Peripheral Involvement

By Bob Waldner

Jack Caufield never imagined that he would wake up one day and find a dead woman in his bed. That sort of thing wasn't supposed to happen to guys like him. He was on his way to law school, but instead of fielding Socratic questions from law professors, he finds himself facing the third degree from a bunch of angry cops. Despite their efforts, they find nothing incriminating, and Jack is allowed to get on with his education and his life.
Over the next fifteen years, he becomes a modestly successful corporate lawyer, a well-paid but insignificant cog in the Wall Street machine. He's resigned to playing a disappointing role in the system that he has come to disdain, until he learns that his encounter with that unlucky girl may not have been coincidental. Confronted with the possibility that the men who run the prestigious financial institution that he now represents may have been involved in a shocking conspiracy, his search for the truth is complicated by the knowledge that discovering it could cost him the career that he's spent his life chasing.
Peripheral Involvement explores Jack's struggle to reconcile the reality of his life against his expectations and to refine his understanding of success. Along the way, it looks at the absurdity of the modern-day financial industry, the current state of the American Dream, our propensity for self-deception... and baseball.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bob Waldner
• Release date: Jun 30, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311942197

Bob Waldner

Bob Waldner was born and raised in New Jersey, before heading off to Duke University and the University of Michigan Law School. He practices law in New York, where he lives with his wife, Erinn, and his daughters Maureen and Madeleine. His short fiction has appeared, or is scheduled to appear, in The Saturday Evening Post, theEEEL and Mulberry Fork Review.

Book preview

Peripheral

Involvement

Bob Waldner

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, entities, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2014 Robert J. Waldner

Smashwords Edition

All rights reserved.

ISBN: 1495302946

ISBN-13: 978-1495302947

To my wife, Erinn, without whom I’d be lost.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Epigraph

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book took a very long time to write. I worked on it (or didn’t work on it, as the case may be) over a period of eighteen years. I share this with you in an effort to give you an idea of the number of people that I encountered along the way. So many of them influenced my writing, directly or indirectly, that it’s impossible to list them all here, or to thank them properly. Whatever I include below will be incomplete, and for that, I apologize. Furthermore, as much as the credit for anything good in the following pages should be shared liberally, I want to make it clear that the blame for anything bad lies entirely with me. Please direct your vitriol appropriately.

That said, there are a number of people to whom I want to offer my gratitude, starting, of course, with my wife, Erinn. Throughout this process, she’s acted as sounding-board, editor, counselor and cheerleader, all with unfailing skill, enthusiasm and good cheer. But for her encouragement and unwavering support, this story would still be sitting half-finished in a drawer somewhere. On top of all of that, she is a wonderful mother and a beautiful, brilliant woman. I am a lucky man indeed.

I also want to thank my mother, for being the driving force behind my education. She was my first and greatest teacher, and I still remember reading with her when I was a very young boy. Whatever successes I’ve had can all be traced back to her.

Right alongside her was my father, who passed away in 2010. I never took the chance to thank him, in so many words, for all the things that he did for me, so I will now. Thanks, Dad. I wish that he would have had a chance to read this book. Honestly, I’m not sure that he would have cared for it, but I know that he would have liked the fact that I took a shot at writing it.

I thank my sister, Karen Williams, as well. She was one of the first to read the manuscript, and her positive reaction meant a lot to me. Beyond that, she’s just a cool person to have as a sister.

I very much appreciate the time, consideration and thoughtfulness of everyone who took the time to read my work along the way. Ted Callahan, Matt Tocks, Brandon Holder, Guthrie Paterson, Courtney Gilbert Middelton, Steve Maiden – many thanks for your interest, guidance and support. It’s exhilarating and terrifying to share one’s writing for the first time,

and you guys were a great audience.

I also want to say how touched I’ve been by the overwhelming amount of encouragement that I’ve received from so many of my friends. It was only recently that I told anyone what I was up to, and the outpouring of good wishes that I’ve received since then has been heartwarming. I can’t express how good it felt to get messages of support from people who come from all phases of my life, some of whom I’ve not seen in decades. I am very fortunate to have met so many quality people over the years.

