Negotiation

The economy of emotion

They celebrate the acquisition on a ferry. Lights hang from the bridges like jewels on necklaces. The river unrolls in fine purple fabric in front of the prow, splitting down the middle as the ship passes over it. From his table, David watches white headlights tumble down FDR Drive, swimming through the dark.

“And we all know we wouldn’t be here without our fearless CFO,” Paul declares. “Numbers are the scariest part of any acquisition. David, man, you are one fearless crusader!”

Applause washes through the space. David represses his pity for Paul’s desperate and shaky grasp on youth, the wrinkled blazer and skinny jeans. The shoes. God, they were sneakers. Four different colors, maybe five.

The “Woos!” from the company woo him and he loves them for loving him. Pride, that replenishable resource, flushes through him. David stands and bows and thanks Paul for leading such a brilliant team. Hydrated with hype, he feels as if he’s part of the river, that infinite current cresting silver in the moonlit currents passing the Statue of Liberty as the boat rounds Ellis Island.

A text from Catherine. Anna didn’t board her flight. Missing

Frank Sinatra calls out across the dance floor. David cradles a seltzer in the back and watches couples form their private worlds, judging each employee anew by their plus one. He sees where Catherine would have wanted to be, where she would have led him. He goes out to the deck into the whispering ice of the December wind.

Reads the text again:

Anna didn’t board her flight. Might have gone missing.

Maybe we just leave her this time, he texts.

Retreats from the chill back to the echo chamber where the company sweats, joins Paul and the other executives to talk about their money’s future.

*

Fifth Avenue rolls past in windows and promises. Snow wilts in gray lumps, decomposing on curbs, on corners. In Madison Square Park, a scarfed saxophonist honks into the ice-cold air, each note breaking the glass of the atmosphere. In the back of their Uber, Sarah instructs David on what to say in the interview about the acquisition.

“I’ve done this before,” he snaps. “A dozen time. Thirteen, actually. A baker’s dozen of funding, acquisition, mergers. IPOs.”

“I know, I know.” Sarah looks at her wedding ring. “But Paul is putting a lot of pressure on the message that we’re ‘partnering’ with Central Electric, not getting acquired. He’s worried that the open source community will be mad that we ‘sold out’ or whatever. You know how developers are. Can you just drop the word ‘partnership’ a few times here and there?”

He sits up straight. “’Why, yes, Tina, good question. We’ve partnered up with CE so we can better profit from all the developers who contributed to our platform for free.’”

“David!” she laughs. He laughs, too, feeling accomplished, and they arrive at the lobby.

Framed issues of BossMan magazine gleam down at him. He tries to remember the last time he ever saw a print issue for sale. As Sarah checks in with the receptionist, David peers at one of the men on the covers, a beaming executive. “The Next Bezos?” bold bubble letters ask.

Sarah hands him a security badge. She follows his gaze to the Bossman profile. “I don’t want to get your hopes up. But this might be it. A cover story. I pitched your record and called you ‘the great negotiator.’ All capital.”

“Capital.” He pictures his face on the cover, feeling wonder. “’The Great Negotiator’ would look really good there. Great title.”

Catherine has called four times. He swipes her name away and posts about how excited he is to be getting ready for his interview with BossMan. With a grin, he inspects the number of followers that Boss has: 500,000.

The receptionist takes them up an elevator and through an open floor of BossMan employees clicking things and into a corner office with a view over the naked skeleton trees of the park, the gritted teeth of the Flatiron Building. Lunch hour has started. A line forms outside a salad place that looks like an Apple store. A wholesale carpet salesman watches the people in line watch their phones. With a sudden flash, he sees Anna down on the street. Six, maybe seven. Back then, she always danced or hopped, never walked. They would clown to see the Christmas lights in Madison Square Park. Easier than Rockefeller. More intimate. More efficient.

“My little lighting bolt,” he says to the window in a voice he lost long ago.

