Bank

by David Bledin

  Now I have to trudge down to the archives with these boxes, which, according to the Dirty Hippie Office Supply Manager, involves taking the elevator to the lobby and walking across to the stairwell, down three flights of stairs, and along a narrow corridor. Of course, as the boxes are crammed full of papers that will never again see the light of day, each one is back-breakingly heavy. I ask the Utterly Incompetent Assistant if there is a mail cart around somewhere, but she snaps her gum, throws me that vapid expression, and goes back to the Minesweeper on her monitor.

  Invoices, my ass.

  Fine, I can manage this. I stack two of the boxes and lean down to pick them up. I hear a disconcerting popping sound from the general region of my spine. Alrighty, then; I’m not going to manage this. I lift one of the boxes and head toward the elevator.

  I’m fairly sweaty by this point: two huge pit stains sloping down my white shirt, my pants soaked through along the waistline. I drag the box into the elevator and push “Lobby.” A karate chop just as the doors are closing, and they open once again to reveal the Prodigal Son.

  Fan-fucking-tastic.

  We begin our descent and the Prodigal Son snickers.

  “Getting pretty soaked there, huh?”

  I do this mock-sigh thing that sounds really put on.

  “The Sycophant has me boxing up every paper he’s ever read and schlepping it to the archives down in the basement.”

  The Prodigal Son chuckles hoarsely and crosses his arms, stretching the shirt’s fabric with the girth of his biceps.

  “Yeah, he’s quite the little fucker.”

  Uh-uh; I refuse to get into this with him. To vent successfully, to feel fully satisfied via your venting, there has to be a shared sense of mutual subjugation. And in truth, I wouldn’t put it past him to repeat everything I said straight to the source.

  We descend the remaining floors in an awkward silence (awkward for me, at least; I’m sure the Prodigal Son isn’t attuned to it), and when the doors glide open, we part ways by exchanging stiff half-nods. I’m so distracted watching him exit through the revolving doors, no doubt for an afternoon tryst with an ex-cheerleader now hawking overpriced body gels in a nearby department store, that I manage to barrel into somebody, my view mostly obstructed by the box I’m lugging. A female voice cries out. Dropping the box, I hurry over to a hunched-over form.

  “Ow! My ankle!”

  Of course. The forces of the universe wouldn’t have it any other way.

  The Woman With The Scarf.

  “Jesus, I’m so sorry.”

  She looks up and rolls her eyes.

  “You again. God, it’s like we’re in this crappy Sandra Bullock romantic comedy over here.”

  I help her up. As she’s smoothing out her dress, she admits, “It wasn’t your fault. These stupid heels—”

  “I’m really sorry. I should have been paying more attention.”

  “Relax,” she says, waving it off. “It’s not a big deal.”

  Giving me the up and down, she scoffs, “What’s with all the sweat? You’ve been working out with your shirt on?”

  I’m abruptly brought back to my pit stains. I pray I’m wearing enough deodorant.

  “My evil VP has me bringing these boxes down to our archives in the basement. Not the most pleasant of tasks, I assure you.”

  “Don’t you have assistants or mail clerks to help out?”

  “Exactly what I said, but this VP’s had a major stick shoved up his rectum as of late. Wife left him for the cable guy, we think.”

  “Never the best of domestic situations. But then again, he probably deserved it, right?”

  “Oh yeah.”

  We chuckle quietly.

  “Look, I’m really sorry about before, standing you up like that.”

  “Hey, it happens. Don’t stress about it.”

  I smile sheepishly. She stifles a yawn. She seems just as exhausted as I am.

  “Well, I should let you get back to your archiving. I’ve got some hefty photocopying awaiting me upstairs, but I think your grunt work has mine beat.”

  I glance back at the box, half concealed behind a potted floral arrangement.

  “How about getting some coffee? I mean, we’re already down here; it would only be a couple more minutes.”

  She mulls it over.

  “Yeah, a jolt of caffeine would be great.”

