Quant

BY SAM McPHEETERS

oss finally saw it on the freeway, just a few miles north of the airport. An animated auto-dealership sign blinked out the fall financing deals against the fading dusk, then flashed to announce SALESMAN OF THE MONTH JIM CURLAN. He’d been spotting fewer and fewer of these roadside testimonials on the far-flung interstates of his travels. Were there fewer good salesmen in the world? Or just fewer companies willing to congratulate them in public? The dealership complex passed in a blur of light as he dialed information on his cell phone.

A robot voice asked for a city name. Ross overenunciated, as if speaking to an idiot, “San-ho-zay. Cal-ih-for-nya.” The voice paused then cheerfully asked for a name. “Foot-Hills-Knee-sahn,” he said, seeing this name neatly inverted in the rearview mirror. There was a silence and then the robot made a phone ring somewhere deep inside the sprawling, overlit complex still flashing in the mirrors. Ross punched a given number for the company directory and then another number to reach his party. Jim Curlan’s voice—confident, with a trace of boredom—asked him to please leave a message. The recording beeped.

“Jim. You piece of

shit

,” Ross said serenely.

“You thought I’d forgotten what you did? You fucking maggot. You disgusting venereal-wart joke of a man.” He sighed and glanced

back

in the rearview mirror, and even though it seemed counterintuitive with the dealership getting farther and farther away, said, “I’m coming to get you, Jim. Here I come.” He yawned and let a nice pause settle in.

“Better grow some eyes on your

back

, buddy. This is really happening. You fucked up. So get ready. Twenty-four seven.”

He let another pause sink in, then whispered, so low it was almost a croak, “Doomsday, Jim Curlan.”

An hour later, in San Francisco, he pushed through half curtains printed with cartoon octopuses brandishing a sinister assortment of knives and swords. Steff had told him to meet her here, at this particular Japanese-fusion eatery in this particular neighborhood, too late for dinner but not too late to catch a drink and debrief each other on their lives. Steff and Ross had dated for a few months in college, but they’d worked much better as pals. Now she was married, to a man named Kim whom Ross had never met, and as he spotted them in a booth toward the

back

—Steff next to a runtish, mustached little fellow—he realized he’d never met any man named Kim and perhaps didn’t yet trust this new husband.

He slid into the booth opposite the newlyweds. Handshakes were exchanged. A waiter came by. Drinks arrived.

Kim said, “So. Steff tells me you’re on the road all the time.”

“I am. Ten months a year, 15 presentations a week.”

“What exactly do you do?”

“She didn’t explain it?”

“Yeah.

I

explained it,” Steff snorted sarcastically. She’d put on considerable weight since the last time they’d seen each other, six years already, but still had that great broad smile.

“I’m a quant salesman,” Ross said.

“Wow. OK. What?”

“See?” Steff said out of the corner of her mouth.

“Aw, it’s not that crazy,” Ross said, swigging his beer. “I’m the public face of a quantitatively managed investment fund. Meaning, a fund that uses only computer-based models to make investment decisions.”

“I thought you all went to a liberal-arts college,” Kim said.

“We did,” Ross and Steff said in near unison.

“I’m not an analyst, just a salesman,” he explained. “I translate highly technical concepts into an easy-to-understand presentation. For most novice investors, it’s a bizarre concept that you could run a successful investment strategy without any strategic input by people. So I’m the guy who normals it up.”

“You’re talking about a black box,” Kim said. Ross decided he liked this guy.

“That’s it exactly. Data goes in the black box, stock picks come out of the black box. That’s it in a nutshell.”

“Ross, why on earth would I trust a black box with my money?” Steff asked.

“Why would you trust a black box on an airplane?” Kim said, taking Ross’s side.

“Actually, the question is why would you trust the people who built the black box,” Ross said.

“But you just said that people had no input.”

“Yeah, you did,” Kim added, switching sides, aping their old banter.

Ross smiled.

“The quant was designed by humans to filter out human error. We even use a separate, smaller quant to sift out human biases from our initial data mining…”

“It sounds a lot like internet gambling,” she interrupted.

“It does,

if

gambling clocks you a nine-point rate of return. Look, our risk management is exponentially more rigorous than most meat funds. That’s what we call traditional investment funds behind their

back

,” he said, suppressing the urge to wink. “And we have lower overhead. Tiny research staff, no star stock pickers, no prima donnas. We’ve got this motto: ‘Let the data drive.’ It’s corny, but hey, we run on facts, not intuition.”

