The Corporation

CHAPTER FOUR

MICHELLE JUMPED RIGHT into her work the following morning at Building Products and was so busy with meetings and strategy sessions with various personnel that she didn’t even think about Jay O’Rourke until that afternoon when Alan took her to the IT department and she saw his empty cubicle.

She was sitting at the cube of an IT tech named Shane Newstead, who was explaining the Network Administration stuff. Michelle had been taking notes in the various meetings all day. Her plan was to begin preliminary work on developing her documentation tomorrow and meet with a few other key people. Jay was one of those people she wanted to meet with, and when the tech she and Alan were talking to finished, she asked, “Is Jay around?”

“He’s not here today,” Shane said.

“He was so tanked up on caffeine last night, he probably didn’t get to sleep till five a.m.,” Alan said and laughed.

Shane nodded. “Yeah, he drinks coffee like a demon, but he can get by with little or no sleep. All I heard was that he wouldn’t be in today. I don’t know what’s up.”

The thought that Jay had become a victim of some HR espionage as a result of last night troubled Michelle, but she quickly put that out of her mind and continued with the rest of her day. That evening she, Alan, and another Financial Consultant employee named Henry Wagner worked out of the conference room with the high level executives of the company as well as the Human Resources Director. They called out for pizza, and dinner was eaten amid the meeting. Michelle didn’t mind, but she was anxious to call it a day and get back to her hotel room.

She got back to her room at nine p.m., showered quickly and called Donald. “How’d your day go?” she asked.

“Okay. Still dicking around with Red Rose on this testicular cancer thing. How’s El Paso, Texas?”

Talking to Donald long distance like this was tough. She wanted to be home; wanted to be safe and snug in the evening chill of Spring. This was the first consulting job she’d ever had that required out of state travel and, while it was fun, she did not like being away from home. They talked for fifteen minutes then parted with goodnights. Michelle spent the rest of the evening watching a movie—Training Day with Denzel Washington—then fell asleep.

Despite lying in bed, waiting for sleep to overcome her, thinking about that painful memory of the past as she drifted to sleep, she did not have the dream, nor did she wake up crying.

Jay O’Rourke wasn’t in the office the following day, and after meeting with the last few staff members she needed to talk to before beginning her preliminary sketches of the product, she asked one of the IT techs she met yesterday, Rob Fegley, where he was.

“My boss told me that Jay left Building Products.”

“Huh?” The news was sudden and surprising. Michelle looked at Rob with a stunned expression. “You’ve got to be kidding! He quit?”

“I don’t know if he quit officially or what,” Rob said, typing at his computer terminal. “But an HR person spoke to Joe this morning, and Joe told me and a few of the other guys that Jay is no longer with the company.”

“That’s too bad,” Michelle said, trying to keep a neutral tone.

As she continued with the rest of her day she found herself pondering the real reason for Jay’s departure. It would suck if he had actually been dismissed for shooting his mouth off the other night at the Lone Star. Could a company really fire you for that? For expressing your personal opinion about work in general in a public place, on your own time? Michelle was fairly confident that various issues like the First Amendment would protect Jay in a case like this if that was what really happened. At one point during the day she stumbled across his business card and made a note of it; in addition to his office and fax number, his cell phone number was listed. She wondered if his cell phone was a private one or if it was company owned. Maybe when she had time she would call him and find out. She could do so from her hotel room; what could it hurt?

She mentioned this to Donald that evening. She’d left the office at five-thirty and stopped for take-out at a Barbecue place on the way back to her room and was just finishing her supper of a roast beef sandwich and soup when her cell phone rang. “So you haven’t seen this guy since Monday night?” Donald asked.

“No,” Michelle said. She’d gathered the trash up in a plastic tie-off bag to take downstairs to the lounge where she’d deposit it in a trash bin there. She didn’t want the smell of leftovers in her room tonight. “Like I said, he kind of got in a tiff with some of his co-workers about employment in general. Technically, he was in the right. We were talking about social issues and some of his co-workers took exception to it. I’d hardly think you could be fired for discussing social issues outside of the work place on your own time.”

