Eddie Joyce - Small Mercies

Fuck ’em, bro, they don’t know.

That’s what he said.

Fuck ’em, bro, they don’t know.

Years ago, when Peter was a summer associate at the firm, he’d gone to dinner with a group of summers and young associates. Everyone was talking about where they were from, some girl with a weird J name — Jordan? Jade? Jenna? — who’d grown up on Central Park West, laughed at him when he said he was from New York.

“Staten Island, uhh, that’s not really part of New York. You know that, right? I wouldn’t walk around the firm admitting that, Pete. They’ll think you’re support staff. That’s bridge-and-tunnel country.”

Try the ferry, you stuck-up bitch, he thought but didn’t say. No, instead, he turned quiet. His face went hot with embarrassment. He told Bobby the story a few weeks later at the Leaf. Bobby listened intently, his fingers peeling the label of a beer bottle, then rendered his judgment.

Fuck ’em, bro, they don’t know.

Peter’s hands started to shake. How could Bobby be gone?

Three years on and he still experienced a moment of murderous rage whenever he considered the incomprehensible horror of how his brother had lost his life. He imagined his fingers curling around guilty throats or squeezing triggers to propel bullets into the heads of responsible parties. He had thoughts that scared him, that convinced him he was capable of monstrous reciprocities.

And then the absurdity always hit him. He was a lawyer, not a soldier or vigilante. He went to work in a suit and tie, sat behind a desk, spent countless hours trying to lessen the already insignificant travails of his corporate clients, was paid handsomely to do so. Litigators routinely used the jargon of warfare; they spoke boldly of “going to war” and “skirmishes” and “battles,” of “bodies” and “strategic maneuvers,” of breaking out the “big guns” or needing “ammunition.” They spoke without irony, without self-awareness. Some of them even believed that their personal fate hinged on whether this or that motion was granted or summary judgment was awarded or the SEC decided to close its investigation. The truth was that these things did matter, but not nearly as much as everyone believed they did. Real thoughts of physical violence, like the ones Peter experienced every day, had no place in this arena. They belonged to a different world, one that reached the courtroom only as a shadow of its true self.

And even then, it reached different courtrooms, filled by different lawyers.

After the anger leaked into absurdity and the absurdity drifted into numbness, there was a hole. He looked at the phone. He wanted to pick it up and call Bobby, wanted to tell him that he’d done it, that they’d done it, that they were going to Luger’s for steak and bacon and enough beer to drown a small village. He wanted to tell him to bring Franky too, because, fuck it, things were too good to be petty. All three of them should enjoy this together. He could almost hear Bobby joking that he was gonna get left behind again, like that time down at Gateway, only this time it would be with a seven-hundred-dollar check in a place that only took cash.

Fuck ’em, bro, they don’t know.

He came back to work the Monday after Bobby was killed. Dominic walked into his office, closed the door behind him. He told Peter to go home, to take as much time as he needed, take the rest of the year if he needed, to be with his family.

“He’s gone, Dom,” Peter replied, his voice hoarse. “He’s gone and he’s not coming back. And I can’t sit at home and think about it because I’ll go fucking crazy if I do. I want to work. I need to work. Put me on as many cases as you can.”

Dominic didn’t try to change his mind. He knew the narcotic power of intense industry. He did as Peter asked. Peter had always worked hard, but after Bobby was killed, he became a machine. He billed 2,700 hours in 2001 despite everything. In 2002, he came up just shy of 3,000 billable hours, the holy grail of large-firm insanity. He was on pace to break that barrier this year. Work had always been an ocean — vast, bracing, capable of overwhelming — but instead of trying to reach an ever retreating shore, Peter stopped struggling; he simply ducked his head below the surface and surrendered to its numbing infinitude.

His weight fluctuated: ten pounds down, twenty up, fifteen down. He barely slept. His eyes sagged and his hair started to thin. He checked his BlackBerry incessantly, spent the few dinners he took Lindsay to with it tucked below the table, fingers tapping, scrolling through his inbox to make sure nothing demanded his immediate attention.

He woke up one day and Amanda was walking. He came home from a business trip to Houston — six weeks reviewing documents in a windowless conference room — and she was talking.

He gave Bobby’s eulogy. He sent Tina money. He held his dead brother’s son when he was a screeching purple newborn. He took calls from his mother late at night, listened as she cried softly into the phone while his father snored in the background. His eyes ached expectantly, but he would not let the grief win. The work was always there, waiting to be done, welcoming him back without judgment.

Lindsay pleaded with him to cut back his hours, to take some vacation, to spend more time with her, with their daughter, and he told her he would. As soon as he made partner. When that happened, he promised he would slow down and take a breath. Not a moment before.

Fuck ’em, bro, they don’t know.

He thought of that snotty bitch Jordan/Jade/Jenna and her long-ago dismissal of his borough. Where was she now? Not here. Not a partner at Lonigan Brown. But he was. The donkey dago from Staten Island had made it, not the privileged debutante from the Upper West Side.

He’d done it, climbed to the top of the mountain, had the world by the balls. He’d made partner at one of the most prestigious firms in the country.

And Bobby was still dead.

He picked up the phone, dialed his house. Lindsay answered on the second ring.

“Hey, sweetie.”

“Linds,” he managed to get out, his throat clotted with emotion.

“Pete, is everything okay? Are you okay?”

“We did it,” he said and then started sobbing.

* * *

The New York offices of Lonigan Brown occupy the uppermost twenty-five floors of a nondescript fifty-seven-story commercial building on the corner of Fifty-fourth and Park. When Peter enters the building at quarter to eight, the lobby is a swarm of unhappy office workers, heads down as they swipe through security monitors and head for the elevator banks. Peter isn’t even sure what other companies share the building with his law firm. Hard to imagine he could spend so much time in relative proximity to a mass of people and know nothing about them, but he does. Everyone in New York does.

Peter walks to the last elevator bank, lets a group of women take the first available car, slides into the second unoccupied one, and presses fifty-five. A small screen scrolls through the day’s news: market turmoil because of Greece’s debt, three cops killed in a shoot-out in Cleveland, the impending March Madness tournament.

Jesus, was it already the middle of March? He doesn’t even know who’s good this year, hasn’t watched a basketball game since last year. Bobby would be disappointed.

The elevator doors open and Peter steps into another lobby. This one is spacious and airy, not cramped and claustrophobic like the one downstairs. The firm’s name is emblazoned on the wooden reception desk in deep crimson. These are the Lonigan Brown colors: deep crimson over chestnut wood. Crimson details that not so subtly evoke Harvard, at which most of the founding partners undoubtedly matriculated. The design serves a purpose: clients can see the stolidity of their counsel, can sense the venerability and stalwartness of this firm.