The Assistants(5)

Then Emily Johnson summoned me up to the forty-third floor.

For most purposes, our office on the fortieth floor could have been considered the building’s top floor. The three floors above us were all business-related—the bean counters—strategically positioned to remind every employee below them that these folks were watching, omnipresent, like an all-knowing god from above. Forty-three was Corporate Governance’s floor, composed of barely used rooms filled with plush couches that were reserved for the tight buttocks of Titan Corporation board members. And it was T & E’s floor.

What is T & E, you ask? Not to be confused with T & A (Google it; NSFW), T & E stands for “Travel and Entertainment.” At some companies it might stand for “Travel and Expenses,” which makes a little more sense, but Titan higher-ups were generally more entertainment focused. It would have made the most sense if everyone simply called it BE, short for “Business Expenses,” because on the most basic level that’s what these reimbursements were supposed to be for—expenses you incurred while conducting business. But such an acronym was probably way too metaphysical for everyone involved.

Anyway, the forty-third floor looked exactly like you’d expect it to. All slick brass and polished wood. It smelled like nothing. Like if nothing were a scent that could come in a bottle, it would smell exactly like the forty-third floor. And it was quiet, so quiet they pumped in white noise from overhead vents. For privacy, supposedly, but I think it was to keep people from going ballistic over the impossible nonexistence of the place, to keep the operating officers and bookkeepers from disappearing into its cool vacuum, convinced they were invisible.

The director of Travel and Entertainment was a middle-aged man who wore a bow tie every day and listened to opera with headphones on inside his office. His final approval had to be stamped on every expense account filed within the building—even Robert’s. But it was his assistant who actually waded through all the forms and approved them with the loopy script of Bow Tie’s signature, while he hummed along to Puccini.

All important men have assistants. The T & E director’s assistant was Emily Johnson, a blond-haired, blue-eyed bitch from Connecticut.

Emily was the type of girl who would reject my reports if I failed to arrange all the scanned receipts facing the same way. “I can’t read this chaos,” she’d say over the phone in her Waspy lockjaw accent. The accent of East Coast boarding schools. “Upside-down receipts give me vertigo.”

But Emily had never before summoned me up to the forty-third floor to speak face-to-face. My guts went limp the moment I read her e-mail and I ran to the bathroom.

Hovering over the spotless marble sink, I looked in the mirror. Stupid. What a stupid anemic face I had, even paler now with guilt. It had been a little over a week since I used the flight reimbursement money to pay off my student loan. Why didn’t I just hold on to it for a while longer? Now I couldn’t even give it back. I was certainly about to be fired, or interrogated. Or worse, prosecuted. And Robert. Most horrible of all would be Robert’s disappointment in me, the way he would raise his hands to his head, or begin restlessly turning his UT class ring—his other nervous habit. He was away on business today, thank god, but it was only a matter of time now.

The bathroom door swung open and in stepped two freelancers with toothbrushes in hand. There was a strange obsession with oral hygiene in our office that permeated all the way to the temp staff. I slipped past them with my head down, dodging the trappings of restroom small talk.

My heart raced and I could feel two sweat stains pooling beneath my underarms as I made my way to the elevator bank’s centralized kiosk. Out of habit I pushed the down button and then had to wait for the system to sort out its digital confusion when I immediately switched to the up button. The kiosk directed me to elevator D, then to E, and finally to A—which I dashed to before it could complete the ominous spelling of the word dead.

Emily was waiting for me behind the forty-third floor’s sliding glass doors when I stepped out of the elevator. She wore a white blouse over white pants and white high heels. It was still the tail end of winter, but already her skin had somehow tanned to a beachy golden brown. She watched me, smiling.

The doors were locked for security and my ID card couldn’t open them, so I had to wait for Emily to scan her card and let me in. Just for fun, she kept me standing there, helpless and waiting, hyperventilating.

When she finally relented and scanned her card, the doors unlocked with a metallic clank much like the release of a prison cell gate. So many aspects of our building struck me as prisonlike—our ID cards may as well have been one of those house-arrest ankle bracelets the way they tracked our every move. Not to mention all the security guards leering around each corner. Why in the world did I think a place like this would just overlook nearly twenty thousand dollars?

Emily led me to the northwest conference room and hermetically sealed us inside. She sat opposite me and soundlessly slid a manila folder across the glass tabletop.

I looked away. The view outside was so much more beautiful from up here, even though it was only three floors higher. The windows went from floor to ceiling with no obstructions, so even from where I was sitting I could see the frantic procession of tiny people and yellow cabs struggling down Eighth Avenue.

“I know what you did,” Emily said. And before I could muster up any false confusion she added, “Don’t deny it, Fontana; you’d be wasting my time.”