Anna didn’t board her flight. Missing

BossMan field correspondent Tina Riwali apologizes for being late. She takes out her laptop, looks at him, and radiates anxiety. Her questions coagulate into blank checks awaiting his signature. They take photos together and he asks if she can include his social account when she posts about the interview. In the car, he checks his post about getting interviewed. Only two likes. He looks at his notifications. Nothing from Tina.

Back at the office, he calls Catherine from a conference room.

“David.”

Having her say his name, even twelve years since the divorce, is a bucket of freezing water over his head.

“Catherine.” He wonders if she still shivers when he says her name, too.

They had always thought Anna would go on such great adventures. She had always invented worlds for herself. Catherine and he would watch from the porch as she took Brian into the backyard with her. Together, they would build galaxies out on the swing set. No one knew, then, her fantasies could become such terrible realities.

“Where is she?”

“She met a guy, some European. They went to Croatia.”

“And she didn’t come back.”

“Glory was supposed to pick her up from JFK, she never showed. Her phone is off.”

“You sent Glory to pick her up? She’s twenty-eight, she can get home herself, for God’s sake!”

“You know you can never really tell what state of mind she’s going to be in. Who knows whether she even brought her pills there.”

“She did this when she lived with me. Disappeared twice, remember? One time, she ended up at Brian’s. The other time, she came back on her own. This is just another one of those times.”

“She’s been kidnapped.”

The blood falls from his head to his toes.

“They found my email, I think on the firm’s site, and sent me a picture.” Catherine is crying. “It’s awful, David. They beat up the guy she was with at some nightclub in Dubrovnik and took her.”

“What do they want?”

“Money.”

A polite knock sounds against the conference room door. A gaggle of pink-cheeked salespeople stand outside the door. “We’ve got a call with SF in five!”

David tucks the phone to his ear. “How much?”

“They’re asking for half.”

“Half?”

“Everything. Half our net worth.”

Anna didn’t board her flight. Missing

David laughs but stops when he realizes it doesn’t sound confident, that it’s the noise of an animal in anxious anticipation of a cruel inevitability.

“They say to send ten million by tomorrow. Bitcoin.”

She breaks into the static of tears.

His laughter curls and dies in his throat.

“David?”

The door behind him opens. Two of the apple-cheeked sales guys shuffle into the room, escorted by the stubbled manager with dumb glasses.

“Sorry,” the stubbled manager tells him, “but we’re already two minutes late to the call. We booked the room.”

*

Pulling into the driveway back in Short Hills, David remembers three years ago when he got out of the car and heard screaming. He had run for the kitchen and stepped over a broken plate. Blood gleamed across the tiled floor. A scarlet footprint soaked the white carpet in the hallway.

Anna stood outside the bathroom in the hall hitting the door so hard that the wood had cracked and her knuckles had burst into blood. Her hand was swollen, a berry about to burst.

“You don’t tell me what to do!” she screamed at the door. “You don’t tell me what to do!”

Accessing a controlled rage deep within himself, David shouted: “Anna! This is not about your mother or anything she said. Control yourself!”

He would never forget how his daughter had turned to him but stopped halfway, as if she were a bird of prey, one eye bulging and huge, unblinking, watching him from the periphery. “Anna,” he had urged. He pointed at Clara, just six then, sucking her thumb with her blanket shoved into her mouth. “Your daughter is scared.”

From the bathroom, Catherine sobbed and ran the faucet. Clara watched, absorbing it. He didn’t know whose blood was in the kitchen and made an awful prayer that it was from his ex-wife and not his granddaughter.

Anna screamed and ran and brought him to the floor, clawing his face. David snapped and hit her back with all the force of all the years they had hoped for the best.

*

Tina posts about “the awesome interview I just had with @davidauburn.” Five people repost her. David looks at each profile of each account and relives his fame from their eyes, clicking his own profile to see how they see him. He puts away his phone and gets out of the car, staring at the house he used to call home. The school bus rolls up to the other side of the street. Clara emerges, her gleaming pink backpack jogging on her shoulders as she skips over to him.

