The Assistants

by Camille Perri

  While gazing into the check’s fine crosshatched surface, I’d let my eyes go soft and compose scenarios of cashing it and then being caught. What would I say? Oh, that check? Didn’t I cancel that? I’d never intentionally take money that didn’t belong to me. That’s just not how I was raised.

  Which was true. I was raised Catholic by what they call old-school Italians. (Or what Robert in his native Texan twang would call Eye-talians.) My parents were the kind of people who favored the vengeful, Old Testament God over the more forgiving, nonviolent version from the “Americanized” (their word) New Testament. My father would threaten to cut off my pinky finger himself for a lesser offense than stealing. But then again, wasn’t my angry Geppetto of a dad’s most favorite phrase God works in mysterious ways?

  What if this was that mysterious way?

  And didn’t I “secret” this exact type of scenario when I read that self-help book The Secret? Twenty thousand dollars, I remember saying to the universe. That’s all I need. It’s not that much money, but for me it would be a life-changer. Nineteen thousand, one hundred forty-seven dollars was pretty damn close to twenty thousand dollars, and only a fool would refuse an accurately answered prayer from the universe.

  Before long, I found myself becoming absentminded. I would catch myself leaving the house without shoes on or forgetting where I put my keys. I was this close to brushing my teeth with hemorrhoid cream when I realized what was going on. I was in love. I’d fallen in love with the idea of not having student-loan debt, and all the swooning and fantasizing that accompanied love was making me scatterbrained.

  While drinking a cup of coffee or riding the L train, I’d slip into daydreams about how my life would change for the better if I let myself keep the reimbursement money. I could have savings, I thought. I could start hoarding my money in one of those things they call a savings account. All at once I would become less anxious and more generous. Maybe I’d get a dog—one of those adorable new mixed breeds, like a Cheagle. Maybe I’d start going to the gym with all the extra time I’d have not debating between eating the slightly off leftover burrito in the fridge and splurging on some groceries from C-Town; between getting the cavity in my molar filled and having that funky paramecium-shaped mole on my back looked at. And, sure, I could get one more wear out of this pair of socks before I go to the Laundromat. And look at this sheath of aluminum foil, it’s still good as new, I’ll just give it a little rinse. No. No more of that. Instead, I could be living the good life of enjoying dire necessities and bountiful comforts. I could pay my phone bill and go to the movies on the same day.

  The next thing I knew, I’d come to in Canarsie.

  This is the last stop on this train. Everyone please leave the train.

  Something had to happen. I had to rip up that damn check!

  Okay, fine, I told myself. I’ll do it.

  Back in the safety of my bedroom now, blinds drawn, check in hand, I was poised to end this thing once and for all. But maybe I would just, you know, take a picture of the check first. Not a selfie or anything, just a snapshot. And not the kind that disappears thirty seconds after you take it, or whatever—just an old-fashioned photograph, to remember the check by.

  And then I remembered that app on my phone, the one where all you have to do is click a photo of a check and—poof—it’s deposited into your bank account.

  Damn you, technology.

  Technology made it so easy to deposit that check, I could have done it by accident.

  It wasn’t an accident—but it could have been.

  First I had to open the magical check-depositing app and log on with my username and password. Then I had to snap a picture of the check’s front and the check’s back. Make sure the entire check is inside the box and touch the camera icon when you are ready.

  Was I ready?

  No, but the novelty of this process was so fascinating that I continued on anyway. Depositing a check with my phone? Who knew I’d ever see the day? It was just unreal enough to feel imaginary.

  It wasn’t an accident when I logged on to my student-loan account either. But that was the cunning whimsy of technology at work, too, because if I actually had to leave my house at any point—or even just sit down at my desk and write out a physical check, and stuff that check into an envelope, and walk that envelope to the mailbox to mail it—I don’t think I could have done it. But quietly typing alone in my dark bedroom felt so innocuous, so anonymous, and even potentially undoable. There’s something devastatingly permanent about dropping a letter into a public mailbox, isn’t there? The way the envelope is in your grasp one minute, and then it’s gone, followed by that heavy metal lash of the door. You open the door again just to make sure, as if in the history of all letters there was ever one that didn’t make it down. And then there’s that split second of panic. Did I remember the stamp? The return address? It’s too late now.