“

Meat

fund,” Steff said, looking away and rolling her eyes. “That’s so

stupid

.” But Ross knew from her smile that he could sell them right now. It would be nothing. By the time the check arrived, they would have written his company contact info on a napkin. Within a month they’d be clients.

“I bet you use this exact same speech all over the country, trying to sucker all your poor college pals into this wicked pyramid scheme,” she said.

“I never said I didn’t. Signed up Stu in August,” he said truthfully.

Ross was the only frequent flyer from the old gang, the lone cross-pollinator for a once tight-knit group in which Steff had been the lone girl: him, her, Stu, Chet, Todd, Gordo.

“Hey, yeah, that reminds me. Have you seen Chet?” she said.

“Chet still makes good money repairing ATMs. Still lives in Dallas.”

“He’s still married to…”

“Still married to that lady who runs the belly-dancing website. Saw them in June.”

To Kim, Steff explained, “Chet was the guy we were all so sure was going to be a famous comedian.”

“He still could be,” Ross said.

“Remember those horrible prank phone calls we used to do?” Steff asked Ross, but for the benefit of her husband. Ross took a long, thoughtful sip from his beer and glanced over at the twin name plaques near the restrooms, photos of the owner and manager.

“Vaguely.”

“What kind of prank calls?” Kim asked.

“The worst kind,” she said. “The really evil kind.”

Kim glanced to Ross with a look of delighted expectation. Ross shrugged.

“Chet had all these crazy characters he’d do. Like, a drill sergeant, an angry neighbor, a confused Hungarian landlord…”

“Albanian,” Ross corrected.

“Albanian landlord. He’d just lay into people, totally humiliate them. We’d sit around and listen to him go off for hours.”

“You’d all crowd around the phone?” Kim said.

“No, we—somebody—had one of those sucker microphone things for the old telephones. We’d tape the calls on a boom box so we could all listen in.”

“Couldn’t they trace the number?” Kim asked with real concern.

“This was the old days, before caller ID. You could call people all night long and never get caught.”

“Amen to that,” Ross said softly.

“And this guy!” she said, pointing across the table. “This guy was the worst. His specialty…”

“Aw, Kim doesn’t want to hear all this…”

“Ross would find a couple in the phone book. Like, Jane and John Jones. And then he’d call and whoever picked up—like, if a woman answered, he’d go, ‘Jane?’ And she’d say, ‘Yeah?’ And then Ross would say, really softly, ‘John’s cheating on you.’” She and Kim were laughing together, husband and wife.

“And Ross had this crazy way of hanging up. The ‘Ross Touch.’ Just real light.” She mimicked this motion daintily with her fork.

“Reeeal soft.

Click

.” Kim was laughing a little too hard.

“‘Just thought you should know.’” She lifted the fork for an encore, whispering, “‘Bye-bye.’

Click

.”

“That’s wrong,” Kim managed to get out between chortles. “So, so, so wrong.”

Steff wiped an eye. “We spent hours and hours doing this. It was

addictive

.”

Ross smiled and took another long swig of his beer, finally saying, “So. Kim. What do you do?”

Daily road conferences with his boss, Carly, were always harder on the West Coast. The next morning, Ross was up before dawn. It would be after 8:30 in New York. He glanced down through heavy hotel curtains as if looking for someone, seeing only the stretch of desolate twilight-gray sidewalk visible from his window. Carly said, “Your number keeps coming up blocked.” Next to the suite’s sink, a tiny coffeemaker quietly tinkled into itself.

“I keep meaning to fix that,” he said, stifling a yawn.

“Yesss,” she said over the sound of ruffled papers, a deeply sexy voice disembodied from a deeply homely face. “Speaking of fixes. We need to discuss your ‘buts.’ Again.”

“Really.”

“Really. The quant isn’t happy about this.”

As stipulated in his contract, each of Ross’s presentations was digitally recorded and emailed

back

to the home office, to be transcribed and analyzed by proprietary software. His lectures were a work in progress, ever susceptible to the whims of pure analysis. Although this particular program operated independently of the main investment-analysis engine, he and Carly had long since begun referring to these separate systems as one, a benevolent brain guiding its fallible human operatives.

“You’re using that word too much. It implies indecision, Ross. Notice, I never use the word unless I’m discussing it with you.”

“If someone in the crowd moons me, how do I refer to their body part?”