“Grampa!” she cries through her thumb.

He melts to his knees and wraps her in a hug. He spews nonsense, a fever dream of hope. In the house, Glory takes her from him and deposits her in the mandatory afterschool bath, one of Catherine's ongoing demands since Clara moved into the house at age five, when Anna came back from California with bruises on her neck.

He makes his way up to the third floor, passing hallways he used to know, doors opening to unfamiliar familiarity. In her office, Catherine is wearing her headset and staring out at the street with narrowed eyes.

“Still doing the bath thing?” he asks.

She holds up her hand. “Right. Right, well we’ll learn that at the deposition. Bill. Bill, right, tell him that. I’ve got to go. Yeah, you too. Bye.” She tosses off her headset. “Bath thing. Yes. Kids are just second to Bubonic rats. She’s like a super-virus.”

“Nice way to think of your granddaughter,” he says. “Let me see this email.”

It’s two sentences. The second sentence discusses Bitcoin. He clicks the attached picture. Anna is tied to a chair with ropes, her mouth stuffed with a rag. He closes it quickly, but the image burns his brain and smolders.

“FBI?”

“They’re on it.” Catherine chews her lip. The bags under her eyes hang heavy and purple. The bob of her brown hair glows gold and silver in the winter twilight. “I don’t know if they’ll be fast enough.”

“Ten million dollars,” he mutters.

“David.”

Clara announces herself by making helicopter noises. She launches herself onto Catherine’s reading chair, jumping up and down. “Your throne is bad for bouncing!”

David smiles, remembering when he had called the chair ‘Grandma’s throne,’ then told her a story of a queen and a kingdom and a time when everything was magic and everything made sense. Except for the Queen. You know who the queen was? he had asked her, looking into her full bloom of her face. Your grandma. Clara had howled with laughter. The joke never got old. She had so much of Anna in her, turning worlds on and off like a lights, the constant searching stars of her eyes, that open sky of a soul that expands until collapse.

Clara shakes Catherine’s shoulder. “Grandma, can you give me pigtails?”

“Glory!” Catherine cries. Glory marches up the stairs and whisks Clara away.

A space opens and standing over the edge, David spins with vertigo looking down at the gravity that pulled his daughter into the abyss and sent his granddaughter flying high.

“What do we do?” Catherine asks.

He can’t help but look at the scar carved from her eyebrow to her temple. A sickness boils in him as he thinks about the picture in the email. His daughter. Ten million dollars. Blood in the kitchen. Breaking open the bathroom door to see Catherine sitting on the toilet, crying, barely conscious, blood all over. From his daughter. The ambulance. The police. The handcuffs.

“I know,” Catherine predicts. “But we have to get her back.”

“How do we know we can trust some Soviet Union thugs?”

“Croatia was never technically part of-“

“Cath-”

“Look, it isn’t hard to send this Bitcoin. It would at least buy us time.”

“Time for what? To transfer even more of our money to them?”

“To make sure she isn’t harmed. To show them we're serious. Ten million is less than ten percent of our worth. Isn’t Anna worth ten percent?”

“A steal.”

“You’re acting like we have a choice.”

They stare at each other and he feels the lightheaded love he feels when he sees her see him, the way so few people can see him. He leans in and traces the scar above Catherine’s eye where Anna had left her mark. He starts to tremble, to vibrate. They both break down to cry without holding each other, only the space between them, and he wonders if it’s the loss of their marriage or the loss of the daughter they had known, the one who had already vanished so many years ago, the one who was supposed to fill in the center of them.

*

They decide to send the Bitcoin from a MacBook from Catherine’s Times Square office. Far below, a man dressed as Mickey Mouse bullies tourists and Spiderman smokes a cigarette under scaffolding.

David taps open the photo of Anna on his phone. He absorbs the blind on her eyes, gag in her mouth, fear on her face. The cement of some cruel space caught between a thousand lifetime. His stomach curls as he crosses every lifetime to rescue the daughter that drifts inside his dreams, not the daughter in the photo or the daughter in all those leftover lifetimes.