  But just clicking Send? There would always be Cancel. Edit/Undo.

  I stared at the words on my computer screen—Pay in Full—for a long time before making the decision. Earlier in the day, Robert had had an argument with his wife about whether the peppers growing in their garden were jalapeños or habaneros. He turned out to be wrong, so he had me run out to buy her the diamond bracelet she’d had her eye on from Tiffany. Total cost: $8,900.

  So $19,147 was roughly only two lost arguments to Robert.

  And it wasn’t even his money, was the thing. It was the Titan Corporation’s money, and Titan had billions—literally billions and zillions of dollars. Could anyone really blame me for not giving this minuscule-to-them-yet-life-changing-for-me amount of money back to the Titan Corporation?

  It had already been three weeks since the reimbursement check was issued to me, and nobody had missed it. Nobody had missed it! Meanwhile, I could have fostered a family of Cambodian children for what I was paying in interest alone on my student-loan debt each month.

  One click. Pay in Full. That was it, that was all it took, and it was done. I was free.

  2

  DAYS OF anxiety-induced nausea, accompanied by acute acid reflux, passed. Every time Robert called me into his office an angel somewhere would lose its wings and I would throw up a little bit in my mouth. I thought I would feel a great sense of relief once I deposited the check and paid off my loan—and there was an initial rush—but then, instead of relief, what followed was more worry. Except it wasn’t the low-level, all-pervading, quiet hum of money-related worry I was accustomed to. This was more concentrated and pointed, like an in-your-face cystic pimple. Instead of Shoot, rent’s due this week, is there enough in my account? or Fucking-a, Time Warner raised their rates again?, it was: I stole. Robert asking me when his peak-lapel tuxedo would be back from the cleaners? I stole. Robert asking me to research the political donations made by his three o’clock appointment? I have no morals. Robert just back from Georgia, dropping a bag of peaches onto my desk because he knew how much I loved them? I could take my own life.

  Then Emily Johnson summoned me up to the forty-third floor.

  For most purposes, our office on the fortieth floor could have been considered the building’s top floor. The three floors above us were all business-related—the bean counters—strategically positioned to remind every employee below them that these folks were watching, omnipresent, like an all-knowing god from above. Forty-three was Corporate Governance’s floor, composed of barely used rooms filled with plush couches that were reserved for the tight buttocks of Titan Corporation board members. And it was T & E’s floor.

  What is T & E, you ask? Not to be confused with T & A (Google it; NSFW), T & E stands for “Travel and Entertainment.” At some companies it might stand for “Travel and Expenses,” which makes a little more sense, but Titan higher-ups were generally more entertainment focused. It would have made the most sense if everyone simply called it BE, short for “Business Expenses,” because on t
he most basic level that’s what these reimbursements were supposed to be for—expenses you incurred while conducting business. But such an acronym was probably way too metaphysical for everyone involved.

  Anyway, the forty-third floor looked exactly like you’d expect it to. All slick brass and polished wood. It smelled like nothing. Like if nothing were a scent that could come in a bottle, it would smell exactly like the forty-third floor. And it was quiet, so quiet they pumped in white noise from overhead vents. For privacy, supposedly, but I think it was to keep people from going ballistic over the impossible nonexistence of the place, to keep the operating officers and bookkeepers from disappearing into its cool vacuum, convinced they were invisible.

  The director of Travel and Entertainment was a middle-aged man who wore a bow tie every day and listened to opera with headphones on inside his office. His final approval had to be stamped on every expense account filed within the building—even Robert’s. But it was his assistant who actually waded through all the forms and approved them with the loopy script of Bow Tie’s signature, while he hummed along to Puccini.

