"Hello?" "Hi, Patrick." "Can you slow..." "slow down for a minute?" "What do you mean he f..." "He fell?" "But I didn't even know Dad was in the hospital." "Okay okay, fine fine." "I'll..." "I'll pay more attention to him." "Wait!" "When did they transfer him?" "But how long after he had the fever?" "It's a fucking nursing home." "They should know that!" "Okay, I'm not yelling at you." "I'm sorry." "I'll be there on saturday." "Synchro:" "EdM" "You should be happy about one thing:" "they took away my phone and my blackberry." "I hated those things." "In my day an exec never typed a note." "Never took one." "Never carried anything." "I guess that makes me a dinosaur." "I'm glad you came." "I hope you don't feel any pressure today." "I finally have the time to talk to you, but it's too late for you to help." "How are you handling it?" "I'm wonderful, Paul." "Aces." "I know you said that you're past the point where... where talking could be of help." "But long as you're here, why don't we... why don't we try?" "Well, what is there to say?" "I've lost my job, my name." "I can't leave the house." "There's a pack of reporters on the street waiting for me to come out so they can stick microphones and cameras in my face." "So coming here today meant you had to run a... run a gauntlet." "I can handle that." "I tell them the truth." "I did everything I was supposed to, that I took the pages straight from the playbook." " What playbook is that?" " Johnson  Johnson, the tylenol scandal." "Seven dead from product tampering and the companywasn't concerned, but they pulled every bottle nationwide." "It's still the gold standard for crisis management." "At the first sign of trouble, you do everything you can to inform and protect the public and protect your name long term." "So what do you think went wrong?" "Here, Connie let me read this one article... in the journal." "They came flat out and said I did everything right." ""Played by the rules."" "The only thing is the world's changed a lot since 1982." "It's more predatory." "The minute we assumed responsibility the bloggers, the press, the class-action lawyers came after us." "Then the short-sellers hammered the stock down and that's when the parasites in my own company saw this as some fucking opportunity for themselves." "And then the Donaldsons capitulated." ""A perfect storm" they called it." "When you read an article like this, how does it make you feel?" "Like an old man who stayed too long in the ring." "You feel like a..." "like a boxer taken a beating." "I dropped my guard, Paul." "I deserve everything I've gotten." "Are you eating?" "Yeah, I eat when I have to." "Shredded wheat, chicken soup... that's what I had today, okay?" " How about sleep, are you getting any?" " Are you a therapist or a pediatrician?" "Yeah, I sleep." "The pills help." "Has your doctor written any other prescriptions for you?" "Well, under Natalie's name, yeah." "Any day now there'll be a headline in The Post:" ""Baby-killer C.E.O. binges out on pills."" "Baby killer?" "Is that how you feel that you're being depicted?" "Well," "I don't know actually." "My wife isn't even letting me watch TV except for old movies." "I'm in a bunker with a remote control and pills by my bedside." "What pills do you take?" "It's called..." "Kloni... klopi..." "something like that." "Whatever it is, it helps me sleep." "And how many are you taking?" "Well, it depends." " Maybe three or four." " A day?" "Is that the dosage that Dr. Wells has prescribed?" "That's what I need to sleep." "But you have to let him know how many you're taking." "I mean, you're not somebody who's had a lot of exposure to pills, so you may not have the tolerance that other people do." "What's gonna happen, Paul?" "I fall asleep and I don't wake up?" "Is that what you want?" "Take a pill, fall asleep, not wake up?" "No no, I want to wake up." "I want to find that the last two months were just a nightmare, that the pipeline didn't get contaminated, that the press didn't vilify me, that the people underneath me didn't lie to me." "That's what I'd like." "I can understand that you might feel that way, but since you know that that's not the case, have you found yourself" "thinking that not waking up might be a solution?" "What do..." "Come on, Paul!" "I don't quit." "You know me better than that." "And I would never leave a mess like that for my wife to clean up." "As it is, she can't even look at me without bursting into tears." "That must be something that neither of you are used to." "Well, the tears, I've seen plenty of those." "Usually right before I cave in and give her the second baby or the third baby or whatever else she's ever wanted." "But what is new is this look of pity." "It's just god-awful." "I told her never to look at me like that again." "You sure it's pity?" "I mean, she's your wife." "You've been married for 44 years." "She loves you." " When she spoke to me on the phone..." " That's another thing!" "I told her never to do that again." "She felt that these were extraordinary circumstances." "What?" "I got fired." "What's the big deal?" "The whole country's getting fried..." "fired... fired!" "But all of a sudden" "I get an orchestrated show of compassion, teams of people dropping in." "It's like an