by John Forelli
1
“Begin at the beginning” my father had said. I wasn’t sure if he’d meant the song, the day, or the interview. My dad had a way of speaking cryptically when it was advice I needed most. Instead of clarity, he served frustration.
He’d told me to listen to a song called “Bohemian Rhapsody” on my drive to the interview. I’d never heard it before, but I do know that it’s a Queen song. I find that odd. Whenever a man would act particularly effeminate in my dad’s presence I’d inevitably hear him called “a regular Freddie Mercury.”
And so I hook my phone up to my car’s bluetooth and plug “Bohemian Rhapsody” in. It buffers as I pull out of the driveway, finally invading my ears with the most flagrant falsetto I’ve ever heard as I pull out onto Route 42. “Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy?...”
I tap the pause button on my phone in a motion so fast that were I able to consistently pull it off I’d surely have a prosperous career in bug assassination. If the first six seconds of that song are any indication of the following three hundred and forty nine, then maybe my dad should shift his scorn away from Freddie Mercury’s sexuality and toward his musical ability.
My dad is quite the amateur music critic, as he’d taken numerous linguistic assaults on my musical tastes, EDM foremost among them. It’s from that catalog I select now, choosing Axwell’s “In My Head” to accompany me down Route 42.
The song comes from the speakers, synthesized yet gentle, soothing my ruffled senses with rhythmic waves of sound. “In my mind, in my head…” The whole song sounds like the aggressively definitive answer to a question I haven’t asked, at least not yet.
I knew it was a quick drive before I left, but it makes the subsequent six minutes seem even quicker. The buildings pass on either side in a blur of metal, brick, and moderately creative architecture. They occupy my periphery while my destination settles in the center; ten stories of glass that could be green or blue depending on the light and your perspective. The morning sun glints off the facade in a thousand tiny sparkles, and as I near it and it gets bigger and bigger it looks as a wave coming to wipe out my existence and begin it anew.
“In my mind, in my head…” The song crescendos as I turn right off Route 42 and into the parking lot, joining my own with the other cars about to be crushed by the giant wave building. I scoop my phone from the divider and my jacket from the passenger seat. My dad had told me to hang it from one of the hooks in the back to avoid wrinkles, but I thought that too much effort. By the look of my reflection in the driver side window, he was probably right.
It’s not like I have a choice now, so I walk the fifty or so yards from my car to the building’s entrance, one of those revolving doors that’s both entrance and exit. A few others amble lazily around me, apparently willing time to slow down on this Monday morning and preserve the last vestiges of the weekend.
When I’m ten yards in front of the revolving door I look up, craning my neck against gravity and my eyes against the sunlight toward the top of the building. It’s farther than I thought it would look, but it’s probably just the angle. Frame of reference can do some crazy shit.
I sneak into the revolving door, hearing the mechanical buzz as it turns and feeling the cool artificial air buffet around with me. It opens out into a lobby of dead silence, save the pinging of the elevator on the other side of the room and a lazy flow of typing from the information desk in front of it. There are black leather couches on either side of it that contrast sharply with the dull off-white of the walls. It’s the same color as all lobbies and waiting rooms, the kind of color designed to provide a sheltered interim between drive and appointment, inside and out, past and future. A declined head of brown hair peeks out over the top of a computer screen on the information desk, and it looks up as my feet move forward and announce as much in echoes throughout the lobby.
It’s a face that vacillates between cute and pretty like a Captain and Coke flows between sweet and strong. Her hair is a brown that looks black because it doesn’t show any inclination toward shine. It looks to be tied in a ponytail that I can’t see, leaving no trace of a part. The face it frames and her nose are in a competition to see which one can be thinner. It’s an altogether fragile face that’s entirely improved by a smile with dimple craters so deep on either side they’d make the Moon jealous, and eyes so blue they would see the sky fall in envy.
She maintains the smile all ten seconds of my walk. Usually eye contact as unyielding as her’s would make me even more nervous than I am right now, but this time it doesn’t. Her eyes soothe more than the kindest of words ever could. “Hi! Can I help you?” she asks in a voice that laughs on every syllable as though it’s a gift to whoever hears it.
“Yeah, uh…” I begin, embarking on a pointless expedition to flatten the wrinkles in my suit. “I’m here to interview with Warren Friel of Simulations, Inc.” I end the sentence apologetically, as though it’s rude to disturb her with an inquiry so impertinent as my professional future. I read somewhere once that girls like guys who act like dicks, but being anything but outrageously nice to this girl should be considered a war crime.
She squints at her computer and nods, looking back up at me before saying “yep! I have you listed right here. Go ahead and take the elevator up. Tenth floor.” She smiles again and I depart unwillingly, as my heart sinks into a nervousness that's worsened by the disappointment of leaving this secretarial angel. I smile back before shuffling off around her desk toward the elevator, taking care to flatten the damnably persistent cowlick on the top of my head.
