Moral Compass

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Bradley Bravard

Copyright © 2021 Bradley Bravard

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the author, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Second Edition

Cover by Francisco Moraga

www.thecreativelifeadventure.com

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ISBN: 978-1-7377245-0-6

My thanks to the dot.com recession of 2000 - 2002

Without which I would never have met my wife

Shortly after I moved to North Carolina, a coworker asked what brought me to the state. I held out my hands, palms up, and said, “God.” He was a devout church-goer and pleased with my response. My answer was based on audience appeal, not substance. If he had asked me a year later, despite my being a non-believer, I might have blamed it on Satan.

Is there something that draws us to be in a certain place at a certain time? Does where we live determine who we are? Or will our lives play out the same, regardless of geography?

SUMMER 2001

San Jose, California – July

WE WOULD BE ABLE TO laugh about it later.

On the Saturday afternoon when I started thinking about leaving Silicon Valley, my wife looked at the wall thermostat. Her blond-brown hair was long in those days, halfway down her back. She stood relatively bundled up in black sweat pants and a neon green sweater. The air conditioner had pushed the temperature in our two-bedroom townhouse down to sixty-eight degrees.

“We should have made plans today,” she frowned. “A million things we could be doing. Why are we just sitting around here?”

Because we weren't able to laugh about it yet.

I stood in front of the TV with the sound muted and tuned to the local twenty-four-seven news channel. A supremely handsome weather personality appeared for “Forecast on the Five,” a meteorology sequence that repeated every ten minutes throughout the day. Particulars of temperature and humidity scrolled along the bottom of the screen while the meteorologist, since I couldn't hear him, presumably tried to make the constancy of our long, hot summer seem interesting and urgent.

The TV occupied a cherry-stained wood entertainment center surrounded by the only material possession of real importance to me, a dozen vintage cameras I had turned up at flea markets and antique shops over the years. I enjoy photography as a hobby but am more drawn to the history of the art and the technical aspects of image production. One day an earthquake started while I was in the shower. A lot of earthquakes in California never get reported because they are brief and cause no damage. You don't know if you're experiencing one of those until after the fact. So I ran, stark naked, from the upstairs bathroom to stand facing the entertainment center, my arms spread out to protect the camera collection. “The full moon was last week,” Karen smiled from the sofa across the room, browsing through the newspaper, having never blinked while the earth trembled.

This seemed like a bad time to remind Karen that we had left home during the last rolling blackout. The previous week, the outage scheduled for one hour had lasted four hours and left a refrigerator full of suspicious food. Karen was the budgeter in the household (one look at a budget sends me into a delirium of debatable alternatives), so this time around she suggested packing the fridge with bags of ice from the grocery store. And staying home.  She briefly surveyed the living room. I had a couple of prints by a photographer named Fred Lyon on the wall, dramatic black and white mid-twentieth century images of San Francisco. Karen, being more inclined to the abstract, had two Paul Klee prints on the opposite wall. She walked to the window and looked out at the parking lot of our perfectly landscaped condo complex.

Instead, “It's ninety-five out,” seemed a harmless enough thing for me to say on this day of forced blackouts. “No breeze to cool things off.”

“No breeze. There’s never a breeze in Silicon Valley when you need it.” She looked at her watch. “Looks like our time is up.”

We kept our positions a bit longer. Then the power shut down on schedule. The TV and air conditioner clicked off. As the temperature inside heated up we would de-layer into shorts  and t-shirts.

“Rolling blackouts” was a new term for us. A lot of new terms had been introduced to conversations in northern California the past ten years or so. “Paradigm shift” became a considerably overused phrase. Later I would hear that time described as the “Fourth Wave” of Silicon Valley development, including the rise of the Internet and e-commerce, when IPOs and stock options suddenly seemed the path to wealth for ordinary Americans, a reliable alternative to company-sponsored pensions, nearly a decade before social media became the next paradigm shift. Rampant spending, mergers and acquisitions, product launches that were really beta versions, and rapid job-hopping turned Silicon Valley into the Wild West of business.

