The rink was closed due to weather. I walked away, down Sixth Avenue, past the Van Lewig Building where Chip himself was said to keep his New York office. I pictured the mogul smoking a cigar, looking down from a high window at the masses below. I pictured his wife waving smoke from her face.
Muzak played in the C&S lobby. Leather chairs sat empty. Men walked briskly in and out of elevators. Piped-in air conditioning chilled the building and I stepped to the front desk and asked to be connected to Michael’s office.
When the assistant called, there was no answer.
I asked for Ricky’s office. No answer either.
I asked the assistant if she’d seen Michael and I showed her a picture on my phone. She said a lot of people passed through the lobby each day and they were all white men in dark suits with quarter-inch stubble and gelled hair. She suggested I try Michael’s cellphone. I thanked her for her time.
I was about to exit when I felt an arm around me. The arm belonged to Edward Jin, Michael’s boss. I did not have warm feelings for the man. He always managed to touch some part of my body: a forearm squeeze or a head pat or an arm around my shoulder. I asked if he’d seen Michael. He invited me upstairs. We rode the elevator in silence.
I was not expecting the piles of cardboard boxes that filled the hallways and cubicle areas. People knelt on the floor feeding paper to shredders. Bloomberg terminals blinked unattended. Desks sat empty. A watercooler lay overturned, leaking onto the tile. I followed Edward into his office.
“Sit,” he said, and indicated a chair piled high with paperwork.
“Can I move these papers?”
“I’d rather you didn’t.” He poured whiskey into a small plastic cup, the kind they give you to rinse at the dentist.
“No thanks,” I said.
“Oh it wasn’t for you,” said Edward. He drank from the cup and refilled.
“Where’s Michael?”
“No idea. Haven’t seen him all day.” He took a second shot of whiskey.
“So why did you bring me up here?”
“Just thought I’d check in, make sure you’re set for the next step.”
“Next step?”
“The place is swarming with Japanese if you haven’t noticed.”
I hadn’t noticed.
“Utter chaos. We thought the deal was on, but now the SEC’s up in our shiz and we’ve got to shred everything in sight. I don’t know much Japanese because my dad was Mr. Assimilation. Wouldn’t even touch sushi until I was in my thirties. Now I love the stuff, but only the real American kind. I put the ginger right on top of the roll. An embarrassment. Meanwhile C&S thinks I’m the guy to charm these fuckers at karaoke every night. You know how many sloppy renditions of ‘Livin’ on a Prayer’ I’ve sung? It’s getting to the point where I can’t tell whether I’m drunk or sober.”
“You’re drunk.”
“You may be right. Anyway, I wanted to make sure things were okay on your end because I know Michael has more paper tied up in this drowning ship than nearly anyone.”
This was news to me.
“There were memos going around for months telling everyone to diversify. It’s not like we didn’t see this coming. But Michael’s been a bit checked out. Or maybe he’s an idiot. Pardon me. I didn’t mean that. He’s not an idiot. Just very dumb. Nice guy, but very stupid, low IQ. I hope everything works out.”
I poured myself a drink. The whiskey tasted terrible.
“Bottom shelf,” said Edward. “End times.”
I exited Jin’s office and walked down the hall to Michael’s. The last time I’d visited was when he’d been upgraded into this office, a south-facing room with floor-to-ceiling windows. He’d had grand plans to decorate, but I saw now that he’d never done it. The walls were empty. The leather couch was empty. It seemed to be the only room in the building not overflowing with paperwork. Even the trash bin was empty. The shredder was room-temperature, unplugged.
Michael
I followed my therapist into his office, plopped myself onto one of his Eames chairs, unloosed a cough drop, lay my legs on the ottoman, and closed my eyes.
I’d been to this office once a week for some twenty-odd years. When I first started seeing Dr. Becker, I was a depressed college student, though I’d have been hesitant to use that term. All I knew was that I stayed in bed for days at a time, sleeping through weekends, and sometimes into the week, missing classes; that rising to face the morning felt like a monumental task. I wasn’t planning to kill myself, but I thought about suicide a lot, imagining, in methodical detail, the way I’d do it: buying a stepladder from the hardware store on 109th and Broadway, hanging the rope from an exposed pipe in my dorm’s laundry room. I knew these feelings weren’t normal, and I’d met this girl—this woman—Wendy, and I wanted to be normal.
From the get-go, Dr. Becker had pushed medication. I was resistant at first, fearful in the trite, familiar ways: that I would become a different person, unfeeling, delibidinized, dimmed into hippie placidity. My doctor did his best to quell these fears. I remember, once, he told me I was giving the drug “too much credit,” that, as a person who’d experimented with everything from ketamine to cortisone anti-itch supplements, and who’d spent my senior year of high school in a marijuana haze, I was—in so many words—acting like a little bitch. But it was my experience with stonerism that made me suspicious. I’d lived under the delusion that smoking marijuana at hourly intervals had no effect on things like my short-term memory, levels of motivation, or enjoyment of certain Southern rap groups. It was only after
