## Chapter 2 I handed Victoria her phone and took the coffee back to my desk because I couldn't think of what else to do with it. Victoria watched me leave the break room, and I gave her a little nod that was supposed to mean everything was fine. I probably should have said something else, but I was already walking away. The email to Aries was still in my drafts. Same complaint, same attachment, same paragraph I had spent Friday afternoon trying to make sound professional. I clicked into it and put my fingers on the keyboard. My calves hurt under the desk. I stretched one leg out, then the other, trying to find a way to sit that would let me forget about them. I remembered waking up late on Saturday. I remembered playing games with my friend. There were parts of the afternoon I couldn't have given a very good account of, sure, but getting dressed before six-thirty and sitting in Victoria's car? I would have remembered some of that. She said I had complained most of the way up. That sounded like me, which somehow made it worse. I kept seeing my face in the photograph whenever I looked away from the screen. I unlocked my phone, then put it facedown. I didn't even know what to search. I wanted the letter from the journal. I had left it at home that morning, when sore legs had still seemed like something I could explain. By the time I found the dirt on the shoes, I was already late. Bradley stopped beside my desk. "Have you talked to Nolan?" I looked at the open draft. "I'm working on it." "Come in for a minute." He went back to his office without waiting for me. I took a drink of coffee so I would have a reason to remain seated for another few seconds, burned my tongue, and followed him. Bradley's office had originally been the small conference room. I still thought of it that way until I saw his name beside the door. His daughter had drawn something on the whiteboard under the sales numbers, a person with an enormous head standing beside a smaller person with an enormous head. Nobody had erased it. If I left something unrelated to work on a whiteboard, I was pretty sure somebody would have had a conversation with me. He turned his monitor a few inches so I could see Nolan's name at the top of an email. "He's called twice this morning." "I've been here twenty minutes." "He called Friday too." "And I was checking the quote." Bradley leaned back. He was wearing a blue shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and I had the irritating impression that he had already done several useful things that morning. He usually had. That was one of his more difficult qualities. "Derek, I need you to call him. We have to get this moving." "The quote matches the approval. I checked." "I know." Bradley opened an earlier message. "They said they were replacing equipment in an existing room." "Right." "And they asked about access for cleaning." "Which is in the documentation." "What layout did engineering review?" I shifted in the chair. "They haven't sent a layout." "Did you ask for one?" "I asked them to confirm the specifications." Bradley looked at me for a second, then scrolled back up. I could already see how the conversation was going to go. He was going to take each thing I had done and explain the additional thing I should have done, until sending a quote required personally visiting every factory in California with a tape measure. I was a sales associate. We had engineers. Aries presumably employed people who knew the size of their own room. "They think it will fit against the wall," he said. "They need to know whether they can open it up there and service it. That's what they've been asking." "Then they should have checked before approving it." "Start by saying you're sorry we've ended up with the wrong package for what they need. Then find out what we have to fix." I looked at him. "You want me to apologize for them ordering the wrong thing?" "I want you to help them get the right thing." "They signed it." "We can deal with the approval and the cost after we understand the problem. Right now he can't get you on the phone." "I sent both options," I said. "I can't make people read." "Did you recommend one?" "I sent the comparison." "Call him and find out what we need to get engineering involved. Today, Derek." He glanced at his screen again. "And I need updates on the other leads we went through last week. A couple of those are still sitting there." I stood up. "Okay." "Do you need help with any of them?" "No." I said it too quickly, but I was already at the door. At my desk, I reopened the comparison sheet and enlarged it until the two model numbers filled most of the screen. I wanted it there while we talked. If Nolan started pretending he had never received the information, I wanted to be able to read it back to him. He answered on the second ring. "Nolan, it's Derek at Meridian." "Finally." I moved the phone slightly away from my ear, then put it back. "I've been reviewing your order." "Good. Are we getting this fixed?" "Well, the package in production is the one on the approved quote." There was a little silence. Somebody on his end was speaking in the background. "Derek. We've been through that." "Right, but what's being built is what you approved." "And I'm telling you we can't get in there to clean or service it once it's installed. I told you how much room we've got." "I sent you the comparison between the two