What we definitely weren't ready to laugh about yet were the flimsy business practices behind some of the stock prices that had skyrocketed in the 1990s. By late 2000 we knew some businesses had clearly been a mistake – most consumers still weren't ready for home grocery delivery, and how could you really value the stocks of companies that had never shown a profit? Still, some of the worst offenses hadn't come to light yet. That was part of what brought us to this moment. Energy companies like Enron were among the offenders, creating imaginary profits so their stocks could be valued, even if falsely, in order to justify exorbitant quarterly bonuses for corporate executives. We were paying a lot more money for a lot less energy. And that was how we ended up with rolling blackouts – a deliberately limited supply to maintain the illusion a little longer. Lack of oversight was the barbed wire that boxed in the frontier.

“Look at this.” Karen pointed out the window.

I stood next to her. Outside, two burly men in coveralls carried a large-screen TV down a delivery truck ramp. A very large screen, supported by a correspondingly large box of electronics in these days before flat screens would become common. The delivery men maneuvered their product up the sidewalk and into our neighbor’s townhouse. The neighbors were a thirty-something couple who’d had their first child the previous year. Ever since, they had charitably shared a series of firsts with us: first step, first runny nose, first diaper rash.

“Nothing like a giant screen to babysit the infant.” Karen became more opposed to television every year. At this stage she simply encouraged friends and co-workers to turn the thing off. It rots your brain, she would tell them. Contributes to heart disease. Think of all the other things you could be doing. By old age, I could imagine her becoming a sort of Carrie Nation, going house-to-house and smashing the offending devices with an ax.

“I’m too caught up in what other people are doing,” she said. “It’s not healthy. All this rampant materialism. This used to be a kind of spiritual place. Intellectual, artistic. Now everyone is in a contest to see who can buy the most stuff. I feel like we’re all ruining paradise. Or am I just romanticizing the past?”

“Both. It has gotten worse.” We watched the men work the TV through the condo door. “Did I tell you my boss bought a new car? A Cadillac. Big one.”

“Neri?”

“Yeah.”

“I figured him to be more the Beemer type.”

“American all the way. The car doesn’t bother me. It’s the way he flaunts it. Like the car somehow elevates him above his staff. And there are rumors we’ll be taking pay cuts if business doesn’t pick up soon.”

“Pay cuts. Last year they told you you’d retire rich when the company went public. But they didn't. And housing costs keep going up. Along with the cost of everything else.”

Karen put an arm around my shoulders and I reciprocated with an arm around her waist, a remarkable waist for any woman in her mid-thirties, thanks in large part to a regular Yoga practice begun in college. The townhouse was still comfortably cool, a good snuggling temperature.

“What are we going to do, Alex?”

What, indeed?

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SEVERAL DAYS LATER, having survived another rolling blackout, Karen and I sat on our deck in the evening. The upstairs deck opened from the bedroom with a view of the parking  lot, two rows of tan buildings identical to ours, and a small children’s playground bordered with California lilac trees. Our deck furniture was constructed of unpainted wood, the only style approved by the condo association. Metal and plastic were strictly forbidden, and no garish colors, meaning no color at all. A few moths batted around the deck light, a light bulb enclosed by a regulation-sized light globe of precise dimensions determined by the association. When we bought the townhouse, there was no globe, just a naked light bulb. We thought nothing of it, one more detail that got lost in the stress of moving and settling into a new home. We were just thankful to be able to afford a home in such an expensive market. When a house with less than one thousand square feet sold for over one million dollars in Palo Alto, fifteen miles north of us, we laughed. But it was a nervous laugh. Just how much were we willing to pay to live there? We came to Silicon Valley for the lifestyle – hiking, kayaking, museums, art galleries, coffee shops, performing arts, day trips to San Francisco, Monterey, or Carmel. The lifestyle came with a terrible financial cost, and that led to emotional costs.

Three months after we moved in, we received a letter from the condo association. They ordered us to install a light globe because an exposed bulb risked compromising the integrity of our community. Size and color, white (no color at all!), were specified to head off any thought of individual expression. Karen said, “We should get a bright red globe just to see how they react.” I reminded her the letter was very clear. We could be forced to sell our townhouse if we failed to cooperate. Karen wasn’t sure if I was being sarcastic or if I genuinely feared eviction over a light globe. We, of course, caved in and bought the required fixture.

