The Futures

by Anna Pitoniak

  “Appetizer. They were good. We went to Ikea, and I talked them into buying me a nightstand, so success.”

  “Had they seen your apartment yet? Did they like it?”

  “They did.” Abby paused, her hand full of brightly colored cereal, and tilted her head in contemplation. “They did, except my mom got sort of teary. I don’t know. I think it was too real for her. Seeing me all grown up and everything.”

  I threw a pillow at her. “You are not that grown up.”

  “Well, my mom cries at everything.” It was true. I’d taken a picture of them at graduation, Abby and her parents, and her mother had been sobbing before I even turned on the camera. She was sentimental. Their other four kids were already grown and scattered, with careers and marriages and children and at least one divorce. But Abby had always been the baby, and suddenly she was gone, too.

  After dinner, when we had devoured the sesame beef and kung pao shrimp and cold noodles, I felt myself sliding into a familiar jelly-limbed mellowness. Our thoughts were moving slowly enough for us to observe them, like glassy orbs in the air.

  “Do you know that feeling?” Abby said, her voice thin and distant. “When you wake up in the middle of the night and don’t recognize the room you’re in? Like, the shadows on the ceiling are all weird, and you’re like, where the fuck am I?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I hate it.”

  She was lying on her back, arms and legs splayed out, gazing up at the ceiling. She was quieter than usual. I nudged her with my foot.

  “You okay?”

  She rolled to her side and curled into a fetal ball. “It was sort of weird. When my parents visited. I couldn’t figure it out. And then my mom told me, on their last night, when the two of us went to get ice cream after dinner. It’s my dad’s job.”

  When I got high, my emotions always felt slow to catch up, thickened like honey left in the fridge. “What happened?” I said, belatedly registering the heaviness in Abby’s voice.

  “Nothing. Nothing yet. But you know, he works at a bank. This year has been brutal. He thinks he’s going to be laid off soon. Which explains—well, like, every time we went out to eat, he’d sigh and roll his eyes at the prices. He and my mom got in a big fight, I guess, and he told her she needs to go back to work. But I mean, who the hell is going to hire her right now?”

  “Oh, Abby. That sucks.”

  “The whole thing is a disaster.”

  A few days earlier, the president had signed a massive bailout into law. A few weeks before that, the Republican nominee had suspended his campaign, announcing that he had to return to Washington to address the crisis. I followed the developments with a shallow curiosity, but lately I’d been caring less about all of it. Maybe this was going to be the headline for the era when the historians had their turn. Maybe the market crash would emerge as the defining moment of the year, of the decade. But I’d been thinking about other things. I’d been thinking about Adam, the sound of his voice, the color of his eyes. Talk of the NASDAQ and the Dow was so abstract. The world still looked the same. The sun still set and rose; the moon still pulled the tides in patterns around the globe. My mind was aloft, scattered among the stars. I squeezed my eyes shut and tried to snap out of it. Other people were hurting, even if I wasn’t.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said.

  “At least I’m off the dole, right? Last kid. No more tuition.” She tried to smile. “I don’t know. I mean, maybe he won’t even lose his job. Maybe everything will be fine. But it’s so weird. These are my parents. It’s weird to have to worry about them. Aren’t they supposed to worry about me?”

  I lowered myself to the floor and curled up behind Abby, a big spoon to her little one. It was rare for me in our friendship, offering comfort to her. To Abby, who always knew what to do. “You want to sleep over?” she said. I had started spending the night occasionally, when the quiet of my apartment was too much. I texted Evan to tell him. We lay in her bed, talking until late, when we finally drifted off.

  The next morning, we went to the diner on the corner for breakfast. I emptied the tiny plastic cup of cream into my coffee, watching it swirl into spidery threads. I still felt a little high. Abby scrolled through her phone while eating a piece of buttered toast. She had cheered up considerably.

  “Guess who texted me last night,” she said. “Jake Fletcher.”

  “You guys know each other?”

  “Remember? You introduced us at his party. I’ve bumped into him a few times. He asked for my number last week.”