Finally, I want to thank my daughters, Maureen and Madeleine, for bringing so much joy into my life. They are both way too young for this story right now, but someday, when they’re all grown up, I hope that they’ll read it. Maybe they’ll see this page and be reminded that their father loves them, always and forever. If nothing else in this book proves durable, at least I’ll know that the chance to put this message in writing made it worth printing: Daddy loves you, Mo and Maddie!

I hope that you enjoy the book!

Bob Waldner

New York, 2014

…when these matters are discussed by practical people,

the standard of justice depends on the power to compel

and that in fact the strong do what they have the power to do

and the weak accept what they have to accept."

- Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War (circa 400 B.C.)

"Thus our own age is essentially one of understanding, and on the average, perhaps, more knowledgeable than any former generation, but it is without passion. Everyone knows a great deal, we all know which way we ought to go and all the different ways we can go, but nobody is willing to move."

- Søren Kierkegaard, The Present Age (1846)

CHAPTER ONE

The first thing that Jack Caufield noticed when he awoke was the pain in his back. This was followed closely by the realization that he was on the floor, and that something hard was beneath him, digging into the skin just below his right shoulder. Rolling over, he discovered that he had been lying on his car keys. That answered one question, but a slew of others immediately popped into his head. They were all pretty basic. Where was he? Why was he on the floor when there was a bed right next to him? Why did his head feel like someone had jammed an ice pick through his left eye? He raised himself up to a sitting position and ran his right hand through what was left of his thinning brown hair. The curtains were still drawn in front of the windows, but enough light was seeping in to make him squint as he tried to get his bearings. It must have been a brilliantly sunny day outside.

As he sat and massaged his mostly bald head, it occurred to him that he needed to find his eyeglasses. After looking around and confirming that they weren’t within reach, he resolved to get up and hunt for them. It took a few moments to gather the energy to translate that resolution into action, but eventually he grabbed the edge of the bed and gingerly pulled himself to his feet. Woozy and nauseous, it was all he could do to keep from falling face first onto the mattress. He actually might have, if he hadn’t noticed that it was already occupied by a woman, passed out face-down on top of the comforter and completely naked. Jack took a look down at himself and confirmed that he was fully-clothed, belt buckled and all. He even had one shoe on.

Staring at his naked roommate, he began to recall some salient facts about his situation. Seeing her in the flesh confirmed that she hadn’t been a figment of his imagination. He remembered that her name was Jen, and that she’d told him some pretty crazy things about herself. Everything beyond that, though, was a blur. A few memories from the night before flashed through his mind: checking in to the Days Inn; passing a bottle of Wild Turkey back and forth; making a makeshift bong from a Coke can; laying out lines of blow on the nightstand next to the alarm clock. All of these images came to him as disjointed snippets. He couldn’t construct a coherent narrative that accounted for everything that had happened since he’d gotten out of the shower the previous evening.

He kicked off his odd shoe and shuffled toward the bathroom. Luckily, he noticed his glasses on the floor as he rounded the corner and avoided stepping on them as he crossed the threshold onto the tile. Bending over to pick them up turned out to be a more challenging exercise than Jack expected. More precisely, it was getting back to, and maintaining, an upright position that proved disappointingly difficult. Once achieved, he used the frame of the door for balance and managed to urinate into the toilet, more or less. After finishing, he eased over to the sink and splashed a little cold water onto his face before he took a look in the mirror.

Given how awful he felt, he was pleasantly surprised by what he saw. Other than his eyes being slightly red, he looked pretty much the same as he always did. He had a round, friendly face, clean-shaven and dotted here and there with freckles. He had always felt like it went well with the rest of his body, which was on the short side of average, but not small-looking. He had broad shoulders and muscular thighs and calves. When he was younger, people had often mistaken him for a wrestler, appreciating his low center of gravity. Since college, he had packed on a few pounds, but his frame still managed to carry it pretty well.

