Breathe In, Cash Out

by Madeleine Henry

  “Harry, Alex,” I say, pointing. “Skylar.” I gesture.

  “Nice people skills,” Harry says. “And how do you two know each other?”

  “I’m Skylar Smith,” she says warmly. “I teach yoga. Allegra is a student.”

  I cringe, awaiting their response. Harry leans forward from his self-assured recline. His smirk expands.

  “Her guru, perchance?” he asks. “Now that is by far the most interesting thing I’ve heard all day.”

  Skylar beams despite his sarcastic tone.

  “You could say I’m a neophyte,” Harry says. He holds up Yoga for Dummies from where it lay on his desk.

  “A Neanderthal?” I quip.

  “No, there’s only one Tripp,” he says. “Skylar, was it?”

  She nods. “Skylar Smith,” she clarifies. “From SkylarSmithYoga.”

  “I’ve been needing a guru,” Harry says. “I feel very lost these days.” He flips through the book and pauses on a dog-eared page. He curls the remaining pages behind the spine. “I just have so many questions. For instance, I’ve been tortured by this concept of kundalini.”

  Fuck. He actually has been reading it. Kundalini is a kind of yoga that has always been linked to kinky sex.

  “Is it true that kundalini yoga can incite a twenty-minute orgasm?” he asks. It’s easy when the bullies are stupid. It’s tougher when they have done their homework. “I know it’s crass,” he continues. “My colleague Alex and I have just been reading about it. Call it intellectual curiosity. Apparently, it’s like a flower.” He gestures to the book. “I could read a testimonial, though I may blush. The body is supposed to fill with light, heat, and energy. Has that been your experience?”

  “No,” Skylar says, apparently earnest.

  “We can go, Skylar,” I say.

  I touch Skylar’s shoulder and push her gently forward. She resists, grounded in her stance. Fuck, she’s strong.

  “Allegra, please,” Harry says. “I am in the market for an awakening.”

  Skylar glances at Alex, who is nodding along like a bobblehead.

  “That’s great!” Skylar says. “That open-minded energy is what I look for in new students. I’d love to answer any questions you have.”

  “Splendid,” Harry says.

  “And if you have friends interested in the practice,” Skylar continues, “here or at another firm, I would be so happy to talk to them as well. From what Allegra’s told me, this job can make it hard to stay balanced.” She shakes her head. “Maybe I could walk a group of you through small lifestyle changes that may help.”

  “Tell you what,” Harry says. “I have the perfect venue for some introductions. Would you like to be my plus-one at our group’s humble little Christmas party?”

  Alex sniggers and makes a silent, clapping motion with his hands. The group’s annual holiday party is coming up. Everyone will be there—it’s HG’s only mandatory social event. It also signals Bonus Day is close at hand.

  “Rumor has it there will be a mentalist during the cocktail hour,” Harry says. “And another rumor has it that he is quite legit. Maybe you and he can swap trade secrets, talk shop, what have you.”

  “Thank you,” Skylar says. “I’d love to come.”

  “Perfection,” he chirps.

  Skylar writes down her email address inside one of his client books.

  “Email,” Harry says. “Ice queen.”

  “Do you have an Instagram too?” Alex asks.

  My stomach curdles. Too.

  “Yes,” she says. “SkylarSmithYoga. I post how-to videos for beginners sometimes, if that’s something you’re interested in. Meditations, breathing techniques—everything, really. I make sure there’s a lot of variety.”

  “Okay, that’s enough,” I say. “We’re leaving now.”

  Harry and Alex turn to their phones, presumably to search for her page. Once we have made enough headway, I lean toward her.

  “I am so,” I say, “so, so sorry about that.”

  “It’s okay,” she says.

  “Really, I know this is obvious, but I’ll say it anyway,” I say. “You really don’t have to go to that party. Honestly.”

  And please don’t.

  “I want to,” she says. “You know better than anyone how much I could help.”

  We complete the safari. There isn’t much to identify without sounding patronizing—computer, person, trash can—so I don’t narrate the round. We wind up back at my pod, where we began. The full-screen window on Tripp’s left monitor is the landing page for Skylar’s Instagram.

