Agarwal kept a signed Yankees baseball bat hanging on the wall in is his office, and whenever he needed to concentrate, he’d take it down and fondle it, like those little stones that dufuses keep in their pockets, for when they get worried – and worried is exactly what all of us junior guys at the bank were, because Lehman Brothers had just gone under. So, one Friday afternoon, when the Agster got his bat down, we watched him. He’d been on some call for over two hours, which was too damn long for a Friday call. Most of the time, he was calmer than the swans in Central Park. But through the glass, we could see him working that Yankees bat with both hands, like some numskull on a first date, struggling to uncork a bottle of Moët. When the call finally ended, he hung the bat back up. Then he called Rothman and Hyun into his office. They cleared out their desks, and security walked them out. We agreed to meet up with them later, at Arctica, the only bar in Manhattan that kept serving booze after 4:00AM – so long as our bribes to the bartender were juicy enough.
We waited until the last of the senior guys left for the weekend – off to Martha’s Vineyard or Montauk or wherever those big-swinging-dicks spent their weekends – then cabbed from Midtown down to Arctica, where we bought Rothman and Hyun gin-and-tonics and slid the bartender some insanely fat tips. We stayed there drinking until just after 7:00AM, when the bartender finally redlined: she started off yelling, and when that didn’t work she grabbed one of our Blackberries and began hammering it on the tabletops, like some unhinged judge. We said our goodbyes to Rothman and Hyun, then cabbed back to the office, to finish all the shit we hadn’t finished during the week.
From then on, every damn Friday went like that. It’d hit 3:50PM, and the Agster would close his office door and take his bat down, then wait for the call – torquing the bat like he was choking one of the Central Park swans. Then one, or two, or sometimes as many as five desks would get cleared out, and we’d cab down to that hemorrhoid of a bar – palming our work Blackberries in one hand, and our personal cells in the other – and whoever the Rothmans and Hyuns were that week would joke about no longer needing to schlep around two phones. And we’d buy them plenty of drinks, and they’d say they were looking forward to not living inside spreadsheets 24/7, so they could spend more time with family, or get back into shape, or travel, or some other bullshit we doubted they’d actually do. And we’d tell them all that bullshit sounded lovely – when actually we were thinking about that old saying in war: good luck is when the bullet smokes the guy next to you.
Every damn Friday went like that. Going to Arctica wasn’t about paying our respects or survivor’s guilt or crap like that. Instead, it was like doing stealth autopsies, on the Rothmans and Hyuns. We’d watch them: covertly, but closely– closer than we’d ever watched them under the industrial pig-barn lighting back in the office. We’d keep buying them drinks, and they’d get increasingly shitfaced, and we’d try to figure out why we were better than them – why they had gotten pink-slipped and we hadn’t. But each week, we tripped over the same conclusion: there weren’t any differences between them and us – the layoffs were totally random. So what we started watching for was hope: some genuine indication that the Rothmans and Hyuns would pull an Ebenezer-style turnaround, and go do something meaningful with their lives – something human, and humane – and not just scurry back to being Excel chimps the first opportunity they got. If we’d been in their shoes…well, personally, I had zero fucking clue what I would’ve done. I wanted to believe I could change, if one Friday I ended up like them. But I was identical to them, wasn’t I? So, I needed to believe they could change, in order to believe I could too. We all needed that. Which is why it was crucial that Arctica kept on serving so late: so we could keep on watching the Rothmans and Hyuns, looking for evidence they could change – and us with them – even though we didn’t know what evidence to look for.
Every damn Friday went like that. Until one Friday when Agarwal didn’t hang up his bat after the call ended, and instead used it to obliterate his keyboard – like, went full-on apeshit and completely annihilated it. I skipped Arctica that evening.
DANE ROOK is an author of fiction and nonfiction. He is based in Northern California. His work has been published by Stanford University Press, Blood+Honey, MAYDAY, Little Old Lady, Down in the Dirt, and elsewhere.