Satisfied with his appearance, and with his head feeling marginally clearer, he stumbled back into the main room. With his vision corrected, he was able to more fully appreciate the disaster that the place had become. It reminded him of his old room in the fraternity house on a Sunday morning. On the dresser next to the television was the Wild Turkey, with maybe one shot left, the light brown liquid barely covering the bottom of the bottle. On the floor in front of the dresser was the Coke can bong, covered with ashes and scorched black by flames. Scattered all over the place were other half-empty Coke and Diet Coke cans, most of which had been turned into ashtrays. The nightstand was covered with cocaine residue and marijuana remnants. The whole place smelled like stale cigarettes and decaying sugar.

The thing that distinguished this place from his old college abode was the volume of the mess. The night before, it had just been him and Jen, whereas in college he usually partied with a bigger group. There was also the beautiful naked woman passed out on the bed. That didn’t usually happen in his particular college room. He thought about that as he stared at her, and he smiled a bit. A sexy girl was a nice addition to the routine.

After a minute of staring, though, it dawned on him that Jen was lying incredibly still. Too still. She hadn’t so much as twitched a muscle the whole time he’d been looking at her. At that moment, he was overwhelmed by the absolute silence that surrounded him, and his heart plunged into his stomach when it occurred to him that his companion might not be OK.

Jen! he called to her from across the room. You all right? She remained completely motionless. Jack walked to the edge of the bed and tried again, raising his voice this time. Jen!

He could feel his heart rate increasing as he looked down at her. Totally still. Totally… lifeless. Jack shuddered. He reached down to give her a nudge. Maybe she was just really passed out…

As soon as his hand touched her back, he knew. He had never touched a dead person before, but there was no doubt in his mind. Jen was… gone. He kept staring at her, his right hand still resting on her bare back. Slowly, he raised it off of her, and he could see that it was shaking. Holding it in front of his face, he alternated between staring at it and staring at Jen. He stepped back from the bed and sank into a crumpled ball on the floor. Once he did so, the enormity of the situation hit him like an atomic bomb.

"Shit shit shit shit shit. Holy shit!" was the refrain that kept echoing through his mind. He racked his brain, trying to remember what the hell had happened in that room the night before, but he still couldn’t put any of it together. None of the jumbled images that flashed through his mind gave him a clue about what had led to this. The only facts that he understood to be indisputable were that he was in a strange hotel room, sitting next to a dead girl and surrounded by a sea of illegal drugs.

His first instinct was to get as far away as he could as quickly as possible. He realized that he didn’t have any sense of the time; what if it was already past noon and a maid was getting ready to knock on his door? Panicking, he jumped to his feet and looked for the alarm clock on the nightstand. It wasn’t there. Looking down, he saw that it had been knocked to the floor and unplugged. He turned and walked over to the desk in the corner of the room and found his watch. It was just before nine in the morning. For some reason, that seemed to make him feel a bit more at ease, even though it certainly didn’t improve his situation in any material way.

His hangover symptoms were completely gone by that time, or at least they were well-masked by the adrenaline that was coursing through his system. He desperately wanted to make a run for it, to get away and pretend that the whole thing had been a horrific nightmare, but he knew that running was a terrible idea. For starters, he had checked into the hotel under his own name. He’d also given them his license plate number. He assumed that the hotel had security cameras in the common areas, but even if they didn’t, the police wouldn’t have had any trouble identifying him. Also, any number of people had seen him and Jen together over the previous twenty-four hours: at least two hotel desk clerks, the staff at the local Chili’s, a couple of gas station attendants… It was pretty clear that if he went anywhere that he was expected to be, the police would be there waiting for him, but other than school or back home, he had absolutely nowhere to go. Going on the lam took some planning, and he’d never given it so much as a passing thought before that moment.

In the midst of these frantic musings, he was struck by another, much more compelling, thought: what if Jen was actually still alive? Jack wasn’t a fucking doctor; how could he tell for sure that she was dead? Suddenly buoyed by this flash of hope, he scrambled back to his feet and climbed onto the bed. Kneeling next to Jen, he slowly leaned his head down toward her until his right ear was almost resting on her left shoulder. He held himself there, as still as he could, hoping to detect some sort of sign that she was still with him. Minutes went by, but Jack heard nothing. His heart sinking again, he shifted his position on the bed and lowered his left hand, trembling again now, until his palm was directly in front of her nose and mouth. He strained to feel even the faintest sensation of her breath. Still nothing. Drawing back from her, he once again rested his head in his hands.

