Whisper Network

by Chandler Baker

  Who were we to judge? More like, who were we not to?

  Sloane judged her appearance in the foggy metal of the elevator doors on her way to her personal training appointment with Oksana. She’d thought to cancel more than once. But Oksana didn’t exactly do cancellations and there was a chance the workout would help. She felt terrible. Mainly because of the thing with Ardie, but that wasn’t all.

  The movement of the chamber eased to a stop. The steel mouth opened and in walked Chrissy Ladner, a senior accountant at Truviv, holding a company-issued water bottle. They greeted each other good-naturedly and Chrissy took her spot next to Sloane, shoulder-to-shoulder.

  “How are things in Accounting?”

  Chrissy, small of stature, large of chutzpah, shrugged. “Same. Legal?”

  Sloane shifted her weight. “Same.” Which was true only in all the worst ways.

  Chrissy gave a soft snort. “I don’t know how you work for that guy,” she said, glancing up at the red, digital numbers reconfiguring at the top of the elevator.

  “Who?” asked Sloane, already knowing. How do you work for that guy? It felt more like accusation than commiseration.

  “Ames. We were all wondering when you were going to add him to that list.”

  The corners of Sloane’s mouth pulled down. “Who said that I did?”

  Chrissy raised her bottle as though in surrender. She’d always been no bullshit and Sloane liked running into her at Truviv events. If they worked in the same section, Sloane imagined, they’d be good friends. “Anyway, I guess we all might be working for him soon enough.”

  “You believe that?”

  Chrissy lifted her penciled eyebrows and sipped. “I wish that I didn’t. But haven’t you heard? The board met this morning. Apparently he’s as good as in.”

  Chrissy disembarked on the next floor, leaving Sloane to absorb this news alone.

  The reality was that Sloane, who was accustomed to operating at the very edge of chaos, suddenly felt herself starting to lose her balance, to skid over the cliff into real, honest-to-God turmoil. Sure, she’d felt the strings pulling for some time now, but she’d believed she had a hold of them, right there at the ends, where she could reel them back into place if need be. Chrissy’s news should hardly have come as a big surprise. But she still found herself unprepared for it.

  She believed she was seeing, for the first time, the rickety tower on which her life was constructed. Sloane worried over her cuticle. She felt as though it all—her life—might shatter. Ardie, Abigail, the school board, Ames, her job, her credit card balance, her to-do list, and even Katherine. Katherine, who represented something to Sloane, something uncomfortable: I want to be like you.

  Press any and—Jenga!

  On the eighth floor, she swiped her fob on the keypad and the glass door to the gym clicked. Her personal trainer, Oksana, was already waiting at the receptionist’s desk and she didn’t look pleased. Sloane had completely forgotten that she was running late.

  “If it helps,” Sloane said, swiping her hair into a ponytail, “I’ve only had a Lärabar today.” Though Sloane had actually had two, one for breakfast and one for lunch, and while they were healthy, they probably weren’t intended to sustain an entire human being.

  Oksana used to be an MMA fighter. That was when the women fought in a cage and tried to break each other’s arms and noses and rolled around on the floor while kicking each other’s ribs to death.

  “Twenty push-ups.” Oksana pointed to the ground in front of her. Sloane hadn’t made it into the locker room and was still wearing her narrowly tailored suit and Dolce & Gabbana heels. She hesitated until Oksana snapped her fingers and, dutifully, Sloane let go of her bag and dropped to her knees, where she began huffing and puffing through a series of push-ups, like she was in military school instead of paying Oksana an exorbitant amount per hour to be chastised for tardiness.

  For the last three push-ups, Oksana placed a foot on her back, making the exercise exponentially harder. Sloane was chagrined to find she was sweating into wool.

  “Twenty,” Sloane announced breathlessly. And at last, she was permitted to hurry into the locker room and change into proper workout attire. So long as it took no more than 120 seconds.