  As we stand in the back of the line, an interminable length to the baristas, I’m beginning to regret my initiative. We’re smiling at each other, and I know she’s waiting for me to dazzle her with witty banter, but my brain keeps latching onto work-related trivialities, and who in their right mind wants to hear about the copy speeds of our color printers? Maybe it works on the type of girls the Star picks up.

  “I’m sorry,” I mumble, “it’s just that I, uh, I don’t know—”

  “Tell me about your work.”

  “But it’s boring.”

  “Work is supposed to be boring. Anyway, it has to be better than watching you struggle to impress me or whatever.”

  She smiles encouragingly.

  “All right. Well, today for instance, I’m supposed to be bringing these boxes down—”

  Getting started on the injustices of the Bank is like breaking the urinary seal when you’re completely sloshed, and my self-consciousness dissipates under a torrent of relieved babble. I bitch about the Sycophant, and then she regales me with tales of her own boss, a Maggie Thatcheresque ballbuster.

  “She sounds like an absolute tyrant.”

  “Wouldn’t you believe it. We call her the PMS Express.”

  “So you guys do the nickname thing too.”

  “But of course,” she says, winking demurely. “Doesn’t everybody?”

  We pick up our coffees from the Asian barista with the Coke-bottle glasses. The cappuccino foam is dense and perfect. Fortunately there is an empty table discreetly tucked away in the corner. We sit down and she takes a sip, smiling blissfully.

  “Oh lord, I really needed this. I didn’t get to bed until two last night.”

  “Why? Did you go out or something?”

  “On a weeknight?” she snorts. “Please, I haven’t been able to pull that off since college. Nah, I just couldn’t sleep for some reason. There were a few episodes of The Joy of Painting on television, though, so my insomnia wasn’t a complete bust.”

  “Bob Ross! That guy’s a genius.”

  “Yeah,” she says, grinning.

  “?‘Every tree needs a friend’ and all that.”

  “He’s dead, you know.”

  “No shit.”

  “I’m totally serious. Died of lymphoma a couple years ago.”

  “Oh. That’s too bad, I guess.”

  We stir our coffees in silence. Then I think to ask the dumbest question ever.

  “So, you must have hated me that first time we met up here, huh?”

  She sips the cappuccino, getting some froth on her upper lip.

  “Hmmm. Hate is such a strong emotion. I definitely thought you were a jackass, though.”

  “Fair enough.”

  She chews on the end of a stir stick.

  “Though sort of cute, mind you.”

  “Sort of?”

  “Definitely easy on the eyes. Nice ears. Anyway, I had to have thought you were sort of cute; it’s not like I hand out my card to just any guy who approaches me at Han’s.”

  Nice ears; all right, I can deal with that.

  By the time our coffee cups are empty, I’m trying to figure out how to end this appropriately. Would it be acceptable to just lean over and kiss her, a quick peck on the cheek? I settle on moving my hand slowly across the table, a tentative path until it gingerly brushes up against her fingers. She looks down at my skittering hand curiously. I blush, quickly drawing it away.

  “You’re thinking way too hard about this,” she says, laughing.

  She reaches across and wiggles her fingers against mine, sighing breathlessly. I chuckle de
spite my embarrassment. Getting up from the table, she says, “A pity we have to go back to work after this. I could definitely use a nap right now. Much obliged for the coffee, kind sir. I’ll have to return the favor.”

  “So, we can do this again?”

  She smirks. “What, some good ol’-fashioned finger stroking?”

  “I was thinking more along the lines of another coffee.”

  Tightening the scarf around her neck, she nods briskly.

  “Yes, I do believe it could be arranged.”

  On Monday morning I pass Clyde in the corridor.

  “Hey, man,” he asks casually, “how was the weekend?”

  “Not too shabby. Worked the entire Saturday but had a couple hours off on the Sunday. Managed to get some laundry done.”

  It’s such a nonchalant exchange, Clyde so his usual self, that it’s not until after I’ve arrived at my desk and hung my coat on the hook that I realize the weirdness of it and address the Defeated One.

