The Escape Room

by Megan Goldin

  ‘I think I’ve found our next clue.’ Sam broke the silence abruptly. It made them all jump in surprise. He pointed the light of his phone up at a corner at the top of the elevator. When the others looked closely, they saw a string of letters written on the wall.

  ‘Has that been there all this time, right above our heads? How didn’t we see it earlier?’ said Sylvie.

  ‘I don’t think it was there before,’ Sam said. ‘I could swear I looked there earlier. Maybe it’s been revealed by the heat? It’s right by the vent.’

  Jules wrote the letters down on a section of the mirrored elevator wall using a marker pen that he took from his bag. The clue looked unsolvable. A jumble of random letters.

  IPX NVDI EP ZPV USVTU FBDI PUIFS?

  ‘So what do you think about investment banking after your first month in the job?’

  Sam asked the question while cutting into a steak at Delmonico’s. Sam had been stand-offish since I’d joined the team. After weeks of being treated like a lackey, it felt strange to be sitting in an expensive restaurant watching Sam cut into a $60 steak. As if he really cared about my impressions of the firm.

  ‘Is it everything you expected, Sara?’

  ‘I’m loving it. Still getting used to the lack of sleep, of course. I don’t think I’ve slept more than six hours a night since I started.’

  ‘As my old man used to say, you can sleep when you’re dead. Or in our case, when you’re retired at forty.’

  That was the fantasy of every investment banker I’d ever met; to retire at forty. Few managed to pull it off. The men developed a taste for trophy wives, expensive yachts, summer houses and all the other accoutrements of wealth. Not to mention the financial burden of multiple alimonies and child support.

  Then there was the constant adrenalin rush that came with the work, which became almost as addictive as the drugs many took to get through the brutal hours. From the finest Colombian blow to a smorgasbord of amphetamines, from Adderall to Quaaludes and every letter in between. Those addictions kept people in the game long after they wanted to quit.

  We only had forty minutes for lunch so I was surprised that Sam insisted on going to Delmonico’s, a grill bar known for its long liquid lunches and oversized steaks. It turned out he’d taken all of that into consideration. Sam ordered our meals on the way to the restaurant. Within thirty seconds of us sitting down, our food was brought out. He’d arranged it all with military precision.

  Sam had ordered a medium-rare rib-eye steak. I had the grilled sole. I shook my head when he asked me if I wanted wine. We had a client meeting that afternoon and I didn’t think it was a good idea to get soused.

  ‘You’re right,’ sighed Sam, as he waved away the waiter holding the wine list. ‘This meeting will be tricky enough even if we’re sober.’ It was with a Japanese consortium and the non-disclosure agreements that we’d had to sign just to talk with them could fill three volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

  I’d already been firmly instructed by Sylvie that during the meeting I was to sit at the back of the room and keep my mouth shut. She’d had a whispered argument the previous day with Sam about his decision to allow me to attend. ‘It’s too soon,’ she hissed. ‘Sara doesn’t know enough to be useful.’ In the end they’d agreed that I could attend as long as I didn’t say a word.

  I suppose that I should have been honoured that they were letting me near a client so soon. Lucy was never taken to client-facing meetings. I overheard Jules once say that Lucy was ‘too weird to put in front of a client’. They’d leave her at the office but covertly consult her by text message when they needed some quick number crunching. They cashed in on her genius without our clients ever knowing who the real brains behind all our sophisticated financial strategies was.

  Most client meetings were held during the day, usually in the afternoons. Occasionally over lunch. Some evenings Sam and Jules would disappear for drinks with clients. Sylvie was never invited. Just two nights earlier, Jules and Sam left abruptly in the early evening for a client meeting. I asked Sylvie why she wasn’t joining them. She stared at me. Shocked by my naiveté.

  ‘They’re going to a strip joint, Sara.’

  ‘Isn’t that a bit, I don’t know, circa 1955? Who conducts business at a strip joint in this day and age?’

  ‘Sara, topless bars are where some of the biggest deals in Wall Street are cut,’ she said. ‘Right now their CFO is probably putting a $50 bill into a stripper’s G-string while using his other hand to initial a billion-dollar takeover.’

