by Megan Goldin
Sylvie touched the television monitor in the hope that it would display the next clue. The screen remained as lifeless as it had been every other time she had tried it. This time though, perhaps because of the angle that Vincent held his phone flashlight in the dark, Sylvie noticed something underneath the monitor. It looked like tightly rolled plastic. It had been taped in such a way that it was disguised as part of the frame of the panel.
It came loose when she tugged on it. It was a roll of small square pieces of cellophane.
‘What’s that?’ asked Sam.
‘Cellophane,’ said Sylvie. ‘I found it taped under the monitor.’
‘Let me take a closer look.’ Sam snatched the squares from Sylvie and held them under the beam of his torch, looking for writing. All he saw was three sheets of cellophane, two purple and one blue.
Sylvie was annoyed. She’d already checked for that. There was no writing on the cellophane sheets. No fresh clues. Sam’s small success at solving the code had gone to his head, now he was acting as if he was a leading authority on escape rooms. As far as Sylvie was concerned, that would have been fine if he’d been able to get them out. But he hadn’t.
‘They’re blank,’ complained Sam, as if Sylvie was somehow to blame.
‘I don’t think they’re a clue,’ said Vincent. He took the sheets of cellophane, studied them for a moment, then arranged them one over the other. He held the combination of them tightly over the flashlight of his phone, producing a darkish blue beam. ‘I think this is like a blacklight?’
He moved the beam against the back wall of the elevator. It was very faint under the filtered light, but there was writing that had been invisible to them before. Under the filtered light, a number of messages were revealed all over the walls, as well as what looked like doodles and other illegible graffiti.
At the top of the back wall, painted in large letters were the words ‘Welcome to the escape room.’ That was innocuous enough. When Sam ran the torch light over the area underneath, they all fell into an awkward silence.
Underneath the words ‘Wider Feedback’ was a series of quotes that appeared to be taken straight out of their annual reviews.
‘Sylvie needs to learn that her looks will only get her so far,’ read one of the quotes on the wall. ‘Sylvie should be less critical of her colleagues and focus more on the quality of her own work,’ said another. ‘Sylvie needs to step up. She’s the weakest link.’
Another message, written on an angle, read: ‘Jules seems to be distracted by his personal life and hasn’t been productive this year.’ ‘Jules is a great sounding-board for his teammate’s ideas,’ said a slightly more diplomatic backhanded comment.
‘Sam needs to lose his negativity and display some leadership qualities if he wants the respect he thinks he deserves.’ ‘It was good to see Sam buckle down and do some work this quarter, for a change.’
A large message in capital letters read: ‘It’s not surprising that we’ve had the worst year on record given that Vincent is distracted and indecisive.’
There were other quotes too, covering the wall in a swirl of the team’s poisonous remarks about one another. The quotes had obviously all been taken from their annual reviews, in which they were asked to anonymously submit feedback about their colleagues. They’d traditionally used the opportunity to score points and undermine each other. Sometimes subtly, sometimes more directly.
Stanhope had a way of pitting people against each other. After all, bonuses, salaries and promotions were a zero-sum game at the firm. Even best friends would throw each other under the bus if it raised their chances of getting a bigger bonus.
But there was a difference between suspecting that nasty things were being said about them behind their backs and actually seeing the words in front of their eyes. They could feel each other’s anger boil to the surface. The veneer of camaraderie was dissolving.
Jules turned the flashlight beam away from the wall in embarrassment. There were still plenty of comments they hadn’t read. They’d seen more than enough.
Sylvie was particularly crushed. Nobody had a good word to say about her. It was all cruel and reductive. The comments tapped into Sylvie’s worst suspicions that her colleagues saw her as the token female in the team. Literally just a pretty face.
Sylvie had grown a tough skin over the years. She’d put up with an awful lot. Not just the ‘bro talk’ but constant passes made by men angling to turn her into a notch on their bedpost.
When she was a junior analyst she’d attended a dinner at a grill restaurant to celebrate closing a lucrative deal. One of the young bankers at her table called over a pretty waitress with a pixie hair-style to ask about a particular steak on the menu. ‘It’s a tenderloin,’ the waitress explained earnestly.