  Sloane tended to like people who took their jobs too seriously. Like her eyebrow lady, who claimed to be a visual artist. It showed gumption. And so, for their hour-long sessions, Sloane was willing to surrender herself, fully, to the world of Oksana.

  When she returned, Oksana informed her it would be a “leg day” and Sloane knew she was in for it. Double pulse jump lunges followed by barbell squats on top of weighted reverse lunges. By the end of the first rotation, lactic acid tore through Sloane’s thigh muscles like snake venom.

  “For how much it hurts, I really don’t understand why my legs don’t look like Carrie Underwood’s.” She panted.

  Oksana’s bubblegum popped over her lips.

  “What?” Sloane looked offended. “You’re telling me that Carrie Underwood’s legs hurt more than mine? I am suffering, Oksana. Do not make light of true suffering. It’s very passé.”

  “You think you’re the first client to try to distract me from making you work hard with conversation?”

  “No, of course not. I just think I’m the best at it.” It was true. Sloane did use her chattiness as a shield against Oksana’s sadomasochism. That was probably why she told her personal trainer more than she’d ever told her therapist. That and the fact that she only went to her therapist once, and it was five years ago. She assumed trainers were like hairdressers in that you could tell them anything. But at the moment, Sloane wanted to distract herself as much as anyone else. She was still thinking about Chrissy. About Ames.

  “Sumo squats. Go.” Oksana set a timer on her watch. Sloane was never privy to how much time was on it and it drove her mad.

  “But I did want to ask you one thing.”

  Oksana took a deep, exasperated breath.

  “Sorry, squatting and talking.” Sloane widened her legs and tried to block out the burn as she imitated ballerina pliés. Oksana studied her watch. “Okay.” Sloane’s voice was strained. “So my question for you is this.” She lowered her voice, conscious of the sweaty men pulling cables and giving themselves hernias nearby. “Do any of the men here ever, you know, try anything?”

  Oksana snorted.

  Sloane wrapped her hands around her waist as she squatted. She was beginning to get a stitch in her side. “Is that a ‘yes’ snort or a ‘no’ snort?”

  “What do you think?”

  “Yes.”

  Oksana took mercy on her and allowed her to quit sumo squatting, but then she had to transition instead to walking lunges. Oksana kept pace alongside her.

  “There are the relatively harmless ones,” she began. “The ones that walk by and shill out advice while I’m working out, like I’m supposed to care about some guy’s opinion who went to CrossFit one time.” That was the number of times Sloane had been to CrossFit too. She wheezed her appreciation. “But then there are the other ones.” She glanced sidelong at Sloane. “They hear ‘no’ and reframe it as an opportunity for ‘persistence’ or ‘relentlessness’ or whatever other corporate buzzword they’ve just learned from the most recent Ted Talk they watched on YouTube. Those are the types you have to watch out for. So buttoned up. Established. And don’t even get me started on my Instagram DMs.”

  “Dirty?” Sloane asked, legs trembling.

  “Filthier than the inside of a port-o-potty at Coachella.”

  “Okay, then,” Sloane said. “Do you just put up with it?”

  Oksana laughed. “No. It’s all fairly organized, really. The female trainers here, we have this system. First, we hire female receptionists. Only female receptionists. That’s key.” Sloane glanced at the young, redheaded woman standing behind the front desk. “If a client becomes a problem,” Oksana continued, “we ask the receptionist to highlight his name with yellow in the computer file. If
that client requests evening or early morning training, the receptionist tells him that the female trainers are booked up or have off. If a problem client gets too out of hand, we code him red. And if that’s the case, all the female trainers become too busy to work with him at all.”

  “That’s kind of brilliant.”

  “Why, is someone giving you trouble?”

  “No more than the standard fare. Code yellow, I guess you could say.” She hoped that was true. She felt she’d committed to it being true. She had tried to put the office conversation with Ames, during which she’d ostensibly agreed to ignore whatever it was that was or was not happening with Katherine, behind her. And whatever definitely had happened in the years before Katherine. But it was like the laundry hampers at home: no matter how many times she shoved the clothes down, eventually they overflowed the top again. She was better, however, at ignoring the laundry.