  “Hey, Clyde’s back already.”

  He looks up from his stock quotes.

  “No shit, Sherlock.”

  I’m flabbergasted. “But I mean, I just saw him in the corridor. And it’s as if nothing ever happened. Everything exactly the same as before.”

  The Defeated One shrugs. “We all deal with things differently.”

  I shake my head at him and say, “But his dad died just a few days ago. Wouldn’t that fuck you up for at least a couple weeks?”

  “You’re not a psychologist, Mumbles. I’d leave it if I were you.”

  I chew on the eraser end of a pencil, contemplating the strangeness of it. Is this the Bank’s influence, a malevolent vortex sapping Clyde of his regular emotions, preventing us all from behaving like rational human beings?

  “It’s just so messed up.”

  “Leave it.”

  “Fine.”

  Clyde comes by an hour later.

  “Anybody game for Starbucks?”

  The Defeated One doesn’t look up from flipping through a tower of pitch books, ensuring all the pages are in the correct order.

  “Sorry, man, have two pitches due this afternoon. Would love a double macchiato, though, if you’re taking orders.”

  “Sure thing, boss. And yourself?”

  A part of me wants to decline, unnerved by this discomfortingly numb Clyde, but then I also want to get to the bottom of his stoicism.

  “Yeah, I’ll join you. Where’s Postal?”

  “Bogged down in the copy room. Investor presentation going out in the next half hour.”

  I grab my wallet and we head to the elevators. Clyde’s whistling something or other, more Spice Girls, I think. I know I should probably heed the Defeated One’s advice and mind my own business, but I really can’t help myself; it just seems too unnatural not to say something:

  “I, um, I mean, if you ever want to talk about it—”

  Clyde stops whistling and peers at me intently. The blood rushes up to my ears.

  “I mean, we read in the paper—”

  A momentary breather as we step into the elevator. When we begin our descent, Clyde is still peering at me funny, the tension crackling like if you scuttled across the carpet and shoved your finger in an electrical outlet.

  “What did you read in the paper?”

  Okay. This is getting bizarre.

  “The plane crash—”

  Clyde crosses the small elevator space and gets right up in my face. He doesn’t look like Clyde anymore; his mouth is clamped in an inverted U, and he narrows his eyes menacingly.

  “Haven’t you figured it out, Mumbles? I really don’t want to get into this right now. The Bank is horrible enough without having to drag your personal issues into it as well.”

  I nod apprehensively.

  “No more talk of this around the office,” Clyde warns.

  Just in time, the elevator comes to a smooth halt. Clyde winks at me as he props the doors open.

  “After you.”

  Six

  November ephemerally passes into December: The barely legal Pattaya Fun-Fun Girls calendar mail-ordered from Thailand by the Defeated One, hidden away in an upper filing cabinet, turns a page. There’s only the most delicate rustling of cotton-candy-pink panties and almond-shaped eyes, a shhhh-shhhh whisper, drowned out by the clatter of thirty fingers racing across ergonomic keyboards.

  Outside, there are tremendous happenings. The sky beyond the window is getting dark earlier. As with every change in season, the city belches out a new wave of human eccentricity: a man who’s lived at the top of a tree for twenty-odd years; another who’s been hoarding an exotic menagerie—a pair of leopards, a boa constrictor, several fluorescent amphibians smuggled in from Brazil— in a dilapidated low-income housing project; a blind woman demonstrating her artistic talents on public-access television.

  Locally, the hot-dog vendor on the street corner north of Han’s Blue Diamond Chinese Gourmet has begun hawking his roasted chestnuts. Nearby, the homeless lady who inhabits the bus shelter with her shopping bags full of her worldly possessions, the only person I routinely see on my walk to the subway in the wee hours of the morning, suddenly disappears without a trace. Though I hope for the best, a migration to the sunny beaches of Florida, perhaps, I can’t rid myself of a horrible conviction that she’s wasting away from some Dickensian disease in a dark alley somewhere, consumption or the bubonic plague gnawing at her brittle bones.