packages." "Yes. You sent me a PDF. I asked which one would work in that space." I clicked the email chain. My hand had started moving the mouse in little circles while I waited for it to open. "You said price was the deciding factor." "Between two things we could actually use. I wasn't asking for the cheapest machine you had." "Then that's something that needed to be clarified before approval." "That's what I was trying to do when I called you." I could hear him breathing. I was breathing through my nose too, making an effort to do it quietly. There were sentences Bradley would have used here. I could practically hear them. Let me look into that. Let's get the right people on the call. Something that would commit the rest of my day to cleaning up Nolan's problem while he went back to whatever important thing he thought entitled him to talk to me this way. "I've got your signature in front of me," I said. "Are you an idiot, or are you just determined not to help me?" My face went hot. "You don't get to call me an idiot because you bought the wrong fucking thing." My voice was much louder than the conversation had been until then. A chair stopped rolling somewhere behind me. Nolan said, "Put Bradley on." "You approved it. That's what approval means." "Put Bradley on the phone." Bradley was already standing in his doorway. I looked at him, then at the transfer button, and pressed it hard enough that the plastic clicked against the desk. For a few seconds I couldn't work out whether I had transferred the call or hung up. Then his phone rang. I set mine down. The office had become interested in its screens. Victoria was sitting two rows over with her hand on her mouse. She looked at me once, and I gave her the same stupid nod I had given her in the break room. Bradley shut his door. I stayed at my desk until lunch. I answered an easy email, moved a few files into a folder, and kept watching his door. Every time it opened, something tightened under my ribs. But he went to the printer, came back, took another call. Nobody came over. By noon I was angry that nobody had asked for my side of it. I drove home on the surface streets. Traffic was lighter than it had been that morning, and I made it there fast enough to start believing I could eat, read the letter, and be back before anybody noticed how long I'd been gone. The journal was in the drawer. I opened it at the kitchen table and found the hike entry, still in my handwriting. There was a spot where the pen had caught on the paper. I remembered that. I touched it, then unfolded the letter and read it from the top. Nothing had been added. Nobody had written to congratulate me or explain why Victoria remembered me complaining on a mountain I had never seen. Whoever had sent it apparently considered the original instructions sufficient. `Choose a moment when the decision was yours and either path was possible.` That seemed straightforward until I tried to apply it to anything I actually wanted. I wanted Calder to pay me more. I wanted Bradley's office. I wanted customers who could explain what they needed and then accept responsibility for what they bought. I could imagine all of those things clearly. Finding my part in making them happen took longer. I got a pen and a piece of printer paper. The letter said each page could be used once, and I didn't know what counted as using it. I wasn't going to waste one finding out. Tearing out a page was supposed to undo a change, but I hadn't tested that either. On the printer paper I wrote, `Buy Bitcoin.` I had heard of it years ago. I could remember people talking about it. There had probably been a moment when I could have bought some. But how much? And why would I have kept it? I could write that I held on until it was worth a fortune, but that was the part I knew now. At the time I would have sold as soon as it made enough to buy something I wanted, assuming I hadn't panicked and sold when it fell. I tried a sentence about believing in the technology. I couldn't have explained the technology now, sitting at the table with the benefit of all this regret. It seemed unlikely I could persuade an earlier version of myself to care about it for years. I crossed it out harder than necessary. Underneath I wrote, `Get promoted before Bradley.` That was Calder's decision. I crossed it out. `Ask for a raise.` I had asked for raises. I could remember the conversations, the careful talk about growth and taking the next step, which seemed to mean doing a more expensive job at the current price until somebody decided I had done it for long enough. Bradley had apparently understood how that worked. He had arrived after me and spent his first year volunteering for things I was glad nobody had asked me to do. At the time I thought he was making a tactical error. You couldn't give people that much access to your time and expect them to stop asking. I still thought that. I also wanted his salary. The microwave beeped. I hadn't remembered starting it until I heard the sound. My lunch had been going around behind me while I sat there trying to become independently wealthy. I ate standing at the counter with the letter open beside the tray. `Changes take effect Sunday night while you sleep.