blowing through his nose, a sure sign that he was angry. It made Perry’s hackles go up — he and Lester didn’t fight much but when they did, hoo-boy. “You need to mellow out and see that what you’re talking about is abandoning our friends, Kettlewell and Tjan, to make our own egos feel a little better. You need to see that we’re risking everything, risking spending our lives in court and losing everything we’ve ever built.”
A Zen-like calm descended on Perry. Hilda was right. Suits were everywhere, and you could choose your own. You didn’t need to let the Roy Disneys of the world call the shots.
“I’m sorry you feel that way, Lester. I hear everything you’re saying, but you know what, it’s going to be my way. I understand that what I want to do is risky, but there’s no way I can go on doing what I’m doing and letting things get worse and worse. Making a little compromise here and there is how you end up selling out everything that’s important. We’re going to find other business-managers and we’re going to work with them to make a smooth transition. Maybe we’ll all come out of this friends later on. They want to do something different from what I want to do is all.”
This wasn’t calming Lester down at all. “Perry, this isn’t your project to do what you want with. This belongs to a lot of us. I did most of the work in there.”
“You did, buddy. I get that. If you want to stick with them, that’s how it’ll go. No hard feelings. I’ll go off and do my own thing, run my own ride. People who want to connect to my network, no sweat, they can do it. That’s cool. We’ll still be friends. You can work with Kettlewell and Tjan.” Perry could hardly believe these words were coming out of his mouth. They’d been buddies forever, inseparable.
Hilda took his hand silently.
Lester looked at him with increasing incredulity. “You don’t mean that.”
“Lester, if we split, it would break my heart. There wouldn’t be a day that went by from now to the end of time that I didn’t regret it. But if we keep going down this path, it’s going to cost me my soul. I’d rather be broke than evil.” Oh, it felt so good to be saying this. To finally affirm through deed and word that he was a good person who would put ethics before greed, before comfort even.
Lester looked at Hilda for a moment. “Hilda, this is probably something that Perry and I should talk about alone, if you don’t mind.”
“I mind, Lester. There’s nothing you can’t say in front of her.”
Lester apparently had nothing to say to that, and the silence made Perry uncomfortable. Lester had tears in his eyes, and that hit Perry in the chest like a spear. His friend didn’t cry often.
He crossed the room and hugged Lester. Lester was wooden and unyielding.
“Please, Lester. Please. I hate to make you choose, but you have to choose. We’re on the same side. We’ve always been on the same side. Neither of us are the kind of people who send lawyers after kids in hospital. Never. I want to make it good again. We can have the kind of gig where we do the right thing and the cool thing. Come on, Lester. Please.”
He let go of Lester. Lester turned on his heel and walked back into his bedroom. Perry knew that that meant he’d won. He smiled at Hilda and hugged her. She was a lot more fun to hug than Lester.
Sammy was at his desk looking over the production prototype for the Disney-in-a-Box (R) units that Imagineering had dropped off that morning when his phone rang. Not his desk phone — his cellular phone, with the call-return number blocked.
“Hello?” he said. Not many people had this number — he didn’t like getting interrupted by the phone. People who needed to talk to him could talk to his secretary first.
“Hi, Sammy. Have I caught you at a bad time?” He could hear the sneer in the voice and then he could see the face that went with the sneer: Freddy. Shit. He’d given the reporter his number back when they were arranging their disastrous face-to-face.
“It’s not a good time, Freddy,” he said. “If you call my secretary — ”
“I just need a moment of your time, sir. For a quote. For a story about the ride response to your printers — your Disney-in-a-Box Circle-R, Tee-Em, Circle-C.”
Sammy felt his guts tense up. Of course those ride assholes would have known about the printers. That’s what press-releases were for. Somewhere on their message-boards he was sure that there was some discussion of them. He hadn’t had time to look for it, though, and he didn’t want to use the Disney Parks competitive intel people on this stuff, because after the Death Waits debacle (debacle on debacle, ack, he could be such a fuck-up) he didn’t want to have any train of intel-gathering on the group pointing back to him.