“You said that last time I brought this up, and it wasn’t really funny then either. What are you wearing?” This nudged him awake.

“Come again?”

“Shirt and tie. What color combos. Jesus, what did you think I meant?”

“Uh.” he looked over at the day’s wardrobe, neatly splayed on the suite’s unused bed. “Looks like today it’s French-cuff off-white—cream?—with the royal-blue tie.”

“Nope. That’s out. White and blue says retail.”

“It does?”

“We’re going to switch you to Wallace Green with classic black four-inch.”

“You are?”

“I’ll drop-ship some ties to your hotel tonight. Call me after Sacramento.”

The burn of this costume change followed him through the day’s presentations and into the following day in Reno. Carefully inserting

yet

and

although

into his speeches made him annoyed, and pondering his own annoyance made him more annoyed still. Catching his reflection in the mirror at the

back

a conference room, he realized the green-black combo made him look like a card shark, or an affordable gigolo.

There weren’t many problems, however, that a good layover couldn’t fix. He stepped into the Denver International Airport the next morning armed with 50 minutes and his red pocket notebook. The notebook was alphabetized by city. Under DENVER, after a half-dozen tiny lines carefully crossed out by ballpoint, he found two names, each marked with tiny notations: PM for property manager—info gleaned from some anonymous wall plaque months earlier—and OP for op-ed, denoting some poor slob who’d had the misfortune to write the

Post

anytime within the last year.

From a payphone white pages, he learned that the property manager had moved on in life. But the letter writer yielded a listing, which in turned yielded a voice-mail message. He waited for the beep.

“Hey Karen. Hey Josh. Guess who? No, don't guess. I'll tell you. I'm a totally whacked out nut job. Also, guess what? I'm going to be at 2320 Elkwood sometime between 4 and 6 AM, and I'm going to smear my creamy feces all over your windows. So keep your eyes peeled? Ta!”

At a different pay phone, he found a different copy of the white pages. He flipped through this and hit a good line at random: Moisey, Cindy and Danny. Who lists nicknames in a phone book? A woman answered.

“Cindy?”

“Yes,” a woman’s voice said, a bit breathless. She’d run to answer the phone.

“Danny’s cheating on you.”

After a wonderful bit of silence, he added, “Bye” and hung up the phone tenderly. It was at that moment he realized: He would someday miss payphones. There’s simply no way to communicate emotion by pressing a button on a cell. As if to emphasize this point, his own phone rang. He was surprised to realize he didn’t recognize the 918 area code.

“Yeah?” Ross said.

“Oh.” It was a different woman’s voice, cheery but hesitant. “Ahm. Can I speak to Ed?”

“You want to speak with Ed?”

The woman’s voice paused. “Yeah. Is he there?”

“I don’t know any easy way to say this,” he said, glancing over to his gate with a breathy exhale. “So I’m just going to say it. Ed died two hours ago.”

He hung up and powered off the phone, feeling good again. Freebies.

Years earlier, after he’d gotten fired from his marriage, Ross had audited a month of Alcoholics Anonymous meetings in the basement of a pet store. He wasn’t looking to join any of the 12 steps. Instead, Ross needed a pitch, an angle. He was already in sales at that point: He wanted someone to sell him on the idea of sobriety. He’d needed a way to quit binge drinking without having it seem like self-denial.

The meetings had done nothing for him. But one night he’d arrived buzzed and, enjoying his seat, stuck around for the nine o’clock group. This was an entirely different crowd. Gone was the buttoned-down contrition of the alcoholics, replaced by the pleading chaos of General Addiction, a wild, desperate bunch, a revival meeting for mutants. The counselor was a weathered little imp with an absurd blond crew cut, a man who’d apparently descended into, and returned from, every pit of vice available. The imp had no patience for self-pity.

“What are you overeating?” the counselor had mockingly asked a morbidly obese woman in a double-wide scooter. “Carrots?

Celery

?”

She’d hung her head to blubber, and the imp mounted a folding chair and used the spectacle as a teachable moment.

“Addiction is fine as long you’re addicted to something that doesn’t hurt you. Find that thing and get addicted to it, people. It’s as simple as that.”

Ross had smiled. This he could do. He’d hadn’t touched alcohol since.

As he saw it, there was a finite amount of stress in the world. All he did was transfer tension away from himself, like a heat sink. At no point did he actually add to or subtract from the aggregate volume of pain on the planet. It just got sloshed from person to person. His hobby, it turned out, involved the exact same process as his job: reducing complex ideas into salable morsels. Let the data drive. No prima donnas. Danny’s cheating on you.

