The Escape Room

by Megan Goldin

  The firm required a minimum of four interviews before an offer was made. It was an ironclad rule. Sometimes that number could rise to six. Or even seven, for very senior roles. But nobody was ever hired before passing at least four rounds. That went for everyone from senior executives down to mailroom clerks.

  The first interview of the day was with Donna, a recruiter who had a master’s degree in organisational psychology. Donna had long, dark hair that fell in waves below her shoulders and a wide, sincere smile. She went through a series of preliminary questions mostly asking why I wanted the role and what value I thought I could bring to the firm. I had all those answers down pat. I ran through them confidently and in a clear voice. She took notes frequently and thankfully didn’t throw me any curve balls.

  The next interview was with Deepak. He wore wire glasses over a fine-featured face that matched his thin, delicate frame. He said that he was originally from Bangalore. He told me the interview would focus on checking my knowledge of financial modelling. He gave me a few financial scenarios that he seemed to expect me to solve in my head because he didn’t offer me any paper.

  I was so nervous that at first I couldn’t keep up with the numbers. I paused and sipped my water to calm down. Then I answered all his questions without any mistakes. I could tell that I’d done well from his pleased expression.

  After Deepak was Lance. Lance looked like an advertising executive. He had the chiselled face of a Ken doll that belied the fact he was insanely smart. He bombarded me with questions, probing how I would handle certain situations. When I’d answered that first volley of questions to his apparent satisfaction, he moved onto another set of questions that was even tougher.

  ‘There’s no right answer,’ he told me. ‘I just want to get an idea of how you think.’

  I nodded that I understood.

  ‘How would you find a good Sichuan restaurant in downtown Manhattan without access to the internet?’ It wasn’t exactly the type of question you prepare to answer in an interview at an investment bank.

  ‘I’d walk through Chinatown and look for the busiest one that I could find,’ I answered.

  He wrote something down with an inscrutable expression. There were other questions along those lines. He asked me to calculate how many tennis balls would fit into an eight-seater car, how I would go about finding a needle in a haystack. I told him I’d use a magnet.

  The fourth interview was with Mitch. He was a sharp-faced lawyer from the risk and regulatory team who needled me until I felt like a pin-cushion. ‘If you saw a colleague steal a dollar, would you report him?’ he asked. ‘Come on,’ he prodded when I hesitated. ‘What’s more important to you, Sara, ethics or getting along with your colleagues?’

  The question stumped me because every possible answer seemed wrong. ‘Ethics,’ I said. ‘But I wouldn’t report someone over a dollar.’

  ‘How much would someone have to steal for you to report him?’ he fired back.

  I squirmed under his expectant gaze. I didn’t have a ready answer.

  He took the conversation into a new direction. ‘Tell me about a time you screwed up royally.’

  It went on and on until a trickle of sweat ran down my back as I fielded his questions like a batter facing-off against a fastball pitcher.

  I didn’t show my discomfort, though. I kept my cool.

  ‘You didn’t do too badly,’ he said at the end of the interview. He was intimidating but his hardball interview questions were a walk in the park compared to being drowned out by Richie crunching nuts to throw me off.

  The interview with Vincent was the last for the day. Before it started, the receptionist from earlier brought me a coffee and a muffin. I scoffed them down, grateful for the sugar hit and caffeine kick. I was starting to flail. My voice was almost hoarse from talking nonstop all day.

  Vincent came through the door not long after. ‘Good to see you again, Sara,’ he said.

  He was taller than I remembered. And better looking. I hadn’t seen him properly when we met the first time in the elevator. I noticed that he had wide cheekbones and hair so short it looked almost shaved. His eyes I remembered from our first meeting. They were like shards of light blue crystal in the afternoon sunlight streaming through the meeting room window.

  He sat with his hands pressed together in front of him as he asked me preliminary questions to break the ice. He barely took his eyes off me as I responded. I found it both disconcerting and strangely appealing that he showed that much interest in me. After I finished talking, he contemplated my answer and then pulled over his notepad.

