by Megan Goldin
A few days after our meeting at the zoo, Lucy invited me over for pizza at her place. It was the start of a somewhat strange friendship.
We met up occasionally, mostly at Lucy’s apartment to watch movies and eat dinner. Lucy tried to teach me chess. I was horrible at it. Eventually she gave up and we took to playing checkers instead. Or poker, though that wasn’t much fun for me. It was like playing against a human calculator. Lucy worked out probabilities in her head as she played. Unsurprisingly, she won almost all the time.
Sometimes we’d go to a museum or gallery. One time I convinced Lucy to come with me to an off-Broadway experimental show. Needless to say, she didn’t like it much. Lucy had little interest in the abstract.
I valued the time that I spent with Lucy. I had little opportunity to make friends with the hours that I worked and it was refreshing to spend time with someone who was non-judgemental. Sure, Lucy was idiosyncratic, borderline obsessive-compulsive and often immersed in a world of numbers and concepts that were beyond my comprehension. But she was loyal, and that was a rare quality in our line of work.
When I went out with other people from work, we had a great time but the atmosphere crackled with an underlying sense of distrust. I could never let my guard down or relax. I definitely couldn’t confide in them or show any vulnerability. I had to be uber confident. I was constantly under scrutiny. Anything I said or did could, and would, be used against me if it helped them get ahead.
At work, Lucy’s attitude towards me remained the same. We barely spoke when we were in the office. I told her that I thought it was weird that we hid our friendship there. She said it was for my protection, that it was better people didn’t know we were friends. She was quite adamant about it. I figured that it was another quirk, like the way she avoided touching door handles and only ever drank coffee out of one particular mug.
I didn’t see any point in arguing and followed her lead at work. She barely acknowledged me and I did the same. Most of our interactions went via the rest of the team. I had no reason to deal directly with Lucy. She churned out complex forecasts, statistical analyses and modelled scenarios for Vincent. She reported to him directly. The others bristled that Lucy could circumvent them at any time to deal directly with Vincent.
Lucy was full of contrasts. Outside of work, I found her to have an amusing, self-deprecating sense of humour. She was more savvy about people than she let on at work. It was true that she lacked social skills, but not at all on the level that one might have imagined from the way she acted in the office.
There she was shy and introverted, usually buried in her own thoughts or immersed in mental calculations. She had a habit of not acknowledging anyone until she needed their input, at which point she’d abruptly ask a question without so much as a hello.
People thought that she was rude, but that wasn’t intentional. Lucy tended to work on autopilot. She was free of guile; a loner more comfortable working by herself than with a team.
Her intuition was remarkable and her memory was even better. Lucy was like a human tape recorder. She remembered everything. Nothing escaped her. Nothing. In the end, that’s what got her killed.
The clue teased them as it ran across the bottom of the screen. ‘A Greek god has a message for you. 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.’
‘A Greek god? The only god I can think of is Hades,’ said Sam. ‘That’s fitting, given how dark and hellishly hot it is in here. The lord of the underworld?’
‘Very cute,’ said Sylvie dismissively. ‘But let’s try to be serious here. Vincent, you’re the self-confessed classics expert. Which Greek god could it be?’
‘Zeus,’ Jules cut in. ‘The god of lightning. If we could see what we were doing then we would find the damn clue.’
‘Shut up, Jules,’ snapped Sylvie. ‘Vincent will do the gods part. You can focus on figuring out the second part of the riddle. An object that starts with “E”, ends with “E”, but —’
‘Hermes,’ Vincent interrupted. ‘Hermes is the Greek messenger of the gods.’
‘That’s it,’ Sylvie said, elated.
‘What are you getting excited about?’ Jules’s tone was derisive. ‘There’s no Greek god in here.’
‘Yes there is,’ Sylvie said, quickly turning to the others. ‘Who has anything by Hermès with them?’
‘We all wear Hermès ties,’ said Sam. ‘Vincent has a Hermès briefcase, I believe.’
