The Futures

by Anna Pitoniak

  But I knew, even if I didn’t know what: something was wrong.

  That night was supposed to be the Spire holiday party, an extravagant dinner at the Waldorf or the Pierre followed by a long night of drinking. It had been canceled this year. The recession made it impossible, both financially and optically. The secretaries felt bad for us, so they improvised. Tinsel was strung in the hallways, and miniature Christmas trees and menorahs decorated their desks. Around 6:00 p.m., someone went around offering beer and Champagne. There was a scrappy, festive mood that night. The year from hell was nearly over.

  But I was restless. That afternoon, like something out of a dream, I found myself back at Michael’s door, arm raised and fist clenched, ready to knock. Stop, I thought, and I shook my head. Whatever it was, Michael could handle it. I stayed at my desk the rest of the day, willing my mind to focus, trying not to obsess about things I couldn’t control.

  Roger was drinking a beer. He’d stolen the Nerf football from the other analysts and was tossing it up and down with one hand. He was in the middle of a running monologue about what to order for dinner.

  “Hey, Evan,” Roger said, chucking the Nerf at my chest. It bounced to the floor before I had time to catch it. “Listen. We need to decide. Italian or Chinese?” He burped. “Let’s get more beer, too. We can expense it, right? Anyway…”

  Roger may have hated me, but he liked an audience more. He sounded out every mundane thought that passed through his head, narrating every part of his life. I was used to it by then. I let it wash over me without really listening.

  “Y’know, though, there’s a new Vietnamese place I think we should try, too. Shit—what’s it called?” He sat down at his computer, his cheeks ruddy from the beer. “You know, the one on Forty-fifth. Or is it—”

  I heard a ping from Roger’s computer, the sound of an e-mail arriving. He clicked, his monologue trailing off, then he went silent. His eyes were scanning the screen. I heard the same ping sounding on the computers around me, like a chorus of chirping birds.

  “Holy shit,” Roger said. “Holy shit.”

  “What is it?” I tilted back in my chair, tossing the Nerf from one hand to the other.

  Roger’s face went pale. “Check your e-mail. Right now.”

  The message came with a bright red exclamation point. A news alert. I double-clicked to open it. My stomach plummeted as I read the headline:

  SPIRE UNDER SCRUTINY

  Evidence of bribery sparks investigation

  No, I thought. No, no, this can’t be happening. But of course it was happening. It was the exact fear I’d been trying to suppress all day. I clicked through and began to read the article:

  Federal authorities have initiated an investigation into whether Spire Management, a New York City–based hedge fund, bribed the Chinese government to obtain favorable terms on lumber imports.

  The investigation was launched after the Observer contacted authorities for comment on Spire’s practices in China. The paper learned, through confidential sources within the company, that Spire Management has bribed highly placed Chinese government officials in order to arrange for tax-free imports of lumber to China from several Canadian companies. Spire has taken an aggressive position on these companies, which includes the conglomerate Pacific WestCorp, and stands to profit significantly from their growth.

  A review of WestCorp’s most recent quarterly statement shows that exports to China have increased substantially over the third quarter, and the company expects continuing significant growth in the next fiscal year…

  The byline at the top of the story stood out in big, bold letters. Adam McCard.

  Roger was staring at me when I finished reading. The floor had gone silent while everyone read the news. The only sound was of the building’s joints, creaking in the high wind.

  “Did you know about this?” Roger asked, in a charged whisper.

  Was I being paranoid again, or were people murmuring as I passed? A numb panic spread through my body: my limbs had gone leaden, but my mind was racing faster and faster. I speedwalked over to Michael’s office. All the e-mails and phone calls back and forth with WestCorp. The delivery to Chan in Las Vegas. Security footage from the cameras in the hallways at the Venetian. Chan’s cackling demands. The $20,000 in cash, still sitting in my sock drawer. There were a thousand different trip wires suddenly lying in wait.

  Wanda was back at her desk. Her fingers flew across the keyboard; ten different lines blinked red on the phone. A half-eaten salad lay forgotten at her elbow.