` It was Monday. Even if I found something useful, I had almost a week to wait. I had been sitting there as though I could walk back into Meridian after lunch and find everybody rearranged. My phone said 12:48. I was supposed to have been back eight minutes ago. I put the journal away and took the rest of the food with me. At a red light, I ate the parts that had cooled enough to pick up with my fingers. I spent most of the drive composing an apology that made it clear Nolan had insulted me first. Bradley came to my desk around two. "I've got Aries for now," he said. "Send me everything you've got, including your notes from the calls." "He called me an idiot." "I heard you." "So you understand why I was upset." "Send me the notes, Derek." I forwarded the emails. The call notes took longer because most of what I had written down was a model number and a price. I added a few sentences from memory, deleted one that sounded bad, and sent them over. Bradley replied, `Thanks. What measurements do we have?` `Nothing engineering can use. That's part of the problem.` His next reply was just `Thanks.` By the end of the day, I had started treating that as evidence that we were moving on. Tuesday was quiet. Wednesday was quiet too. I arrived late once because I had stayed in bed reading about companies that hired remote salespeople, which I told myself counted as taking my situation seriously. The listings all wanted somebody motivated, proactive, comfortable owning the customer relationship. Apparently everybody had compared notes. By Wednesday my legs felt normal. That bothered me when I noticed it. For two days I had been able to press on a muscle and get proof that the weekend had changed. Now I was left with dirty shoes, a photograph on Victoria's phone, and Victoria herself asking whether I was getting enough sleep. I told her I was fine and asked about something on her screen. She let me change the subject. I was grateful enough to stay and listen to the answer. The next customer problem came in Thursday morning. A woman wanted to know whether one of our quoted options would work with the way her line was set up. I knew which engineer could answer. I started forwarding her message, then stopped to see whether I could find the answer myself. That would be faster than explaining the whole thing, and engineering would probably ask for more information anyway. I opened the catalog, got distracted by another email, and left the forwarded message in drafts. When I saw it again after lunch, I moved it to Friday's list. There was an Aries email that afternoon too. Nolan thanked Bradley for getting the right people involved and said he would send the remaining measurements. I read it twice, irritated by how friendly he sounded. Apparently he could be perfectly pleasant when somebody else was paying attention to him. Friday afternoon I was looking at a car listing when Calder sent me a message asking me to come upstairs. I closed the listing and checked the time. It was 3:41. Late enough that the day was nearly over. Early enough that there was still time to make it unpleasant. Calder had a folder in front of him. There was another chair beside his desk, occupied by a woman from HR whose name I knew and couldn't retrieve. She said hello. I said hello and sat down. "Derek, we've made the decision to end your employment with Meridian. Effective today." I kept looking at him. He had delivered the entire sentence before I had understood the first part of it. "Because of Nolan?" "The Aries call was part of it. The larger issue is follow-through. We've had this conversation several times." "I was going to explain what happened." "Bradley explained what happened." That made sense. Of course Bradley had gotten there first. "The client approved the order," I said. He opened the folder. There were dates in it. That was what caught me. All those days I had experienced as separate, each with its own explanation, had been put together on a few sheets of paper. A quote that had sat for more than a week. A customer who had gone elsewhere before I followed up. An order sent downstream without the information the next person needed. I remembered them as he named them. I had reasons for every one, and by the third I could hear how much talking it would take to get through all the reasons. "Bradley asked us to give you more time after the last review," he said. "He thought you could turn it around. We're still getting the same issues." I looked at the corner of the folder where my name was printed. "I can fix it." It was embarrassing how quickly that came out. A minute before I had been ready to explain why they had no reason to complain. "The decision is made," Calder said. The woman from HR started telling me what was in the packet she had brought. I watched her move one sheet aside to show me another. I tried to pay attention because there were practical things I needed to understand, but I kept catching on the idea that I was supposed to leave the building and not come back. I had been there that morning. I had put a container in the refrigerator. There were things on my computer I hadn't finished, and some ridiculous part of me wanted to remind Calder that someone would have to do them. He asked for my badge. I took it off the clip and set it on the desk. That was when I believed him. I had imagined leaving Meridian many times. Usually I had another offer. Sometimes Calder asked what it would take to keep me, and I got to consider the question before saying it was too late. In none of those versions did I come downstairs