36

Across the lobby, Vince no longer stood in his doorway. Between that vacant space and Jason, the lobby hummed with voices spoken into mouthpieces. Keyboards clicked in a thousand dissonant rhythms. Electronic ringing of phones, shifting chairs, drawers opening and closing—the activity used to invigorate Jason’s senses. It amazed him that everything about this job had once stirred him. He marveled at how he used to find meaning in the looming daily deadlines, pressure from customer demands and from growth goals refreshed at every cycle of the calendar, from beating the competition that was as persistent as drooling wolves.

Over Angie’s head, he stared at the staff that used to be his. Their allegiances had shifted away from him as easily as drifting leaves turned in a current. With Brenda out of sight, everyone in view belonged to Vince now. The battles Jason had fought for them and with them had all turned into irrelevant memories, their victories together relegated into histories in their disloyal minds, distant as their schoolyards.

Vince’s open door across the lobby was a vacuum sucking the life out of him. Jason felt it pulling away his hopes, the aspirations that used to drive him out of bed every morning with energy surging through him. He took a step toward the open doorway. Soon he was past Angie’s probing eyes, and he entered into the sea of desks and the frenzy of efficiency and urgency that used to fuel him. No one glanced up. Not one of them took the opportunity of his passing to seek guidance or endorsement of a decision. He moved among them with the anonymity of a ghost passing through real life.

Vince bulged behind his desk. The flesh of his neck folded over his shirt collar, a contrast of flab and starched cotton, and where the collar strained at the button holding it together, a bright tie with insanely twisted paisleys was noosed. Vince focused on the paperwork before him, his mouth open, the wet weenies of his lips moving almost imperceptibly.

Jason decided to interrupt the machinations of Vince’s mind. “You wanted to see me?”

Vince lifted his eyes, and the close-cropped head came up. He waved his hand to beckon Jason into the sacred chamber of authority.

Jason sank into the sofa. At least it was on the far end of the room.

Vince tented his fingers before his chest and began talking. With every word, the left part of his upper lip twisted into a snarl. Jason had never noticed it before. The ugly maw began to remind Jason of something. What was it? An animal of some kind. A species in a jungle stealing among shadowy leaves in reeking air that boiled with heat. A sloth? Was that it? No. Maybe not a jungle. Maybe an arid plain in Africa. A pack animal of some kind, a hyena or a wild dog, bounding over grassland, yammering on and on as it searched for something to devour.

Vince dropped his hands to the desktop. “Am I getting through to you?”

Jason had no idea what Vince had been talking about. He stared at the hyena behind the desk, the hyena too fat to hunt, fit only for a meal scavenged from the rest of the pack. Did hyenas cannibalize?

“Yeah. Sure,” he said.

Vince’s worm of a tongue darted over his lips, and words started pouring through those twisting lips again. Words upon words tumbled into the room, spilling innuendo, invective, threats of layoffs, the danger of complete collapse of the bank, the ruin of them all. It was the end of the world. Armageddon.

A question hovered in the room. Jason recognized that Vince’s voice had inflected in a way that begged a response. Beyond that, meaning was lost to him.

Vince spread his hands on his desk. His eyebrows were black caterpillars kissing over his nose, rising, rising. “Well?”

“What?”

“I said 20 percent. In case you can’t do the math, that’s four people. Get the door.”

Jason felt the sofa drawing him into it like soil sucking at roots. He wasn’t interested in rising to play doorman. “You want me to fire four people?”

Vince’s lips drew tight. “Yes. Do I have to repeat myself? A 20 percent reduction in force.” He stood and crossed to the door like a balloon on stilts, his bloated frame wafting a trace of cologne that turned Jason’s stomach. He slammed the door. “Your name’s not on the list. This time. I’m willing to let you make the final call on who we RIF, but here’s my list.” He completed the trip to the front of his desk and lifted a sheet of paper, glanced at it, and let it flutter into Jason’s lap. He returned to his chair. The cushions sighed with the strain.

The room’s walls closed in. Jason felt them compressing the air. He fixed his eyes on them to make sure they weren’t shifting toward him. He detected no movement, but the pressure of the air kept growing. Soon it would be too thick to breathe.

He lifted his eyes to look over Vince’s head. Outside the window, the LA air was stacked with seething smog. It diffused the sunlight into an unnatural, hazy glow. Nothing to breathe out there either.

Vince shifted in his chair. “Aren’t you going to look at the list?”

Jason returned his eyes to his boss. The frowning face and gritted teeth could have belonged to an undertaker straining at a cut into a cadaver.

Jason managed to draw in a breath and took up the sheet of paper. Five names. One of them was Brenda’s.

Vince droned concerning the performance of these five, how they hadn’t met their growth goals, how their loan portfolios were poorly rated. About Brenda, he only mentioned her lack of seniority.

“You said four. This is five.”

The twist of Vince’s face made Jason think he suppressed a smile. But it could have been something Vince ate. “I thought you might want to do more than the minimum. Show you can be a team player for once.”

“A team player.”

Vince’s bulbous hand searched out a pink eraser he kept on the desktop, and he busied his fingers with tapping it, turning it, squeezing it. “Tomorrow’s the day. We’re going to do all 20 percent at once. One cut, get it over with. Make the announcement so people won’t think they’re next.” He looked at the eraser as if he could rub out the employees with it. “I wanted to stage it, keep people on their toes, but Mark thought it would be better to just rip off the Band-Aid. So to speak.”

“I don’t think you need to worry about keeping people on their toes. The rewrite of the bonus plan and severance package did the trick.”

Vince rubbed the eraser against the wood grain of his desktop and swept the pink shavings onto the floor. “Yeah, we’re going to take another look at those. They’re still too generous.”

“Now that you’re in the executive plan.”

It brought Vince’s eyes forward. “I can rework that RIF list. The way your portfolio’s shrinking, you won’t cover your own salary in a few months.”

“Yeah, but fire me for cause and you don’t have to pay my severance, right? Good plan.”

Now the animal surfaced fully on Vince’s face. This was no sloth, no hyena. A cat’s callousness emerged, a grin widening, insensate. He didn’t reply.

Jason looked away from the face. On the list were only names, first and last. Labels on personnel files or in org charts. People, yes, but to those who controlled the ledgers, they represented annual salaries and benefits to be cut from a budget with the offsets of the severance packages’ temporary inflections, one-time nuisances for the greater and longer-term good of reduced overhead. When your top line shrinks, you have to make the cuts to keep the bottom line black. Don’t go into the red. He’d lectured his customers on this very thing a hundred times.

But it was different when the employees were yours.

He returned to Vince’s face. Pitiless eyes stared back, the color of deadwood knots and mud. The mouth opened, and it was a bottomless, insatiable cavern. “Get with Margaret and have an HR rep along when you meet with them.” He flipped the eraser onto the desk, and it bounced on its edges until it came to a rest flat.

Vince brushed at the air with the backs of his fingers. “That’s all.”