“You would think, but the world has gotten nuttier lately regarding employment and business practices,” Donald said. She heard him sigh. “There’s some employers now who not only refuse to hire smokers, they’re firing people who don’t quit. They claim it costs more money to insure them. I read about one company that banned their employees from smoking anywhere! Even their own homes. They’ve actually fired people for it.”

“Really?” Michelle asked.

“I kid you not,” Donald answered. “As a doctor, if I encounter a patient who smokes I try to convince them to quit for health reasons. I cannot force them to quit. The decision is up to them, and it’s theirs to make. Plus, last time I checked, tobacco is still sold legally. Same with alcohol. I heard a similar case in which a company that had a policy against its employees drinking alcoholic beverages off company hours fired an employee because he was seen drinking a beer one night in a bar. Alcohol and tobacco both pose health risks, but they’re not illegal by any means. You can take that same kind of reasoning and apply it to people who are overweight—not just obese, because there’s actually discrimination laws that can protect obese people—but honest to goodness overweight people. Somebody who is twenty, maybe fifty pounds overweight but isn’t considered obese. Companies can use this same argument and fire those people for not losing weight or eating right. And if you break it down further, what’s to stop them from forbidding you to participate in certain sports during your off time? It all boils down to health coverage. They want to save money on it. Once you head down that path, it can get worse.”

“I hardly think Jay got fired for what he said,” Michelle said. “But still—”

“Corporations do a lot of weird things, honey,” Donald said. “I’m dealing with one now that doesn’t want to pay for a surgery that will not only save a man’s life, but will ultimately save them hundreds of thousands of dollars in long term care which they’ll end up paying anyway if they don’t approve the twenty thousand dollars upfront it will cost to cover the surgery. They just want to save as much money as they can for this quarter to meet their executive’s financial goals. Nothing more, nothing less.”

Michelle didn’t want Donald to go off on another tangent again so she changed the subject. “I might give him a call Friday,” she said. “I was supposed to meet with him today on this project anyway.”

“Will you not meeting with him change the scope of your project?”

“I met with a couple of the guys he worked with and they filled me in. I have enough to get started.”

They talked for a little while longer and when Michelle hung up she found herself in a deep, melancholic funk. Talking about Jay brought the memories of their conversation Monday night to the surface; how he’d asked her if she had children and her response to that question, followed by that painful memory. That painful memory now burned in the surface of her mind, and she sat on her bed and pulled her purse to her lap. She rummaged through it, found her wallet and opened it up, flipping through the pictures.

When she extracted the photos she let the tears come. Unbidden.

Her daughter had been beautiful even though she’d been born two months premature. Eyes forever closed, skin dark pink, little hands splayed open, a white blanket covering her to her chest, Alanis Michelle Dowling looked just like her mother and nothing at all like the sonofabitch who’d fathered her. Thank God for that, but even if she did possess traces of Kirk’s features she would have loved her fiercely just the same. For now there were the photos, over five prints taken the day she was delivered prematurely and lost forever. Her only link to the best thing that had ever happened in her life.

She was twenty-four years old when she became pregnant with Alanis. She’d been working at All Nation Insurance in Manhattan and hated every minute of it. Her parents had gotten her a job there—had insisted on it, actually. Michelle had wanted to go to college after graduation and major in art but her folks shot that idea down. Her mother told her it would be a waste of time going to school. Her folks could get her a job at All Nation, get her into a good position, and she could work her way up the ladder.

There would be no need to waste four years of her life on a worthless degree when she could cut right through the line and have a secure job by the time she would have graduated. Against her better judgment she’d gotten a job at All Nation right away, mainly to make her parents happy, but she’d been unhappy. She’d spent the first four years working a variety of entry-level jobs by day and partying and getting into the underground rock scene at night. By the time she was twenty-two she’d worked herself into a fairly well-paying administrative position. It was there that she met Kirk Hummel, five years her senior and a budding middle-manager.

