The Vegan by Andrew Lipstein

Author:Andrew Lipstein
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

* * *

The new shoes were comfortable, or would be once I’d spent a few days in them.

I walked into the office, nodded to Peter, and was immediately accosted by Milosz, who paced over from Simo’s desk.

Herschel, he said, where’ve you been? I was no longer Hersh. And he was no longer in awe of the world, or even happy.

Is everything okay? How are the trials?

The new buys? They’re spot-on, exact, by now we can confidently iterate. But we’re wasting time, I need your signature on new data orders, I needed it two hours ago. I thought we agreed on eight thirty?

He was artless, he’d never been anything but. I had always thought of this as some defect, his inability to cater to others, but now it showed itself as an honesty I myself could rarely achieve.

It’s Thursday, I said. I had therapy.

Therapy, he repeated. As if I’d said handball. I nodded. Okay, he said. I think we need to rethink some things. I already have, I mean. I saw past his shoulder to the windowsill, which no longer featured our very expensive plants. It would be too easy to hide a camera there, a listening device, anything. And from now on there are no electronics allowed past that line. He pointed to a strip of blue electrical tape two feet behind me. So, your phone. He put out his hand. This gave me a brief, unexpected glimpse into him as a father, something I always struggled to imagine. Actually, it often felt like he kept that part of his life completely insulated from the part I inhabited. A few months ago he’d set a photo of his wife and kids on his desk. I was mesmerized by it, by his smile, which was more tender than I’d known him capable of. He seemed unsettled by my interest in it, and the next day the picture was gone.

Milosz.

We agreed on this. You yourself announced it to the team. I took out my phone, turned it off, and gave it to him. In return he reached into his pocket and handed me a large set of keys. The one marked with your—he stopped, noticing Peter next to us, and led me away. The one with your height in inches accesses the server room. The rest do nothing. He pulled out the right key, as if I couldn’t calculate it myself: number 70. He walked past me, nodding for me to follow.

As we walked across the trading floor I noticed that Simo was now closely flanked by four other researchers, their computers pushed screen-to-screen. On the floor, enclosing them, was a three-sided box made of that same blue electrical tape. Their backs were parallel, their spines at nearly the same angle, they looked like they were servicing something more hands-on, a car, or maybe it was the opposite, that they themselves were being serviced, cows to be milked.

We came to the server room. On the door, in addition to the new keylock

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