  Bigger office. More pay. Better benefits.

  She tried to look at it the way Ardie would. Dollars and cents. Or was the phrase actually dollars and sense? She didn’t know. She thought it might make a difference.

  “Right. Well, just remember, hands on the shoulders. Front foot planted. Aim higher than you think is right.” Oksana demonstrated in the air: knee to testicles.

  “Still looking for something a bit more subtle, I think, but thanks.” And she meant it.

  After she had rinsed her body and changed back into her office attire, Sloane returned to her office. The phones were ringing. The printers were chugging. Secretaries were typing. Everything was normal. Except for one thing: Ames Garrett was about to become the company’s next CEO.

  Employee Statements

  13-APR

  Marvin Jefferson:

  Ames was a stand-up guy. Anyone who had ever met him knew that. He had a beautiful family. He worked his rear end off for this company. Every single employee in this company with stock options should be bowing down to that man in gratitude. That’s the truth. When I heard his name had been added to that stupid list circulating then, well, that was immediate proof to me that the whole darn thing was a load of crap. No good deed goes unpunished, I’ll tell you that for sure. Ames learned that the hard way.

  Bob Rogers:

  What I want to know is, where’s the list of women? Some woman from accounting asked me to go get a drink and I didn’t call the police on her. She’s seven years older than me. You think that was wanted attention? I don’t think so.

  Zane Spivey:

  I think you’d have to be pretty naïve not to know that the types of things detailed on the BAD list were going on. I mean, I’ve found a condom and lady’s underwear in the men’s room. Did I know about Ames’s behavior in particular? I’d rather not say.

  Josiah Swift:

  You know what I think? I think someone—someone high up who didn’t want Ames to be CEO—paid those women to add his name to the list. That list is a life-ruiner. I bet that sort of thing happens more than we think. Corporate espionage and backstabbing and all that. These are high-dollar positions. Is it really so crazy to think that the very purpose for the list’s creation was to bring people down professionally? I think it’s worth looking into. Are you writing that down?

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  3-APR

  The thing we would articulate, far too late, as it turned out, was that when a building’s burning, no one just whispers, “Fire!” No one sits quietly at their desk, diligently completing their work and checking for typos while the smoke pours in overhead. No one cries for “help” softly, under their breath, so as not to disturb their neighbors.

  So why did we?

  Shhh, don’t tell anyone but … Keep this quiet, please, but … We haven’t told anyone else, but … This stays between us, but …

  Perhaps the people closest to us would manage to evacuate and the people closest to them and to them and to them, but whispers could only carry so far. Such was the purpose of whispering—to ensure that not everyone heard.

  Hush, but the building is in flames.

  Rosalita had never understood why her son couldn’t hear out of one of his ears. She often thought about it as she pushed a vacuum down the carpeted floors, trying to imagine what it must be like inside her little boy’s head. Quiet-loud, he’d once told her.

  She hated vacuuming days where she had to be at work a full two hours early, even though she was only working third shift. The pay, however, was better.

  The clock on her phone read: 7:01 P.M. when she finished going over the lobby. She flipped the switch and the roar of the vacuum died. She wrapped the cord around the crook of her thumb and elbow, pleased at the tight wad of muscle bulging from her biceps. She had been following exercise videos on YouTube.

  She pushed the vacuum over to the next outlet, plugged it in. Crystal hadn’t showed up to work today. It was a fact that Rosalita found bothersome, mostly because Rosalita wouldn’t get paid double for doing Crystal’s half of the work. If she was supposed to worry about Crystal, young, pregnant, and expected to be at work right now, she was deliberately trying not to. She wasn’t the girl’s mother.