‘And I bet that inside his briefcase is the envelope we’re looking for,’ said Sylvie. They all looked at her in confusion.
‘What makes you think that we’re looking for an envelope?’ Sam asked.
‘An object that starts with “E”, ends with “E”, but only has a single letter in it,’ she repeated the riddle. ‘The answer, of course, is an envelope. And it’s carried by Hermes.’
Jules swivelled around to confront Vincent. ‘Is there an envelope with a code in your briefcase?’
‘How would a clue for the escape room get into my briefcase?’ Vincent asked.
‘Humour us, Vincent,’ said Sylvie. ‘It’s the only thing we have to go on right now.’
‘I keep my briefcase locked. Always. Nobody can put anything in it,’ said Vincent, irritated.
‘Come on, Vincent,’ said Jules, some of the earlier menace back in his voice. ‘Open your briefcase.’
Vincent reluctantly complied, unlocking his ebony Hermès briefcase and pushing it into the middle of the elevator so they could all look for themselves under the beams of their flashlights. He had nothing to hide.
His briefcase contained a thin silver laptop and charger, a sealed bottle of water, two energy bars, a few sticks of nicotine gum and his security pass for the Stanhope offices. There was no envelope inside. Vincent sighed as if to say, I told you so.
‘What about the outside pocket?’ Sam asked.
‘Go ahead,’ offered Vincent.
Sam slid his hand into the external pocket. When he removed it, he was holding a white envelope. On the front were the words ‘Annual Bonuses: Private and Confidential’. Next to it was a drawing of the Greek god Hermes, wings on his Grecian sandals.
‘I didn’t put that there,’ said Vincent, trying hard not to sound defensive. They all looked at him sceptically, as if they’d caught him out in a lie.
Jules took the envelope from Sam and began to tear open the sealed flap.
‘You can’t open that envelope,’ Vincent commanded. ‘The firm’s rules are clear. No one is to be advised of their bonus early, and there can be no sharing of bonus information among staff. Sharing remuneration information is a firing offence.’
‘We have to open the envelope,’ Sylvie said, surprised by Vincent’s reluctance. ‘It’s our next clue! I’ll do anything to get out of here, even if it means breaking a company rule. Come on, Vincent. They’ll never know.’
The roar of the ceiling vent emphasised the urgency. The temperature was still rising. The heat was melting their self-control. They were acting out of instinct rather than with their usual careful calculation; normally none of them would consider defying Stanhope’s cardinal rules.
‘Stop and think for a moment,’ said Vincent. ‘This might be the key test of the escape room. It might be why they sent us here in the first place. To see whether, even under extreme provocation, we observe the rules.’ Vincent’s point was persuasive.
He looked at his watch. ‘The hour will elapse in exactly eleven minutes. We don’t need the code. We can just wait until they let us out.’
‘Fine,’ relented Sylvie. ‘Since the hour is almost up anyway, we’ll wait.’ She leaned against the steel elevator doors with her arms crossed. It was dark again. They’d turned off their flashlights to conserve their batteries, which were starting to wane after almost a solid hour of near constant use.
Without his glasses, Vincent perceived the darkness
as thicker than it had been earlier. It didn’t help that he had sweat pouring down his forehead into his eyes. The last time he’d been this hot was when he’d had to stay in a ditch for three days straight, in high summer in Afghanistan’s Helmand Province, while a US bomb-disposal unit swept the road ahead for IEDs.
As they waited to be let out of the escape room at the end of the hour, they thought about their plans for the rest of the evening. Sylvie mentally packed her suitcase. Jules wondered if there would be time to call his kids before they went to bed. He liked to read bedtime stories to his four-year-old daughter Annabelle over the phone. She’d taken the divorce hard.
Sam decided he’d take a cab straight to the airport and get on the first flight to Antigua. Kim had taken his suitcase to the airport, so he needed nothing except for a ticket.
