The day before the hurricane, I bailed on my work trip and caught a flight back to New York. Staying in Silicon Valley would’ve meant another day of listening to tech bros in too-tight suits telling me how to do my job. Disaster was preferable. Besides, the “calm before the storm” and mansplaining were the much same experience: trying to withstand the threat of an unsolicited bluster.

I had booked a town car from JFK. There were few cars on the expressways; arteries hollowed by Category 4 danger, a city in trepidation. I pressed my nose to the window. The late afternoon sky was dirty wash of white-gray, as if someone had taken an eraser to an entire chalkboard’s worth of theorems only to find the dust wouldn’t lift, the answers invincible, merely pushed around.

I tipped the driver extra for his efficiency, and he wished me well. The well wishes were too late: Cal had been tipped off by his girlfriend Bobbi and was waiting for me in the lobby of the apartment building. Our apartment building, except his apartment was with Bobbi and mine was mine alone. We all, however, owned the illusion that a trendy rental in the upper part of Chelsea meant we were thirty-somethings who “had it all.”

I strode over to him, the dinky wheel of my suitcase scraping the tile in protest. The doorman winced. The lady at the reception desk winced. Cal winced. The insincere hug we shared was a wince.

“I thought you might’ve gotten stranded at SFO,” he muttered, checking his suit pockets for an unknown object. A key? A pen? A way to manipulate time and space?

My voice spiked with sarcasm. “You would’ve loved that.”

He scoffed but it came off as more of a dry cough. He didn’t offer to help with my luggage. “I promised Bobbi I would text when I was sure you got home safe.”

“Yeah, women do that. Check we haven’t gotten raped and/or murdered on routine journeys. Men, you know?”

“Sure. Whatever.”

He, Bobbi and I were up-and-coming management consultants in the same global firm, headquartered here in New York City, where all corporate quarters coalesced to form whole dollars. Our specialty was making companies run better. The goal was to restructure. Find “efficiency dividends.” America invented the company game and we also invented the fixes. Rigged from the start.

In the elevator, I kept my gaze trained on our warped reflection in the stainless steel, our reflections disappearing as the doors opened at my floor.

“You didn’t tell her about… did you?” Cal asked when I had one foot out.

I hadn’t, of course. But the tremble in his falsely casual voice was like water running up into a tap. All suction and no gravity. I kept silent, knew he would not have the courage to ask again, nor to follow.

When I looked back down the hallway, I saw the wheel that refused to spin had drawn a line in the carpet. 

*

One of the comforts of being home was my favorite bodega around the corner, a block down 31st Street. I knew they’d be open, ready to cash in while other operators stayed home. I grabbed a faux fur coat to wear over my black satin pajamas and headed down.

Outside in the night, an eraser had been at work again. Building facades were austere. Neon lights dark. There was no foot traffic, no road traffic, no trafficking in general. This silence unnerved me: the usual horns and sirens and hissing absent. The loose trash blowing about was muted, urban tumbleweed. Trash! I couldn’t smell it. I sniffed the air as I turned up Sixth Avenue and it was so devoid of the usual neighborhood excretions—exhaust, fast food, coffee, urine, sweat, arrogance—that I mistook the faint notes of rust as an emerging nosebleed.

If I didn’t already know Minnie and Paul would look after me, I would’ve gotten an actual nosebleed from their jacking-up of prices. Everything from bottled water to instant ramen to canned beans had a surcharge of around twenty percent. Even the scented candles—Guava Fresh! read one label— weren’t exempted.

I smirked, lowered my voice as Minnie poured me a cup of coffee. “Don’t you think you’re taking capitalism a bit too far?”

A guy at the fridge swore at the price of 7 Up.

She snorted. “You think I escaped my country to come here and not learn the rules? American dream, baby. Right, P?”

Paul grunted in satisfaction.

On the small bracket television, a weatherwoman suffering from what seemed like a crisis-induced facial tic stood in front of a synoptic chart. Her arm jerked out at intervals, a boom gate. Paul used the remote to turn on closed captions, which obscured the scrolling news ticker; I missed the latest polling figures for Romney and Obama. Not that the election seemed to be the biggest problem now anyway.