  The halls were mostly empty, the secretaries and runners having already left for the evening. Rosalita hummed a tuneless song as she worked, not because she was feeling happy, but because she was bored and frustrated. The happy, sitcom version of her would be grateful for this job. Rosalita didn’t know how to be thankful for a job that required her to turn off her brain for eight to ten hours at a time, to be a machine. Not even a machine, because all she had to do was push one, back and forth, back and forth, until she’d lulled herself into a stupor finally broken by the sound of a man’s voice, clipped, talking into a phone.

  When she heard him coming—the seal of the lobby doors slicing apart, slacks brushing together at the inseam—Rosalita had dueling urges: bend down and pretend to fiddle with the cord or don’t. The result landed somewhere in between.

  She stood in the crosshairs. The voice, something faintly West Texas in the way that he pronounced his “e”s as “a”s, a quirk she recognized from her uncle’s wife, who was born in Rule, cut in and out with the rhythm of the conversation, surfacing closer each time.

  Ames Garrett. She committed his full name to memory only after.

  He snatched the phone from his ear, transitioned immediately to tapping at his screen. The wave of white snaked through his dark hair. There were patches of razor burn, dried pricks of blood left behind on his neck.

  People on the upper floors walked with speed in direct proportion to how important they believed themselves to be. When Ames walked, loose papers fluttered on the secretarial stations as he passed.

  He would go by without noticing, she hoped. But then there was a chance glance up, instinctive so as not to collide with whatever—whoever—was in his way. She sidestepped and shrank into the wall, which had the texture of cool fingerprints pressed to the backs of her arms.

  Ames stopped directly in front of her. The cuffs of his suit pants broke at the ankle. “Oh, um,” he snapped. Twice. It reminded her of a thumb pressed over the spark wheel of a lighter. “Glad I caught you. You mind coming in to empty my bin now?” He made a “follow me” gesture with his whole arm. “UberEats for lunch. Tired of smelling like Korean barbecue.”

  Do you mind?

  It was a formality. It created the illusion of choice and decency. She had been surprised when he’d spoken to her that day in Ardie’s office. Had it only been a warmup for this, whatever this was?

  She followed without comment and went straight to the corner behind the desk, where Ames’s trash bin was located. Her body listened for the click of the door shutting behind her.

  But Ames had moved beyond it without bothering to close her in. He pulled a can of Coca-Cola from a coaster on his desk and popped the tab. He tipped his head back and let out a smack of satisfaction when he’d taken a large gulp. He was in a good mood.

  “How long have you been cleaning here?” he asked, as th
ough they were old friends who’d bumped into one another after a long while.

  She stood, feet hip-width apart, the full pail held at her waist. The power differential loomed massive. She didn’t know enough about Korean food to know whether there was any left inside.

  “Nine years, give or take.” She’d always liked that phrase, as she did most idioms she learned. Get the hang of it. Before you know it. Blow off steam.

  The corners of his mouth turned down, as though he were impressed. He lifted the Coke can to his mouth again. “You may have heard that I’m poised to be promoted to CEO of the company. Chief Executive Officer,” he explained.

  She was careful not to let her face move. “The walls are thick,” she said. She hadn’t heard. For all she knew, the jobs of the men and women who worked on these floors were to tap nonsense into their keyboards, yell into speakerphones, and shuffle papers. In substance, it was a black hole to Rosalita, as she assumed her world was to them.

  “Desmond was a loss, no doubt.” Ames shoved a hand in his pocket. “Truly saddened me. We’d been through a lot together.” He watched Rosalita, who at once understood that there was a script to this meeting that she hadn’t been provided. She said nothing. “I don’t expect any problems from the cleaning staff. Is that right?”

  She shifted the waste bin to the other hand. “I can’t imagine why there would be any more than there would be problems from management,” she said, pleased by the steadiness in her voice.

  And with this, she knew she was permitted to take her leave. The dismissal was implied. He’d said what he needed to say. But she hadn’t.

  She looked to his desk, where sterling frames held pictures of two small children. “Yours?” she asked, picking up one of the photographs. One of the boys looked more like Ames, but without the odd streak in his hair.