I reach the reflective silver doors of the elevator and see my slightly distorted self, six feet of goofy, skinny wrinkled suit with a pale face and brown hair a pathetic imitation of lobby lady’s. I wouldn’t hire me for anything more than awkward interactions with cute receptionists. The elevator pings! as though it agrees with my thought, opening in a greeting much less welcoming than I’d just received. I enter and turn around, finding the girl behind the desk turned around herself and looking at me. She smiles as the doors begin to close, and the last thing I hear before they bang shut is “good luck.”
2
The elevator opens to a foyer not big enough to hold more than the one door standing before me. It has Simulations, Inc. stenciled on it in black letters that seem portals to the night sky in comparison to the pale wood around it. On either side are tall windows with blinds lifted just enough to let strands of light through, as if simultaneously teasing you and warning you of what lies beyond.
I put my hand to the door and open. The dull typing sound that meets me is clearly joined from many keyboards, so it seems staccato after the typing downstairs. What looks like the entire floor is taken up by a maze of cubicles, except for the back wall, which has three doors, one on each side that look like bathrooms and another right in the middle. From this perspective the winding tops of the thin, gray cubicle walls form an elaborate maze throughout the floor, inviting one from my starting position to solve the maze and find the truth on the other side.
I’m in another kind of foyer, like a waiting space with one wall removed. It makes me think that life is just a series of foyers, each day a waiting room for the next, so that we never actually find what we're waiting for.
There’s a receptionist and her desk pointed away from the left wall and a couch against the other. I turn to her, not nearly as impressed by her graying mop of split ends as I was downstairs. She looks up and gives me a brief smile which I return, followed by a “My name's Ray Ality, I’m here to meet Warren Friel” that must have been far more brusque than I’d planned, because she answers with a purse of her lips, a finger at the couch, and a curt “I’ll let him know. Please take a seat.”
The couch is a gr
ayish shade of black like everything else in here, like there’s no meaning to anything other than the fact that they exist. I watch as the receptionist takes ponderously slow swoops with her mouse, ending each with a click and a sigh. She catches me watching, sighs, and looks away again. I’d feel weird about it if there was anything out of the absolute ordinary to feel weird about.
There’s a rustle by me every few seconds, accompanied by what could be generously described as a person. It’s like a parade of average. A woman with short hair, a limp, and a gut, a man with an apish gait and blank eyes, a person whose long hair and hint of a bosom contradict the unfortunate masculinity shadowing her prodigious jowls from 5 o’clock to 5 o’clock.
The next one is a man who could most aptly be described as a cardboard box with limbs attached. His polo shirt is a dark green to go with the red of his beard and the remnants of hair that abandoned his head long ago. He stops and looks at me, hands in his pockets, gut tucked in in a useless attempt to hide a decade of post-college six packs. “You Warren’s new guy?” he asks.
“I’m interviewing with Warren, yes” I respond, much more politely than the brusque way the question had been phrased.
After a second the man’s lips open up into a bizarre smile. His teeth are yellow and spaced very far apart, as if a crenellated castle wall attempting to defend what surely no woman has ever dared assail. His laugh is the halting sputter of a 1990 Ford Bronco that needs its oil changed. I smile uncomfortably
as he waits there, hand stroking his beard in a vapid attempt to appear intelligent.
One second turns into five, and five turns into ten. As ten is about to turn into fifteen, a man walks deliberately toward the foyer from one of the offices I can’t see around the corner. He’s a tall man with salt and pepper hair and a well-trimmed goatee. His first glance is a smile to me and his second is a look at the beard-stroker which he maintains while saying “Hello Ray. I see you’ve met Ty.”
Ty’s smile vanishes as his beard-stroking hand returns to its pocket. Warren turns back to me as I stand, responding in the affirmative, shaking hands with my interviewer. Ty isn’t there when I turn to him. His back is ten steps down the hall. Warren says “come” and when I turn back to him he’s already begun walking, so I follow behind.
He’s just as tall as he’d been from a seated perspective, and his arms hang loosely by his sides, swinging with the palms facing directly behind him, as if offering me a low-five. After about ten steps he stops and enters an office door, waiting to shut it as I enter behind him. “Please sit,” he says, closing the door and fiddling his suit jacket unbuttoned before sitting in his own chair across the desk from me.
“So Ray,” he begins, slowly, as if every syllable is a lump of clay to be poked and prodded and heated into a pot. It’s the voice of a man who takes caution in his words while respecting those that will hear them. “What is it about the job that made you want to apply?”
I take the three seconds of breath one of my college professors taught us was a trick to make people think you knew what you were talking about. “Well, I just graduated college, so I like to explore as many options as I can, but statistical forecasting has been interesting to me for a while.” I’m satisfied with my answer so I shut the hell up, which my dad told me is the key to acing an interview. It’s a pity he doesn’t take his own advice, especially about music.
“What about it is fascinating to you?” Warren is clearly a man of few words. He crosses his hands over his svelte middle in the ensuing silence.