  “I need to talk to him,” I said.

  She looked bewildered for a second, then laughed. “Are you kidding?”

  “But it’s about this story. The WestCorp story. Please, Wanda.”

  “Evan. This is way above your pay grade, okay? Just go home, get some rest. It’s the best thing for now. Trust me, hon. I’d help you if I could.”

  When I got back to my desk, Roger stared at me with a mixture of pity and contempt, maybe even a little bit of awe. I turned off my computer, pocketed my phone, put on my coat. The elevator whisked me down to the ground floor. Outside, the night was consumed by a vicious rainstorm, dark and howling and damp. I walked to the subway at Times Square, dodging umbrellas and sprays of water from cars streaking by. One foot in front of the other. Just keep walking. I elbowed my way into the middle of the train for a seat and collapsed, my clothes dripping wet.

  I thought of Brad, shouting and seething with anger that night in Las Vegas. It would have been nothing to him to pick up the phone and vent it all to a reporter. Michael had a fat bull’s-eye painted on his back. Anyone who resented him, anyone who wanted him gone, any of those people would have happily spilled the news. And who knew how many people Brad could have told? Chuck, or Roger. Roger, his jealousy barely guarded by derision. He wasn’t someone used to coming in second. On the roof that day in September, the day of the crash, he had been the one to summon forth Adam McCard’s name. I always read the Observer. Just for their finance guy. He’s good. Adam’s silky touch might be exactly what Roger’s wounded ego needed. Making Roger feel like he was doing the right thing. It explained Adam’s pointed questioning when he ran into me at Thanksgiving. He’d been chasing the scent of the story. Roger had acted so surprised when the news broke.

  Who would do this? Why would he do this? If someone really hated Michael, if he wanted him gone, there were other ways. Roger or Brad could have gone straight to David Kleinman, and Kleinman would have handled it—probably would have rewarded the whistle-blower, to boot. Instead, whoever did it had gone nuclear. Someone was willing to blow up the whole company because of some petty jealousy. I felt my blood rising. It stank of hypocrisy. Everything Spire did, every bet we made and trade we transacted, was dependent on some kind of asymmetry. We had better information, faster networks, a heavier footprint. We got rich to the detriment of some other party. That’s how it always worked. For this particular deal to be singled out was completely arbitrary. How many hundreds of morally questionable deals had been made at Spire in years past? Who had the gall to decide that, here, a line had been crossed? Who had the right?

  I knew how it would go. It would be a fucking nightmare. The country had just been devastated, and it needed someone to pin the blame on. The SEC would come in with guns blazing. In the papers, on TV screens, broadcast over radio waves: people wanted blood. They bayed for revenge. The complexity of subprime mortgage products meant that the real bad guys might never face punishment. But this story, our story, was easy to understand. Rich guys bribe the Chinese in order to become richer. All while the rest of the country shrivels in a drought of our own creation. I saw it from the outside for the first time, just how bad this looked.

  The train pulled into 77th Street. The crowd moved up the stairs in a slow trudge, each person pausing at the top to open an umbrella or pull up a hood. It was earlier than I usually came home, the tail end of rush hour still thick with commuters. My thoughts looped back to Adam. That
slimy bastard. Preying on disgruntled employees to get his next story; converting other people’s unhappiness into fuel for his ambition. I wondered what Julia ever could have seen in him, even as a friend.

  Then it occurred to me, as I waited for the light to change on 3rd Avenue. Julia. Had she seen Adam lately? Had she mentioned his name? I sifted through my memory: no, she had never said anything. But this city wasn’t very big. Even I had run into Adam, and what were the odds of that? And Julia kept in touch with everyone, even people she claimed to dislike, even the bitchy girls from prep school. But she hadn’t uttered his name once since that rainy March night, sophomore year, when she’d disappeared upstairs with Adam during that party. I wasn’t stupid. I could guess what had happened. But after that party, the fights tapered off. Things felt steadier, calmer. She went away to Paris, and, after that, we were happier than ever. We never spoke about it again. It had been left completely, resolutely in the past.