  ‘Don’t mind me,’ he said without looking up as he put on reading glasses and wrote notes in distinctive longhand. He was the only one who hand wrote his notes. The others used laptops.

  ‘Go ahead,’ I said.

  After a while he put down his pen. ‘I’m confused,’ he said.

  ‘Confused about what?’

  ‘You studied pre-med. Your subjects included chemistry, biology, and math. Your results were excellent. I’m sure you would have been welcome at any medical school in the country. Yet you studied an MBA. And you’re interviewing for a job in finance with an investment company.’ He waited for an answer even though he hadn’t actually asked a question.

  ‘You want to know what prompted me to abandon the sciences for finance?’

  Nobody had asked me that question in all the interviews I’d gone through. It was the one question I hadn’t prepared for. I didn’t have a clear answer myself.

  By all accounts, I should have gone to medical school instead of business school. I had the prerequisites and the marks. In fact, I’d received two offers from well-regarded medical schools. I rejected both of them.

  ‘Why the change of direction in your career?’ he asked.

  His eyes held mine. They reminded me of a blue ocean on a sunny day. It was obvious that he wanted a considered answer. He didn’t want some lame response about how I’d always dreamed of working on Wall Street, how I saw myself as a female Gordon Gekko.

  He wanted the truth. But I hadn’t even been able to tell myself the truth about that decision.

  ‘My mother had a stroke when I was in my senior year at college,’ I said. ‘And my father has had major health problems for as long as I can remember. I’m an only child.’ My voice trembled with the effort of holding in my emotions. ‘Not a day passes where I don’t wonder if that’s the day I’m going to get a call telling me that Mom or Dad has died, or that one of them is in hospital needing treatment their health insurance won’t cover.’

  I willed away the tears forming in the corners of my eyes. I sensed that Vincent noticed them glistening. I cleared my throat. ‘That’s a long way of telling you I wanted a career path where I would earn well from day one, because I’ll need to help them with their medical expenses.’

  ‘Instead of within three to five years after graduation, which is how long it takes a doctor to start making money,’ he observed. ‘And of course business school takes half the time of medical school.’

  ‘I was given a partial scholarship for women in finance to cover the cost of my MBA. It cost far less than medical school. Somehow it made sense.’ I hesitated. ‘And I spent so much time in hospitals with my parents … I loathe hospitals.’

  ‘But you didn’t anticipate there would be an economic downturn after you graduated. You figured you’d walk into a job,’ he said. ‘You didn’t have the faintest idea that MBAs would be a dime a dozen by the time you left business school.’

  I was embarrassed by how much he knew about me. ‘I read the crystal ball all wrong. I figured that I’d be financially independent by now.’ Left unsaid was the fact that it had turned out to be about the dumbest thing that I’d ever done in my life.

  Vincent didn’t respond. He was writing in his notepad again. Minutes passed before he looked up at me. I wanted to kick myself for being so blunt. I should have told him that I fainted at the sight of blood, or something else predic
table.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he reassured me. ‘I’ve heard worse reasons for wanting to work here.’

  Sam had done an escape room challenge about ten months before, as part of a bachelor party for an old college friend. They’d done two different rooms at the facility that night. The one he liked best was a room laid out as a Learjet, complete with a replica of the cabin, windows and seats taken from a decommissioned executive jet. The scenario they were given was that there was a bomb on the plane and they had an hour to defuse it.

  It took them 58 minutes to figure out the code to disarm the virtual bomb, using clues they gathered by solving various puzzles on board the fake aircraft. A boarding pass from a previous ‘flight’ led them to a particular seat, under which they found a laptop requiring a three-digit code to disarm a bomb. They figured out the code by solving various word games and math problems scrawled in the back of a magazine, under a drink coaster, and in the text of a flight safety card they found in a seat pocket. There were other clues along the way, some of which led them to dead ends. With two minutes to go, they entered the code to disarm the fake bomb. It was the wrong code. They heard the deafening sound of an explosion followed by a pre-recorded announcement telling them they had failed in their mission and everyone was dead. A second later, the lights turned on and the door opened. They were back in the warehouse where the escape rooms were located.