episode of This is your life." "So it hasn't been a comfort for you to know how much you've touched these people?" "It's been embarrassing." "I told her yesterday, "that's it." ""I don't want to see anyone else." "Tell them I'm sick."" "I had to promise her I'd see you before she'd go along with me." "So basically you used me as a bargaining chip." "I don't mind." "Long as it got you here." "And now what?" "What are you gonna tell me, Paul?" "That life is beautiful?" "That nothing happened?" "That it could all be a blessing?" "I don't think nothing happened." "On the contrary, I imagine it might feel like you're going through some kind of crucible." "People give me all these nostrums, this self-help garbage." "Not what you need to hear right now, I'm sure." "An old friend of mine," "Dean Larue, came by the apartment all the way from Rochester." "I don't know what Connie told him to get him there." "But he's my age." "We were R.O.T.C. buddies." "Two years ago they fired him from a company that he had built from the ground up." "So he's somebody up here who's gone through what you're going through." "He tells me he's found a hobby." "He's started taking pictures... landscapes, old factories and fishing boats." "He prints them up and makes them into books and gives them to his friends." "He gave me one... a photographic essay of Centralia, Pennsylvania." "Is that the coal town with the underground fire?" "I'm sure you wondered why he gave you that." "No... well, what do I care?" "I don't care about that." "The point is, does he realize how stupid he looks?" "So you don't buy it?" "If there's one thing I can't stand it's people who fool themselves, lead fake lives, become fake human beings." "Not always a choice, Walter, so much as the way the twig was bent." "I want to shake Dean and say," ""Don't you know everybody is laughing at you, you old fool?"" "I threw the book out as soon as he left." "What the hell am I gonna do with a picture of some smoldering meadow where a town used to be?" "What if he was really proud of the book?" "Do you think it might have given him a different sense of accomplishment, of achievement?" "Or brought out a side of him that maybe he..." "You're smart." "You know better than that." "If that company called him back right now and said," ""We made a mistake, Dean, we'd like to have you back", he'd go running in a heartbeat." "No, the truth is that... he's outlived his usefulness." "I've got a couple of years left to take photos and lick stamps, but... let's face it... death is just the..." "official acknowledgment." "The show's over." "So you don't want your family to show concern." "You don't want friends or a therapist to offer you support or... nostrums." "Your life's over, like Dean's." "Is that what you really think?" "Why don't you tell me?" "Better yet, why don't you tell me what you think of me?" "The first time I walked in here, what did you think I was?" "I'll tell you what you thought." "You thought I was a piece of shit who didn't care if his products were killing infants." "You thought I was greedy, insensitive, a son of a bitch." "You feel that I've judged you from the beginning?" "I told you I can't stand fake fucking human beings." "Don't patronize me, and don't lie to me." "I've had enough of that this week." "Just tell me the truth." "The truth is I'm angry." "I'm surprised at that reaction, but I am." "I'm angry at what they did to you and I'm angry at the way they did it." "I think you're a man of integrity." "I'm not going through what you're going through, obviously." "But I can understand your sense of anger, your sense of... betrayal." "I teach... or taught... classes in business schools... on corporate responsibility." "I guess those days are over." "They'd bring me in as a guest lecturer and..." "I'd look at all those kids who'd all gone to biz school for all the wrong reasons, and I knew I had... an hour to maybe reach one or two of them." "To try to get them to understand that a company's name, a product's reputation is all that you have." "That... if you lose your name, you've lost everything." "Do you feel that you've lost that now?" "I didn't lose it." "It was taken from me." "You mean by the Donaldsons?" "You haven't mentioned their part in all this." "What can you say?" "Mr. Donaldson's old world, like me." "He got scared." " I don't blame him." " But isn't loyalty... part of being... old world?" "It's not just the old man now." "He still has his wits about him, but... the daughters are involved and the grandkids and the fucking lawyers and punks like Jace." " You know, they put him in charge." " But you said that the family, I think, has a majority interest in the company." "That's right." "So, it wasn't just the press or the parasites who forced you out." "The Donaldsons had to go along with it." "They had... credit market's drying up." "The stock was in the tank, well, everybody's stock is in the tank now, but this was... carnage." "The minute they gave me up, the stock gained it all back." "Have you spoken to them lately?" "The old man, he could barely look at me at the meeting." "I went over to him after... afterwards and..." "I thanked him for the opportunities he'd given me and..." "He said, "Good luck, Walter"." "That was