Paul commented, “They said ‘more of a bitch than Hurricane Irene.’ ”

It wasn’t clear who “they” were; not this weatherwoman, that was for sure. The word “bitch” also sounded weird from him, like he was trying to be cool, but I couldn’t comment without sounding racist or overly feminist. Instead I asked for two glazed donuts.

He shook his head but still selected the freshest ones for me. Started working the register. “Too easy making money. What use is donuts for storm?”

The answer: they offset the gritty dregs of the coffee here. Minnie had mentioned once that the presence of grounds was normal in her country’s coffee. Like with all names, if you didn’t catch it at the start, it was too late to ask years later. I was pretty sure she named her country as Turkey. Shit, or was it Egypt?

Maybe I knew no names at all. I couldn’t be sure of the exact words on the sign outside. Even “Paul” and “Minnie” were Westernized shields.

On the walk back, I thought about how it was unfortunate that living people could wake up one day and find they now shared their name with a destructive force of nature. Irene and Sandy were old lady names. Irene had been fucking angry last year. Maybe she’d been angry for years prior. Maybe she’d wanted to become a meteorologist back in the day but was laughed at and sent to secretarial school instead. Maybe every punch of every key on that typewriter, every whack of the carriage return, was all practice for something bigger. She came, she saw, she wreaked havoc, then challenged her dear disgruntled friend Sandy to do better.

The damage bill from last August? From New York to Florida to the Caribbean, fifteen-point-eight billion dollars.

We could only hope Sandy was all talk. 

*

The next morning, I woke to a text from a managing partner: if I was going to work from home, I needed to make sure I at least got a deck done for the team still in Palo Alto.

A “deck” was a slide presentation. The first in any project captured the baseline; the status quo. You had to know the current structure before you could decide how to restructure. Next came the ideas to do just that. Pick a card, any card, the card you already knew you were going to pick before you engaged our consultancy firm. The baseline would then morph into a projected timeline for the change, milestones hung up like the company’s once-dirty laundry, now bleached squeaky clean.

To support the deck, we’d produce a report with “evidence.” Detail bullshitted to the nth degree, because anything exponential is too intimidating for a client to query.

Naïve consultants like Bobbi thought we asked real questions, but in reality we were only pretending; my being clued in was why I’d sprung ahead in seniority. If we actually bothered to do proper research on site, we’d find the real reason why operations weren’t optimal: management incompetence. But there was no money in telling the people with money that they’re the problem. So the lower levels had to be trimmed, a strategy justified through a deck from us, the external consultants. The workers had no defense, their pitchforks useless against gloss.

By the time the solution failed years later, our firm would already be absolved by distance, able to point to faulty implementation, a bad economy, intervening circumstances. We went on, peddling our card trick.  

I had my task for the day: a new deck. I checked my inbox for more details. Felt unwashed. Decided to shower and did so. Changed into fresh pair of pajamas. Tinkered with the deck. Adjusted infographics. Tested slide transitions. Updated a table with revised layoff numbers. Duplicated a box entitled “surplus to requirements.” Googled “hurricane survival strategies.” Filled plastic tubs with tap water. Made ice. Located flashlights. Replaced batteries. Arranged junk food on the kitchen counter in order of preference. Ate instant ramen. Read version 5.7.3 of a report. Skimmed job descriptions. On instruction from a senior manager, engineered a redundancy to get rid of a guy who once tried to sue the tech company. Checked phone due to pinging, which sounded like: a typewriter ready to be returned to the start, a new customer walking into the bodega, an elevator reaching the intended floor.

A text from Cal: any tips for how to impress my boss

An hour later: jefferson says i should get u to check my work – you’ve consulted on this media company before

Another half hour: come on, i need your help here ive got a performance review coming up only had 2hrs sleep

Another fifteen minutes: he says i’m too factual can’t sell shit

Another minute: just because you’ve been promoted you won’t help??

Another hour: name your price. PLEASE. i’ll even go down on you as a bonus

I munched on a stale donut as I reread the texts. Let the glaze melt on my tongue.  