  ‘Doesn’t that mean you get left out of all the glory?’ I asked.

  ‘They’d feel awkward with women around,’ she said, without any irony. ‘And I would find it bizarre if they ever asked me to join.’

  Just as Sylvie predicted, Sam and Jules arrived at work the following morning to brashly announce that the parameters of the deal had been finalised over the course of five hours of binge drinking and lap dances.

  ‘You must have wrapped up early last night,’ said Sylvie, eyeing them both. They were freshly shaved with healthy pink complexions.

  ‘Not really. We finished at 4 a.m.,’ said Jules.

  ‘You’ve had four hours sleep! It doesn’t show at all,’ I said. ‘What’s your secret?’

  ‘Tea bags,’ said Jules with a straight face. ‘I freeze used tea bags and put them on my eyes while I do my stomach crunches in the morning. Sam uses bee venom serum, but I can’t because I’m allergic.’

  It turned out that eye cream was a big topic of conversation among male investment bankers. Women at least had the option of putting on extra concealer when we looked run-down. In an industry notorious for long hours, it was probably our only advantage.

  Despite Sylvie’s apparent indifference to being excluded from the after-hours client meeting, I could tell from the tight set of her mouth that she was not happy they’d finalised the deal without her. I knew that Sylvie had done an incredible amount of work behind the scenes. She’d negotiated most of the key points of the deal through exhaustive meetings over several weeks. All Sam and Jules had really done was ensure the agreement was signed.

  From their boasting around the office and at the celebratory drinks they arranged, most people without inside knowledge would have assumed Sam and Jules were the ones responsible for the deal.

  Not that I felt bad for Sylvie. She was a big girl. She knew how to manipulate things better than most. I suspected that it wasn’t so much our colleagues’ credit that worried Sylvie. She was afraid that Sam and Jules would get a bigger share of the bonus from the deal, when all they’d really done was get the client drunk enough to sign a memorandum of understanding.

  The atmosphere was tense for weeks afterwards. Sylvie tried to undermine both of them in a dozen different ways to get back at them. It was nothing new. There was always an undercurrent of conflict in the firm. The air crackled with a permanent sense of distrust. In the firm’s toxic worldview, conflict was good. Conflict made people work harder and smarter. It made them ruthless.

  ‘There are winners and losers in this world,’ Sam told me as he wolfed down his steak that day over lunch at Delmonico’s. ‘So pick a side, Sara, and don’t ever look back at the trail of people you’ve trampled into the ground. You don’t owe them a thing. Success is not for the squeamish.’

  They stood together in the gloomy darkness trying to decipher the letters of the next clue. Bunched together, they reminded Sam of canned sardines. Entombed in a small metal box. Cooking in their own juices, as it were, with the heater blasting on high and sweat pouring down their bodies. They were barely able to stretch or move without bumping into each other.

  They went through the motions of trying to solve the code but it was beyond their abilities. Sam knew it. They all did. If Lucy had been around she’d have solved it in sixty seconds. He wasn’t sure if they’d be able to solve it in a lifetime.

  Sam wanted out. Not just from the elevator but from all of it. His life had been s
pinning out of control for a long time. Materially, he’d more than achieved his goals, but he wished he could go back in time and change many of the decisions that he’d made along the way.

  He often thought back to the Sam Bradley that he’d been as a kid. The idealist impatient to go out into the world and make a difference, like an over-ambitious home decorator who thought that a new roll of wallpaper would fix a crooked wall.

  Sam had wanted to become a human rights lawyer. ‘Can you imagine!’ he’d say, long after he’d grown out of his idealistic phase. How many people had he amused over the years with hoots of drunken laughter, telling that story at rowdy Wall Street parties?

  He wondered how he’d let his optimism morph into a hard shell of cynicism. The Sam Bradley of his youth would have hated the man that he now was. As the years passed, he increasingly agonised over the possibility that he’d let himself down. Worse than that, he’d let down his dead father, who’d always put more store in values than in money.