Vincent decided that he wouldn’t suggest they go for drinks once they got out, as he’d initially intended when he’d received the message they were doing an escape room team-building activity. He didn’t want to spend the evening making small talk with them at a bar. After seeing the wider feedback comments, he didn’t want to be with any of them for a moment longer than necessary.
‘Right,’ said Sylvie when the final minute elapsed. ‘The hour’s up. Let’s get out of here.’ She stepped forward. She was so close to the elevator doors that she practically touched its smooth steel.
They didn’t open. Perhaps their watches weren’t synchronised. They waited a little longer. But the doors remained shut.
‘Well … it doesn’t look like they’re gonna open,’ Jules said, finally.
‘I want. To get. Out.’ Sylvie spoke with the demanding tone of a little girl on the verge of a major tantrum. They waited a few minutes more. Nothing happened. Everything was as dark and still as it had been. The lights remained off. The doors remained closed. The elevator remained paralysed. Their disappointment was palpable. Their ordeal wasn’t over.
‘Sorry Vincent, we tried it your way,’ said Jules, turning in his direction. ‘We’re going to need to open that envelope after all so we can get the code to get out,’ he said.
‘Wait a little longer.’ Vincent ordered. He gripped the envelope.
‘We did what you wanted, Vincent. We waited for the hour to elapse. We’ve played the game the way you wanted. Now it’s time to go home.’ Sylvie’s voice rose with each word. ‘Open the damn envelope!’
‘Sylvie,’ warned Vincent, ‘you know Stanhope’s salary disclosure rules are very strict. Maybe this isn’t a sixty minute escape room. Maybe it goes for seventy minutes, or ninety. We should wait longer. The firm takes a very dim view of sharing remuneration information. It’s an iron-clad rule. We need to stick to it.’
‘Rules?’ Jules spat. ‘Did you just say we should stick to the rules? It’s so hot in here that I’m sweating like a stuck pig. It’s so dark that I’m practically blind. It’s so stuffy that I feel like I’m suffocating. I never signed up for this. It’s cruel and inhumane punishment.’ He paused to take a deep breath. ‘I’m tired of rules, Vincent. We all are. We’re getting cooked in here.’
The growing hysteria in Jules’s voice was contagious. Sam and Sylvie began to feel it too. Until now Jules had used every ounce of self-control to not give in to his childhood phobia of being trapped in a dark, airless place. But he could only exercise so much self-restraint when there was no sign it was going to end.
‘The final clue is in that envelope. All we have to do is open it. And you have the nerve to tell us that we can’t, because we have to play by the firm’s rules?’ He took a step towards Vincent. ‘You seem to be intimately acquainted with rules of this escape room. Vincent? It’s almost as if you designed it yourself to mess with us. Maybe that’s why the final clue was in your briefcase.’
Vincent couldn’t see Jules in the dark, but he could sense his approach. He knew that he had to take charge of the situation or he’d have a mutiny on his hands.
‘How about I look at what’s inside and tell you what the third digit of each number is, and we put that into the keypad on the screen?’ suggested Vincent. ‘That way we aren’t breaching the firm’s rules, and we still get out of here.’
‘I don’t see why you should see it and not us,’ complained Sam. He was still angry about the comment he’d seen on the wall about him lacking leadership skills. It had obviously come from Vincent. He’d always shown Vincent loyalty – clearly his boss had not returned the favour. Vincent had screwed him with his comments in his annual appraisal. Sam wondered if he’d screwed him on his bonus as well. Maybe that was why Vincent was so reluctant to let them see the figures.
Vincent opened the envelope containing the letter with their bonuses. It was blurry. He tried to focus his eyes but still couldn’t see a thing. Not without his glasses. He didn’t want everyone to know just how useless he was in the dark. It was a sign of weakness. It would be a mistake for them to see his vulnerabilities.
‘Alright, I’ll tell you what. Sam, you do the honours,’ he said, handing him the papers.
The others crowded behind Sam and read the document over his shoulder. There was only one page that seemed pertinent. It was a single page with the bonuses they’d received, listed in order of how much they’d each been given.