  All important men have assistants. The T & E director’s assistant was Emily Johnson, a blond-haired, blue-eyed bitch from Connecticut.

  Emily was the type of girl who would reject my reports if I failed to arrange all the scanned receipts facing the same way. “I can’t read this chaos,” she’d say over the phone in her Waspy lockjaw accent. The accent of East Coast boarding schools. “Upside-down receipts give me vertigo.”

  But Emily had never before summoned me up to the forty-third floor to speak face-to-face. My guts went limp the moment I read her e-mail and I ran to the bathroom.

  Hovering over the spotless marble sink, I looked in the mirror. Stupid. What a stupid anemic face I had, even paler now with guilt. It had been a little over a week since I used the flight reimbursement money to pay off my student loan. Why didn’t I just hold on to it for a while longer? Now I couldn’t even give it back. I was certainly about to be fired, or interrogated. Or worse, prosecuted. And Robert. Most horrible of all would be Robert’s disappointment in me, the way he would raise his hands to his head, or begin restlessly turning his UT class ring—his other nervous habit. He was away on business today, thank god, but it was only a matter of time now.

  The bathroom door swung open and in stepped two freelancers with toothbrushes in hand. There was a strange obsession with oral hygiene in our office that permeated all the way to the temp staff. I slipped past them with my head down, dodging the trappings of restroom small talk.

  My heart raced and I could feel two sweat stains pooling beneath my underarms as I made my way to the elevator bank’s centralized kiosk. Out of habit I pushed the down button and then had to wait for the system to sort out its digital confusion when I immediately switched to the up button. The kiosk directed me to elevator D, then to E, and finally to A—which I dashed to before it could complete the ominous spelling of the word dead.

  Emily was waiting for me behind the forty-third floor’s sliding glass doors when I stepped out of the elevator. She wore a white blouse over white pants and white high heels. It was still the tail end of winter, but already her skin had somehow tanned to a beachy golden brown. She watched me, smiling.

  The doors were locked for security and my ID card couldn’t open them, so I had to wait for Emily to scan her card and let me in. Just for fun, she kept me standing there, helpless and waiting, hyperventilating.

  When she finally relented and scanned her card, the doors unlocked with a metallic clank much like the release of a prison cell gate. So many aspects of our building struck me as prisonlike—our ID cards may as well have been one of those house-arrest ankle bracelets the way they tracked our every move. Not to mention all the security guards leering around each corner. Why in the world did I think a place like this would just overlook nearly twenty thousand dollars?

  Emily led me to the northwest conference room and hermetically sealed us inside. She sat opposite me and soundlessly slid a manila folder across the glass tabletop.

  I looked away. The view outside was so much more beautiful from up here, even though it was only three floors higher. The windows went from floor to ceiling with no obstructions, so even from where I was sitting I could see the frantic procession of tiny people and yellow cabs struggling down Eighth Avenue.

  “I know what you did,” Emily said. And before I could muster up any false confusion she added, “Don’t deny it, Fontana; you’d be wasting my time.”

  It was strange hearing her call me by my last name. That’s what everyone in the building called me, except for Robert, but how did she know that? We weren’t friends.

  “I understand why you did it,” her lockjaw said.

  She understands? This girl didn’t understand the first thing about me. She was Connecticut Barbie. I was Skipper, and not even the modern Skipper of recent years with larger breasts and a new face mold. I was the juvenile Skipper of the sixties, the one perpetually on the brink of becoming a woman. Emily Johnson and I would never understand each other.

  “In fact,” Emily continued, standing up from her chair, coming around to my side of the table, and leaning her perfectly toned lower body against its glass edge, “I think you did the right thing. They wipe their asses with twenty thousand dollars around here.” Her WASP accent dropped like a curtain. Gone were the intonations of Katharine Hepburn and Bette Davis. “You get me?” she said.

  “Um,” I said, startled, “I’m not sure.”

  “I think you do.” Emily opened the manila folder and gestured for me to read it.