Sitting in the twilight, drinking coffee, we watched a group of kids play football in the parking lot. The city provided a large public park only two blocks away. Instead, the parking lot became a football field.

“They did it,” I said to her. “The company's going ahead with ten percent pay cuts next quarter if we don’t meet our revenue targets. And the targets were out of reach even before the recession.”

“It was bound to happen.” Karen gave my shoulder a sympathetic rub. “Market research is the first to go in a down economy.”

It was true. The business-to-business market research firm I worked for had risen on the dot-com tide in the late nineties along with so many other companies throughout Silicon Valley, spending money as fast as they possibly could and falling back on the cliché that “you have to spend money to make money.” My employer’s mission was collecting data and advising client firms on which market needs were not being served, which new applications suited their existing product line, and which competitors they should consider acquiring to increase market share. We were part of a cycle of rising stock prices, or IPO aspirations, all tied to fast-and-loose business spending, and, as time and numerous state and federal investigations revealed, profits were too minimal to sustain the system. Side effects included the aforementioned rolling blackouts (to satisfy the ever-growing quarterly earnings expectations of institutional investors) and competitive materialism (because we would all become millionaires from employee stock options) Karen and I had been cursing a few days earlier.

All good things, as they say, must end. Sometimes that end is an abrupt, screeching halt. The stock market took a dive in 2000 as the savvy investors pulled out, followed eventually by terrified amateurs who were newly connected directly to the stock market via online brokerages. Optimists continued calling it a market correction but a lot of companies cut spending and reduced staff. This brought us to sitting on our deck contemplating the reality Karen had pointed out: market research is among the first budget items most companies eliminate in a down economy.

“Have you ever thought about living someplace else?” I asked.

Karen stared at me. My wife’s gray eyes, even in the dark, made me wonder, as I do from time to time, how I should be so lucky.

“Are you serious?”

“It’s just something I was thinking about.”

“You, Alex? Mr. Anal-Retentive? You love living in the Bay Area.”

“I used to.” I had enjoyed myself since moving to San Jose, the southern end of the San Francisco Bay Area, more than ten years before. “It was a big change coming here, after growing up in Illinois. But now... It’s just that the whole area has kind of gone downhill. Anyone who thinks California is laid back has never driven Highway 101 during drive-time. Maybe a change would be good. I mean, if you’re interested.”

She nodded and gave me a sly smile, thrilled that I would be so open-minded as to consider moving. “Okay, what do you have in mind?”

“I read this online survey last night. You know, magazines rate the best places in the country to live? People are raving about Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina. I couldn’t find a negative thing about it.”

“North Carolina? Isn’t that the South? Grits and moonshine, all of that?”

“They say it’s really progressive. A developing arts community. A lot of companies are based there. It’s not as close to the beach and mountains as we are here, but it’s relatively close. Major universities. The cost of housing is lower. Much lower. And the southern hospitality. A slower pace, not the insane work hours and materialism we have here. We’d be like the Beverly Hillbillies in reverse.”

Karen processed this for a few minutes. “There's less traffic, yes? So we’d have shorter commutes. Since Dad passed away I don’t have family to keep me here. We don’t know anyone out there, either, though. I’ve never been to North Carolina. You haven’t, right?”

“No. My parents went a few years ago and said they liked it.”

“I don’t know if that’s much of an endorsement. Your dad doesn’t get much farther than Civil War battlefields. So you’ve been researching this for a while?”

“Daydreaming, mostly. Wondering if we’re missing something.”

A Mercedes driver who dared to return home interrupted the parking lot football game. The kids yelled at the driver, who honked the horn, causing the kids to make obscene gestures and yell various profanities. This led to more honking and shouting before the driver finally inched through and rocketed off, tires squealing, to the far end of the parking lot.

Karen looked at me. “So, what else have you read about North Carolina?”