carrying a folder and have to ask where we kept empty boxes. I found an empty paper box near the printer and carried it back to my desk with the lid tucked under my arm. There wasn't much. A mug, a charger, the little stand I kept my phone on. The bottom drawer held a protein bar with the wrapper split at one end. I threw it away. I picked up the pen beside my keyboard, looked at the Meridian name on it, and set it down again. Victoria came over. "Do you want me to get anything?" "Apparently I'm done here." "I know." I didn't like that she knew. I also didn't want to have to tell her. She picked up my water bottle from behind the monitor and put it in the box. "Your lunch is in the fridge." "They can have it." "I'm not leaving it in there," she said, and went to get it. While she was gone, I wound the charger around my hand even though there was plenty of room to drop it loose. She put the lunch in the box and stayed beside me while I finished. I wanted her to leave and wanted somebody to remain standing there for another minute. "Text me," she said. "Yeah." "You can still text me." I nodded and lifted the box. It was light enough to carry in one hand, which somehow made the whole thing worse. Bradley's door was closed when I passed it. I was glad. I had no idea what I would have said to him. Outside, I put the box on the passenger seat. The mug tipped against the water bottle. I took out the mug and put it in a cup holder so I wouldn't have to listen to it knocking around on the drive home. Then I sat there with the engine running. I could go home. I had spent the whole week wanting to. The apartment would be quiet, the couch would be where I left it, and now I could stay there for as long as I wanted. I picked up my phone and opened my bank balance. Closed it. I didn't want to make the numbers fit yet. I drove toward the beach. It took a while to find parking. I passed two paid lots and circled back to a meter, where I stood debating how much time to buy. Being unemployed was already interfering with a walk. I paid for two hours because one would have made me keep checking, left my shoes in the car, and went down to the water. There were people out in it, dark heads beyond the breaking waves. Farther up the beach, somebody was trying to shake sand out of a towel while the wind blew most of it back onto their legs. I walked until my feet were cold. Then I turned around and walked the other way, having reached no useful conclusions except that Nolan was still an asshole and I was the one without a job. At some point my anger started repeating itself. I had explained the signed approval, the phone call, and Bradley's promotion enough times that even in my own head I wanted to skip ahead. I sat on a low wall near the showers and checked my work email out of habit. It wanted me to sign in again. I put the phone away. "Derek?" Bradley was coming from the parking lot with a board under his arm and a wetsuit pulled up to his waist. He stopped beside the wall and shifted his bare feet on the pavement. Without his work clothes he looked less certain of what to do with me. "Hey," I said. "Didn't know you came down here." "Apparently I do now." He glanced toward the water. "You okay?" "Pretty good. Light schedule next week." He didn't laugh. I picked a small piece of shell from the bottom of my foot and dropped it beside the wall. "Calder said you'd been defending me." "Yeah." "Why?" Bradley looked at me as if it was an odd question. "Because I thought you could do the job. I still think you can." He adjusted his grip on the board. "Remember that quote where purchasing had put in the wrong voltage? You caught it before anyone else. Then the corrected quote sat in your drafts until I asked where it was. That's what I mean. You'd already done the part that required knowing something." "I was waiting on a price." "I know. You told me. Then I called for the price." I picked at another bit of shell. It was harder to hear him say what I was good at with the rest attached. "You could have told me it was that bad." Bradley set the tail of the board on his foot. "I told you we needed to get those accounts moving. More than once." "I didn't know it was a firing conversation." "I was trying to keep it from being one." I looked down at my hands. There was salt drying white on the side of one thumb. I rubbed it with the other until it disappeared. "What happened with Aries?" "Engineering's looking at a different arrangement. Nolan's getting us the layout measurements we were missing." "So he hadn't given us everything." "No." I looked up, ready to make something of that. Bradley said, "That's why we needed to ask." "He still didn't have to talk to me like that." "I know. I told him that." I hadn't expected that answer. It left me with nothing prepared to say next. He started pulling the wetsuit over his shoulders. I watched him struggle with one sleeve, then help it along with his teeth. This was the man who had my office. He had a wife and kids, apparently defended me in meetings, and still had enough time left to go surfing on a Friday. I wanted to ask how often he came down here, whether he went home first, what time his kids went to bed. I couldn't decide which question to start with. "Any good?" I asked, nodding at the water. He looked out. "Kind of a mess." "Why bother, then?" "It's when I've got time." He bent to fasten the leash around his