it." "How long have you worked for this man?" "35 years." "You know, when I came in, his son James was..." "He was reckless." "The old man asked me to keep an eye on him." "James was his only son." "And a few years later, James went West to... look for some new markets." "And one night, he drove his car into a tree." "Right away the sharks started circling the company." "The old man was barely hanging on." "But I told him not to give in." "I promised him that we would build something special, and we did." "We did." "Are you saying you turned him into one of the wealthiest men in the country?" "I did okay too." "And after 35 years all he has to say is good luck?" "He said one other thing... before he wished me good luck." "He said, "They tell me Natalie's in Rwanda." ""What the hell is she doing over there?"" " What do you think he meant by that?" " I think that was his way of saying... that I'd dug my own grave." "How do you mean?" "You said yourself last week:" "in the middle of a crisis" "I ignored my responsibility to the Donaldsons and to the company." "I also remember saying that there were two crises, one with your daughter and one here." "And we talked about the way you experienced your daughter's distance, how that anxiety might have colored your judgment." "So you're agreeing with me." "I misread both situations." "My judgment was bad." "Perhaps your going away did contribute to this situation exploding." "We know on some level that your body had been trying to tell you something was very wrong... your insomnia to the panic attacks." "By going to Natalie when you did, you were trying to bring this crisis to a head." "It was already past that point." "Jace was a cancer I should have cut out long ago." "I trusted the wrong people, the wrong labs." "Under my watch... this poison got into the pipeline and onto the shelves." "But you issued a recall the minute you found out." "The papers... the ones my wife won't let me read... they're all saying kids died, and it was my fault." "Is that what you think?" "Natalie thinks so too." "When she emailed Connie you could tell she thought I was some sort of... corporate criminal." "You said I think you're guilty, the papers too." "Now you're saying Natalie..." "It's not paranoia, if that's where you're going." "Part of you believes you did everything that you could properly, and part of you is punishing yourself for not doing more." "I'm okay during the day, most days." "But at night I wake up in a cold sweat, wondering... how I missed it, what I could have done, what I should have done, how much hurt I've caused... to families, to the company." "God, if you could see the old man's face." " He looked stricken." " That must have made you feel terrible, to disappoint the old man." "You seem to talk about him as if he's..." " a father that you've let down." " It's my fault, Paul, not his." "I see you struggling to understand what happened and why it happened." "But as hard as you're working to deal with this guilt, this sense of betrayal, it seems to me that you're working just as hard to avoid looking at him and his role in this." "Why do you keep harping on him?" "He did the best he could." "You said that when his son James died, old Donaldson was ready to just... give it all up." "But you wouldn't let him." "You took on the family business for 35 years." "Their son was dead." "And did you feel guilty about that?" " I'd promised to keep an eye on him." " And so for what, some penance you took on this enormous responsibility?" "The same way that you took responsibility for your parents' lives" " after your brother Tommy died?" " I had no choice." "Walter, you were just a boy." " I had no choice." " You were six years old." "You shouldn't have been taking care of your parents." "They should have been taking care of you." "It was my fault!" "That's why I had no choice, it was my fault." "What was your fault?" "A hot summer night, before air conditioning," "the air was dead still." "Tommy was just going to sneak out to the quarry lake to cool off." "He came to my room... and said... tonight was the night he was going to jump off the highest cliff." "He was asking me, really, more than telling me." "And what did you tell him?" "I said, "Tommy, you can do it." ""You can do it, Tommy."" "And I told him in the morning I'd... brag about him to everyone." "Then he kissed me good night." "And he never made it back." "And you felt responsible for your brother's death." "I was." "I am." "Walter, your brother jumped." "You didn't push him off the edge." "He chose to jump." "And in a flash a family was destroyed." "That's it." "It happens." "There are lots of them... destroyed families." "Are you okay, Walter?" "I have to go." "I know this week your sense of guilt about all this, it must feel like an avalanche." "I know you must... feel overwhelmed, but it's urgent that we talk about this feeling in here." "My wife's waiting for me outside." "Can we arrange something for tomorrow morning?" "Sometimes if I'm up all night, I need the mornings to sleep." "What about Monday afternoon?" "I'm fine, fella." "Do you mind if I call your doctor and..." " talk about those prescriptions?" " I said I'm fine." "I'll see you next week Walter." "My wife's waiting for me outside."