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MOST OF OUR FRIENDS and co-workers thought we had lost our minds. Especially those who knew me, as I am not prone to sudden life changes or rapid decision-making. My boss Neri, a big Italian with graying hair and a beard, bellowed, “North Carolina? What the hell do you want to do that for? Alex, life's like real estate. It's all about the three L's – location, location, location. Let’s talk about it over lunch. We’ll take my Caddy.”

The rest was easy. Too easy. We sold our townhouse in no time flat and made a substantial profit. Despite HOA fees that increased every year, buying the townhouse when we did was one of the smartest financial decisions we ever made. Only later did we realize that selling it when we did was one of the worst financial decisions we ever made.

Nevertheless, we did sell. Karen suggested a yard sale to lighten our load for moving. The association had other ideas. I think their letter of denial actually let out a sinister laugh when we opened it. Instead we donated a carload of accumulated stuff to various thrift shops. We sold our compact Toyota and shipped the rest of our belongings with a residential mover. Then we loaded up our Nissan Pathfinder to drive across the country.

That drive, in hindsight, was about the best part of the entire experience. For geographic diversity alone, the United States is a remarkable place. We stood in the California desert at night and saw more stars, brighter stars, than I ever dreamed possible, so many it almost made me cry. We saw that there really are majestic purple mountains, like the song says, when the light is just so. We craned our necks at the Gateway Arch in St. Louis. We talked about our fears of moving to a new place, our strategies for finding new jobs, the possibility of culture shock.

The first couple nights of our cross-country trip, we slept in cabins at campgrounds. After two nights Karen decided we were bringing unpleasant new smells into our car and insisted on at least budget motels. Even at her most demanding, my wife is blissfully low maintenance, something I think she inherited from her father, the imminent professor and spiritual adviser, who maintained the most minimal household I’ve ever seen and never did like me. More accurately, as he used to say, “It’s nothing personal, Al. I just don’t think you’re good enough for my daughter.” When I told Frank I might be able to improve if he would specify my flaws, he used his fingers to count them off. Thankfully Karen always stopped him before he ran out of fingers and had to resort to counting on his toes.

Karen’s mom passed away long before I entered the picture. She suffered a massive stroke at far too young an age, a heartbreaking thunderbolt that bonded Karen even closer to Frank. He may have been a cad, but he was her cad. To everyone else, he was a Buddhist superstar, something I had not realized was possible. For most of his life, Karen's father taught “westernized” versions of meditation and other Eastern spiritual practices. His rugged good looks, like the broad-shouldered sheriff from a John Ford western, didn't hurt his popularity any. Frank achieved rock star status on the campus of the University of California-Berkeley, conducting standing-room-only retreats and seminars and maintaining a long waiting list for entry to his classes. One Halloween I even encouraged Frank to dress up as Elvis for a faculty party, with an orange, sequined toga and sideburns as big as minivans. “You could do karate yoga, Frank,” I joked, trying to win his approval with humor. “Rock-and-roll meditation.” Frank responded with that droll look of his, implying my remark was as funny as a drug-induced heart attack. Frank was a master at what he did. Unfortunately, he compensated for material simplicity with psychological complexity, and became equally adept at seducing his young female students. Vanity was the sin Frank could never get past. He sought among young coeds the validation he couldn’t find elsewhere. Karen pretended not to notice his philandering, but it infuriated her. It seemed a betrayal of her late mother. More importantly, it was a betrayal of Karen herself, who stopped being the apple of her father’s eye before she was ready.

During the cross-country drive, we considered diverting north to Illinois to visit my own parents. As we motored along I-40 through Tennessee, I asked, “Why risk spoiling a good time?”

“As long as you said it and not me,” Karen grinned. We stopped in Memphis and took pictures of each other at the gates of Graceland. I couldn’t help but think of Frank.

Crossing the state line into North Carolina, we stopped at the state visitors’ welcome center; you can see the exuberance on our faces in the photos we took backed by a breathtaking vista of the Great Smokey Mountains. I drove us into Raleigh and Karen grabbed at my hand periodically as we entered the city we had chosen for our new home. She rustled a map in her lap, tilting her head up and down as she squinted first at the map, then at the passing street signs.

“The signs are awfully small,” she said.

