Before You Go

by Tommy Butler

  Though Matt and I work on separate matters, my desk is likewise littered with file boxes, as is the floor around me. Half of these are stuffed with documents from the client—everything from financial statements to credit card receipts to angry letters from litigious customers. The other half contain empty manila folders with as yet blank labels, which I will use to organize, catalog, and otherwise bring order to the chaos of paper. When I’m done, our senior auditors will assay the files, examine my spreadsheets, and divine their conclusions.

  You can learn a lot about a business by looking through their linens, so to speak—what they sell, how much they earn, who they hire and what they pay them to stick around, who they fire and what they pay them to go away, even where their executives eat dinner or take vacation. I absorb all of this data, not just for the audit but also as research for the inevitable launch of my own advisory firm, the dream I am still determined will someday be a reality. I even offered to audit my father’s shoe store, assuring him that my results wouldn’t be for public consumption. He politely declined, which was probably for the best.

  12:30 p.m. I allow myself forty-five minutes for lunch, though it only takes ten to pick up a sandwich and scarf it down at my desk. Hunger sated, I fill a glass with ice and pour myself a soda, which I will savor through the remainder of my break. As the drink effervesces into a sugary froth, I reach solemnly into the bottom drawer of my desk to retrieve a worn spiral notebook. It is here that I carefully preserve the aforementioned research—along with any conclusions, conjectures, and notions of my own that I feel may be of value to my future clients. I call it the Vade Mecum, a Latin name for manual that I feel more appropriately captures its significance.

  When finished, I close the Vade Mecum and stash it away, leaving myself twenty minutes to solve Sasha’s latest cipher. Sasha works as a copywriter for an advertising agency. She secretly embeds a coded message in every ad she writes, both to relieve her boredom and, I suspect, to assuage her guilt. Sasha detests materialism, and the cipher is often a more or less veiled reproach to whatever is being promoted for mass consumption. An advertisement for candy might ostensibly advocate the scrumptiousness of chocolate, caramel, and other sweet delights. But if you were only to read every third letter, you would receive a different message. “Eat broccoli,” perhaps. Or, if the ad were short, something more simple, like “cavity.”

  As far as I know, I’m the only one privy to Sasha’s cryptographic protests. I try to get my hands on whichever publications her ads happen to appear in. Today it’s the New York Times. I leaf through the paper, my fingertips slowly blackening with ink, until I find it—a large half-page spot for cigarettes. An alluring woman flashes a pearly grin from behind a beguiling wisp of smoke. There’s a lot of text, which usually means Sasha’s code will be hard to crack, but fortunately I spot the key—the words “second” and “word” both appear in the first line. I write down the second word of each sentence, rearranging them again and again, but to no avail. Changing tack, I put the words back in their original order. When I then take the first letter of each word and string them together, I finally crack the code. The result, while inflammatory, is not terribly original. Still, the puzzle itself was a bit tougher this time. I’m glad, because if anyone else ever deciphers these things, Sasha’s going to get fired.

  3:00 p.m. Dean performs his flyby.

  “Wassup, ladies?” He leans against the doorjamb with a toothy grin on his face. Dean’s not in the office much, and I think he’s glad to see me. He spends most of his time on the road or in the air, drumming up business. Unlike me and Matt, Dean is neither an auditor nor an accountant. He’s an account manager, which means he’s responsible for bringing in new clients, then keeping them happy once they’ve signed on. With his designer suit and sharply coiffured blond mane, my brother is still the young golden retriever at heart, perpetually in motion and eager to please. His misses may yet outnumber his makes, but he does well for himself nonetheless, which is why he had the clout to get me this job in the first place. To his credit, he hasn’t lorded it over me, though he’s not shy about checking on the work I do for the clients he’s brought in.