“The address for the Bitcoin transfers here,” Catherine says. “You can still just send some of your wallet directly, right?”

“We’re not paying the full ten million,” David says.

“What do you mean?” Catherine touches her throat, a gesture he remembers from college on their first date, right when he knew he would kiss her and knew she wanted him to kiss her and it was snowing like stars dissolving into dust around them.

“I mean we aren’t paying ten million. Where did they even get that number?”

“This isn’t some business deal. This is our daughter.”

“The thought of spending all that money on someone who assaulted my wife-“

“Ex-wife.”

He paces, remembering the divorce proceedings. How easily she could have crushed him, tapped her fellow Harvard Law graduates, how she didn’t. How she struggled to raise Anna and Brian, didn’t complain about it once to him. How he had been the one who complained that the kids never came to his apartment and argued with Catherine when she told him they didn’t want to come to the city. How none of it made sense.

When Anna did visit, it was all screaming, fighting, breaking things on the floor. Chasing after her in clubs at all hours of the night and those hopeless colorless hours before dawn.

“We’re not doing this for her this time,” David says. “We’re supposed to bail her out of some shit she got herself into. My whole life, your whole life, we spent working to make sure we were all comfortable. And now we give that all away?” He shakes his head. “She won’t be grateful. She’s incapable. She’ll just be the same. Always!”

“I don’t even know why we’re having this conversation,” Catherine says. “You know what we have to do.”

“I know what we have to do,” he says. “But I don’t feel it. I don’t feel it at all.”

*

The company happy hour is at a cocktail bar in a basement built like a sunken ship. Backlit by gold light, hanging from a blue ceiling, buoy and ropes and rafters put everyone at the bar underwater.

“This is more like a tomb, like we're all dead and drowned in here,” David says at the leadership table.

Paul chuckles. “I love this place. Great date spot.”

Matt chuckles. “Can't we get one drink in without having to hear about another sordid story about some conquest of yours?”

“Someone's got to liven things up. It's lonely over here in the exec circle.” Paul nods at the sales reps, who are playing beer pong on a table glazed blue from the underwater lights. “You're married with kids. And David...?”

“I don't think grown men should talk about women. Too variable.”

Matt and Paul laugh at what David didn't think was a joke.

“You are something else, Dave.” Matt finishes his drink. “You didn't make those millions trying to chase girls, that's for sure. Anyway,” with a look at his watch, “I need to get back to the old smile-and-chain. See you guys.”

“Good news,” Paul says as they slide up to the bar to avoid the hollering of the sales reps. “You got the cover story. You're the next BossMan.”

Warmth floods him. “Is that right?”

“I think you'll be known as 'the Great Negotiator' for the rest of your career. Online edition comes out tomorrow.”

“'The Great Negotiator.' Is that cheesy?”

“Everything that matters is cheesy.” Paul orders another cocktail.

David laughs. Toasts.

“To the Great Negotiator. Whoever he really is.”

“The Great Negotiator!” Paul clinks his glass against David's. “Anyway, I'm getting in on that beer pong. Or cocktail pong, whatever those bros are calling it.”

David opens his texts to tell someone about his new name. The texts from Catherine about Anna are a punch to the gut. He starts to panic. So he looks at the posts of the BossMan profile again. He looks at all the followers of BossMan who will see his face, his name, his life. He relaxes in recognition and leaves the happy hour without saying goodbye.

*

The FBI are already tracing you, David writes to the email address that he memorized from the email to Catherine. He drinks more wine. And we have no plans to give you the full amount. We have been estranged from our daughter for years. She has a criminal record and has been institutionalized.

But rest assured, we will comply with your request. We can send $1m in Bitcoin by next Monday for a guarantee of Anna's safe release. Otherwise, we will pursue you with full force, along with our friends in law enforcement.

Your choice. Let me know within the next 24 hours.

