Bellevue in late June runs about twenty degrees warmer than the air conditioning inside the corporate office — a gap that tells you everything about the institution's relationship to its own climate. I had been back in the US for the first time in three years, walking the not-so-big downtown with colleagues until I'd mapped every block of it, back and forth, the same sidewalks in different configurations of conversation: who's aligned with whom now, who got quietly moved, the new VP who arrived in Lululemon with a chihuahua that waits outside restroom doors like a small, loyal deputy. She books herself in calendar blocks labeled only 'Busy.' The architecture of power made legible in a single word.
On my last morning I sat at Farine from seven to nine, jet lag doing its honest work while the city slept. An eight-dollar-and-twenty-five-cent Cardamom Orange Mocha — two dollars of that purely ceremonial, because the iPad now opens negotiations at twenty percent. I watched the bakery fill from empty to overflowing: the table beside me turned three times, conversations migrating from animal shelters to a sister in Paris, the whole restless catalog of human fear and desire conducted over pastries. I had nothing to do but receive it.
The trip itself had been that kind of receiving. Business dinners in new office buildings that still smelled of fresh drywall. A thirty-five-minute walk to a FedEx print shop during working hours — past sixty idle TVs mounted across three floors of vacant real estate — to produce an A2 poster in color, because someone needed to be certain the VP wouldn't flag the expense, and because the poster was never really about the project. It was set dressing. Theater maintained for an audience that rotates through on a schedule nobody publishes.
Two and a half years ago the company felt like it was trying to build something. Now it feels like it is trying to remember what building looked like, and reproduce the posture. The layoffs didn't hollow it out — they just made the hollowness visible. What replaced the people who left was not new people but new performance: enthusiasm that stops just short of the eyes, learning-faces worn in meetings about projects whose purpose no one in the room could actually name. A thumbs-up emoji sent by someone who didn't open the document.
The Uber to SeaTac smelled of synthetic pine, the road was badly maintained, and I was asleep within three minutes. The chihuahua, the calendar blocks, the color-printing anxiety, the Cardamom Orange Mocha going cold on the table — all of it compressing into the specific weight of an institution that has decided the appearance of motion is cheaper than motion itself.
I'm starting to understand why everything about this company feels like fall: not the dramatic kind, but the kind where the light is still beautiful and the leaves haven't dropped yet and you can already tell, by something in the angle of things, that the whole system is preparing to let go.
Busy