  Venturing outward now, beyond the city walls, beyond the strip malls of suburbia, beyond the sprawl of suburbia’s suburbia, skimming across an ocean toward the other side of the world, we watch as a country is invaded. Then there is a second invasion purely through happenstance. Weapons of mass destruction are found, then lost, then found and lost all over again. More personally, my cousin Ruth in Prague gives birth to twins, and this makes me do a double take because she’s only, what, seventeen months older than me?

  Inside the Bank, time is far more unassuming. Flakes of skin fall away from our microscopically crumbling bodies. They collect in little piles in the cracks of our desks and behind messy stacks of annual reports and pitch books—wherever the cleaning lady with the golden caps on her teeth neglects her early-morning wipe. Market prices on Bloomberg take a slight beating and then healthily veer back up again. The knob connecting the swivel to the base of my chair loosens, so now there is a creaking noise when I lean all the way back. We close one deal that makes a client a millionaire, another deal that makes another client a billionaire. In our neck of the woods, the Philandering Managing Director starts screwing around with a new assistant. My ball of rubber bands grows to the size of a puny organic tomato.

  Despite this stagnation, I haven’t for a moment lost sight of the end goal: eighteen months, seventeen days, four hours, and sixteen minutes remaining until the expiration of my contract. And when the clock winds down, when it’s finally time for that faux-bittersweet farewell e-mail—good-bye all, it’s been such a blast!—I’m going to race through the streets, knocking on random doors, bellowing at the top of my lungs: I’m alive! I was dead, but now I’m alive! And people will emerge onto their fire escapes, blocking the glare of the sun from their eyes, wondering what the heck is causing all that racket, and then they’ll see me barreling along, really gunning it, and they’ll smile wistfully, because they’ll understand what it’s all about.

  A shorter countdown is kicked into gear whenever my eyes stray toward the palm trees tacked beside my telephone list: Only a week remains until the Bank’s annual holiday party.

  “Hey,” I ask the Defeated One, leaning back in my chair, “are you bringing your girlfriend to this holiday party?”

  The Defeated One swivels around to face me.

  “Of course. It’s mandatory stuff. You don’t think the senior guys aren’t itching to judge you by your date so that they can form all sorts of conclusions about your management potential based on what she looks like?”

  “You make it sound so appe
aling.”

  “It’s the truth,” he says. “My girlfriend absolutely despises these Bank events. But there’s pretty decent alcohol at least, none of that bottom-shelf crap.”

  I shift around in the IKEA swivel chair, and it makes its horrible groaning sounds, its fragile Scandinavian being shuddering under the weight of my Krispy Kreme–enhanced buttocks. Note to self: Remind the Dirty Hippie Office Supply Manager to reenter the cycle of rebirth and order me a new chair.

  “You’d think they’d cut us some slack. It’s not like we have all this time to go out, meet a great girl, and cultivate a meaningful enough relationship that she’s willing to tolerate the Philanderer trying to sniff out her panties.”

  The Defeated One holds up his hands. “Hey, I didn’t write the rule book of this industry. What about the chiquita you’ve been going on all those Starbucks runs with? The one who always has that fuck-with-me-and-you-die scarf tied around her neck?”

  An interesting proposal, not that I hadn’t considered it already.

  “I don’t know. I’m thinking it might be a bit too early to subject her to our guys. And lay off the scarf. I kind of like it.”

  “Of course you’d like the scarf, you submissive little bitch.”

  “Piss off.”

  “Which reminds me. Hey, Starsy—”

  The Star swivels around on command.

  “Yup?”

  “How’s our video project coming along?”

  The Star opens a drawer and pulls out a CD case. Tossing it to the Defeated One, he says, “Finished as of last night.”

  The Defeated One wiggles his fingers together.

  “Exccccellent.”

  “Check out the last thirty seconds. Wait until you see the detail on the penetration . . .”