  In contrast, the elevator escape room was claustrophobic, dark and frighteningly real. It took the concept up a notch by putting the experience in an actual elevator instead of one built from plywood in a warehouse.

  ‘What happens now? You’ve done these before, Sam.’ Jules betrayed his nervousness by speaking too fast. He pressed his hand to Sam’s shoulder, ostensibly to get his attention but really to make some human contact in the dark. Sam whirled around.

  ‘How the hell do I know!’ Sam snapped. ‘This is too fucking real for my liking.’

  Before doing the Learjet escape room, he and his friends had received fifteen minutes of instruction. In this one, apparently, they needed to figure out everything themselves. There was only the message on the television monitor. ‘Welcome to the escape room. Your goal is simple. Get out alive.’

  ‘When I did the other escape rooms, we had to find puzzles and solve them,’ said Sam. ‘Maybe we should start by looking around for instructions or clues? They could be hidden anywhere.’

  He remembered how on the Learjet he had found a major clue on the safety card in the pocket of a seat. But in the spartan elevator there seemed to be no obvious place to hide clues. There were no nooks or crannies. No furniture. No props. Only the four of them standing in the dark, unsure of what to do.

  ‘Apparently we won’t need to find a clue,’ said Sylvie, dramatically. ‘I believe a clue has found us.’

  The original message on the television screen had been replaced with a new one.

  Dead but not forgotten.

  ASLHARLA

  ‘What the hell does that mean?’ asked Jules.

  ‘It’s an anagram,’ said Sylvie, with a slight eye roll. Sylvie had never been one for games or team building activities. She kicked herself for not declining the meeting invitation with an excuse that it clashed with her flight to Paris. But Vincent had made a point of texting them all to tell them attendance was compulsory. He would not have been pleased if she hadn’t turned up.

  ‘We can spend the next twenty minutes figuring out this anagram,’ said Sylvie. ‘Or we can get the answer in two seconds and get out of here.’

  She opened the internet browser on her phone. She didn’t give a damn if that was considered cheating. Showing initiative to get ahead was an integral part of the firm’s ethos. Plus she was pressed for time. Sylvie wanted to get out of the escape room as fast as possible so she could get home and pack for her midnight flight.

  Sylvie’s phone displayed a message saying there was no connection. She tried again with the same result. She checked her phone settings.

  ‘I don’t have a signal on my phone and there’s no wi-fi,’ she said, to nobody in particular. ‘Does anyone else have a connection?’

  ‘No,’ the others said a moment later, almost in unison, as they checked their phones.

  ‘How’s that possible?’ asked Sylvie.

  ‘Maybe the escape room people blocked our phone signals because they didn’t want us looking up answers on our phones?’ suggested Sam.

  ‘You give them too much credit,’ Vincent said dismissively. ‘If we’re in the express part of the elevator then we’re in the equivalent of a long concrete tunnel. Except ours is vertical. Internet and phone signals can’t get through reinforced concrete. And there’s no wi-fi connection,’ he said. ‘In short, we’re cut off from the outside world. We’re going to have to figure this out without any help from Google.’

  ‘I don’t have the time or patience for stupid games,’ snapped Sylvie. ‘I have a flight to catch.’

  ‘You’ll make your flight. We’ll all be let out after an hour,’ Sam reassured her. ‘At my friend Phil’s bachelor party, we did a couple of escape rooms. One of them was really tough and we couldn’t figure it out – they still let us out after an hour.’

  They’d gone to a strip joint straight afterwards, where they got plastered and encouraged the groom to get down and dirty in a private room with one of the strippers. The best man alluded to their strip joint visit in his drunken speech at the wedding reception. It hadn’t gone down too well with the bride, who’d hoped the bachelor party would begin and end with the escape rooms, which is why she’d suggested it.

  ‘We’re all stuck here for the next hour,’ said Vincent. ‘We might as well try to play the game. The firm sent us here for a reason. It’s a test of some sort. I think we should give it everything we’ve got.’