  A typical Dean flyby is brief—just a few words—and always ends with a mangled aphorism that I believe Dean prepares for the occasion. “Remember, dorks,” he might say, “there’s more than one way to count a chicken.” Or, “Remember, dorks, you can fool most of the people most of the time.” Sometimes the misquote is close enough to the original that I suspect he thinks he’s getting it right, but he never does.

  Matt doesn’t look up from his desk. He stopped humoring Dean and his flybys long ago, but I lean back in my chair to properly enjoy the afternoon’s entertainment. I am by now halfway through my second cup of coffee, in the form of an oversize mug I commandeered from the office kitchen. It’s red and black, with the words “Just do it” emblazoned across the side. I take a sip, then look up to let Dean know I’m ready. This time, however, he doesn’t immediately unleash his latest customized adage. Instead, he steps into our office and drops an envelope on my desk.

  “What’s this?” I ask.

  “Bonus, baby bro!” He smiles more broadly, pleased with his alliteration and even more by the fact that he’s no doubt already opened his own envelope. Though Dean’s not responsible for my bonus, he likes to drop it off when he can, as a gesture of fellowship and collective achievement. This is primarily symbolic, since our jobs are completely different, and Dean—who works mostly on commission—receives much larger bonuses than I do.

  Nevertheless, I’m grateful. I get paid well enough, and diligently allot my salary according to the proper and accepted ratios—forty percent on rent and utilities (a bit high, but it’s Manhattan), fifteen percent on food, ten percent on clothing and entertainment, fifteen percent miscellaneous, and twenty percent to savings. The allotment to savings is higher than normally recommended, but in order to start my own business I’m going to need capital, and relatively soon. Five, six years, tops.

  Dean himself doesn’t subscribe to these recommended allotments, perhaps because he earns so much more than I do, or perhaps simply because he’s Dean—somehow less genetically predisposed to concerning himself with the future. Still smiling, he gives me a salute as he backs his way out of our office.

  “Remember, dorks,” he says, “if the world gives you lemons, make a gin fizz.”

  6:15 p.m. I leave work early to meet Bannor for our walk. Every month or so, Bannor leaves me a voice mail indicating a date, time, and particular location in Manhattan where I am to meet him. His choices appear completely random and yet are somehow never inconvenient for me, and I am no longer surprised by wherever we might end up—roving the Bowery, skipping stones over the Harlem River, circling the ice-skating rink at Rockefeller Center.

  Bannor had been going on these rambles long before we met in group. When I asked him why he invited me to join him, he said only that he knew we would take these walks together. Because he’s been to the future. Obviously. I then asked whether he would have invited me if he hadn’t already seen it in our future. He just shrugged and told me he couldn’t say. Despite his extraordinary temporal travels, he doesn’t really understand how the whole thing works. Regardless, he was right. Though I stopped attending group after a few months, I still regularly meet Bannor for our walks.

  Today we convene at the gated end of an oddly quiet lane just north of Washington Square Park. On either side, low-slung carriage houses stand shoulder to shoulder, in marked contrast to the mostly high-rise architecture of the rest of Manhattan. Closed to traffic, the way is paved with cobblestones, which no doubt encourage fast-walking New Yorkers to choose a different path. As a result, Bannor and I have the street mostly to ourselves. We step through the gate as if into another city and time.

  “What’s this place?” I ask.

  “Washington Mews.” In his tweed suit and vest—the same ones he wore on that first night of group—Bannor looks at home amid
the carriage houses and cobblestones, but then he sports the same outfit on all of our jaunts. He assures me he doesn’t always wear it. “Special occasions only,” he says, though when I ask him what the other special occasions are—or were—he won’t tell me. In general, Bannor doesn’t say much, particularly when he’s not talking about the future. On most days, we simply walk in silence.

  I slow my pace to match his leisurely gait. This gives me ample time to peer into the windows of the simple yet elegant homes, imagining them in their former incarnations as stables for horses. I am just settling into a groove when we abruptly reach the end of the block. Here stands a second gate, beyond which modern Manhattan resumes its rush and blare.