That night, Ross found two packages waiting for him at the hotel desk in Raleigh. One was a large box from Carly—for a moment he thought it was a huge batch of ties—containing the autumn company prospectuses. The other package was a light express envelope. An hour later, he retired to the hotel’s business center with damp hair and an unexpected drowsiness. This business center was really just a business nook, barely wide enough for a computer and printer, so he sat with the express envelope and a company catalog in his lap.

The envelope was what interested him. He ripped open the little tab and realized, with annoyance, that his CD came sheathed in nothing more than a flimsy paper sleeve. He removed this, spindling the disc on his finger and holding it up to glint under the fluorescents to check for scratches.

India had 10 to 12 million internet users. He now had 800,000 of their email addresses speared around his left index finger. The mailing list had cost him $450, about one day’s commission. He had all night to figure out how to grievously insult 800,000 people in the English-speaking world. With his free hand, he logged into his email account and flipped the empty express mailer into the tiny trash can, reading HAVE A CONVERSATION WITH THE NUMBERS on the fresh prospectus on his lap. When had they switched mottos? His phone was vibrating.

“Why would you

say

that?” a woman’s voice asked, nasal and pleading.

“What?”

“Why would you tell me my husband died?”

“I think you got the wrong number, lady.”

“Do you have any idea what it’s like to think your husband is dead?”

He laughed. “Is that a trick question?”

“For three hours? Do you have any clue what agony that was?”

“I don’t know.” Ross yawned. “Can it match the agony of having your concentration interrupted while you’re trying to type a very important letter?”

The woman’s voice went silent. He almost thought she’d hung up on him when he heard the quick involuntary intake of a sob.

“You fucking…

bastard

.” There was another, louder sob, then she said, “Aren’t you sorry?”

“I am a tad regretful that I answered my phone just now,” he said with a laugh, adding “

Click

” before actually hanging up. But when he glanced at the blank computer screen, his smile dropped. His concentration had indeed been interrupted.

“Crap.”

The morning required a quick mental calculus. Did Ross’s love of free breakfast outweigh his distaste for families? In the dining area off the hotel lobby, he located the table farthest from a dozen-strong gaggle of parents and screaming toddlers. Ten minutes later, eggs and bacon pushed aside to make room for his collection of local postcards, he sighed with satisfaction. So many good choices. On a postcard featuring the North Carolina Sports Hall of Fame, he wrote an address in blocky capital letters—a housewife who’d written a concerned letter to the

Oregonian

a year earlier—then drew a small tombstone on the message side. Inside the tombstone he printed R.I.P. YOU. Behind him, a grown man was saying, “Dylan, honey! Where’s your juicy juice?”

His phone rang: 918.

“Yeh-low.”

“Do you believe in karma?”

“Actually, I don’t.”

“You don’t believe that what goes around comes around?” Her voice was serene, with no trace of yesterday’s anguish.

“Na. Shitheads rule the roost in every arena of human history,” Ross said, loudly slurping his coffee. “And the virtuous get the shaft. No one ever gets exactly what they got coming.”

“Really?”

“Really. See the news this morning? That mudslide in Belize? Don’t tell me all those little kids deserved what they got.”

She paused, perhaps in consideration. “Maybe they were bad kids.”

From behind, he heard an upsurge of screaming children followed by the sound of tiny hands beating a tabletop like a conga drum.

“That is possible. But, OK… what about 9/11? Or Darfur? What about the Holocaust? You’re going to get tangled up in logic if you keep…”

“We’re not talking about Darfur,” the voice said evenly. “We’re just talking about you.”

“Then you definitely just got checked by logic.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because if there was any kind of cosmic justice in play, I’d have retired to a houseboat ten years ago,” he said, hanging up.

Ross loved the nowhere zones of his transits. Interstitials. He thrived in hotel suites and airport lounges. He looked forward to casual dining, to reading the sports pages over a plate of ribs in an unfamiliar city and not having to talk to anybody. He crossed the earth, visiting bathrooms he would use once and never see again.

Ross was fumbling with his notebook, trying to transcribe a HOW’S MY DRIVING? number while barreling north on I-95, when his phone rang.

“

Yeah

?” he said, giving up on the notebook with a frustrated sigh.

“You want to know what I think?” said the voice from the 918 area code.