ankle. A wave folded over almost all at once, leaving white water across the place where a man had been trying to stand. "Seems like a lot of work for that." Bradley followed my look. "Well, you've got to surf the waves that are there." I glanced at him to see whether he was doing something with that. He was checking the strap around his ankle. "Anyways," he said, straightening up. "I've got to get in before it gets worse." He stood there another second. "Take care of yourself, Derek." "Yeah. You too." I watched him walk down to the water. For a while he did nothing especially impressive. He waded out, got pushed back, climbed onto the board, and paddled. I lost track of him among the other people before I saw him catch anything. After a while I got up and walked back down to the wet sand. Nolan had asked me which package I would buy. I had remembered that during Monday's call too, and hurried past it. He had said it in almost those exact words. If this were your line, which would you put in? I had told him it depended on his requirements. He had started describing the gap between the existing equipment and the wall, and I had been looking at the time because there were several more quotes in my queue. I sent the comparison sheet. The dimensions were right there. He could measure the space himself. It hadn't occurred to me to ask how anybody was supposed to get around the thing once it was hooked up. I could have called engineering that day. I knew the number. I had called it before. Somebody there would probably have asked me for information I didn't have, and I would have had to call Nolan again. I could remember thinking that too. It would turn one task into several. Sending the sheet let me mark the quote as sent and move on. The water reached my feet while I was looking down. I stepped back and checked the parking time on my phone. I went home before it expired. At home I carried in the box and mug, left them just inside the door, and put my lunch in the refrigerator. I took out the journal and wrote `Take work seriously` on the printer paper from Monday. It looked like something Bradley would put in a review. I tried `Stop being lazy`, which was at least shorter. I had told myself that plenty of times. Usually in bed, with the lights out, making plans for a version of the following morning in which I woke up wanting to do everything. I left the paper there and ordered dinner. Then I remembered I was unemployed and went back into the app to see whether I could still cancel. I couldn't. I ate too much of it, smoked, and spent the rest of the night watching people explain things I would never need to know. Around midnight I opened the journal again and couldn't remember the useful thing I had been about to write earlier. Saturday I woke before nine and reached for my phone to see how much of the weekend I had left. There was a pleasant second when I remembered I didn't have to go to work Monday. Then I remembered why. I lay there anyway. Getting out of bed seemed unlikely to improve anything immediately, and for once there was nobody I had to convince otherwise. My mother called while I was making coffee. I watched it ring, waited until it stopped, and sent her a message saying I would call later. She replied that there was no hurry and asked whether I was having a good weekend. I put the phone face down. The coffee came out too strong because I hadn't bothered measuring it. I drank it sitting on the couch with the television on, and at some point an entire program ended without me knowing what had happened in it. I opened my resume after lunch. It was still named for an old application, and the first thing I did was spend several minutes deciding what to call the new file. Under Meridian I had written that I managed client relationships. I tried to improve that sentence. Managed sounded better than handled. Cultivated sounded ridiculous. I went back to managed. Farther down I had written something about making sure customers got the equipment they needed. I took that out because I could hear Nolan reading it. There were other things I could change. I kept coming back to them while I tried to work on the resume. My body, for instance. The journal could presumably get me to the gym years ago. A fitter version of me might be better at interviews. Or I could have gone on a date I had canceled, moved somewhere less expensive, picked a different major. Soon I had so many possible lives going that I couldn't finish a sentence about the one where I had worked at Meridian. There were jobs I could apply for. I found three that were close enough to what I had done, although the salary ranges gave me no reason to be excited. One application wanted a separate account. Another wanted me to retype information that was already on the resume. I saved the links and returned to the scratch paper. By then it seemed sensible to find out what the journal could do before spending the rest of the weekend applying for another version of the job I had just lost. Sunday afternoon I finally unpacked the box by the door. The charger went beside the couch. I washed the mug and put the phone stand on the desk in the spare bedroom, where I would presumably be looking for jobs. I left the empty box on the floor next to the kitchen table and spread the scratch paper out again. I could fix Monday. I could write that I apologized to Nolan, asked for the