  While Skylar uses the restroom, I wait for her in the HG pantry. What the fuck, Harry? I sit on a banquette and wonder what I am going to do now. Before I make any headway on the question, Skylar is back. She reappears after a lightning-fast pee, smiling, parka zipped up to her chin in ready position, in her purple pants.

  “Chakras?” she asks.

  Skylar extends her hand, palm up. I take it limply.

  * * *

  I take an armpit shower in one of HG’s bathroom sinks. After ten splashes per side, I still reek of incense. Walking back onto the floor, my tote is heavy with gemstones. Apparently, my third-eye chakra is blocked.

  Skylar didn’t ask me again to join her team. Instead, she acted as if I were already committed. She said I should let her know when I plan to leave Anderson, and told me she’d prefer I quit “ASAP” so that we could begin our “journey together.” She kept handing me rose quartz and hugging me every time I opened my mouth. I couldn’t get a word in, and then I had to keep track of all those fucking rocks. I knew I’d have to see her at the holiday party anyway, so I figured I’d save any serious conversation for later.

  Now, I detour before heading to the pod. I’m headed to the printer enclave, where the machine is allegedly broken. We have a dozen printers in HG, but only two laser-speed, industrial-size units. The broken printer in question is one of the two stallions. This has incited a barrage of apocalypse-themed cartoons on blast. People can’t stop reply-all emailing about it.

  From: Adam Simmons

  To: HG Analysts and Associates NYC

  Sun 10 Dec 12:24 p.m.

  [Apocalypse Now movie poster]

  From: Chloe Walker

  To: HG Analysts and Associates NYC

  Sun 10 Dec 12:25 p.m.

  Stop spamming.

  Each of the two mainframes has its own enclave, and I reach the one in distress. As usual, the room is a mess. There isn’t a naked surface in sight. Every bit of counter is covered with abandoned printouts.

  Despite the mindshare this has commanded, nothing is on fire and no one is dead. Brian takes a picture of the flashing paper-jam alert, presumably to send in a blast. I roll up my sleeves while he finishes his shot. He leaves sniggering. An associate enters to kick the “piece of junk,” which I half-laugh at to be nice. Turns out there are thirteen different paper jams in the system. This printer’s chakras are beyond fucked. Each jam flashes red in the schematic on-screen. I start to un-dam each one.

  “Well, well, well,” Harry says, walking in. He sips a thimble-size espresso.

  “Fixing the printer, I see,” he says. “Were you promoted?”

  He hovers over me as I crouch. I pull a crumpled “slide 49” from one of the printer wheels, and it rips in half.

  “Perhaps you should prana it back to life,” he suggests.

  Prana is Sanskrit for “breath” or “life force.”

  I hope all the time you spent doing yoga homework puts a dent in your bonus, asshole.

  “No thanks,” I say.

  “So,” he says, “what can you tell me about your guru before our date?”

  Oh God. I fish for half of a slide from deep between the printer’s wheels and pull it out. My fingers are black with ink.

  “She’s a public figure,” I say.

  “So?” he probes.

  “So ask Google.”

  “I am starting my search the old-fashioned way,” he s
ays.

  I clear the last juncture. Lights blaze and the printer’s wheels roar in synchrony, the first leg of a start-up sequence. That was unexpectedly satisfying. I stand to face Harry.

  “Printer’s fixed,” I announce.

  “Brilliant,” he says, leaving. “Another way to squander your education.”

  The blasts turn, and celebration memes replace disaster ones.

  “Printer’s fixed,” I tell my pod.

  “How is that possible?” Chloe asks.

  “I fixed it,” I say.

  “Oh,” Chloe says. “On purpose?”

  “Yeah,” I say.

  “Huh,” she says. Her brow stitches. “Thanks.”

  I sit down for a split second before a collision jolts my desk. Tripp has dropped a plastic food delivery bag to smack the wooden surface between us, and it hit with unusual heft. With dramatic slowness, Tripp pulls from the core of his bag lunch a Saran-Wrapped orange brick.

  “What,” Tripp demands, “the fuck.”

  “Hungry?” Chloe asks.

  “I ordered a side of queso,” he says. “A side of queso. Some pisswizard sent me this. What the fuck am I supposed to do with this?”

  I laugh.

  “Pisswizard?” Chloe asks.

  “That’s nacho cheese,” Puja says.