“Do I have a choice?”

“I think you’re the kind of person who, anytime someone calls you with a wrong number, you answer with the most horrible thing you can think of.”

“Huh.”

“And that makes me think you’re kind of person who takes any opportunity he can to make people miserable.”

“Well, hey, far be it from me to disabuse—”

“—and so what I want to know is, have you suffered because of this?”

“Have what?”

“Have you

suffered

? Has someone, somewhere, punished you for what you’ve done?”

He chuckled warmly, taken off guard.

“Please say yes,” she added softly.

“Why do you care what I say?”

“Because it’ll be quicker for you if you’ve already suffered.”

“What will be quicker?”

“Ed.”

“‘Ed’ will be quicker for me is why you want to know.”

She paused, and when she finally answered she spoke with precise enunciation, choosing her words with care.

“Sooner or later I’ll have to tell him what happened.”

“So?”

“I can’t lie to him.”

“Again, so?”

“Any information you give me, I will have to tell Ed.”

“I reiterate. So. What.”

“So… Ed hurts people.”

Here Ross surprised himself by exploding in laughter. Several years ago, in Utah, he’d accidentally cut off a biker in traffic. The man had followed him down the highway for 20 ominous minutes. But when Ross finally arrived at the airport, bypassing the rental-car dropoff and easing straight into Departures, there was nothing for his pursuer to do. It was the most secure curb in the state. Later, flying away, he’d had to suppress laughing just like this. No one could bully him. He lived nowhere.

He wanted to communicate this concept to her now, but he was howling and snorting and even tearing up too hard to speak. She was still saying something, pleading comically. Finally, all he could get out was “Awwww… fuck it. OK?” before hanging up and reaching for the assortment of fast-food napkins that rode shotgun.

In Richmond, he sat across a linen tablecloth from Tracy and asked, “Have you ever had to deal with any crazies? In a professional capacity?”

She seemed to give the question serious thought. Tracy was his counterpart—or competition, depending on the flavor of the conversation—at one of Boston’s leading traditional equity funds. She was a broad-shouldered, high-foreheaded black woman with a stern poker face. Occasionally their travels overlapped for a night of sexual gymnastics. But usually they never crossed paths for more than an hour. After today’s brunch, she was off to meet a group of Colonial Williamsburg asset managers. Ross had a lunch appointment with the pension-fund supervisor of a multinational skateboard company. It was a day of rare parity; each could mock the other’s business model—quantitative versus qualitative—with something approaching symmetry.

“Remember Zobach?” she said, dabbing at her cheek with a napkin.

“Zobach Management Group?”

“Yeah.”

“Never heard of them.”

“Of course you haven’t.” She smiled. “But I

know

you never pitched them when Richard Zobach was around. I had one meeting with the guy, and ten minutes in he tells me he’s ‘committed to honesty.’”

“Huh?”

“That’s what I said. In not so many words. Apparently it was like a New Age, lifestyle, self-help thing. Being ‘committed to honesty’ meant you couldn’t lie, among other things. He spent the rest of the meeting critiquing my hairdo. Apparently that’s what he had to be honest about.”

“You get the account?”

“Yeah, but then a week later he went nuts and tried to board a flight to London without any clothes on. I lost the whole thing.”

“Fascinating story,” he said, finishing his coffee. “Maybe you can tell it to Ben Franklin in a few hours.”

“Hey, at least I’m not going to be scrounging for nickels with teenage skateboard dudes,” she said, motioning for the check and adding, affectionately, “Dick.”

He sighed, glancing around the room for manager-award plaques or special-employee notices.

“You been having problems with a crazy?” she asked, fishing in her purse and then retrieving a compact mirror.

“Not in so many words.”

“Hey, insanity is, you know, an occupational hazard.”

“How? You just said the worst you had to deal with was getting your weave dissed.”

“No, I mean occupational hazard for

you

. You algorithm quant guys bring the crazy out in everybody.”

“That so?”

She finished pouting at herself, snapped the mirror shut, and looked him in the eye.

“I’ve been telling you this for years, Ross. You got a fucked-up business model. Your risk exposures are too high.”

That evening, he drove to the airport with an irritating and undefined dread. In the terminal, he swiped his credit card into a kiosk and was rewarded with a flimsy paper slip, a vestige from the days when airlines held a trace of glamour. Elsewhere, a teller wordlessly swiped the flimsy paper slip beneath a laser, producing a tinny ping that let Ross advance down a metal corridor. A number on the flimsy paper slip matched a vacant chair. In flight, vast, invisible systems managed his passage—a blip on a succession of screens—and at a predetermined time and place, the plane slid

back

to earth.