  “It’s a beautiful street,” I say. “A bit short, though.”

  Bannor stares out through the iron bars. “True and truer,” he says.

  I’m a bit befuddled. Though my excursions with Bannor aren’t always long, this is ridiculous. The second gate, like the first, is open to pedestrians. We could pass through and turn north on Fifth Avenue, or make our way into the West Village, but we would have to abandon the antiquated magic of the mews.

  Bannor solves the problem in easy fashion, spinning lightly on his heels and heading back toward where we started. The stroll is just as pleasant the second time, which is a good thing, because when we get to the first gate, we turn around and do it again. I don’t mind in the least, and am impressed as always by Bannor’s poise. It strikes me that he is the most serene person I’ve ever met, despite the fact that he’s perfectly insane.

  “You are unflappable, Bannor,” I say. “Incapable of being flapped.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You are,” I insist. “What’s the secret?” I don’t really expect him to answer, but we have begun our fourth lap of the mews now, and I’m a little bored.

  “Maybe you stop worrying once you’ve seen your own death.”

  I am as surprised by the tenor of his response as by its utterance, and I now feel bad for having asked the question. Bannor rarely broaches the subject of his own suicide, or his supposed precognition of it. “But you don’t know for sure, right?” I ask. “You can change it. Isn’t that why you go to group? To stop it from happening?”

  He shakes his head. “Not to stop it. Just to understand it.”

  “I don’t think you have to settle for that.”

  Bannor reaches his hands behind his back and clasps them together gently. The rhythm of his stride remains slow and steady, though the front curl of his homburg hat dips earthward. “They say a drowning man stops panicking once his lungs fill with water,” he says. “Maybe losing things is like that.”

  “What have you lost, Bannor?”

  He slips into silence, one that I don’t expect to be broken by anything other than the soft tap of his burgundy shoes on the cobblestones. But he proves me wrong again.

  “In the future,” he says, “you can talk to the dead.”

  7:30 p.m. I hit the gym, having fully embraced the view that physical fitness is a critical component of the happiness equation—and also, of course, wanting to look good naked. I’m six feet tall and 160 pounds. I’m not scrawny, but I can’t deny that my stomach is a couple abs short of a six-pack, and it would be hard to describe the flexing of my biceps as an “invitation to the gun show.”

  This is about to change, however. I’m now in the gym six days a week—two days of lower body, two days of upper, and two days of cardio (treadmill or rowing machine). Today is Tuesday, which means I’m all about my upper body. After chugging a protein shake with creatine, it’s reps and sets—pull-ups, sit-ups, bench, incline, military presses, extensions, cable rows, shoulder raises, curls, flys, crunches, dips. I shred my pecs, smash my biceps, blast my delts, and destroy my abs. It won’t be long before I’m jacked, ripped, yoked. It won’t be long before my arms are more pipes than pipe cleaners. It won’t be long before I’m a bona fide brick shithouse.

  Five, six months, tops.

  9:00 p.m. I climb the fire escape of Sasha’s building to find her already sitting on the landing outside her window.

  “Cancer,” I say, settling down into my regular spot beside her.

  “You’re getting too good at them.” She strikes a match and lights a cigarette. “I tried to make that one harder.”

  “It was harder,” I say. “Also a bit hypocritical.”

  Sasha exhales a puff of smoke at me. “Maybe it was meant to be aspirational.”

  “Are you aspiring to quit smoking, or get cancer?”

  She shrugs, and I let it go, turning my gaze out over the river. The lights of the two bridges shine in the adolescent night. “You’re not worried that your ciphers are going to cost you your job?” I ask.

  “Present company excluded, no one is ever going to read them. For all intents and purposes, they disappear the moment they’re written.”

  “Like a floppy disk tossed into the East River.”

  Sasha frowns, confused for an instant, then remembers. “Yes, exactly like that.”