  “Wow. Small world.”

  “I think I’m gonna do it. I have gone way too long without any action.”

  I laughed weakly, signaling to the waiter for more coffee. Abby looked at me.

  “Wait. Wait—what is it? Do you guys have a history?”

  “No! God, no. I’ve just known him since forever. I still think of him as, like, the bratty five-year-old he once was. That’s all.”

  She raised an eyebrow. I wasn’t sure whether she bought it. But that was the nice thing about us. Abby knew the difference between big lies and little ones. She might guess at what I was leaving out: a game of spin the bottle in middle school, or maybe a tipsy kiss in the backyard during one of his parents’ big parties in Boston. A stupid kid thing that wasn’t even worth the energy to mention. Something you could skate past because you were so certain it was meaningless, that it had nothing to do with what you were actually talking about.

  Chapter 5

  Evan

  “What the fuck, man?” Roger said, shaking his head. “It’s a bloodbath out there.”

  Despite Kleinman’s rousing speech that morning, there was not much to be done that day. The top executives were in damage-control mode, on the phone with our investors, conveying to them the same confident lines we’d just heard. But everyone else had too much time on their hands. Taking slow walks around the floor, calling their wives in the middle of the day. Roger staring, slack-jawed, at the computer screen. The eerie quiet was only punctured by his occasional declarations of disbelief, which I did my best to tune out, because I was the anomaly. I actually had work to do. This lumber deal was taking up every second of my time.

  Roger noticed me studying a model and chewing on a thumbnail. “What is that?” he said. “Peck. Are you actually working right now?”

  “Just something, um, something leftover from a few days ago.”

  Keep it light and vague, those were my orders. “Not till we’re ready to push the button,” Michael had said. “Soon. I know how hard you’ve been working on this, Evan. I’ve seen how late you’re staying and how early you’re coming in. I’m impressed. You’re handling this very well.”

  This was the previous week, in Michael’s office, the beginning of September. I had stopped by to go over the latest numbers. I’d been working up the nerve to say something to Michael about the workload, which I could barely handle. In a bathroom stall that morning, I practiced the sentence in a whisper. My stomach was a watery mess. Michael, I wonder whether we want to think about bringing someone else on board. Couldn’t the deal use a fresh pair of eyes? That seemed a fair enough rationale.

  But Michael had preempted me with praise before I had a chance to open my mouth. It was a cornering tactic. A dare. What was I going to do, tell Michael that his confidence was misplaced? That I actually wasn’t as capable as he thought I was? And risk getting kicked off the deal entirely? So instead I mumbled a thank-you.

  “And I appreciate it,” Michael went on. “How discreet you’ve been. That’s the best way to handle a deal like this. Stay quiet. Just focus and do what you’re doing. Keep up the good work, Evan.”

  So that was it. I was just going to put my head down and get through it. Just as I’d done in the past, taking it one predawn practice at a time, inching closer to the end. By eleven that Monday morning, the morning of Kleinman’s departure to DC, I had finished the latest component of the model. I walked the papers over to Michael’s office.
There was an assumption in the formula that needed clarifying, the one part of the deal that still didn’t make sense to me. I was a little worried, actually. It was the last factor that seemed liable to screw everything up.

  Michael’s secretary, Wanda, halted me outside his office. She was all sassy middle-age curves: blown-out hair, chair-wide hips, bright red lipstick. “Uh-uh,” she said in her Jersey accent. “I don’t think so, honey. You’re not getting in there today. You wanna give that to me, I’ll try to get it to him.”

  I peered over Wanda’s shoulder, trying to see through the open door. She’d been with Michael for years, and she could be excessively protective. “What’s he doing?”

  “Trying to run the company—what do you think? He’s been on the line all morning.” The phone on Wanda’s desk rang. She tapped her Bluetooth headset and jerked her head to dismiss me. “O-kay? Stop by tomorrow. Maybe I can fit you in.”