Nobody was surprised to see Vincent had earned the biggest bonus. They were surprised, though, to see that his bonus was $1.25 million. It had been a bad year for their team. In terms of revenue generated, their worst ever. If Vincent earned a seven-figure bonus in a bad year, it made them wonder how big it must have been in the good years. Sam came next with $850 000, followed by Jules, who received $585 000. Sylvie burned with anger when she saw her bonus. A mere $378 000. She’d received half the amount that Sam did and more than 30 per cent less than Jules.
Sam entered the third number from each bonus amount using the virtual keypad on the monitor. 5-0-5-8. They all held their breath as he pressed Enter with a dramatic flourish, as if the elevator doors would open the moment the button had been pressed.
Nothing happened. The screen froze. And then it turned off, casting the elevator back into complete blackness.
Bonus day was traditionally on the third Monday of January. By close of business, you would either be floating on air or getting filthy drunk. In the run-up to the day, people ingratiated themselves with whoever had influence in a bid to shore up a bigger bonus.
‘You have to kiss ass. That’s the game. Just try to keep it tasteful,’ said Sam, over a lunch of pasta and salad.
‘How exactly do I do that?’ I asked.
‘Buy Christmas presents. It’s the fastest way to get people on your side, and …’ Sam examined me dubiously over his glass of white wine, ‘in your case, reminding them that you exist.’
‘So what do I buy? Chocolates? Wine?’
‘Sara, do me a favour, don’t make a rookie mistake.’ Sam was shaking his head. ‘Not only does it reflect badly on your personal brand, but also mine as your mentor. Whatever you do, don’t ever skimp on the cost. Buy big. Be generous and don’t think about the price. Make a list of people with influence; it could be a personal assistant, it could be someone in HR. Make sure to buy gifts for everyone on that list and anyone else you think might be worth it. And I mean anyone.’
‘You mean like you?’ I said, cheekily.
‘Sara, please. You don’t have to worry about me, I already have your back. Save your presents for someone who doesn’t give a rat’s ass about you, which is pretty much the rest of the firm. Even if it doesn’t help you this year, it’ll build your brand for the future.’
‘So how much do people spend?’
‘I spent close to fourteen grand last year,’ he said matter of factly.
I held my fork in the air in stunned silence. ‘Fourteen grand.’ I gulped.
‘You’re still entry level so you could get away with half that,’ he added, with a twinge of something akin to sympathy.
I was still paying off my student debts as well as h
elping my parents with their medical bills. And then there was my insane rent.
‘Consider it an investment,’ Sam said. ‘Get a loan to cover the cost of the gifts until your next pay cheque if necessary. It will more than pay off in the end. Trust me.’
Sam asked me to trust him a lot. In this instance, though, he was right. It was an investment for my future. Unfortunately, I wasn’t the only person who thought so. In the week before the holidays, the office was inundated with the most lavish Christmas giving imaginable. Everyone vied to give the most original gift, or the most expensive. If they could swing both then better still.
First-year analysts spent $200 on a bottle of aged Johnny Blue Scotch with the label engraved with a message of thanks to their boss. Others bought day-spa treatments for the personal assistants of executives who had their boss’s ear. Not a day passed without a delivery of Cuban cigars, monogrammed silk ties and cashmere socks, and boxes of intricately iced cupcakes from Brooklyn bakeries. You name it and people gave it.
As much as Sam tried to warn me about the insanity, nothing he told me in our informal lunch or coffee mentoring sessions prepared me for the nailbiting tension of the day itself.
Bonuses were handed out in order of seniority. I was pretty low on the totem pole, which meant I was on edge for much of the day as I waited for my turn.
It was hard getting any work done that day. I couldn’t concentrate. Nobody else could either. Productivity was almost non-existent. Everyone was too busy surreptitiously watching each other, looking for signs of how well colleagues had fared and clues as to how their own bonus might shape up. Those who’d already had their meetings with their managers did their best to maintain a poker face. No matter how hard they tried, you could get a sense of who’d done well and who’d gotten shafted.