  As much as he despised his life, Sam was addicted to it. His salary had become his morphine. His designer watches, suits, shoes, ski trips, cars, homes and wife had become his coke. His success had become his heroin. It was killing him softly. Brutal hours at work, backroom machinations. Not to mention the pulsating stress that was a constant undercurrent of his life.

  Sam longed – with a nostalgia so sweet that it almost hurt – for the simple, modest world in which he’d been raised. At the same time, he shuddered at the very thought of ever returning to it.

  Since hearing about the planned lay-offs via the rumour mill, he’d been feeling anxious for weeks. He worried that it was the beginning of the end for him. That he’d hit his peak and his career would be all downhill from here.

  He didn’t believe Vincent’s claim that their performance here might offer a reprieve. That solving mindless clues in an escape room elevator would somehow reassure the firm that he, or any of them for that matter, was worth keeping on the payroll.

  For what felt like the dozenth time, Sam examined the jumble of random letters on the glass elevator wall, where Jules had written them in neat letters. IPX NVDI EP ZPV USVTU FBDI PUIFS?

  ‘It’s indecipherable.’ Sam complained in frustration. ‘I can’t see how we can possibly solve it.’

  There was still a good twenty-five minutes until their time in the escape room was up and, judging by everyone’s expressions, nobody had the faintest idea how to solve this puzzle. He sensed that Jules and Sylvie had given up and were prepared to wait it out until the end of their escape room session rather than make the effort of cracking the code transcribed on the wall.

  ‘Let’s all work on it separately,’ suggested Vincent. ‘We’ll come together in five minutes and share what we’ve come up with.’

  Sam wrote the letters into his phone. ‘IPX NVDI EP ZPV USVTU FBDI PUIFS?’

  He was good at this sort of stuff but his mind kept drifting to bigger problems. The conversation with Kim earlier had upset him more than he’d cared to admit.

  He’d been sitting in the backseat of a chauffeured town car as it crawled through the traffic of 2nd Avenue and East 66th. The cars around him blended into a kaleidoscope of colours as they snarled in the low light of dusk, waiting for the traffic lights to change. The oncoming headlights were almost blinding. He swallowed hard. He couldn’t delay it any further. He had to call Kim to tell her that he wouldn’t be able to make their flight to Antigua.

  It wouldn’t be the first holiday that he’d missed, though it was probably the most important. Kim insisted the trip to Antigua was ‘do or die’ for their marriage. ‘It’s time to show who you love more,’ she’d said, ‘me or Stanhope.’

  Kim was already at the airport with the twins, waiting for him to arrive, when he telephoned her. He gave her the bad news quickly. Before she could say a word, he quickly promised to take the next flight or the one after that. He swore on his life that he’d get to Antigua by Saturday afternoon at the latest, even if he had to ride shotgun on a DHL flight.

  ‘Honey.’ Pause. ‘Honey.’ His tone was placating.

  ‘Honey. Let me explain.’ He put his phone on speaker and scrolled through his emails as he let Kim talk without interruption. Slight eye roll. He folded his arms as he was forced to endure another barrage.

  ‘I know we’ve been planning this trip for ages. Kim. Honey,’ he interrupted her before she could get going again. His voice rose slightly in irritation. ‘I know how much you’re looking forward to it.’ He opened an attachment to an email. ‘I’ve been looking forward to it too.’

  He allowed a note of sincerity to enter his voice as he zoomed in to analyse the figures in a chart at the bottom of the email. ‘Believe me, Kim, I don’t want to be here, but I didn’t have any choice in the matter. It’s an important meeting.’ Pause. ‘You’re right, I do always say that, but this one really is. I wish I could get out of it. I tried. Honest to God, Kim, I tried. I read Vincent the riot act but he absolutely insisted. I’ll fly out straight afterwards. I promise.’ Pause. ‘Kim? Honey?’

  The line was dead. He was more relieved than angry that she’d hung up on him. It saved him the effort of lying to get off the call. Plus it gave him the higher ground.

  Sam’s phone vibrated. Kim was calling him back. He pressed the speaker button to answer it.

  ‘Kim,’ he answered. No response. He was about to hang up when a foul-mouthed torrent spat out of the speaker of his phone. Kim spoke so fast and with such fury that most of her words were unintelligible. Except the last few before she hung up again.