  ‘Let’s get going then,’ sighed Sylvie, thinking about Paris.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Jules, reading her thoughts, ‘there’ll be plenty of time for you to make your flight to visit, uh, what’s his name again?’ Everyone shifted about awkwardly.

  ‘It’s Marc,’ said Sylvie, coldly. ‘I introduced you to him at the Christmas charity dinner.’

  ‘Of course,’ answered Jules, as if he’d genuinely just remembered. ‘The art dealer. Short. With a nose that looks broken but isn’t and hair that’s too thick for a man his age. I presumed he has hair plugs. He’s married, isn’t he? With a daughter around your age?’

  ‘Shut up, Jules. You’re being an ass,’ said Sam.

  ‘To answer your question, Jules,’ said Sylvie. ‘Marc’s separated. His daughter’s in junior high. Not that being a married father ever stopped you.’

  Jules smiled to himself but said nothing more. He’d hit his mark beautifully. But then he always did know how to press Sylvie’s buttons.

  ‘Dead but not forgotten,’ Sylvie repeated the clue, determined to ignore Jules’s barbs. ‘Who do we know that fits that definition.’

  ‘John Wayne,’ said Jules, flippantly.

  ‘What about Abraham Lincoln. Or Kennedy,’ suggested Sylvie.

  ‘It might be a pop culture reference,’ said Sam. ‘How about Jimi Hendrix or Kurt Cobain?’

  ‘You’ve all forgotten about the anagram. None of those suggestions fit with the letters in the anagram,’ Vincent pointed out. ‘Let’s work backwards. Who do we know whose name is made up of the letters A-S-L-H-A-R-L-A?’

  There was silence as everyone contemplated possible answers.

  ‘Well, that’s a blast from the past,’ said Jules in a tone that told them he’d figured it out.

  ‘What’s the answer?’

  ‘If you rearrange those letters …’ Jules began. ‘It spells out “Sara Hall”. Dead but not forgotten. Sara Hall. It fits, right?’

  Despite my best efforts at keeping my hopes in check, I was practically packing for New York the moment I returned home after my interviews with Vincent’s team. I was on a massive high. I looked at apartment rental listings an
d read forums for people relocating to New York.

  Two weeks passed. I didn’t hear back. It was obvious that I hadn’t got the job. I crashed back to earth. Hard. I was devastated that I’d blown my chance a second time. First with Richie and then with Vincent. I ran through the final interview over and over again in my head.

  I shouldn’t have allowed Vincent to corner me about medical school. I should have given him a banal answer. And I should have held my emotions in check. He didn’t want to hear about my personal problems. And he certainly wouldn’t hire an analyst who might quit the firm a year into the job to chase a dream of studying medicine. Maybe that was why I hadn’t heard back? Whatever the case, I had screwed up what was probably my last chance to get my career on track before it was too late.

  I increased my shifts at Rob Roy, took on double shifts on weekends, when tips were bigger. Anything to distract me and make a dint in my credit card bill. I worked from noon to midnight for so many days in a row, I felt permanently jet-lagged.

  I resumed my job search, focusing on second and third tier jobs in finance. There wasn’t much around. Recruiters told me that positions were frozen due to the downturn and that people were getting jobs largely through their networks. ‘Don’t take it personally. Even people with experience are struggling to find work,’ they told me.

  I was reaching the point where I didn’t care where I worked. I wanted a job that didn’t involve being nice to rude customers, an aching back from carrying heavy trays, and chefs who would grab my ass in the restaurant kitchen whenever I had my hands full with dishes, knowing I couldn’t swipe their hands away without dropping everything.

  Three weeks after my interview with Stanhope and Sons, I was working the afternoon shift at Rob Roy. I was tired, annoyed with every single aspect of my life. Leo, the short, balding shift manager chewed me out over a customer who threatened to put up a negative review online because there were only five baby tomatoes in her salad. She insisted that there were eight tomatoes in a photograph of the salad in the menu.