After a long walk through more chilled air he found another kiosk, typed in a fresh code, and was issued another flimsy paper slip. This slip led him to a parking lot and then a parking spot where a rental sedan waited with keys dangling from its ignition. He plugged a cheap plastic TV screen into the car’s cigarette lighter, and a computer voice told him where to drive. On the highway, he put the car in cruise control and felt as if he was being pulled along on invisible train tracks. When he turned on the radio, a voice dedicated a song to someone named Little Spooky, and when the song started up it was so riddled with Auto-Tune it might as well have been singing androids.

The car brought him to a hotel. In the lobby, another kiosk—this one sleek and rounded and reading DIRECT CHECK IN—issued him a plastic card with another four-digit number. In the elevator, he pressed the button matching the first two digits of this number. On his floor, he found a room matching the last two digits of this number. When he slid the card into a tight metal slot, a tiny light winked green, indicating he had shelter for the night. He had made it from one city to another without speaking to a single human being.

Ross flipped on the light and paused to lean on the cool wallpaper of his new home. The dread he’d felt 700 miles earlier was still here, in this room. He extracted his phone from behind his wallet and turned it slowly in his hands, like a smooth stone. What was he forgetting? Clicking the phone on, he saw a tiny orange airplane in the upper left corner of its screen. Hours earlier, this was how he’d imagined his own flight appearing in the national air-traffic-control network. He took the phone off airplane mode, aligning it with its own invisible network.

He had six messages. Three were from Carly (watch his prepositions; she’d booked him a teeth whitening in St. Paul; seriously, watch those prepositions), one from Tracy (his online schedule put them both in Dallas overnight next month), and one from the building manager of the Kansas City Convention Center (his entry code had been emailed). The sixth message was no message: a click. He scrolled through Recent Calls without suspense. 918. There it was.

He checked his outgoing voice-mail message, hearing, “You have reached Ross Garmey. Please leave a message.” He sounded confident, with a trace of boredom.

“You’re stressed,” Carly said him the following night, once he was safely

back

in his room. He understood she meant this as a statement, not a question. The quant tallied not only words and phrases, but also the pauses and intakes between words and phrases. Last December, it’d told him he was coming down with the flu two days before he’d felt any symptoms.

“Also, your MFTs are up,” she added, referring to his Mobile Follow Throughs, the number of people who had been so moved by his presentation that they actually perused the company website during the presentation itself.

“Way up. So, yeah. I gotta say… whatever it is that’s eating you, hey. Keep up the good work.” She laughed genially. “Seriously, I hope everything’s going OK.” She laughed again. “Although not too OK. No, I’m joking.”

That morning, he’d looked up “Ross Garmey” online. Even misspelled, his name lead directly to his photo and schedule. Then he’d looked up the mysterious area code, learning that its three digits added up to northeastern Oklahoma. He’d made the four-hour drive from Tulsa to Kansas City enough times to remember its rest stops. In the afternoon, he’d given three talks in one of the smaller chambers of the Kansas City Convention Center, a room built for 1,800 people. In the largest of his talks he’d spoken to maybe 100 people. Normally such vast, carpeted chambers invigorated him, spurring him to politician-grade oration. Today he felt like a high schooler running for class president. During each presentation, he’d registered a new and unwanted lucidity, examining the faces of all the strange, intent men watching his every word. At the end of the day, he’d lingered by the loading dock until a surging crowd—ferret enthusiasts, he’d read earlier, in the lobby—allowed him to slip out to his car and slink out of the massive lot.

“I need to change my phone number,” Ross said.

“Are you serious?”

“Yeah.”

She made a quiet sucking noise and then said, “Sorry. No.”

“Excuse me?”

“I had to fight to secure you a 917 area code.”

“Yeah?”

“They’re long gone. You can’t just get a new one. It’s like getting a 212, or a four-letter domain name.”

“So?”

“So, do you really want to be a 646? A 929? A nobody?”

“Look, I need…”

“The answer’s no, Ross. That’s not negotiable.” She laughed, trying to defuse her own tone. “Hey, if it’s any consolation, you’re going to kill it with commissions this month.”

