The Futures(87)

“I already told you. No. I never heard from him.”

“Well, it’s possible he might have reached out to you since we took your testimony the other week. Has he?”

“Why would he do that? He knows we’re being investigated.”

“Maybe he wanted to find out what exactly you were telling us. Maybe he wanted to make you an offer for your cooperation.”

I felt like I was going to throw up. “Don’t you think that I would have told you? That I would have told you if I’d heard anything from him?”

“Come on, Evan,” John or Kurt said. “You don’t exactly have a great track record with that. That’s the whole reason we’re here.”

“What the fuck does that mean?”

“Evan,” my lawyer said, in a warning tone.

“It means you kept this deal a secret long after you knew the truth. It means you chose to keep silent about Michael’s plan even though you knew it was wrong. It means we can’t trust you to give us the full picture unless we ask.”

“I didn’t keep it a secret!”

“Then who did you tell about it?”

“Okay,” my lawyer said, shutting her briefcase with a firm click. “I think that’s enough. Let’s take a break.”

My lawyer and I had lunch together that day at the Indian place on 9th Avenue. Roger and the other analysts were at another table in the restaurant. I hadn’t been invited to lunch with them in months.

My lawyer spent most of the meal on her BlackBerry. “Sorry,” she said. “My nanny has the flu. We had to use the backup. Now the kids are sick, too. It’s a fucking nightmare.” She noticed my untouched food. “Hey. You okay?”

“No.”

She put her phone down. “You know it’s not personal, right? The things they were saying back there. They really don’t give a shit about you.”

“It doesn’t feel like that. It feels like they’re after me.”

“They’re only trying to get as much out of you as they can. So they can nail Michael and the Chinese. You’ve got the testimony they need. But you’re small fish, Evan. I mean that in a good way.”

Roger and the others walked past on the way out. Roger bumped into my chair. “Oops. Didn’t see you there, Peck,” he said, grinning. “Hot date, huh?”

After we finished eating, after she paid and we stood up to put on our coats, she asked: “What did you mean before? When you said that you didn’t keep it a secret?”

“Oh.” I was hoping she had forgotten about that. “I didn’t really mean anything. Just that, um, I didn’t consciously keep it a secret.”

When we returned to the conference room, John and Kurt looked up in unison. “Actually, we’re done,” one of them said. “For now, at least. We don’t need anything else. You can go back to work.”

“That’s it?” I said.

“We might need to call you back for a few things as they crop up. But yeah, that’s it. You’re done. Thanks for your help.”

“You must be relieved,” my lawyer said, walking me back to my office-slash-closet. “Now you can go back to normal, right?”

“I guess.” I did feel relieved—that weak but good feeling that comes after you’ve finally thrown up—but I also felt confused. Shortchanged somehow. What would come next? What was going to happen to me?

We stopped outside my door. “Well,” she said. “Good luck, Evan.”

*

My life went soft at the edges. The same feeling permeated the hours at work, the hours at home: emptiness, futility, like a bucket with a hole in the bottom. The SEC investigation had been my last vestige of purpose. For a few weeks I continued to arrive early, stay late, and keep my closet door propped open so that anyone walking past might imagine me hard at work. Then I left a little earlier. Arrived a little later. Started shutting my door at lunch so I could watch the postgame highlights with the sound on. January became February, then February became March. Eventually I gave in to it. I punched in and out. I ate dinner; I drank. I’d go entire weekends without speaking, so that my voice felt scratchy and strange when I greeted the security guards on Monday mornings. I arrived hungover and shut my door for long stretches to take naps on the coarse industrial carpet, letting time pass like high clouds drifting through the upper atmosphere.

I realized at a certain point that I’d been celibate for nearly three months. It was the longest by far I’d gone without having sex. In high school, it was only ever a few weeks at a time, and in college, too, and after that came Julia. It was like a portal to an earlier time. The texture of this frustration was identical to what I’d felt as a virginal teenager. It was almost as if, by going so long without sex, I had become my younger self again. I felt confused and melancholy in a way I hadn’t in a decade. I could have gone out to a bar and ended the celibate streak with a one-night stand easily enough. But in a way, I liked being alone with my former self. I indulged it. I liked recalling how it felt when adulthood was still a distant mystery. When the concrete details—an apartment in Manhattan, a high-paying job—would have been sufficient by themselves. I hadn’t realized, back then, how messy it actually was. I wanted to go back and hide inside that ignorance.