  I couldn’t go any further on this model without Michael answering my question. So I spent the rest of the morning as Roger and the other analysts did, trolling the Internet for updates, killing time in an uneasy boredom, the same things I had done at the beginning of the summer. The TVs in the lounge were tuned to CNBC and Bloomberg Business. People lingered there, watching, looking for any excuse to stay away from their desks. Late in the afternoon, I walked past and found myself hypnotized by the mounting intensity of the coverage.

  WALL STREET’S WORST DAY SINCE 9/11

  DOW DOWN OVER 500 POINTS

  LEHMAN DECLARES BANKRUPTCY

  MERRILL BOUGHT BY BANK OF AMERICA

  IS YOUR MONEY SAFE?

  FORCED LIQUIDATION—HISTORIC VOLUME

  EVERYTHING CALLED INTO QUESTION

  One of the managing directors, a petite brunette woman, had her hands steepled over her mouth and tears in her eyes. Another woman put her arm around her shoulders. “Her husband works at AIG,” I heard someone whisper. “Three kids. Just bought a house in Quogue.”

  Roger, standing across the lounge, caught my eye and waved me over. “Let’s go to the roof,” he said.

  “What? Now?”

  “Come on. It’s dead. No one’s gonna notice.”

  We took the elevator to the top of the building, where Roger propped open the door with a loose brick. It was a beautiful day, a bluebird September sky. The city stretched out far below us, metal and glass glittering in the sunlight.

  “Holy shit,” I said.

  “You never been up here?”

  “I had no idea we could get up here.”

  “We’re not supposed to.” Roger pulled a crumpled pack of cigarettes from his pocket. “You want one?”

  “I’m okay.”

  I wandered out toward the edge. The roof was covered with tar paper and gravel. Only a low wall and a flimsy metal bar stood between me and the sixty-story drop. On the other side of the roof was the area where David Kleinman’s helicopter had taken off that morning.

  From this vantage point, life down below was proceeding normally. Taxis and trucks flowed up 8th Avenue in waves. Tiny pedestrians drifted down the sidewalk, their motion smooth and toylike. Sounds echoed up from the street: honking horns, a jackhammer, the rattle of a loose manhole cover, a siren in the distance. I could almost pretend the crisis was contained within the walls of our building, the babble of the TV irrelevant beyond its perimeter. The numbers were plummeting, the market was in a frenzy, but for the moment, it didn’t result in any visible change. No fires, no earthquakes, no violence or bloodshed. But it would take time for the real world to catch up to what was happening on our screens, and in a situation like this, the worst lay ahead. I understood that.

  That woman downstairs, trying not to show her panic: her husband would lose his job, and she would probably keep hers, but it didn’t matter. The balance would be upset. I knew that feeling, of living exactly within your means. Their life was fancier than mine—children in private school, a second house in the Hamptons—but that feeling didn’t change. The precarious flow of incoming and outgoing gave you a toehold in this world, but it was one that would vanish if the paychecks stopped. Numbers had always felt realer to me than anything else. Days like this reminded you of that.

  To the rest of America, to the rest of the world, I was indisputably one of them, even if I hadn’t been pushing shady CDOs. A bad guy. A practitioner of the dark arts who had suddenly lost control of his slippery magic. Why didn’t this bother me more? In the past, I think it would have. But my mind kept going back to the numbers. You could talk in generalities: Wall Street bad, Main Street good. It didn’t really mean anything. I liked the economy of action. A goal scored before the third-period buzzer, a clean and precise pass, an airtight model. You didn’t need words to complicate it. There were winners, and there were losers. The game bore it out. At first this job seemed more practical than anything else: a way to stay in New York with Julia, to make money and pay off student loans quickly. But it had transformed into something else. The thing I was meant to be doing.

  I shoved my hands in my pockets and turned, taking in the panorama. The city was sparkling and alive, taking up every inch it could. I looked back at Roger, leaning against the wall. He was moving his lips as he read something on his BlackBerry.

  “What is it?” I asked, walking over.