Notwithstanding the disappointing results of his examination, he couldn’t write her off. Without stopping to analyze any further, Jack went straight to the phone on the desk and dialed 9-1-1. He stayed remarkably composed as he answered the operator’s questions, and after he hung up, he felt a sense of relief. It seemed that doing something, even if it turned out to be the wrong thing, was preferable to sitting around and waiting for the world to collapse on top of him. Within seconds, though, his stomach started doing backflips. He looked at the door. "Last chance to run…" he mused, although he didn’t really entertain the possibility again. He looked around at all of the illegal detritus scattered across the room, but he made no move to do anything about that, either. He sensed that any effort that he made to try to conceal anything was bound to fail, and likely would have made things worse. Jack accepted that once he had invited the authorities to intervene, he had irrevocably committed himself to the course of complete truthfulness. He was resolved to tell them everything exactly as it had happened. As problematic as he understood that approach to be, he was convinced that it was the least bad option. He walked over to the window, peeled back the curtain, looked out at the parking lot, and waited.

CHAPTER TWO

As he waited, Jack felt compelled to try to understand the chain of events that had led him to that place. He was about to turn twenty-five years old, and nothing that had happened over the course of the previous quarter-century had made it seem even remotely likely that he would ever find himself in such a situation. Until the moment that he laid his hand on Jen’s lifeless body, he’d been the embodiment of the American Dream: a middle-class kid that was solidly on track to do better than his parents. They’d set him up for success by plucking him out of the mediocrity of their local public school after seventh grade, sending him first to Lawrenceville and then to Duke. It wouldn’t have been accurate to say that he’d always made the most of the opportunities with which he’d been presented; he’d never really possessed the drive required to become a seriously high achiever. It was the difference between going to Duke instead of going to Yale, or between graduating with a B+ average instead of at the top of the class. A lifetime of mild underachieving had made him acutely aware of his shortcomings, but he didn’t feel like he had anything to be ashamed of. Maybe some of the choices he’d made along the way had been less than optimal, but he had never seriously doubted that he’d make something of himself, eventually.

He looked over his shoulder and stared at Jen’s naked body, still lying face down on the bed. Even as he forced himself to absorb that image, he still found it inconceivable that someone like him had wound up in such a predicament. Surely, he thought, it wasn’t supposed to end like this.

Even though he found it difficult to connect the events of that morning to the overall arc of his life, it was actually very easy to identify the moment when he’d embarked on the course that had led him to the Days Inn in South Bend, Indiana that day. He thought back to October 10, 1995. That was the last day that he’d worked at his first job after college, at a small consulting firm in Columbia, Maryland. Ten months had passed since then, but Jack still felt a twinge of embarrassment at the unmitigated disaster that the whole experience had been.

He hadn’t been terrible at the job, at least not when it came to doing the actual work. Jack’s real problem was that he was never able to master the art of budgeting his hours in the office, which was an entirely different exercise than time allocation in any other setting. In most venues, the goal was to get as much done as quickly as possible, or, in short, to be efficient. It took Jack a while to figure out that efficiency wasn’t especially prized in a world in which time was sold for money. If a client was prepared to pay for forty hours on a certain task, it was not in the interest of the firm to complete the job in sixteen hours.