  ‘You fuck!’ she yelled so loudly that his driver’s head snapped back against the leather headrest. ‘You sad fuck!’

  Sam had mulled over Kim’s words all the way to his destination in the South Bronx. All the way inside the escape room. All through their childish game of hunting clues in the overheated elevator with the vague promise it might guarantee them their jobs, though that felt like a cheap door prize to Sam.

  Kim was right. He was a sad fuck. He’d become a slave; to Stanhope, to Kim. And most of all to his own ego. What price would he pay for being a no-show for their flight to Antigua? It would not come cheap, especially as Kim had made it a test of his commitment to their marriage. Kim had talked of little else since she’d been offered a place at the exclusive resort. It was usually booked out by movie stars or trust fund kids. Kim said they were lucky to get in.

  He wasn’t sure if luck had anything to do with it. The resort charged $8000 a night for a private beachside villa with its own infinity pool. That wasn’t including taxes or service charges. Or meals.

  He’d stood Kim up but he assured himself that he had nothing to feel guilty about. After all, it was his work at Stanhope and Sons that produced the money that funded Kim’s exorbitant holidays.

  It wasn’t a huge hardship for Kim to fly alone to the Caribbean with their two-year-old twins. They were booked in business class and the resort had a babysitting service. Kim could enjoy herself unencumbered by the toddlers. She’d barely be inconvenienced. Sam would arrive before she developed tan lines. Maybe even before dawn broke. He’d pay whatever it took. It would still work out cheaper than if it pushed Kim over the edge and she followed through on her frequent, thinly veiled threats of divorce.

  That thought reminded Sam to focus on the escape room. He needed to play the game. He needed to show that he was an asset to the firm so that Stanhope wouldn’t retrench him, and might even promote him to Eric Miles’s vacant job.

  He thought about how he’d make it up to Kim. He’d buy her jewellery. That’s what he usually did. Last time it was earrings, the time before a bracelet. There’d need to be at least one diamond. Kim’s taste in jewellery was as extravagant as her temper.

  Sam looked at the jumble of letters on the wall once more. ‘IPX NVDI EP ZPV USVTU FBDI PUIFS?’ It made no sense whatsoever. He reworked the letters into a different order on his phone. The result was as mystifying as the original had been. As
mystifying as his marriage, he thought.

  They’d had many arguments about the same thing: Kim barely got to see him. He racked up eighty to ninety hours a week at work. He routinely missed dinner parties, weekend trips and holidays. When he did get home, he barely had enough time to screw Kim and get five hours’ sleep before he had turn around and go back to the office.

  It had been like that since they were first married. They’d been married for six years and had only managed to spend three anniversaries together. He’d almost missed the birth of his daughters two years ago. He was in Toronto with a blizzard about to hit when Kim had gone into labour three weeks early. He’d pulled in every favour he was ever owed, and then some, to get a seat on the last flight out. It went to Boston. He took a train back the rest of the way. Kim was being prepped for a caesarean at Mount Sinai when he burst through the delivery-room doors. Three hours later, he was back on the phone discussing the finer points of a credit swap with a client.

  ‘You promised that you wouldn’t do this to me,’ Kim rasped once she’d come out of surgery.

  ‘I’m sorry, Kimmi.’ Back then those words still meant something.

  Later, when Kim was in her five-star maternity suite, he reminded her, and his guilty conscience, that she lived the life of a princess purely because of the work that he did and the schedule that he kept. Without him, she’d be a preschool teacher in Queens, wiping kids’ snotty noses. He hadn’t said that, but he’d thought it often enough. He knew that deep down she thought it too.

  ‘Kim, listen.’ He was cradling their baby daughters in his arms, sitting on the edge of her hospital bed. ‘If you want me to quit my job and find work in consulting then I’ll do that. The hours will be better. We can cut back on our expenses to manage on a smaller salary. Maybe that’s better, if it means that I get to spend more time with you and our beautiful babies.’

  It worked. Kim hadn’t raised the issue of his punishing work schedule since. Not until recently. When she did, he knew that she wasn’t upset about his long hours. She was upset because she suspected he was having an affair.