After dinner—room service, left by the door—he squeezed himself down into the space between the second, unused bed and the room’s wall-length window. With one outstretched foot, he nudged the curtain open just wide enough to survey the parking lot. Occasional headlights illuminated rows of cars, spotlighting all the hollows and

back

seats where a man could hide. He’d felt sure that someone was following him on the drive from the convention center, despite all the turns and feints he’d forced on his exasperated dashboard navigator. “Recalculating,” the computer had repeated mindlessly, mirroring his own panic. Safe here now, Ross sat perfectly still, listening to the sounds of the hotel that surrounded him: footsteps in the hallway, a gurgle of plumbing, muted laughter, brighter but more distant laugher from the world outside. He could use a drink.

Ross extracted his phone and dialed ten digits at random. Time for a morale boost. Someone answered.

“Hello, hi.” His mouth was dry. “I’m conducting a survey…”

“Now you listen here, peckerwood,” a man’s voice said. “I’m not going to go one more night listening to my daughter cry herself to sleep. You

stop

calling her.”

“But sir, I’m just conducting a brief…”

“Listen. If you call here again…”—the voice mashed itself into the receiver with a slight vibrato of rage—“… if you call here again, me and Tom Langley are going to drive out to Fisher Creek Road. And I am going to blow your goddamned brains out. Is that clear? Do you understand?”

“Wha…”

“YOU WILL STOP FUCKING CALLING MY DAUGHTER!!” the voice roared with such abrupt fury that Ross actually squawked in shock, tossing the cell phone overhead and past the bedspread. He sat frozen, listening to the caller rage in the distance. Only after the room was silent for a long minute did he follow the tiny screen’s glow to a hollow in a rumpled coverlet—he’d somehow launched it to the next bed—switched the phone off, and collapsed with a groan.

Another groan woke him. A stab of light spilled in through the gap in the curtains and a bitter taste in his mouth told him he’d been unconscious at some point, although it was hard to believe it was for long. He rose with stiffness. It was 6:40: 20 minutes to shower and shave and get on the road to St. Louis. He dialed Carly.

“I can’t do today. You have to cancel.”

“Why.”

“I’m sick.”

“How?”

The question confused him. “Well. Fever, for one thing. Chills. Um. Puking.”

“Since when.”

“Last night. After we talked.”

“Come on, Ross…”

“What?”

“You know I have all the data from yesterday’s presentations.”

He coughed unconvincingly. “And?”

“Come on. Don’t make me say it.”

He couldn’t think of a response, and after a silence she finally said, “We both know you’re not sick.”

He hung up, accepting a deeper level of confusion. In the bathroom, he splashed water on his face and laughed when he caught himself in the mirror. He

wasn’t

sick. He wasn’t mentally ill, or having a breakdown, or losing his hold on life. It was ridiculous. Nothing had changed. He was fine.

Twenty minutes later he was packed, showered but unshaven—maybe the MFTs would like this look—and out the door. In the elevator, he marveled at his own psychic resilience. This wasn’t the first time he’d sunk below the horizon for a night. But he always bounced

back

quick and hard. One fundamental truth kept him anchored: He was a champion salesman. Defying the odds, he’d found the one thing he was best at in this world, and he’d been allowed—encouraged!—to do this one thing. What rare fraction of humanity ever got such an opportunity?

Ross stepped into the lobby, wishing he could call this Ed fellow. It would be just one more sale. He wouldn’t even have to prep. He could just explain that he’d been drunk, that the guy’s wife had misheard him, that there’d been an unfortunate error. He could offer them a nice night at the best restaurant in Tulsa, or whatever little whistle-stop they called home. In three sentences—five, tops—he could flip they guy’s sympathies. It would be nothing.

As with most early-morning hotel lobbies, children ran whooping circles around luggage and oblivious fathers. For once, Ross enjoyed the din. He wouldn’t have traded places with any of these bleary, badly dressed dads for a million bucks, but it was nice to have them here, to be a part, no matter how fleeting, of their family memories. He and they were the same: guys with functions. He liked that.

Ross reached for one of the complimentary apples on the front desk and grinned in sudden revelation. He was Ed’s number. 917. 918. The difference between Manhattan and eastern Oklahoma was just a single digit. It was the most obvious thing in the world. He pulled out his phone and, still holding the apple, dialed his own number—the version of his number existing in an alternate, lower-Midwest universe—with one outstretched finger. Time to make a sale.

Somewhere in the lobby a phone rang.