“Small?  They’re microscopic. I can barely see them.”

The driver behind me honked.

“This guy is right on my tail,”  I said. “I’m going forty-five, isn’t that the speed limit?”

“That’s what the signs say. Those I can read. Wait, is that Duraleigh Road?”

“I thought it said Six Forks Road.”

“Yeah, that’s Duraleigh. That’s what the map says. It’s Duraleigh in one part of town and Six Forks over here.”

“You mean it’s two roads?”

“Something like that. Pull into that parking lot, we’ll figure out where we are.”

As I slowed to pull into a strip mall parking lot, two more drivers honked and raced around us at top speed.

We rolled to a stop and each took a deep breath, happy our journey was over but feeling disoriented over chaotic roadways and hostile motorists.

I looked at Karen. “When does the southern hospitality part start?”

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WE HAD ARRIVED IN NORTH Carolina during the hottest part of the year. We thought we had experienced hot summers; Silicon Valley can seem brutally hot off and on during the summer. The humidity, that’s what we didn’t understand. Everyone warned us it would be humid; the real estate agent we called before moving joked about it. I should have picked up on the nefarious tone to her laugh. This was a clinging, relentless humidity. Karen, true to form, did not complain. She did change her hair a few weeks after we arrived, from a long ponytail to a shorter, lower-maintenance style. This is where we learned a genuine appreciation of heat index, a harmless-sounding phrase that estimates how hot the air feels based on a combination of temperature and humidity. “It’s not the heat, it’s the heat index,” Karen took to saying. “That should be the expression.”

Our mood improved when we bought our house. Housing costs in North Carolina were considerably lower than Silicon Valley, and with the proceeds of our townhouse sale we were able to buy a two-story wood-frame house in what seemed like a nice suburban neighborhood. Increased square footage gave us more room for personalized space. The broad lawn with crape myrtles and a magnolia tree was bordered with boxwood shrubs. A porch ran the entire front of the house; it looked so southern, we were sure we would sit on that front porch every summer evening in big wooden rockers. We would sip lemonade and wave hello to our neighbors when they strolled by. A wood privacy fence enclosed the back yard, with a flowering dogwood tree and a huge wooden deck where we would sit on whatever jauntily colored deck furniture we wanted. The neighborhood formed around narrow, winding streets with plenty of oak and maple trees, something we hadn’t seen a lot of in Silicon Valley. In some ways it reminded me of where I had grown up in Illinois.

On the day we moved in, after the movers had left, we sat on the hardwood floors, the air conditioner humming, sunlight streaming through the windows, boxes stacked around us. The blank walls were ready for our Paul Klee and Fred Lyon works. I opened the boxes that held my camera collection to be sure nothing was damaged. We leaned against the wall in exhaustion and held hands.

“We’re home, Alex,” Karen said. “A slower pace, less materialism. I think we did the right thing coming here.”

“I feel like we’re beginning a whole new stage of our life,” I said.

Karen tilted her head. Always more in tune with her physical surroundings than me, she asked, “Do you hear that? That buzzing sound?”

“All I hear is the air conditioner.”

“No. Something else.” She stood up and walked to the back door. “No, it’s definitely a buzzing sound. Like bees, maybe.”

We unlocked the back door and stepped on to the deck that now belonged to us. Thousands of black objects whirled furiously overhead, so many they actually darkened the sky. The sound was quite clear outside and collectively they sounded like a team of lawn mowers. We hesitated, not sure if we should flee inside or stay and figure out this new wildlife. The crucial juncture in any horror film.

“Are they bumblebees?”  Karen asked. “I’ve never seen so many.”

We ducked when one of the critters flew in our direction and hurled its tiny, crunchy body into the side of the house. It fell to the deck, disoriented. We looked at each other, then leaned forward to get a closer look.

“It’s a beetle.” I tapped it with my foot. Sure enough, a three-inch-long, dark-green beetle lay on its back, kicking its tiny legs in the final throes of life.

We looked to the sky over our backyard, thick with these flying, droning beetles.

“What were you saying,” I asked, “about doing the right thing by coming here?”

