guess what I’m getting to is, there’s been a restructuring. The partners reviewed a lot of the personnel files and they’ve decided to ask you to take on a bigger role here. We’d like you to be design lead on Realms RPG.”
“Oh. Oh, wow. Okay. I mean, thanks,” I said. There was more, about compensation and stock options; I keep saying thanks and nodding and waiting for the meeting to be over.
“Look, can I—” he began. It’s funny that I was thinking of him as much older than I was, but it came to me that he wasn’t out of his late twenties; he was Darren’s contemporary.
“Sure. Sure. I know it doesn’t make sense. Making me that,” I told him.
“If I can be honest, design got hit a lot harder than programming. Focus doesn’t know that much about games, and I think your chess background weighed pretty heavily. I said we would do it, but to some degree it’s going to be in name only, at least until we see how you’re doing.”
“Of course! Of course,” I said. Maybe he’d hoped I was going to refuse the position, which might have been sensible.
“I’ll see you at the leads meeting Tuesday morning,” he said. “I’m looking forward to working with you.”
He leaned forward and put out his hand and I shook it by reflex, and that was our good-bye. All I could think was the profoundly unprofessional thought: Thank God. I’m in the club now.
I left and went to the kitchen and shouldered through the fire door to the loading dock. I didn’t have an office so there was nowhere else for me to go if I needed to be alone for a moment. It was raining but not for real, just enough to speckle the warm sidewalk.
I walked a little ways across the parking lot, feeling the unfamiliar midday brightness through the clouds, the warmth and smell after half a day indoors. It was just after one o’clock on a Monday, and Arlington Avenue was jammed. The land around Cambridge and Somerville gave off a peculiarly exhausted feeling, feeble wetlands mingled with land that had been built on and paved and rebuilt on since colonial times.
I shook my head and walked down to the Mobil station. I went there a lot for Skittles and raspberry Snapple, both of which I could perfectly well get from the office kitchen but I liked the walk, and I liked the smell of gasoline.
I went to badge back in but I’d left my security card on my desk, so I just stood there until one of the workers from one of the other offices—blue shirt, tie, ex-jock demeanor—opened the door for me. Everyone recognized the Black Arts guys; we’re the middle-class adults wearing T-shirts. Sometimes I felt superior to the people in the other offices—I make dragons, what the hell do you make?—and sometimes I felt like a loser.
Inside, everyone was recovering from the news and there was a feeling of mixed panic and relief fizzing on top of the usual post-shipping daze. It looked like nobody knew about my promotion yet. Don sent out a “don’t panic” e-mail to say things were being handled, then a private one to me saying he was holding off on a formal announcement until Tuesday morning.
Darren was the lead writer and designer, the force that had held several successive Black Arts products together, the animating creative voice of the product line. Darren was Black Arts. From what I understood, he also held regular temper tantrums and blamed anything and everything possible on the programming staff. He was a relentless micromanager, mitigated only slightly by the fact that he was right 98 percent of the time. He and Simon had been the rock stars of Black Arts Studios, and after that Darren held that post alone. Depending on how you looked at it, Darren was our Mick Jagger (designated swaggering extrovert) to Simon’s Keith Richards (quietly virtuosic, blatantly self-destructive). Or else Darren had been Paul McCartney (chirpily commercial) and Simon had been John Lennon (moody, introspective, possessed of quasi-mystical insights).
Darren/Paul/Mick had left, and Simon/Keith/John was long gone, and I, hypothetically a backup singer or maybe just the guy who shakes a tambourine at the side of the stage, was in his place. A few other designers were in a huddle around one of their desks—including Peter and Jared, who graduated from Harvard together three or four years ago. I could tell they were talking about who would step