‘Is it juicy?’ he asked, hiding a smirk.
‘Yes, it’s considered a juicy cut,’ explained the waitress before moving over to another table to take an order.
‘I’d like to put her over a chair and give her tenderloin something very juicy,’ said the guy who’d asked the question, drawing uproarious laughter from everyone except Sylvie. The waitress had looked in their direction at the laughter and then quickly averted her eyes with a slight flush on her cheeks. She didn’t have to hear the words to know pretty much what had been said.
Sylvie felt bad not saying anything. She hadn’t wanted the men to call her ‘touchy’ and make lewd comments about her instead, so she’d kept her mouth shut.
She was used to the sexism. It was par for the course. A few years ago, when she’d returned from a holiday with a new boyfriend, she’d found torn, sexy lingerie on her desk with a note that said something along the lines of ‘Hope you had fun!’ Sylvie pretended not to be bothered by such things. Not even after she found a drawing of her naked from the waist up on a notepad left behind after she’d presented to the leadership team.
The comments on the wall proved what Sylvie had always suspected. She’d fooled herself into thinking that they took her seriously. What infuriated Sylvie most about the comments was that they were completely dismissive of her contribution. She’d come up with strategies that had won significant business for the firm.
In her opinion, her contribution was larger than that of Jules and Sam combined. Those two were great at greasing palms and playing politics. They were excellent at taking credit for other people’s work and pontificating about their views. They were extremely tactical in their approach. They did things that looked good in the short term. But she came out with strategies that actually worked, rather than just whatever looked good on paper.
When Sylvie thought about it, her achievements were never acknowledged. At best they were considered to be a team effort. When Sam, Jules, or even Vincent did something minor there were rounds of drinks and high-fives. The congratulatory emails would flow thick and fast. It had been the same with other women who’d been in the team over the years. Lucy, especially, never received due credit for her financial wizardry even when it literally earned the firm hundreds of millions of dollars.
If the elevator had felt small before, it felt impossibly tiny after they’d read what they all thought about each other. They wanted to get as far away from each other as possible. Instead, they were so close they could almost hear one another’s quickening heartbeats. They stood around awkwardly, angry and embarrassed, smelling each other’s sweat and frustration in the rising heat.
Nobody spoke. The silence was thick. It was almost a relief when the television screen came to life again and red letters scrolled across the bottom like a caption for a breaking story on a cable news broadcast. Above the red bar was a virtual keyboard with four empty boxes where they were obviously supposed to enter a code.
‘A Greek god has a message for you,’ said the text on the screen. ‘Find an object that starts with “E”, ends with “E”, but only has a single letter in it. Enter the third digit of each number in the message and you shall be free.’
I was ambling through Central Par
k about two months after starting work at Stanhope, enjoying the Sunday morning sunshine filtered through the golden rust of fall leaves. It was a rare day off work and I felt liberated to be in jeans, a sweater and sneakers instead of a suit and heels.
I saw a sign for the zoo at Central Park. I’d last been to a zoo when I was eleven. I had a sudden urge to visit, whether from nostalgia or loneliness, I wasn’t sure.
I strolled along the main track that looped around the zoo, watching moms and dads taking photos of their kids in front of various animal enclosures, or pushing drowsy toddlers in strollers while enthusiastically pointing out the animals they passed.
I stood by the sea lion enclosure for a while, watching the keepers throw fish into their greedy whiskered mouths. Next to me was a little girl with a blue foil helium balloon that kept getting caught up in her hair. Eventually I landed at the snow leopard exhibit, where a young leopard was sunning himself on a rock. I sat down on a bench next to someone in a black sweatshirt and an oversized baseball cap who was drawing quite expertly on a large sketchpad.
The leopard was flapping its tail comically to swat away a persistent fly. I instinctively turned to share with the stranger my amusement at the leopard’s unwitting comedy. With surprise, I realised that the stranger was not a stranger at all. It was Lucy Marshall, my colleague.