  He tosses it disdainfully into the trash, and it clatters in the bin.

  “Oh, fucking amazing, now Jason wants me to swing by,” Tripp says.

  He leaves. Excel fingers pitter-patter. I dump the reply-alls out of my inbox in chunks, until Tripp is back. He takes his seat in slow motion, contracting one discrete muscle at a time. It’s odd not to see him animated, and even odder to see such a stark contrast from how frenetic he was just minutes ago. He carries a printout.

  “Hey, A,” he says.

  He jerks his head in the direction of an empty MD office. We walk into the room, which provides a bit of privacy.

  “Do you remember those strip profiles?” he asks.

  I raise and lower my chin.

  “So, you want to tell me what happened?” he asks, uncharacteristically serious.

  Blood drains from my cheeks. What the fuck does that mean? He hands me the printout titled Discussion Materials for Titan—Draft. The first few pages of my strips are here, just as I remember them. I continue to turn until one pivotal flip—the border into Skylar’s first slide.

  Beside the pristine column of perfectly aligned company logos, red markings appear like crop circles in a cornfield. The columns are stick-straight and perfectly spaced, and the bullets are perfectly formatted, but most of the words have been circled, crossed out, or linked to underlined question marks in the margins.

  “I mean, what the shit,” he says. “Headquarters in ‘Italy, France’?” He gestures at the page open in front of me. “And the company descriptions are nonsense. It looks fucking random. None of the revenue numbers are right. None. Not a single one, and not by a long shot. What the fuck?”

  How did I not check this? I try to remember back to that night. It was right after I broke the fast with Skylar. She offered to help. I did check it. I think I did. But it comes back to me now, and my stomach drops. I only checked the formatting. I trusted her.

  The only reason Tripp and I aren’t fired right now is because we never actually gave Titan the book—it remained a draft. Mark requested we “back-burner” the strips, as we were “moving forward” with new Titan-Sierra merger analyses that took over that entire weekend. With the deal dead, Jason must have come across this deck while archiving materials for compliance reasons. The damage is contained, but it’s still beyond terrible.

  Skylar’s profiles read like streams of consciousness. It’s as if she saw the category labels—market cap, revenue, HQ, and company description—as prompts for free writing. It reflects such a startling lack of concern for my livelihood that I am paralyzed with shock. This is beyond yogi detachment. This is guru narcissism, or even sabotage. Jason must have thought we were just making shit up, cramming ahead of a deadline.

  “I told Jason it was me,” Tripp says. “PATC is here, and I said it was me.” PATC, pronounced “pack,” stands for “per annual total comp.” Tripp means our imminent bonuses. “I told Jason the book was unfinished and that stuff was just a placeholder. So it looks like I was dicking around with the materials. I can’t even think about it.”

  “I am so sorry,” I say.

  “ ‘Italy, France’?” Tripp repeats. “You mean, like, Italy is the capital of France or their headquarters is just so fucking big it crosses the border and is in both fucking countries?” He shakes his head. “Unbelievable. Right before PATC. This is basic. Were you high or something?”

  I have no words.

  “You know what? This isn’t even fucking ‘oops, I’m sorry,’ ” he says. “This is asking for it. I know you don’t give a shit about this job anymore, but can you please give a shit about me? This is just, like, evil.”

  “Tripp, I was not myself that day,” I say.

  “I’ll say,” he says.

  “Do you remember? It was the day we met with management,” I say.

  “Zombie Day,” he says.

  Fuck.

  “This will never happen again,” I say slowly. “Never before, and never again. I swear to God that it was not on purpose. Do you remember how out of it I was? I was not myself. It wasn’t me that did this. You saw me.”

  A pause grows.

  “I have too much shit to do to beat this horse,” Tripp says.

  He stands abruptly, and I follow him back to the desk.

  As soon as we arrive at the pod, Tripp kicks his trash bin, and the cold, hard block of queso rumbles around in it like a sneaker in a drying machine.

