Pieces of You (12 page)

The following week, business went on as usual until late on Thursday afternoon. Monday’s announcement was no surprise; over 95% of the loan officers and senior managers approved Jim’s requested 50%. The dissension of a small minority was to be expected.

Mark’s friends must, surely have agreed with his suggestion or he would have heard
;
but then his phone rang. The voice on the other end of the line sounded composed but with ragged edges.

Was it Denise? Her brief message was uttered slowly and in words of one syllable: “I need to talk. When can we meet?”

Replacing the receiver after they had arranged to meet in forty-five minutes, Mark put his head in his hands and closed his eyes. ‘Oh my God, don’t let her be a casualty’ he muttered under his breath. ‘It’s too soon for management to make cuts and, anyway, they would need a conclusive reason for axing a model employee to avoid pushing tension in the department even higher.
’

At that instant, an image of the bank’s employment manual flashed into his mind, with the words ‘at will employer’ seeming to glow like a neon sign. Only a supreme effort of will held back a sudden attack of nausea.

The previous year Mark had done some research to help a former college roommate fight his termination by a competitor bank headquartered in Columbus. Mark had discovered that every employee who is not covered by an employment contract has no recourse in such a situation.

U.S. employees may be dismissed for good cause, for a morally indefensible cause or even without cause, without any laws being broken.

He had learned that Horace C. Wood introduced the doctrine in 1877, using four cases as the basis for his claim. Not one of those cases actually validated it.

In reality, Wood had invented the concept
ha
d justified it by creating the impression of courtroom acceptance.
From that year to the present, any dissension had always been overruled by this support for employers.

These findings had offended Mark’s sense of justice but he had felt powerless to fight for what should have been his friend’s rights.

After all, how could one person fight the whole legal system?

***

Choking on her tears, Denise met Mark outside the neighborhood bar with the announcement he had intuited; her job had been terminated.

She described how Jim and the personnel manager had come to her cubicle earlier that day.

Within minutes, her desk was emptied and, as alarmed employees and inquisitive customers looked on, Denise had been escorted out
,
one adjudicator on either side.

The reason for her dismissal had been written up as ‘insufficient growth in her loan portfolio’ and ‘two loans past due’.

No more detail had been volunteered and Denise knew that no more would be given. She was just another ‘at will’ casualty.

As soon as the waitress had delivered their drinks, Mark asked what he had been anxious to know.

“How much did the growth figure you submitted on Friday differ from Jim’s request?” 

Denise almost whispered the figure: “By forty percent.”

Mark felt like screaming at her but he knew she had not made her decision lightly. Her integrity was intact and his had been shattered.

Mark’s guilt made expressions of sympathy stick in his throat, almost choking him
.
T
he best he could manage was to brush a teardrop from his cheek and enfold her in his strong, masculine arms.

Surrendering to her pain
,
Denise reached out to the shelter
—
no matter how temporary
—
that those arms conveyed
,
and Mark responded to the acceptance of which he felt so undeserving.

The strength of their separate needs and the warmth of the physical contact set off a reaction neither had anticipated. As their arms tightened around each other, the fire of passion was lit. A quick walk to Mark’s apartment and they succumbed to it. Her lips were extraordinarily soft against his and tasted deliciously of the wine they had just shared. Their shared grief was transformed into an agony of pleasure, absorbing all rational thinking.
             

Their kissing and caressing, tasting and tantalizing of each other was mutually satisfying. Without knowing she was doing so, Denise pulled Mark into her and moved with him until her gasping and clutching were as tempestuous as his own.

Hours later Mark awoke and Denise was gone. A carefully-worded note vindicated him from all responsibility. He called immediately, hoping they could start over but it didn’t surprise him when Denise insisted they forget the previous night. She gave him two choices: a platonic friendship or none.

The next day Mark was called into Jim’s office and given a sizable bonus. For a fleeting moment, Mark thought of walking out of the office and out of the bank, leaving behind his bonus and advancement potential.

Then he imagined having to tell his parents and his girlfriend that he was unemployed. He accepted the bonus.

A week later, he announced his forthcoming marriage to the nurse he had been putting off for months.

Although he celebrated with his family and fiancée, Mark was finding it harder and harder to live with his conscience; he even began to fear for his sanity.

Daily at unexpected moments and nightly, interrupting his sleep, organisms seemed to gnaw on his brain and wrap themselves around his stomach muscles.