  “Shit. This is crazy.” Roger thrust his phone toward me. “You see that picture? No, scroll down. There. That short guy in the blue tie? That’s my old roommate from Stanford. What are the odds, man?”

  “What is this?”

  “He works at Lehman, I guess. The little shit is famous.”

  “Actually, it looks like he just got fired.” I scrolled to the top, where the headline read: LEHMAN GOES UNDER. It was from the Observer. The picture showed several bewildered-looking young men standing on the sidewalk, clutching cardboard boxes while pedestrians streamed around them.

  “Whatever. He was a tool.”

  “How did you find this?”

  “I always read the Observer. Just for their finance guy. He’s good. You never read him?”

  “What’s his name?”

  Roger reached for his phone, checking the byline. “Adam McCard.”

  “Adam McCard?”

  “What, are you deaf?”

  “No. No, it’s just that I know Adam McCard.”

  Roger raised an eyebrow. “How?”

  “He was a friend of Julia’s in college. Really? Adam McCard?”

  “He’s a good reporter. Better than anyone else. He actually seems to get it.”

  “Shit. If you say so.”

  Roger took a final drag of his cigarette. Adam McCard. I hadn’t thought about him in months—in years. “Ready?” Roger kicked the brick away and held the door open.

  “Right behind you,” I said.

  * * *

  Sophomore year, Julia dragged me along to a party off campus. I was hungover and stiff from the night before, from the hockey team’s end-of-season rager, but Julia insisted I come. She was in one of those moods. The party was on a dark, tree-lined street, in a crumbling old Victorian with a sagging porch. She had given a vague explanation of the occasion—for the magazine she worked on? Something like that—but when we walked through the front door, I saw the real reason.

  Adam McCard was leaning against the wall, arms crossed, one foot hitched up. He waved at Julia, then shook my hand, gripping it too tightly. He told us to help ourselves to the beer in the kitchen, his kitchen. I realized belatedly, stupidly, that this was his house. Julia had been mentioning Adam’s name a lot in the preceding weeks. I’d decided, a while earlier, that I hated him.

  We joined a group in the kitchen gathered around a keg. They gave me curious looks. “Are you an athlete?” one girl asked. She was scrawny, black-clad, with a cigarette smoldering between her pale fingers and an expression of surprised wonder.

  “I’m on the hockey team.”

  “Oh,” Julia said. “Oh, that reminds me of something. So last night…”<
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  I tuned out quickly. I was thinking, mostly, how hungry I was. Maybe I could slip out for a slice of pizza and get back before she noticed. But a minute later, Julia said my name. I turned to face her. She leaned against me, briefly, in recognition.

  “So Sebi finally finishes the bottle,” she continued. “We’re upstairs, in his room, and he goes over to the window. Then he pulls down his pants and starts pissing all over the crowd at the frat next door. Just, like, so casual about it.”

  The group laughed. Julia’s eyes were glittering.

  “Some of the guys from next door get really mad. They come over, trying to start a fight. They’re threatening to call the cops, all that stuff. We’re downstairs at that point, too. Sebi had passed out in his bed. They keep asking who it was, who did it, no one’s going to tell. But then Sebi strolls up to the front door himself and asks what the problem is. And he’s totally buck naked.”

  They laughed louder. “So funny,” the scrawny girl said flatly.

  “So the frat guys are backing away, they don’t know what to think, and Sebi offers to walk them home, throws his arms around their shoulders, being all friendly. He was completely blacked out at that point. He tried to pull one of the guys in for a hug, and that’s when they all finally ran away. No one wants to fight a naked dude.”

  Julia was grossed out when this happened the previous night, at the party at the hockey house, grimacing at the sight of Sebi’s bare ass. But not anymore. She was beaming, clearly thrilled with the story’s reception.

  Later, when we were finally alone, I asked her what that had been about.

  “What the hell, Jules? That was embarrassing.”

  “Oh, come on. It was hilarious. You’re never going to let Sebi live it down.”

  “Yeah, but we’re his friends. These people don’t know him.”

  “Relax.” She rolled her eyes. “It’s not a big deal.”