  I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my time as an analyst. Everyone does. Half of us went to liberal arts colleges with grade inflation. But I know that this mistake is different. Before tonight, my biggest slipup was that I didn’t include the number of stores Starbucks opened pre-IPO in a table. Instead, I put “N/A” in the first draft. Starbucks went public in the 1990s before the SEC website posted documents online, so the S-1 registration document where that number would be is not available. Still, the VP pulled me aside and spat, “This is Anderson Fucking Shaw.” So I searched the internet until I found a scanned copy of Starbucks’s first annual report on a random blog. It was yellow, blurry, and did not allow word-search. I read the whole thing until I found the number of shops open at IPO. It took me an hour to fill that square in a table of one hundred data points for draft two.

  You don’t make these kinds of mistakes with Titan. You don’t make any mistake with Titan. But worst of all, I hurt Tripp, and he’s the one really in this business. Even if he does watch an impressive amount of TV and claim to be “invinsible,” he’s the one who will actually stick around. He deserves all five of those pools.

  * * *

  Janitors arrive at midnight. Each wheels a giant yellow bucket lined with a trash bag and filled with our individual trash bags. It is a Russian nesting doll of garbage. Cleaning supplies clatter against the plastic sides.

  “Thanks,” I say.

  I resume work, still reeling from the strips.

  Last week, I made a deck for a client meeting taking place tomorrow. Since then, the price of every stock in the book has moved. So, I am “price updating” slides to reflect the latest market. In most cases, this only changes the numbers to the right of the decimal place. Still, I re-paste every chart, output, and table. It leaves me enough headspace to wonder what the fuck is wrong with Skylar.

  I stop price updating for a moment—this shit is ridiculous anyway. The meeting will take place after the stock market has opened tomorrow, so updating tonight still won’t give clients accurate numbers. The task is like painting ocean waves and hoping the ocean looks exactly the fucking same when you give your client the painting. This is the ocean right now. My analyst was up all night making sure of it.

  I ri
fle through my top drawer until I find the baseline diary I made for Skylar. The strips were not the first time she messed with my job. I flip past the coffee-stained pages to a fresh sheet and start to tally her offenses. The more I write, the angrier I get: . . . Yeah, go ahead and meditate right at your desk. You have an open floor plan and conservative coworkers? Awesome . . . And then follow your heart all the way to flirting with your married boss. Let yourself live, right? The soul is meant to be free. . . . And then take breaks all fucking day. . . . Oh, and here’s a photo of me, can you edit it right now at 5 a.m. at the ass end of your all-nighter? Write a caption from the bottom of your heart. Now, let’s back-burner those. . . . And then pure fast for forty-eight hours no matter what your meetings are. . . . And to top it all off, teach a class to your most closed-minded peers. That fucking work for you?

  And that’s excluding the biggest ask of all—joining her team. So I can end up like Rosie, who looks like you chained her to that beige sofa? Or like Jordan? Everyone you’re close to fucking works for you, and no one turns out okay. As I stare at the page, it’s clear that Skylar is more “Anderson Shaw Yogi” than I am, and she’s been manipulating me this entire time. It will be easy now to tell her no. I see her show of compassion for what it is: total bullshit. Just like everything I’m doing here.

  chapter 21

  The pod’s bonus countdown began. Tripp hung an advent calendar by our desk to mark the days until PATC or, as he called it, “Money Christmas.” Every day, he opened a new paper square and announced the picture inside. Angel turned to Wise Man turned to Crucifixion Cross, and we got closer to cashing in.

  Bonus Day would overlap with a few key events. Right before, there’d be the HG holiday party. Right after, I would quit my job. Meanwhile, as Tripp flicked advent calendar squares at the ceiling, @PretzelYoga continued to grow. @JordanRPhoto followed me. Requests rolled in from other photographers, InstaYogis, and small businesses looking to collaborate. People kept liking posts in my backlog and messaging me questions about yoga. Eventually, I got enough interest from potential students that I began to view the account as a professional one.

  Until then, I had thought about the path to teaching in a narrow way: quit, then two hundred hours of training, then teach group classes in a studio. But there I was, getting serious interest for private lessons, and it occurred to me that I could get started teaching freelance. My American Yoga gold was a serious credential for knowing safe yoga practices, correct alignments, and poses. @PretzelYoga could connect me with students and create a community of people I had taught, so I wouldn’t be a trackless, rogue instructor. Like, Hey, I’m an uncertified teacher, want to let me into your home for an hour? Sign this fucking waiver first that exonerates me from any injury you may suffer. All right, awesome. Considering those points, people could then choose to hire me or not.