The pain in his gut would not go away. Ignoring it was impossible. He tried to assuage it with every potentially-addictive activity that was not totally illegal. At best,
the relief
was temporary.

The pounding in his head alternated between the hooves of a single horse and a stampeding herd of wild mustangs.

Even intimate moments with his new bride brought little relief.

To hide from what he interpreted as judging eyes, Mark was becoming a recluse; although he was bodily where he was supposed to be, most of the time.

Normally a very neat person, Mark was beating himself up and it showed. Most days he came to work with facial stubble and wayward hair.

The pounds he had lost, a blessing had they fallen from his many overweight colleagues, had transformed his physique from muscular to anemic. The bags beneath his eyes were a distraction from the blue-water intensity of their color in which
, under better conditions,
members of the opposite sex could easily lose themselves.

Immersion in his work seemed to be Mark’s only salvation. The one bright spot in the policy changes was the capacity to approve commercial loans to decent clients
.
H
e would have been forced to refuse them under the earlier, far more stringent requirements.

Helping his friend Ron get the loan he needed to keep his candy store open lightened Mark’s burden of guilt for almost a full week.

***

One Thursday, several months later, Mark felt particularly at a loss; loans had started turning sour and rumors were circulating that his boss and the other four senior bank officers had worked out a deal to give themselves golden parachutes
should
the bank bec
om
e insolvent. If this was true, the scoundrels would triumph by grabbing their ill-gotten gains before the FDIC confiscated whatever assets remained. Mark ardently prayed that the bank would outlive its senior management.

The other issue, equally deplorable, was his act of complete selfishness with Denise when all she had needed was a little human kindness. ‘I was starkly selfish! What can I possibly do to make amends?’

***

Hi
s comatose body was frozen in place, but Mark’s spirit folded into a sobbing, repentant heap. Zachri’s look was tender as he spoke.

“Mark, as agonizing as this is for you, there is reason to be grateful for that chapter of your life.”

“How is that?  I’m not proud to have been such a self-centered schmuck. But guess what? Admitting it doesn’t make me feel good all over.”

Ignoring Mark’s outbreak, Zachri went on.

“The searing imprint on your conscience never left and, even though you’ve made other mistakes, they never had the devastating impact of this one. The bank’s forced closure six years later was a high price to pay
,
but you hadn’t done that alone. Deep inside, you understood that the growth goals could only be reached through corruption of the checks and balances set in place in the 1930s.”

“I must have known but I told myself that regulations were still in place to counteract management’s excesses.”

“You learned the fiction of that soon enough,” Zachri said. “It didn’t happen. What you can’t know is that the downturn of the ‘80s was only a foreshadowing of what’s to come. In just a few years, the playful waves of market risk-taking will become a tsunami of greed and economies throughout the world will be almost swamped.”

“Zachri, it’s just not possible that the whole world would be so direly affected by the unethical practices of a single bank. Even if using derivatives to amass profits became widespread….” Realization of what he had just said stopped Mark cold as he began to visualize lines connecting within the global banking system.

“I do not speculate, Mark. Why would I need to guess when the future is as clear to me as your recent past is to you?”

Zachri reminded Mark: “Do you remember when I said you’d be given supernatural abilities?”

“How could I forget, especially after what I’ve already been through with you?”

“Look at this article, Mark; it’s the headline news ‘Worldwide, a Bad Year Only Got Worse’ that will be published by the New York Times on the first of January 2009, fourteen months from now.”

‘The last four months of 2008 stand out as truly terrible. Bank lending had all but halted and markets went into a tailspin that ended only when governments agreed to spend trillions of dollars bailing out the global financial system.
             
The events of the past year have helped to remind stock investors that equities are just one part of the overall picture. Their importance was dwarfed by a handful of other markets, including credit default swaps that had barely been on the radar of most investors before the storm broke; not to mention the dreaded mortgage-backed securities game.

Investors, hoping that 2009 will be better, point out that 2008 was marked by two major phenomena unlikely to be repeated: the near-collapse of the world financial system along with the subsequent de facto government takeover of many banks.’

Mark was speechless. The machines monitoring his vitals registered abnormally shallow breathing for several minutes.

Zachri went on. “It will be as shocking to almost everyone who hears or reads about it when the news breaks. There were numerous warning signs, and even a few forecasts. All were summarily dismissed with statements such as, ‘It’s not possible; it would not be allowed.’