He stares at the $1 million figure, wondering if it's too high to start. They want $10 million. He could go up to $5 million, but doubts it will go that far. He toys with half a million, but decides it’s better to go higher to guarantee that it's over. He’s the Great Negotiator. He trusts himself.

“A fair deal,” he says, testing the phrase in his empty apartment. He looks back to the second bedroom. He keeps the door closed so the place doesn’t feel as empty. He remembers when Anna would use her key to get into the apartment and wait for him behind the door. She would jump out and scream at him for not giving her enough money. She would sneak into his bedroom while he was sleeping and stand over him spitting at him like a spirit of death. One million dollars.

Once they got her back, everything would be the same. Anna would move into the house with Catherine and Clara. Catherine would call him, crying, at least once a week. David would worry that he would wake up one day and Clara would be gone for good, because Anna would take her in the middle of the night. Ten million dollars.

Sirens sing outside the apartment. David wonders what compassion and children should be worth as currency. How those currencies inflated, deflated. Collapsed. What was it all worth? Nothing? Everything?

What is anything worth when time is the only real value? If marriages decay, if love decays, if people decay, if worlds decay, the only constant is entropy. Chaos. And ignorance. Because ignorance was hope and hope was love. He tries to pour himself more wine, but the bottle is empty. A single crimson droplet splashes onto the desk, trembling in red dissolution. Hope is love. Ignorance is hope. Live is ignorance. Love, hope, ignorance are timeless, forgiving, pure, eternal. Priceless. Worthless. Or…

He sends the email.

*

Tina posts the story at ten in the morning. The Great Negotiator: David Auburn Reflects on His Fourteenth Startup: Companionability.

David reads it three times at the kitchen counter. Emily calls and congratulates him. Paul calls and congratulates him. He stares at the picture of himself on the website. He reads posts about the article: 'interesting,' 'learned a lot about from this profile,' 'wow @davidauburn did it again.' New people follow him. He checks every hour to watch the numbers of admirers increase. Old colleagues email him. A few call him. Skeptics post criticisms about Companionability, describing it as a 'sexbot company pretending to do something more noble.' David laughs when he sees that there are no personal attacks against him. Maybe Central Electric would actually reuse the applications developers created for the sexbots and make something more sophisticated. Maybe not. He didn't care either way.

When his phone rings again, he expects another well-wisher.

“I can't fucking believe you,” Catherine says. “Did you think you could just treat this like a work problem? Go around my back and negotiate some better deal? You sent these terrorists an email?”

“I-”

“The answer is yes, yes you did. They raised the price. Twenty million. If they don't see a million by tomorrow, they say they'll start sending us videos of what they'll do to her instead.”

He slaps his forehead. Feels the betrayer behind the bone. Rape, torture, dismemberment. Anna attacking him. Attacking Catherine and Brian.

“How can we justify twenty?” he hisses into the phone.

“You have the ability to rescue our daughter. And you're not going to do it.”

“Tell me why she deserves it.” The thought comes from the dark before he can see it.

“Catherine?”

“Remember this moment, David.”

*

He spends the walk home from the office trying to call Catherine. She doesn't pick up. He comforts himself by checking the growing number of new followers. He finds the posts about the article and reads through the comments, seeing himself as idol, celebrity, entrepreneur. He checks Wikipedia for an entry about him. Doesn’t find one. He checks again in the elevator, again from the toilet as he reaches for toilet paper.

In his apartment, David looks through family photos. He applies a twenty-million dollar price tag to the photos of his sometimes happy, sometimes moody, always beautiful daughter. He goes through the photos of when he taught her how to ski and she kept falling down but laughing. He finds a photo of her prom, when the boy who had asked her had never showed up so David had gone with her and all her friends had said how cool he was, how he had been the best dressed of them all. He remembers how she had looked up at him, then and remembered what it felt like to be loved from somewhere so deep, so vast, that he felt like he was looking down past his feet into a bottomless ocean where all souls were one, how, spinning her around on the dance floor watching the light in her eyes, he had wanted to throw himself into that cosmic sea if it meant she would live a happy life.