  As I turned onto our block, I passed a group crowded under a bar awning, smoking cigarettes in soggy Santa hats and holiday sweaters. “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” blasted out through the bar’s open door. A girl wearing an elf costume stumbled into me as I pushed through the crowd. “Whoa!” she said, sloppy and laughing. I mumbled an apology. She stuck out her tongue, swaying on her feet. “Merry Christmas, grinch!” she shouted at my back.

  The image materialized as I dug my keys out of my pocket. Julia, turning at the sound of her name. At a bar or a party, or some sidewalk in the city. Smiling at an old friend. Softening and bending toward him, like she had all those years before. A little lonely, bored in her job, with so many hours alone in that tiny apartment. So much restless energy. What might have happened between the two of them, reunited after so long? The conversations, hours and hours of conversation, saying everything she had to say. The things she was no longer saying to me. Julia always loved a good listener.

  The apartment was dark when I opened the door. The light, when I flipped it on, illuminated a strange scene. The blanket was rumpled around a fresh-looking dent in the futon. A take-out container of soup sat on the coffee table, still steaming with heat. The dread swelled, a tinge in the back of my throat. Where was she? I spun around, surveying the room for clues. But the rest of the furniture was neat and in place. A bowl and mug sat on the drying rack next to the kitchen sink. The tea towels hung square from the oven door. The bed was smoothly made, the pillows plumped. A stupid phrase came to mind: There was no sign of struggle. Julia had just up and left moments earlier.

  I pulled out my phone and called her. I belatedly realized that the ringing was louder than usual, coming not just from the speaker next to my ear but also from somewhere in the room. I followed the chime and buzz to the coffee table, where her phone was partially obscured by a stack of take-out napkins. I picked up her phone, which was glowing from my missed call.

  The wallpaper on her iPhone screen, for a long time, had been a picture of the two of us taken during that summer in Europe. She had handed her phone to another tourist while we leaned against the railing that separated the rocky path from the bright blue sea below. She loved that picture. The two of us smiling and squinting, happy and tired and sunburned from an afternoon trekking through the Cinque Terre. After the digital shutter snapped, we relaxed our smiles, Julia thanked the tourist, and we walked back to our B and B in Monterosso. That night we drank wine on the terrace overlooking the Mediterranean. She pulled her hair loose from its bun and tilted her head back to look at the stars. I took her hand and led her back to our room under the attic rafters. We fell asleep curled together as the waves crashed far below. But that photo, that moment, that life was gone. In its place, on the phone screen, was a generic image of planet earth floating in space. That image wedged in my brain like a shard of glass. Erasure of our happiest memories. Evidence of just how far we had drifted.

  But that’s not what I was really looking at. I was reading, over and over again, the text message that appeared on the locked screen of the phone. Eight short words, but that was all it took. It became suddenly, painfully clear who was behind the revelations about Spire. Who had been drawing closer and slipping information to the person on the other side of the table.

  Adam McCard, thirty-two minutes ago.

  I’m sorry, babe. I had to do it.

  Part 3

  Chapter 14

  Julia

  Last week I was lying in bed, pretending to take a late afternoon nap but really just staring at the ceiling, when I heard a car pull up in the driveway.

  My father wouldn’t be back from work until dinner. My mother was busy all day with errands and meetings. I was home alone on that sunny May day. I pulled aside the curtain and saw my sister shutting the trunk of her silver Saab.

  It was like Elizabeth had forgotten, for a moment, that I was living at home. A look rippled across her face as I appeared at the top of the stairs. There she was, fresh from her junior year at college, embarking on summer break with all its possibilities—and as I dragged myself down the stairs in ratty old leggings and a T-shirt, I was there to remind her of everything that could go wrong. Failure, heartbreak. A vector for a disease she might catch, too. But the look vanished in a second, and Elizabeth threw her arms around me in a hug.