As she sketched the snow leopard, Lucy was in a state of such deep concentration that I suspected she didn’t even realise that I was there, although you couldn’t always tell with Lucy. She didn’t acknowledge me as she drew the contours of the leopard with a charcoal pencil.
At work, Lucy was obsessed by numbers, statistics and financial modelling. I would never in a million years have imagined that she had any interest in art. Let alone any talent. It was a shock to see Lucy drawing a monochrome sketch that could easily have been framed and sold at a gallery.
‘You’re very good,’ I said eventually, feeling awkward that I’d been sitting right next to her for some time and hadn’t made myself known.
Lucy immediately panicked. She half covered the drawing with a cupped hand. Her eyes darted around as if to look for an escape route. I felt awful.
‘I’m sorry, Lucy. I didn’t mean to give you a fright. I shouldn’t have disturbed you.’ I stood abruptly and was about to walk off when she called out to me.
‘Stay, Sara.’
I hesitated for a moment and then decided to sit and watch her work. It was a chance to establish a semblance of a relationship with Lucy. She and I had barely exchanged two words since we met the day that I was introduced to the team. It wasn’t personal. I’d quickly learned that Lucy didn’t talk to anyone unless it was work related. Even then, she generally preferred to chat via messenger.
Lucy was the least friendly member of the team aside from Sylvie, who blew hot and cold with a distinct tendency towards the latter. It wasn’t that Lucy was intentionally rude, she genuinely didn’t know how to handle social interactions. It was like a foreign language to her. Jules had told me that Lucy had Asperger’s. While her social skills might have been poor, when it came to smarts Lucy was in the stratosphere.
Lucy never joined the cynical repartee that Sylvie, Sam and Jules engaged in as they sat in the cluster of desks where our team was located. She didn’t join us for lunch or drinks after work. On business trips, she returned straight to her hotel room, where I gather she ate room service and went to sleep.
The others subtly mocked Lucy. They liked to pretend they were ribbing her as if they were older siblings giving their younger sister a hard time, but it wasn’t genuine. There was an underlying nastiness to their comments that made me wonder what it was they said about me behind my back.
Even as they made fun of Lucy’s otherworldliness, there was a grudging respect for her brilliance. Lucy was a genius when it came to finance. Her ability to see patterns and opportunities was unparalleled, which made her work critical to the team’s success.
By the same token, she was an outcast. She did not comply to the firm’s standards for looks, or dress, or social skills. But she more than made up for her deficiencies in other departments. Sam once told me that Lucy had an instinctive, uncanny ability to make money. ‘She doesn’t realise how good she is.’
The only time that I ever saw Lucy doing anything that involved a social interaction was when she went for lunch with Vincent, who was officially her mentor. Nobody really understood his ongoing interest in her, other than the fact that he’d plucked her out of obscurity and brought her to the firm.
The others would make cynical, nasty remarks when they watched Vincent and Lucy disappear for their catch-ups. Sometimes there was sexual innuendo. I had the impression they felt that Vincent was favouring Lucy. In the firm that meant an awful lot because it had implications for salaries, bonuses and career progression. Their resentment created a nasty undercurrent but I don’t think that Lucy noticed or cared.
‘Did you know that they’re blind when they’re born?’ Lucy’s comment was so unexpected that I almost jumped at the sound of her voice.
‘Sorry?’ I said, unsure what she meant. ‘Who’s blind?’
‘Snow leopards are born blind,’ she said. ‘It’s ironic. They’re born blind but eventually they develop acute vision. Among the best of any mammal. Humans, by contrast, are born with the ability to see but become blind. Figuratively speaking. We learn to block out the things that we don’t want to see.’
I was going to ask her what she meant but Lucy was engrossed again in her drawing. She’d already forgotten about me. Her hands became progressively darker from the charcoal dust. She took out a wet wipe and cleaned them before turning the page and starting a new sketch.