I draw another deep breath. “Well, just the idea of forecasting real life scenarios is fascinating to me.” Repeat the question? Check. “Technology and computing have arrived at a point where information about a real life scenario can be input, recombined and simulated on a timeline by the software, and out comes a picture of what the future holds. It’s a menagerie of technical wonder, but at the end it has an application of tremendous gravity.”
Warren takes a moment, studying me through dark, squinting eyes. He cracks a thin smile. “Menagerie? I don’t think anyone would describe this place as a menagerie.” His tone is cynical with a hint of depressed, like he's trying to convey something without spelling it out for me. What that is, I don't know.
I try to modulate my laughter to an appropriate level, as I’m unsure of how humorous he’d intended that statement to be. “Maybe not, but the mundane is beautiful when it produces wonder. A computer isn’t anything to look at until it uses a twelve inch screen to connect you to events on the other side of the world.”
“Fair enough. So about the technical aspects of the job. How d’you think you’ll be up to handling that?” Warren is the Boxer of the conversational Animal Farm.
“Well, ever since Apple introduced Eclipse a few years ago I’ve been working with that, especially in business classes for college. It’s a really amazing program, in that it combines the simplicity and effectiveness of Excel with the reach and applicability of a SQL based software suite. So whereas Excel was copying formulas up and down, Eclipse has the ability to perform extremely advanced statistical calculations from a very intuitive interface that we’re all used to.” I pause, allowing my jargon to take hold. “How widely is Eclipse used here?”
Warren takes a while to consider the question. He reclines and looks up to the blank white ceiling before answering. “Oh, a bit. But not many people use it for much beyond what Excel was used for.”
“See, that doesn’t make much sense to me.” I blurt it out before thinking, but Warren doesn’t seem to mind, so I continue. “Like I said, Eclipse has such amazing capabilities: regression, event forecasting, Monte Carlo simulations, that it’s a shame if they’re not used to their full extent.”
Warren seems a bit taken aback by this, and I’m not sure why. His neck arches back but his face stays somewhat calm. “Monte Carlo simulations?”
I’m confused but I try to hide it, though I can feel my eyebrows arching in failure. “Yeah. Have you never heard of Monte Carlo simulations?”
Warren frowns slightly, shaking his head. “No, please explain.” He says it like I’ll be doing him a favor.
“Well, the idea has actually been around for decades. Basically, you take a domain of possible inputs, let’s say, the tossing of a coin. And then the computer takes those inputs and generates a probability distribution for those inputs over millions of trials. Basically, the computer flips the coin for you millions of times.” I can feel myself talking quickly, and try to refrain from nerdgasming all over Warren’s desk. “Then at the end the computer aggregates the results and tells you ‘okay, we flipped a coin a million times and it came up heads 50% of the time.’ Except that with Monte Carlo simulations you’re dealing with much more complicated situations, like an NFL season or games of chess.”
“That does sound interesting.” Warren seems genuinely, if understatedly, interested. “It seems to have a broad array of applications.”
“Yes! Most definitely,” I say, a split second away from cutting Warren off. “It’s one of the reasons I was so attracted to this position. There’s a real opportunity to pair advanced predictive modeling with Monte Carlo principles to arrive at a forecasting system of unparalleled accuracy and applicability. I’m talking weather forecasting, sports forecasting, traffic forecasting, you name it!”
“Yes, you seem very excited about it.” Warren smiles slightly, again. He doesn’t seem quite as excited as I am. “What gets you as excited as these advanced simulations? What motivates you?” I’m annoyed by Warren’s attempt to redirect the conversation, but I hope I don’t show it. This is going well. “Um, not much, honestly. We’ve arrived at a point technologically where we can simulate reality. We have the ability to wrap our hands around the very fabric of existence and poke and prod it like a doctor would examine a patient’s broken leg. Just as a doctor tells a patient what to do to get better, we can tell people what to do to improve their lives.” I can see Warren’s not going to interrupt me, s
o I add in summation that “that’s an extraordinary service we can provide humanity. At a profit.”
Warren chuckles the loudest this time. “Well you should know that we’re not at that level here yet...not even close...though we’d like to get there. Do you think you have the patience to wait your turn in a corporate environment like this?”
I know that I don’t, but I’m not going to tell him that. I want a job. It can buy a lot of pizza. “I think so. I’m obviously young, just out of college, and I’m still maturing, but I’ve always been a fast learner, so I think I can learn to be patient and internalize reasonable timetables for life, so to speak.”
“That’s good,” Warren says. “Because I’ll be honest with you, you’ll be doing a lot of work that’s far beneath what you’ve discussed with me. And I doubt many of the people around here will be as open as I am to new ideas and unique ways of doing things.” He says it with a grave tone that sounds exaggerated to me.
“Well, if that’s the price I have to pay to begin my professional life and work on ideas that really matter, then so be it,” I say, while giving a mental middle finger to whoever thinks that my ideas about simulating the future are a waste of time.
“Good.” Warren takes a long break between thoughts, keeping eye contact with me the whole time. “If you’re going to do this, you need to understand that there are always walls on either side of us, and you have to navigate the maze before you find what you’re looking for.”