Jack was never able to get comfortable with this concept. On his first few assignments, he was, to his amusement, criticized for being too efficient. Of course, this was never communicated explicitly. Rather, his boss would suggest that Jack should hold onto his work for another day and double-check it, to make sure that it was absolutely, positively correct. Eager to please, Jack tried to adapt, but he was never able to develop a sense of how to time things properly. He would get assignments that he knew that he could do in an hour, spend all day on them, and still have them sent back for further review. Conversely, he would get something that he could do in two hours, spend four hours, and then get chewed out for spending more than one hour on such a simple task. Every time, it seemed, he made the wrong choice. He stalled when he was expected to rush and he worked at a normal pace when he should have taken his time. If only his employer could have issued him a comprehensive guide to clients and their billing expectations; then he would have known, for instance, that a two-page memo to the State could feasibly take all day to write, but that the same memo, if written to the County, couldn’t take more than three hours. Of course, Jack could have actually written the whole goddamn thing in about forty minutes, but no one seemed particularly interested in that fact. Jack’s colleagues always seemed to instinctively know the proper pace at which to work. Perhaps it was experience, or maybe they were just naturally gifted. Whatever it was, they had it and Jack didn’t, and it made Jack’s life as a permanent highway marking consultant very difficult.

Of course, he hadn’t ever expected to wind up in that sort of position. At Duke, he always figured he’d find his way into a prestigious job; maybe spend a few years busting his ass at an investment bank in New York, then go on to Harvard for an M.B.A. All of that would eventually lead to vast riches, and immortalization in the pages of the Wall Street Journal for his noble efforts to spread the Good News of the Gospel according to Adam Smith. In hindsight, he realized that he probably should have appreciated that any path that led him to the bottom of a whiskey bottle every night was unlikely to continue on to such a lofty perch. The reality of his situation never really hit him until he signed up for job interviews just before graduation. As he sat in the hallway with the other candidates, each waiting for their turn to speak with the country’s most prestigious investment bank, Forrester, Underhill & Co., he overheard one girl explaining her senior honors thesis to another. Apparently, she had written one-hundred and ten pages on the mating habits of the lemurs at the Duke Primate Center. Now, Jack didn’t really know very much about that, but, since lemurs continued to exist, he figured that it was a safe bet that they liked to fuck as much as the next mammal. This thought led him to question how enlightening such a paper could have been. More puzzling still was the issue of how, exactly, such studies might have prepared that woman for the world of corporate finance.

In retrospect, he realized that Forrester was really only looking for the type of sucker that would volunteer to write an optional one hundred and ten pages about anything. They probably figured that such a person could easily be persuaded to spend ninety hours a week staring at spreadsheets, which Jack realistically could never have done. It wasn’t that he didn’t have an attention span; once he found out that Jack Kerouac had written the entire text of On the Road during a three-week long Benzedrine binge, Jack bought three packs of cigarettes, locked his door and consumed the whole novel in one sitting. Unfortunately, he was never able to translate that focus to more productive settings, and he couldn’t sit still in his office for ten minutes without his mind wandering off. He was certainly aware of his shortcomings by the end of his senior year, but he could never quite bring himself to abandon the expectation that the bankers would somehow identify his innate genius and whisk him off to New York so that they could make gobs of money together. So, he showed up for interview after interview and tried to convince each prick that he met that he was smarter than all of the other assholes that had paraded through there that day, even though he had not one shred of tangible evidence with which to support this assertion. Unsurprisingly, nobody bought it.

While his friends kick-started their careers on Wall Street, then, Jack found himself treading water in one of the many unremarkable office parks that dotted the landscape off of I-95 in suburban Maryland. Jack imagined that it was about as far from Forrester Underhill’s world as he could have gotten; rather than working on hostile takeovers and IPO’s, Jack busied himself with reviewing highway painting feasibility studies. Before becoming a traffic management insider, Jack had assumed that the yellow and white lines on a highway were simply laid down immediately after the road was paved, more or less as an afterthought that didn’t require a great deal of planning. Once he started working, he learned that the process was much more involved than that.

First, someone who worked for the state or the county decided that new lines were needed on a given stretch of road. Then, they commissioned consultants to determine whether painting that particular piece of asphalt lay within the realm of possibility. Their conclusions were then submitted to another consulting firm, such as Jack’s, that would assess the validity of the initial feasibility study. If they signed off, a design firm would begin preparing drawings and technical specifications, which would go through several iterations before they were finally accepted and made public so that highway painting contractors could bid for the project. The low bidder would get the contract, and the county would then hire another consultant to inspect the work as it was done. Yet another firm would handle quality assurance and quality control.

