I drank my coffee too fast on the subway ride down and burned my tongue. My pace quickened on the sidewalk in midtown, to keep up with the other workers hurrying toward their air-conditioned refuges. Outside my building, I caught a glimpse of my reflection in the glass and started—I wasn’t used to seeing myself in a suit. Up on the thirty-ninth floor, a receptionist typed rapidly behind an imposing front desk branded with Spire’s logo. She sized me up in one glance. “First day?” she said.
I’d gone through several rounds of interviews back in the spring. My third and final interview had been with Michael Casey, the second in command at Spire. Back in March, he’d come to fetch me himself from the thirty-ninth-floor lobby, jerking his head for me to follow. He was on the short side, and his hair was going salty from gray. Other people stepped back as Michael walked past with an impatient stride, giving him a wide berth. In his office, he pointed for me to sit. He looked pissed off. He hadn’t even shaken my hand. He must hate this part, I thought—sifting through résumés, trying to discern some difference among us. It was all a big waste of his time. The interview was doomed. It was stupid of me to ever think I’d get the job. But then Michael picked up my résumé, and at that moment his expression changed. Softened. He looked up at me, back down at the résumé, and nodded carefully.
“You’re from Canada,” he said.
“Yes, sir.”
“British Columbia—near Vancouver?”
“In the interior, actually, about seven hours away.”
“Small town?”
“Yes, sir.”
Michael crumpled up the résumé. “Tell me about yourself.”
I launched into the routine I’d been perfecting the previous few months. My experience was thin, with none of the internships that everyone else had done, but I had other talking points. An economics major interested in the efficiency of the free market. A varsity athlete who knows the value of teamwork and discipline. So on and so forth. But Michael interrupted me before I was even halfway done.
“No, no, I already got all that from your résumé. Tell me more about where you’re from. Your hometown. How’s the economy doing out there?”
“My hometown?” I said, scrambling to rearrange the words in my head. Michael nodded. “Well. It’s really small. There’s not much to do. We like to joke that there are more bears than people.”
Michael smiled. He nodded again for me to continue.
“Everyone who can plays hockey. That’s the main source of entertainment.”
“You played? You must have been pretty good to get to Yale.”
“I’m all right.”
Michael barked a short laugh. “You’re all right,” he repeated. “That might be the first humble sentence ever spoken in this office. What do people do for work?”
“My parents run a grocery store. There’s some tourism a few towns over, so some people commute to that. And logging is pretty big in the region.”
We went on like that for a while. To my surprise, Michael seemed engaged. Some transformation had happened. Maybe my lack of experience wasn’t such a bad thing.
They didn’t seem to think it was, in any case. Two days later, I got the call from Spire. The job paid more than any of the others I’d applied to, a six-figure sum that I couldn’t quite believe. I accepted on the spot. I’d be the only person from Yale joining Spire that year. I was certain the old small-town Evan Peck was gone, once and for all.
I was assigned to sit next to Roger, another analyst, a former tight end at Stanford with a thick Alabama drawl. We didn’t have much to do early on. When we weren’t in training sessions, we wasted a lot of time on ESPN or skimming the news, only jumping into action when the higher-ups staffed us on something. But it looked bad to leave before 10:00 p.m., so none of us did, no matter what. There were five analysts in total that year, all of us men, which wasn’t that remarkable—Spire overall was mostly male. Roger was our ringleader, the one who stayed latest and arrived earliest and generally assumed authority. He led the charge every night for postwork drinks at a bar called McGuigan’s near the office, and already it felt like a mandatory part of the routine.
“So how was the first week?” Julia asked. This was Saturday morning. We’d brought bagels to the park along the East River. Every night that first week, Julia was already asleep when I got home. It annoyed me a little, that she couldn’t bother to stay awake. Her job ended many hours before mine did. This was the first time we’d really seen each other since the weekend before.
“Good,” I said. “I think. I don’t know. It’s hard to tell what it’s really going to be like. It’s all just training sessions for now.”
“What about that guy—Michael? The one who interviewed you. Have you seen him yet?”
“I passed him in the hall, but he was talking to someone else. We didn’t say anything.” Truthfully, I wasn’t sure whether he even recognized me.
Julia nodded. She was quieter than usual. She seemed to be gazing at the buildings across the river in Astoria, but her eyes had that glassy quality of staring at nothing in particular. There was a poppy seed stuck to the tip of her nose. I leaned over and brushed it away. She turned and then smiled. Back to normal.
“Everything okay?”
“Fine,” she said. “Just distracted. Thinking about work.”
“What’s up?”