  “You never told me what was on it.” As with Bannor, there are some questions I ask Sasha without hope of receiving an answer. Yet today, clearly, something is different.

  She takes a particularly long drag of her cigarette. “A novel,” she says.

  “Yours?”

  “No, my neighbor’s.” Her eyes flash darkly, but she smiles. I’m still not sure what to make of the contradiction between Sasha’s shadowy eyes and bright grin. I have, however, learned to ignore her sarcasm.

  “That’s great,” I say. “What’s it about?”

  “Who knows.”

  “Still working on it?”

  “Not unless you’ve got a scuba tank.”

  I feel a small pit open in my stomach. “But you had other copies,” I say. “Sasha, tell me you did not write a novel and then throw it in the river.”

  “I did not,” she says, smiling again. “You threw it in the river.” She seems to think this is funny. “Oh, Elliot,” she says finally. “Don’t fret. I sent it around first, even got an agent, but it was roundly rejected by the publishing world.”

  “But it was your first try. You’ll only get better.”

  “It wasn’t rejected because it was bad,” she says. “Everybody loved the writing. The writing was ‘superlative.’ It was rejected because it was depressing. Publishers said it would never sell, and that they’d lose money. They told me if I wrote a book that made people feel happy, they’d publish it in a New York minute. They actually said that—‘a New York minute.’”

  “That’s what I’m talking about! So you just need to write the happy one.”

  “Or I could knit sweaters,” says Sasha. “People want sweaters, too.” She exhales another plume of smoke and watches it dissipate. “And cigarettes.”

  “It’s not the same.” I wasn’t going to let her off the hook. If I was grabbing happiness by the balls—or horns, or whatever—then Sasha could, too. “If you write another novel—even one that people want to read—you’ll still be expressing yourself. And that must mean something to you, or you wouldn’t have written the first one.”

  “Ain’t never gonna happen.”

  “Yes, it will,” I insist. “I can see it now—the book will be a masterpiece, critically acclaimed, published in seven languages, and you will become a rich and famous novelist. I’ll have Bannor confirm it.”

  Sasha looks away without acknowledging my joke, which surprises me. Unlike me, Sasha still occasionally attends group, where she still occasionally sees Bannor, and she is not normally opposed to teasing our crazy mutual friend. She crushes the butt of her cigarette and lights another.

  “Pearl killed herself,” she says flatly.

  My throat catches. Thoughts of Sasha’s novel evaporate, along with all appeals, argumentation, and cajolery. Instead, I think of Pearl—how she would gently knead her handkerchief in her lap, how she dreamed of gathering memories like stones, filling her pockets until sh
e drowned. I’m not going to ask how she died.

  “I’m so sorry. What a shame.”

  “Is it?” says Sasha. “It was Pearl’s decision. Who are we to condemn it? None of us asked to be here. As far as I know, we didn’t bid for these lives at auction. If Pearl wanted to leave, that’s her call.”

  “I just meant—it seemed like she had a good life, and it’s sad that it ended that way.”

  “I don’t think it’s sad,” says Sasha. “I think we’re obsessed with endings. We can witness or experience the greatest life or love in the history of the world, but if it ends badly, then the whole thing suddenly becomes a tragedy. Or the opposite—one brief moment of redemption at the end of a long life of injustice and pain? Please. All’s well that ends well? Bullshit.”

  “I don’t know. Beginnings and endings just seem to carry more weight.”

  “Why?” demands Sasha. “Why put more weight on one particular moment, just because it’s the last?”

  “Tradition?”

  “It’s totally arbitrary,” she says. “And painful—because this weighty, important ending we’re so infatuated with? Spoiler alert—everybody dies.”

  I am sitting close enough to Sasha that our shoulders touch, and I can feel her shivering, though the night isn’t that cold. A sprinkling of stars appears in the patch of sky between the bridges.

  “This would be a nice ending,” I say.