  We had seen each other at Christmas and when she breezed through over spring break before hopping a flight to Belize. But those had been short, distracted visits, and the depths to which I was sinking weren’t yet clear. It was evident enough now: months had passed, my excuses were running out, and I was still hiding inside with unwashed hair and worn-out clothes. After settling at the kitchen table, Elizabeth asked me how I was. The look on her face said she wanted the full answer.

  I’m okay. That’s what I’ve been saying all along, hoping that eventually I’ll trick myself into making it true. It’s been months now. I’m getting over it. I’m okay.

  But I’m also, distinctly, not okay. I’m not getting over it. Sometimes I feel like I’m living on two planes: the present in Boston, which I move through physically like a hollow zombie, and that night in New York, where I’m stuck forever mentally, replaying the same disastrous sequence on a loop. The memory persists like a hot cavity. I shut my eyes, and I see Evan. I try to fall asleep, and I see Evan. And I see him as he was at the very end, his face written with disappointment. That’s the worst part. It wasn’t shock or anger. It was like he’d always known that it would come to this. Four years of my life disappeared into that expression. All the good things that had come before were negated by that pitch-black reminder of what I was capable of—of the person I had been all along.

  I called my mother later that December night. I was jobless, single, with nowhere to live. But she was too busy to help, so I moved myself out. I shipped a box of books home. I took a taxi to Penn Station with two bulging suitcases in the trunk. A man in a Santa costume stood on the corner of 34th Street, ringing a bell, collecting for the Salvation Army. Tourists streamed down the sidewalks, eyes shining in the holiday lights, on their way to Radio City or the Rockefeller Center tree. It all receded so quickly. The train pulled out of the station, right on time for once, and a few hours later I was in Boston. As fast as that. My life in New York had ended.

  It was like I’d been hit by a truck. My joints felt sore, my skin tender. I hibernated through the winter, confining my movements to the bedroom, the kitchen, the den. I slept too many hours every night—sleep was the only thing I wanted to do, the only way to make the time pass. Lately, though, I’m plagued by a different problem: insomnia. Maybe my body is trying to tell me to move on after the glut of the last several months, but my mind won’t let me. So I’m awake late into the night. Nothing works: warm milk, hot baths, prescription pills. I spend hours going for drives through the darkened suburbs, past shuttered windows and empty parking lots, with only the radio for company. My mother hates my middle-of-the-night peregrinations and the way I sleep so late, wasting daylight hours. So now I’m pres
ented with a double serving of guilt: for what I did last year in New York, and for the way I am constantly failing to get over it.

  An hour after Elizabeth arrived, my mother got home from her errands, carrying a box from the local bakery. She beamed when she saw Elizabeth sitting in the kitchen. She was the good daughter, the successful daughter. Elizabeth would never derail her own life, like I did. She was too smart for that. She was only home for a few days before moving to New York for the summer, where she was interning for a famous painter, Donald Gates, in his Tribeca studio.

  Elizabeth had just turned twenty-one. We had her favorite meal that night: lasagna and garlic bread, then chocolate cake from the bakery for dessert. Elizabeth leaned forward and blew out the candles, their light pale and flickering in the spring twilight. She looked up at me a few minutes later, while I pushed a swab of frosting around my plate. “Jules?” she said quietly, but I just shook my head. Evan’s birthday had been last week. It was always twinned, in my mind, with Elizabeth’s. I was melancholy not because I’d been thinking of him. I was melancholy because, despite my fixation on Evan, I’d forgotten about his birthday until that moment. Time was passing. I was forgetting things, the specific things. Evan was becoming an abstract longing. I was losing him all over again.

  Elizabeth’s college schedule complemented my insomnia, and we lay awake that night in her bed, the lamp in the corner casting exaggerated shadows across the walls. A cluster of glow-in-the-dark stars floated on the ceiling, a reminder of the lives we had lived in these bedrooms before going away and trying to become grown-ups.

  “I wish I could stay longer,” she said. “It’s kind of nice, being home.”

  “Me, too. It’s so quiet here without you.”