I watched Lucy draw the outline of the snow leopard’s front right paw. It stretched out on a boulder near the leopard’s face. When she was finished with the paw, Lucy drew the torso and head of the cat along with its facial features, including a remarkable cat’s-eye iris.
She didn’t say another word to me as she worked on her drawing. It wasn’t personal. When we got to know each other better, I realised that her brain became so immersed in work that she blocked out everything else as background noise. She compared her mindset to an airplane landing: it was only once she landed that she was able to engage with anything else.
You’d think that Lucy didn’t hear a word, or take in anything, and then hours later she’d respond to a comment or question that was posed earlier in the day. It was like watching a computer come to life. Lucy would suddenly spout out an analysis based on information that you didn’t think she’d overheard, because she hadn’t said a word at the time. But Lucy missed nothing. Tone of voice, body language, comments, information. It was all data to her. And if there was one thing that Lucy knew, it was how to decipher data.
When Lucy was done sketching the leopard, she tore the page out of her sketch pad and handed it to me. It perfectly captured the leopard’s languid mood, lying on the rock and gently flapping its tail.
‘It’s stunning, Lucy. You’re very talented.’ She didn’t respond, though I noticed a flush of pleasure on her face. ‘What were you saying before about snow leopards?’ I was hoping to engage her in conversation again. It was so hard to find common ground with Lucy.
‘Snow leopards are born blind. They get their sight when they are seven days old. At eighteen months, they leave their mothers, and for the rest of their lives they live and hunt alone. Doesn’t that remind you of someone?’
‘Who?’
‘Vincent,’ she said, as if it should have been obvious to me. ‘He’s a loner. An apex predator surrounded by enemies waiting for the first sign of weakness so they can take him out. It’s the law of nature. Eventually, the predator becomes the prey.’
‘Who do you think Vincent’s enemies are?’
‘The same as yours and mine,’ said Lucy. ‘The rest of the team. You wouldn’t believe the things they say while I work quietly in the background. They think I’m autistic – and for
some reason they have decided that means that I’m also deaf. So they speak quite freely around me. I don’t show it but I take in everything. And not just the horrible things they say about me.’
‘I’m sure they don’t mean anything by it,’ I said, embarrassed that she’d heard their nasty banter.
‘They talk about you behind your back as well, Sara. That they should leave you a tip when you bring them coffee,’ she said. I flinched. ‘You should be careful, Sara. They’re not just nasty, they’re dangerous.’
‘What do you mean?’ I asked hesitantly. Her words made my eyes sting. I felt like I did in high school – rebuffed by the cool crowd. I honestly thought I’d started breaking into their clique. There had been signs of progress. Sam ostensibly taking me under his wing to mentor me, Jules sharing office gossip, late-night drinks with Sylvie.
‘I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said that,’ said Lucy. ‘It doesn’t matter what they say or think. It doesn’t bother me and you shouldn’t let it bother you.’ Lucy wiped the charcoal dust off her hands. ‘Never think you’re inferior or that the firm did you a favour by hiring you. They’ll only see it as a weakness and use it against you. I’ve seen your work, Sara. You’re good. Stanhope is lucky to have you.’
‘Thanks,’ I said, swallowing hard with emotion. They were the kindest words anyone had said to me since I started working at Stanhope.
‘Let them underestimate you. It’ll give you an advantage.’ Lucy packed her charcoals and sketchpad into a shoulder bag. She stood abruptly and turned to me. ‘“Pretend inferiority and encourage their arrogance.” Sun Tzu, The Art of War.’
Before I could think of a response, Lucy had disappeared beyond a twist in the tree-lined path.
For someone with limited social skills, Lucy was remarkably perceptive. She was right, of course. I carried my inferiority complex with me wherever I went. It was a permanent appendage. I didn’t need a shrink to know that it was the result of my childhood.
No matter how much I achieved, I always saw myself as unworthy. If I hadn’t met Vincent then I wouldn’t have a job at Stanhope. Some people took that sort of luck in their stride, they believed it had been written in the stars for them, that it was their destiny. Me, I felt as if I was a fraud, terrified that one day someone would figure out I was an impostor.