By then her extra-curricular activities in music and art had taken a back seat. Her life revolved around work because it was expected of her. Michelle was an only child and both her parents had been staunch workaholics, completely dedicated to the corporate cause of their employer. Michelle had spent most of her childhood at daycares or in the care of her grandmother. Her mother pushed her into majoring in Business in high school and disapproved of any other career choice Michelle had—journalism, graphic arts, even architecture. “A good solid business education is what you need to better prepare yourself for our growing economy,” Mom had said. This mantra was repeated so often that Michelle finally gave in to shut her parents up. She chose business as a major in high school and her grades promptly fell. By the time she was twenty-two she was asleep at the wheel; a passenger in an automaton that looked like her and answered to her name. She woke up, showered and dressed, took the subway into Manhattan every morning, worked ten to twelve hours a day and came home. She had no time for her friends, her art, or any kind of social life. Until Kirk Hummel stepped in.

Her relationship with Kirk was an affair, plain and simple. Secretly she’d hoped something more would come from it but it never did. Kirk showed his true colors when Michelle told him she was pregnant; the pregnancy was unintentional; she’d been on the pill but sometimes, as they say, shit happens. Kirk didn’t want to get married and, worse still, didn’t want to have anything to do with her or the child and promptly fled the state. Michelle had been too crushed to pursue any legal remedy that would help her financially.

When Michelle found out she was pregnant she was thrilled. Her outlook began to change when her parents weren’t as enthused about the pregnancy. “You aren’t going to have it, are you?” her mother asked . By then, Michelle had moved out of her parents’ house and was living in an apartment in Jersey City. Michelle was stunned by her mother’s use of the word it in reference to what would be her first grandchild. It was then that Michelle saw her parents for what they were and she realized something for the first time: her parents never really wanted her. She realized she’d been a burden on them, that her own arrival had been unexpected, but back in those dim days before abortion was legal there wasn’t much they could have done about it. They’d put up a good front, had provided food and shelter for her and that was the extent of it. Emotionally they had been distant and unavailable.

No wonder Michelle had sought solace in all things artistic. It was in the arts that she found love and acceptance and nurturing. Something that was absent at home.

That phone conversation had been the second to the last one she’d ever had with her mother. It had ended in harsh words and tears and Michelle called back a few days later in a desperate attempt to prove to herself that her mother really wasn’t the cold, callous person she was, that she really didn’t mean the things she’d said. (“A baby is going to destroy your future, Michelle. You need to focus on your career when you’re in your twenties, and a baby is just going to take all of your focus away from that and then where will you be? A common housewife with no use and no skills except for breeding.”)

But her mother had meant what she’d said.

Everything changed after that turning point. As her pregnancy moved along, Michelle’s entire outlook on life changed. She saw life as a precious thing that you only get one chance to make the best of making yourself and your loved ones happy. She hadn’t really been happy growing up, she hadn’t been happy that she made the decision to forsake pursuing a career in art, and she wasn’t happy working as a Junior Executive for All Nation. When Michelle found out she was going to have a girl, her heart swelled. Her daughter was not going to undergo what she’d went through. Her little girl was going to be loved, nurtured and taken care of. She was going to grow up loving life, and she wanted to share her daughter’s joy when she discovered new things for the first time. Knowing that she was going to bring forth new life in the form of her daughter, whom she named the day she found out she was going to have her, changed Michelle’s entire outlook on life forever.

She continued going to work and she cut back on her hours. Her supervisor was very understanding and gracious, telling her she could have three months of maternity time after the baby was born. As the months passed she felt joyous as her belly swelled. She began shopping for maternity clothes with her girlfriends from the office and buying things for the baby that she would set up in her one bedroom apartment. When she first saw Alanis’s heartbeat through the ultrasound she remembered the sense of awe that came over her. She remembered learning from the technician during her eight-week visit that he believed she was having a girl. One of her close friends at the time, Catherine Berman, was concerned about Michelle’s ability to support herself as a single mother but Michelle already had it planned out. “I’ll be fine,” she’d said. And she would have been. Everything would have been fine. After Alanis was born she would have plenty of money saved, would have paid maternity leave, and that would give her enough time to seek residence outside the city and set up roots somewhere else, out in the country, away from the urban jungle. She wanted to raise her daughter in more tranquil, peaceful settings, somewhere where she could still make a decent living and still raise Alanis without having to worry about the two of them becoming a victim of a violent crime or being too far from her daughter’s daycare provider.