*

One of the HR managers at the tech company, a forty-something woman named Dawn, had taken to disliking me on my second day in Palo Alto. The way she’d peered down at me, screwing up her face, you’d think I was the dregs in her coffee cup. Only after I explained I was flying home before the airports closed, did she pull me aside to explain.

“I’m sorry. I get it now.”

The conference room had emptied. Bobbi hovered outside the door, perhaps thinking this was an ambush.

I smiled with lips already glossed. “I’m not following. You have nothing to apologize for.”

“When I complimented you on the presentation you gave to my bosses on the first day, you said ‘thank you, it did go well.’ ” She squared her shoulders as if to mimic the version of me in her memory. Raised her chin. Unfurled one arm, then the other. “I expected you to be more modest. Say something like, ‘oh, it was nothing.’ But it wasn’t nothing, and all you were doing was acknowledging that. I shouldn’t have expected you to downplay your achievement, you know?”

I had not given Dawn much thought. If the tech company hadn’t said to protect her because she was married to someone “important,” her position would be made redundant. Fewer workers meant less HR management.

I could tell, however, that this was a watershed moment for her.

“Own your power, Dawn,” I said with a wink. “I’ll see you at the next visit.”

I sold her what she wanted: a female from whom she could draw inspiration on this otherwise dastardly project.  

The problem with people like Dawn and Cal was that they got caught up in their own fears. There was logic to faking it till you made it; hawking your own success to secure it. I said as much to Cal when I stretched myself out on his couch.

He did not respond. Instead, switched off the lights. Crossed the room to pull down the shades of the floor-to-ceiling windows even though we were forty floors up with no neighboring buildings at this height.

I gestured at the television, the synoptic chart’s greens, yellows and reds projecting onto me. A traffic light warning. “Are you going to keep this on while you sell yourself for expertise? Want me to put the volume up?”

He switched the television off, then came over to the far end of the couch. His body was still but his breathing was not. “This isn’t funny. I can’t flunk this presentation—”

“Relax. I know you love your girlfriend. I won’t ask for too much.”

 To his credit, his performance was more than good. Deliciously desperate. During the bonus round, I held his head down with one hand as he probed and sucked. I asked between moans, “What was your girlfriend’s name again? I can’t remember. Can you?” I felt power inflate my whole body as he tried to speak. Buzzed when he murmured something into my flesh. I must’ve been levitating, slicked in sweat, heated from within.

I wondered if this high was how men felt all the time. I wondered if this was how our consulting firm would feel if a firm had feelings. The thrill of fucking someone over and making bank.

I thought of Dawn. Dear old Dawn. I used to be her. Unsure of myself. Trampled on. Until I realized it wasn’t corporate America that was a competition, it was America itself. If you didn’t compete, you lost. Every day, not just work days.

Cal was quiet after. In the dark, he sat in his boxers at the same end of the couch where he’d stood before submitting. I graciously retracted into the other end and reviewed his presentation while wearing his shirt. I pointed out what was persuasive and what wasn’t, why Jefferson knew the client wouldn’t buy it. I typed over his thoughts. Deleted shapes. Inserted slides.

The hurricane descended with a roar. Since I wanted to see, Cal drew the shades to reveal the night. The ferocious winds bent the rain till it was horizontal, the glass attacked with thin, never-ending arrows. The building swayed. Whole sections of lower Manhattan lost power, a cascade of failure. Transformers blew up across the Hudson, popping iridescent blue. Still, our grid held.

I stopped typing. “What did you say, by the way? When I was holding you down?”

He sighed in the way someone does when they have enough strength to exhale but not to speak.

“You can tell me another time,’ I said.

There was enough light emanating from the laptop for me to see his set jaw, his chin held up. Good for him, I thought. Tell yourself it’s fine.

He flicked the television on, commercials ceding to the latest weather update.

Belinda Hermawan's short fiction has appeared in Cosmonauts Avenue, Pigeon Pages (nominated for The Pushcart Prize), Flock, Split Lip Magazine, Westerly, Going Down Swinging, and elsewhere. She lives in Perth, Western Australia. You can find more of her writing at www.bd-writer.com. Follow her on Twitter @bd_writer