layout, and stayed calm when he was rude. Bradley had told me what to do before I made the call. I wrote a few lines and imagined going back to my desk, with my charger and water bottle back where they belonged. Calder might still be unhappy about the other things. I could go back to the beginning of the week and finish those too. For a few minutes that was enough. I wanted the badge back. I wanted to wake Monday and find out the meeting in Calder's office had happened only to the version of me who remembered it. Then I imagined the rest of Monday. The same desk. Bradley asking where things were. Looking at his office while I waited for lunch. I would have a job again, and I would still be thirty, sitting in exactly the place I had wanted to get out of on Thursday. If I could reach back a week, I could try reaching back farther. The letter hadn't said a week was the limit. I looked at the promotion sentence I had crossed out. I still wanted that. I wanted Calder asking for my opinion. I wanted enough money that opening an unexpected bill wasn't an event. If Bradley could get there from the same starting job, there had to have been days when I could have done what he did. I didn't need to know the future to make a phone call. I had needed to make quite a few, apparently. When I first started at Meridian, I wrote things down because I assumed everybody knew more than I did. I asked questions then. Sometimes I stayed after a call to figure out why somebody had recommended a particular model. There was one call in that first month I could still remember. The person training me was away from his desk, and a customer asked what I would recommend for the space he had. I wrote down two model numbers and kept pressing the pen into a little circle beside one of them while he talked. I was trying to decide whether to tell him I didn't know. I could put him on hold and ask the engineer down the hall. Instead I offered to email him the brochure. He said okay. I got to end the call sounding as though I had helped, and I kept doing it that way. I started there on the scratch paper. Ask what needs to fit where. Ask how they use it. Write the answers down. Those were things I could picture doing even while wanting to leave. I crossed out sentences and wrote smaller along the bottom. By the time I had something I could copy, it was dark outside, and I had turned on the light over the table without getting up to close the blinds. I opened the journal to the clean page after the hike entry. For a moment I wanted another small test. I thought about Victoria at the coffee machine, waiting for me to remember. I still couldn't tell her anything about that day. How many conversations would be like that if I changed years? I could ask people. There would be emails. At least I knew Meridian. I looked at the empty box, then checked the letter again, especially the sentence about tearing pages out. Tomorrow morning I was either applying for jobs or finding out what the journal had done. I put the tip of the pen on the page. > In my first month at Meridian, when the customer calls while I'm covering the desk and I almost put him on hold to ask for help, do it. I want him to think I know what I'm talking about. Get an answer I understand. Ask what he needs the equipment to do, write down the answers, and read them back. When he asks whether it will fit, ask about the space and how they'll get to it for cleaning and service. Get the measurements to engineering before I send the quote. Call him back with a recommendation I can explain. My hand was cramping. I rested the pen across the page and rubbed the side of my finger. Then I picked it up again. > Keep making that choice in the years I work there, when I notice a problem and want to pass it on or leave it for later. Get the missing information. Ask for help before guessing. If I'm waiting for an answer, follow up. When something has gone wrong, call the customer and help get it fixed, even when I think somebody else caused it. Check that the next person has what they need before I consider my part finished. > > When I'm ready to leave and there is work I could finish, stay and get it done. I want more from this job than I've been getting. Use the time to give myself a chance at it, even when I'd rather go home. I read the whole page. There were things I wanted to add about salary, Calder, how fast this was supposed to lead anywhere. I left them out. I had already tried asking for the result on the other sheet of paper. I read the last paragraph again. Staying late sounded like an excellent thing for someone several years ago to have done. I hoped he had gotten used to it. The apartment was quiet. My work mug stood upside down in the dish rack, and the box was still by my feet. If nothing happened, I needed to make some calls in the morning. I needed to tell my mother. I needed to finish the resume. I gathered the scratch paper into a pile and carried the journal into the bedroom. I set it on the dresser and checked my alarm. Six-thirty. I left it on because I wanted to be up early whichever way this went. After brushing my teeth, I checked it again. Six-thirty, Monday. I put the phone down beside the journal and got into bed. I could see the corner of the leather cover from the pillow. I reached over and moved the journal farther onto the dresser so it wouldn't fall, then lay back down and tried to sleep.