She lost Alanis in her seventh month.

Even now she still remembered that awful day, and reliving it brought back the tears every time. The abdominal cramping that woke her out of a sound sleep at three a.m.; the heavy vaginal bleeding that soaked through the first tampon she applied within an hour. Even then she didn’t want to believe it was happening, kept telling herself that this just wasn’t happening even as her rational side kept telling her it was. She remembered dialing 911 with shaky hands, remembered being strapped to the gurney when the ambulance arrived. She remembered taking her purse with her before they left, not knowing when she’d be back, hoping against all odds that the doctors would fix it. She remembered being hooked up to IVs and strapped to monitors. She remembered the dread that filled her as the contractions started, as the doctors worked feverishly to save her baby as the night wore on. She kept hoping the nightmare would go away, kept telling herself she would do anything to save her child. She remembered the doctors telling her the next morning that despite all their efforts the condition was advancing, that they were going to induce labor; she remembered thinking no, this isn’t right! This isn’t happening!; she remembered the intense pain, the gut wrenching cramps in her lower belly; she remembered the warmth that spread through her lower body as Alanis was expelled from between her legs, remembered the flow of blood and amniotic fluid and her loud sobs as she saw her child, forever a seventh-month old fetus, so tiny, so little, a beautiful little face, eyes closed forever, adorable feet and hands, skin pale and gray; a tiny baby who never took a breath or opened her eyes or felt her mother’s loving touch.

She remembered being allowed to cradle Alanis to her breast. She remembered the medical personnel leaving the delivery room to give her some time alone with her baby. And what she saw when she looked down at that stillborn baby broke her heart so badly that it never completely healed. She still felt the pain, even now after all this time had passed. She remembered crying, holding Alanis to her tightly, unmindful now of her nakedness and the blood caking her inner thighs. All she wanted to experience was the feel of Alanis’s tiny body against hers, the feel of her skin against hers. She remembered caressing the oh-so-tiny fingers, kissing them, sobbing uncontrollably, not believing that this nightmare could happen to her and not knowing how she was ever going to get through her life now that the only thing she had ever really loved—for she had loved Alanis even before the moment when she first learned she was pregnant—was now gone from her. Forever.

At some point the medical personnel had come back to the room and gently taken Alanis from her and Michelle didn’t remember much after that.

The next few days were a blur. She was in the hospital for two nights. She remembered being monitored by the nurses. She remembered speaking with a grief counselor. And she remembered empathetically nodding her head when she was asked if she would like memorial photographs of Alanis before she was cremated. In fact, she was overwhelmed at the thought. She remembered going home in a cab, bundled up in a set of spare clothes her friend Catherine had brought for her, clutching the envelope of photos in her hand as the cab made its way over the Hudson River to her apartment in Jersey City. And then she remembered the arrival of her daughter’s ashes and picking out the nice little urn where they continued to rest on a bookshelf along with one of the photos from the batch of memorial photos. They still sat on the top shelf in the living room of the house she shared with Donald and not a day passed when she didn’t think about Alanis, and how much her daughter meant to her and how much she still loved her.

She didn’t leave All Nation. She returned to work two weeks later a broken shell, no longer caring much about her work the way she thought she had. Her demeanor was immediately noticed by her superiors and friends. She confided in her friends that she was crushed by losing Alanis, that it was a hurt she had never felt before. She tried explaining that losing a baby through miscarriage was like losing that same child through something else—crib death, a car accident, some dreadful disease. Just because Alanis never breathed or lived outside the womb didn’t mean her death was less worthy. Her friends said the same meaningless words in an attempt to make her feel better: “You’ll get better in time,” and “You need to get past this,” and that old chestnut: “Someday you’ll have another baby.”

She wanted Alanis!