He tries to look her up on social media but can't find her. He wonders if she blocked him again after the first time at rehab. And when. He looks at Brian's Facebook. Most of the pictures are of him and his girlfriend doing outdoor activities. A few fancy dinners in D.C. He looks hard at his son's eyes, trying to connect, but can't. He digs through the past, watching his son age backwards until the time when Brian had been shy and followed Anna into her worlds, hiding in her shadow, before she grew up and became distrustful, afraid of anything but her worlds.

His phone buzzes. A notification.

Is @davidauburn even trying to negotiate for his daughter's life? Tina has posted. My sources have said there’s more to ‘The Great Negotiator’ than…

Comments come by the dozen. Horrible, inconsiderate, self-centered. Worst father of the year. The finance guy for the sexbot company hates his own daughter… I’m shocked.

He hunches over in pain after reading the posts, groaning over his phone and letting it slip out of his hand onto the carpet. Staggers to his closet and opens the door for Companion II, default name of Envy. Not the latest model from Companionability, but his favorite. He hauls the sexbot's synthetic flesh up from under the arms and sits her on the bed.

He flips the switch.

“Tell me I'm okay,” he begs.

Envy stares ahead with unblinking blue eyes.

He looks at the switch on her neck and realizes he hasn't charged her.

*

He pays $1 million in Bitcoin and emails the anonymous gang holding his daughter that the payment has been sent. He tries to call Catherine. She doesn't pick up, so he forwards her the gang's email when they say the payment was received.

It doesn’t help.

Major publications and websites and influencers pick up Anna’s story, the girl whose “one percent father” won't pay for her release. Anna's bipolar disorder is never mentioned. The time she was arrested for assaulting her teacher isn't cited. The default photo of her is from her junior yearbook at Yale, showing her smiling in a sunlit room. David is represented by a photo from a conference where the stage light shines on his head and makes him look like an oily goblin in a suit.

David lies in bed and doesn't eat. His phone rumbles on the floor, but he doesn't go near it. He holds Envy around the waist. He discovers that he lost her charger completely, but even the weight of her stillness is reassuring.

*

His intercom buzzes on the fourth day.

“Hello?” he croaks.

“It's me,” Catherine says.

He grabs Envy and shoves her back into the closet. He splashes water on his face and gels his hair. He throws a blazer over his shirt to cover up the sweat stains and pulls on a crumpled pair of pants. Catherine wrinkles her nose, paces past him, and jerks open the window.

“They found her,” she says, sitting on his radiator with arms crossed.

“The FBI?”

She strokes the hollow of her neck. “They were able to track that transaction. The money you sent.” She closes her eyes. “She was never kidnapped.”

“What?”

“She was part of it. Her boyfriend knows this group that blackmails people.”

He sits on his bed, looking at his feet.

“I'm sorry, David. She duped us. We can press charges for extortion. The FBI might charge her with something related to cyber crime.”

He puts his face in his hands and feels it coming like a tidal wave until the laughter splits into the palms of his hands, the prison bars of his fingers. He laughs until he's brought to tears and tugs Catherine toward him.

“I still wanted her back. I just…” he says. “We’ve already lost so much for her.”

“I know,” Catherine says quietly.

“I'm kind of proud of her, really,” he says, looking up at her face and savoring the living love, the faded feeling behind glass: fragile, untouchable. A museum, a mausoleum.

“Proud of her?”

He lets out a breath. “We were negotiating with each other. And she won.”

Catherine snorts. “She manipulated us. And now she could be indicted for a federal crime.”

He shrugs. “No one can negotiate their way to happiness.”

She gives him a look that he remembers from long ago. “I'm going to take Clara to the zoo this weekend. Want to come?”

He nods and smiles a little, an expression that feels foreign to him, and thinks that maybe even love is a negotiation, just not with the numbers we know.