  She waited.

  It was an account statement with her name on it from American Education Services.

  “Why are you showing this to me?” I asked.

  Emily tapped her French-manicured fingernail on a number. The total statement balance. Seventy-four thousand, three hundred twenty-three dollars and twenty cents.

  “You think you’re the only one with money problems?” she said. “You think you’re the only one who’s trained herself not to sound like a truck driver from the Bronx?”

  I stood up now, too. “Aren’t you from Greenwich? Don’t you have a pet horse named Dancer?”

  “I’m from the slums of Bridgeport and my parents work for the post office. I just pass real well. Now sit yourself back down.”

  I was so caught off guard that I obeyed her. She pulled her long blond hair back into a ponytail and I swear she transformed into a completely different person. Emily was still stunningly beautiful—she couldn’t not be—but her rich-girl pretension had altered to a thuggish toughness.

  “So here’s what’s going to happen,” she said. “I’m not going to rat you out and you’re going to use Barlow’s expense account to pay off my student loan. Then we’ll be even.”

  “Are you out of your mind?” My voice hit an octave that caused Emily to glance quickly at the glass door, forgetting the conference room was safely soundproofed. “No way,” I said. “Forget it. We’ll get caught.”

  She flashed a pearl smile that resembled the Emily I knew before. “You already got caught. By me. And I’m surely not going to catch myself.”

  She slapped the manila folder shut and hugged it to her chest. “Be creative filling out the reports. Scatter it around. A few thousand dollars here and there. I’ll take care of the rest and in a few weeks’ time this will all be over.”

  “I can’t do what you’re asking,” I said. “It would really be stealing. It’s wrong.”

  Emily fiddled with her diamond-stud earring, definitely no cubic zirconia. What of her was real, and what was fake? I no longer had any idea.

  “That’s so typical,” she said. “Of your kind.”

  “My kind? What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Come on, Fontana. That chip on your shoulder you lug around all day? Like you work harder than
the rest of us.”

  “You don’t even know me! You’ve never once made eye contact with me in the cafeteria; you ignore me when we’re the only two people in the elevator.” Emily freed her golden hair from its knot and shook it down to a cascade upon her shoulders. A long-limbed man in a double-breasted suit walked by us in the hallway. Emily laughed out loud and waved to him through the glass like Miss America.

  Then her face got serious again. “You’ll do it, Fontana. Because above all else, you’re a survivor, just like me. And I know you’re not really as dumb as you look.”

  Before I could protest, Emily went to the door and opened it. “Enjoy the rest of your day,” she said, with her accent back on track.

  3

  I HAD NO IDEA how to go about this.

  Okay, that is a blatant lie. I knew exactly how to go about this. Everyone who filed expenses at Titan was aware of the tiny box at the bottom of our Travel & Entertainment forms labeled Out-of-Pocket Expense, Miscellaneous. You checked this box if you paid for a business-related purchase out of your own pocket. Pretty straightforward, right?

  What’s that you say? Why not just make it all up?

  Because the trick with out-of-pocket expenses was that you had to provide documentation, to prove they were legitimate—those damn scanned receipts that Emily Johnson insisted all face the same direction lest she become dizzy and nauseated.

  It was Friday afternoon, three p.m. I glanced at the rectangular light on my desk phone to see if Robert was on a call. He wasn’t, so I crept to his door and gently knocked on the inside of the glass.

  Robert looked up and his sternness softened at the sight of me. “Tina!” he shouted, like I’d surprised him. “What can I do for you?”

  “Receipts,” I said.

  “Is it the end of the week already?” He shuffled around some folders on his desk, gathering crinkled slips of white and pink paper from the depths of numerous piles. He dug his fingers into the Longhorns coffee mug that he kept on the credenza behind his chair specifically for this purpose. He went to his closet and searched through the pockets of a few suit jackets. Then he handed the whole jumbled, crumpled pile over to me. One or two of the tiniest slips floated down to the floor and I let him pick them up.