And because she’d wanted Alanis so desperately, because her passing had wounded her so deeply, because she grieved over the death of her baby the way one would mourn the death of any child, her friends and co-workers shook their collective heads and clucked disapprovingly, not understanding the level of her grief. She knew what they thought: Alanis had been stillborn, premature; she’d miscarried her baby so her child was never, really, technically born. She had never really been alive, so there was no sense in mourning over the death. This mindset infuriated Michelle more than it saddened her, and she’d tried explaining her feelings to those who she felt were her friends but they merely humoring her and said the same meaningless words of comfort. They didn’t get it, they didn’t understand Michelle’s pain and grief and they didn’t want to understand it. By then the corporate wall that had been built around Michelle’s life by her parents had been all but shattered and Michelle saw the people she thought of as her friends for who they really were: blind, soulless parasites who’s only interest was for their own self-image and worth.

She tendered her resignation three months later, packed up her belongings and moved as far away from New Jersey as she could get and still be within shouting distance of a major city. Central Pennsylvania seemed far enough to get away from the hurt and pain, and it was close enough to at least two major cities—Harrisburg and Philadelphia. She found a small apartment in a town called Rothsville and set up a computer graphics business, peddling her wares to local businesses, and within a few months she was designing flyers, brochures, booklets, restaurant menus and other items. It was grunt work for the most part, but it paid the bills. Her rent was cheap, and the extra money she was saving enabled her to get back into real art—portraits mostly. Within a year she was leasing an old farmhouse in the country where she set up a small art studio and soon had plenty of clients, most of them drawn from an agency in New York she’d hooked up with.

In time she gained a passion for life she never thought she had. And she realized that even in death, Alanis was responsible for her reawakening. For if she hadn’t been pregnant with Alanis, she never would have woken up from the slumber she was in while she was so blindly devoted to All Nation. And even though she lost Alanis, she now had this tremendous gift her little girl had given her and she swore that she would never go down the path that had been prepared for her by her parents. She was going to live for herself, devote her attention to her art and her instincts and find a way to make a living with them. For a while it worked. She was able to make a living with her art for three years or so, mostly doing commercial art for advertising agencies and portraits for corporate clients that would hang in their lobbies and hallways, and even though she never rose above that, had never attracted the attention of one of the more prestigious art museums or collectors, it was more satisfying than crunching numbers on some spreadsheet in some faceless cubicle.

And now things seemed to have returned full circle for she was once again working for another faceless corporation. She’d kept up with her computer skills as an artist and, as a result of designing her own website, became a webmaster for several consulting firms. The computer graphics work usually came hand in hand with web design and she was always able to make a better-than-average living with it. In time, her skills attracted the attention of some of the bigger consulting firms who liked her computer graphics work and she somehow wound up doing work for them. And the more the work morphed, the more she realized she was being sucked back into working for large corporations. The difference this time was that she was doing it on her own terms.

And now she was sitting on a king-sized bed in some drab hotel room in El Paso, Texas, looking at a photo of her still-born daughter, tears streaming down her face, remembering those years with a sad sense of nostalgia and yearning. She had come so far, she thought, tracing a finger over the photo’s edges. Her vision blurred through tears. In the photo, Alanis’s sweet little face had been washed from the blood and membrane that had covered her in birth, revealing pink skin that seemed strangely life-like. She’d been dressed in a little white nightgown and placed in a bassinet with a white mattress, a white and pink blanket pulled up to her chin. She didn’t look dead; she looked asleep, as any preemie would look in the neonatal care unit at any hospital. But Michelle knew better; her daughter’s body had never breathed life, but her spirit had been alive within her these past twelve years and had never died.

Michelle cried softly, the memories washing through her. She brought the photo to her lips and kissed it. “They said the hurt would go away some day,” she said softly through her tears. “It never goes away and I don’t want it to. Because if it does it means… it means that you’ll go away and I don’t want you to ever go away. I want you to be with me right here always… always in my heart.” She cried, kissing the photo of her daughter, one of five snapshots the hospital staff had arranged to have taken which she had since made negatives out of and duplicated numerous times in print and electronically—digital images existed on a zip disk in her bank’s safe deposit box in the event of a fire at her house. If Michelle or her place of residence were to cease to exist through a hurricane or a fire, Alanis would always exist. Forever.

“I’ll never let you go away, baby,” Michelle said, lying down on the bed on her left side, holding the photograph close to her. “I’ll never let you go. Never let you go.”

Her painful little memory was eased of its pain in slow degrees as Michelle sank into sleep.