Chicago – August

THE DAY BOBBY GOT FIRED from his financial services sales position was the day he decided he needed a change of scenery from Chicago.

“Really sorry, Bobby,” his boss, Sam, an older George Clooney type, had said. “The merger has made a lot of positions redundant. It's nothing personal.”

Redundancy is always personal.

Getting home and finding the lock changed on his rental brownstone had a little to do with his decision. He parked his motorcycle, an old Honda that had seen better days but still maneuvered well on city streets, along the curb. He walked up the sidewalk and set his helmet on the front landing. Bobby tried his key several times to make sure it no longer worked. He stood on the stoop in his black pants, white shirt, and tie, sweating in the heat because only the über-wealthy could afford a place near the water where cooling breezes blew in off Lake Michigan. Teenage boys of varying heights and ethnicities played in the street, a game that resembled rugby without clearly defined goal lines. In the late afternoon sun the buildings cast long shadows through the neighborhood.

It has been a long day, Bobby thought. Maybe I’m in the wrong place.

He stepped back and looked up at the two-story apartment in the middle of the block-long building. This was definitely his place. To be absolutely certain, he tried every key on his key ring. Nothing.

Bobby put his face against the door’s glass insert and peeked inside. He pushed the buzzer. Nothing happened. He tapped on the door and called, “Angie, baby, you home? I can’t unlock the door, can you let me in?”

He heard a crashing noise from the sidewalk behind him. Bobby turned and saw his suitcase lying on the concrete. He recognized it right away as the weathered tan suitcase he had bought for the Caribbean cruise with...Rita. Definitely Rita. What a fun time that was. All that delicious food and racing around in golf carts at the various ports of call.

A few of Bobby’s clothes fluttered down and landed around the suitcase. He looked up and saw that his belongings were being flung out the upstairs bedroom window.

“Angie?”

A pair of shoes came down, those expensive Nike sneakers he had bought last fall with a plan to take up jogging. He had to admit the jogging was just an attempt to win points with Mona at the office. Mona left the company and the weather turned cold, and Bobby decided jogging was overrated.

The kids in the street stopped playing ball to watch.

“Angie, baby, what’s going on?” he asked the open window. The only response was a bag of golf clubs. Several clubs bounced out of the bag when it hit the sidewalk. The kids oohed and aahed and a few of them even exchanged high-fives.

“Hey, good arm, Ang',” Bobby said. “I didn’t know you could lift those clubs. Is there any way we can talk about this?”

Angie stuck her head out the window and looked down on him with fury in her eyes. Her long dark hair hung down over her face. “Who’s Suzy?”

“What?”

“You heard me, you prick! Who’s Suzy?”

“Oooh,” one of the kids said. “Busted...” The kids all laughed.

Angie didn’t wait for an answer. She pulled her head back inside. A second later a landline telephone flew out the window. It landed on the suitcase and seemed undamaged.

“Oh, wait, baby,” Bobby called up to the window frame. “Suzy’s just a friend from work. It’s not what you think.”

Angie stuck her head out the window again. This time she held a paper in her hand. She waved it at him and said, “I love the way you kiss me? That’s what she wrote! That’s your idea of a friend?”

“She wrote that?” He was genuinely confused. Why would Suzy write me here? “It’s just a joke, baby. Really. She’s got a real sense of humor, that Suzy. Come on, Ang'. Look, I got fired today, all right? It’s been a tough day. Can we just talk? How about dinner? My treat?”

More of Bobby’s clothes drifted to the ground and they were followed by the crumpled up letter from Suzy.

Bobby sighed. He looked at the kids enjoying free entertainment from his unexpected lifestyle change. “Hey, watch my stuff, all right?”

“Sure thing, man,” a tall, skinny kid holding the ball said. “This is better than a video game.”

Bobby walked to the curb for privacy and gave silent thanks he had programmed Sally’s number into his cell phone.

“Hey, sis, how are things?” he asked when his sister came on the line.

“Bobby! I haven’t heard from you in ages. What are you up to?” Sally had a decidedly southern accent; despite being born, like Bobby, in New England, she had lived in North Carolina more than ten years.

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