Only then would the work actually begin, provided that all of the arrangements had survived the scrutiny of the several federal, state and local regulatory agencies that existed to ensure that the job would be done safely, with the proper materials, and with minimal negative effects on the environment, local businesses, or interstate commerce. After all of this, the familiar double yellow line that ran down the middle of every two-way road in America could finally be sprayed onto the bare pavement. Along the way, that seemingly simple pair of lines would have made many people a good deal of money. This group, of course, did not include the poor bastards that actually stood sweating in the hot sun and dodging traffic while they painted the lines on the road. They sold their time for six dollars and seventy-five cents an hour.

To his dismay, Jack quickly discovered that even unsophisticated girls weren’t impressed by his role in the transportation system. He found it pretty damned difficult to get laid during this period of his life; telling chicks that he spent his days reviewing highway painting feasibility studies didn’t seem to put them in the mood. Hell, when he thought about it for any length of time, it usually got him out of the mood as well.

The whole thing was horribly depressing. He spent the vast majority of his time in the office staring at the clock, each day amounting to little more than an excruciating nine-hour countdown to quitting time. Even though he instinctively understood that clock-watching was a fool’s errand, Jack found it impossible to keep himself from constantly checking the time. He often reflected on the fact that, of all the things that he could possibly possess, time was the only one that was unquestionably finite. Sooner or later, it would run out. No wonder, then, that he was troubled by the fact that he was selling it for sixteen dollars an hour. What should have been priceless went for sixteen fucking bucks an hour, before taxes, forty or fifty hours a week. Of course, he understood that he was selling those forty for the benefit of the other hundred and twenty-eight. It was actually quite reasonable when he considered it, but as time passed Jack found that he was less and less willing to make the trade. Unfortunately, he could never quite bring himself to stop making it, so he wound up working when he was supposed to and spending the rest of his time bitching about his job to anyone that would listen, just like every other sorry son of a bitch that he’d ever met.

Looking back on it, Jack would have described most of his days in Columbia as forgettable, but Jack remembered October 10 in vivid detail. It had begun just like most of the others, with him arriving at his company’s suite of offices a couple of minutes after eight o’clock. After wishing the secretary a pleasant Good morning, or at least as pleasant as he could manage at that hour and under those circumstances, he made his way back to his office. At that point, the day promised to be as unremarkable as the hundreds that had preceded it over the previous eighteen months.

Something different happened on that particular day, though. Jack’s path through life was altered by the most mundane occurrence that he could imagine: he fell asleep in his office. The next thing that he remembered was waking up in his chair and slowly lifting his head off of his desk. As he raised his hands to rub the sleep from his eyes, he suddenly felt like he was being watched. Swallowing hard, he turned his head and swiveled his body so that he could look back over his left shoulder. Sure enough, his employer was standing in the doorway, looking at Jack with expressionless eyes. That moment was frozen in time for what, to Jack, seemed like an eternity before the silence was finally broken by Albert S. Skinner, P.E., M.B.A., the founder, president, CEO and CFO of Skinner & Sons, Inc. Actually, Skinner didn’t have any children, but he thought that adding the & Sons to the name of his company made it seem like more of a well-established, legitimate firm than it really was, and he was probably right. He began in a lukewarm tone. Good morning, Jack.

"Shit," thought Jack. Had the boss seen him sleeping, or had he only just walked in? Was good morning a snide poke at Jack or just a normal greeting? It was still morning, wasn’t it? Jack figured that it was, and so responded to Skinner’s greeting the only way he could: Good morning, Al.

How’s everything going?

Fine. I’ve, uh, started reviewing those new guidelines from the state highway administration and nothing in there looks controversial. I mean… so far, at least. I still need some time to look at it. I can probably have something written up by the end of the day if you need it…

No hurry, Skinner said as he turned to walk out of the room. After he was gone, Jack exhaled dramatically. He finally looked at the clock on the computer screen, which read 9:31 A.M. Jack smiled and congratulated himself. This was the first time he had ever fallen