Through the Fissures in Time

Chapter 3

From beneath the amber, bullet-shaped helmet, the Engineer looked back—like Lot's wife—and grinned stupidly, a smile made of salt. He was late now and wouldn't

have time for breakfast, but he was serenely unbothered by that. It felt very much like a bargain, the exchange of one meal for the minutes crisscrossing the building's ground floor with the young doctor. He slipped buds into his ears and fiddled quickly with the audio settings on his phone as a synthesized beat crackled through the wires. Before he pressed off the curb into the trickle of traffic, he glanced up past the beige overhang of the building toward the bullying walls of blue glass shining between long, white ribs behind it.

The ride through the flow of traffic in the twilight band of rush hour was smooth enough. He coasted between cars with the crackle of music only half occluding the sounds of the living city around him. His eyes darted off the road intermittently at pinpricks of Vietnamese from an open window and a squeaking cockatoo somewhere, but the rest of the usual urban rumble washed over him like white noise, like the flowing lines in a wind tunnel. As the buildings grew taller, the traffic did grow thicker and he stop-started his way through the last block to his destination. As he clicked his bike lock tight between the frame and a fixed metal planter sunk into the concrete, he took a moment to look up and survey the building. He was there—at this giant, blue-steel tower—to help refine the design for another giant, blue-steel tower to be built across the bay.

He did not know precisely how to feel about that.

Inside, he passed over a gleaming lobby floor of splotchy, gray-white marble to a blocky, wooden reception desk flanked by a smaller security desk. The guard, a squat, but sturdy-looking man made from all right angles, eyed him like a potential threat. He wasn't sure if everyone got the same vigilant stare of if he was being singled out. He introduced himself to the receptionist and dropped his contact's name, and the mere mention seemed to light up her face a bit.

A moment later, he heard his name explode across the open space of the lobby. The Engineer looked up and saw a ruddy, barrel chested figure in a gray suit so perfectly pressed it looked like metal.

"Hey!" Bruce was an important contact for him. His consulting firm had brought him in on several big projects and whenever they met, he treated him like an old frat brother (of which, the Engineer was sure Bruce must have dozens). Watching him stride across the marbled lobby, he wondered if he was about to be picked up in some boisterous bear hug.

"Hey, Bruce," he tried to preempt whatever was coming by shoving his hand into the air, but Bruce ignored the hand and slapped his own paw on the Engineer's back, shaking him a little bit like a rag doll.

"Good to see you," he said, shaking his head without disrupting the big smile he wore. "I need you on this one, buddy. These people are not getting it, you know?"

"Their design isn't bad, but—"

"But, right? But? There's something sophomoric in their approach, you know?"

"I don't know that I'd say that, exactly," he countered. But he had, on a job two years earlier, he had used that adjective and it had wormed deep into Bruce's psyche. It was now a shorthand for the man and when he saw it, whatever it really was, he called the Engineer in, trusting him to find and fix the problem that no one else could name.

"You got it, though, right?"

"Yeah, they were clearly thinking of a dichotomous approach—either cluster hardware at each floor or have a central system. The building's clearly too large for a single central system, so they just piled on separate pumping and cooling systems throughout."

"Jesus, it's like they think they're playing with LEGO's, am I right?" Bruce had kids and the Engineer had once asked if they played with the little plastic bricks. When he'd first noticed this echoic quality to the other man's personality, the Engineer had thought it shallow, a sign of an disingenuous superficiality, but through further interaction with Bruce, he'd warmed to his social chameleons. After all, his job was to maneuver people, to put them at ease and create social environment where the work could get done. As he got to knew him, this quality seemed less and less like deliberate theater and more just a kind of courtesy, taking in and consolidating details from those he worked with into his own identity.