Teddy Wayne - Kapitoil

Then I was mute, and for once I could tell he was the nervous negotiator. He rotated his head and observed the snowy trees that looked like cauliflowers. “I’d like you to turn off the recorder for a moment,” he said.

I powered it off and showed him.

He watched the Asian tourists, who were stopping to take photographs and still blocking our progress. He quietly said, “Do you know what a cipher is?”

I said, “It is a jargon term for an algorithm that encrypts or decrypts.”

“No,” he said, even though my statement was true. “A cipher is a zero. A nothing. It doesn’t exist.” Finally he turned his head to me, and his face was slightly red from the wind, although his voice still remained quiet. “You, Karim — you are a cipher. You are a nothing. A nobody. You don’t exist. You don’t make a difference.”

And for a few seconds, his words truly made me feel like I didn’t exist, which is possibly the worst feeling to have about yourself.

“People from your area of the world can encounter visa problems very easily,” he said. “Sometimes they can’t reenter the U.S. after they leave. Forever.”

His face returned to normal color and he looked relaxed again, as if he had hit a strong racquetball shot and knew I had little chance of returning it. My legs lost strength, and it felt like knives were stabbing my back. I also knew he had the power to do this to me. But Mr. Schrub’s warning didn’t target precisely what he thought he was targeting: that I could never work at a company in the U.S. again. That wasn’t what I was most invested in anymore.

He was forcing me to make a zero-sum decision, as the lion’s share of business transactions are.

A pigeon rapidly descended by my side to the ground. It stabbed the piece of bread with its beak and in a second it was deleted, and just as quickly the pigeon vibrated its wings and left behind the ants.

I rotated my eyes toward Mr. Schrub’s hands on top of the blanket. Although he had no cuts or scars on them, his skin had spots and looked as fragile and wrinkled as a used banknote. It seemed like the only thing he could do with them was type on a computer or use a pen. Most of his nails were trimmed, but the one on the second finger of his right hand was slightly longer than the others and slightly yellow and acutely angled.

I wasn’t afraid anymore. Instead, I was very sad, as if I were watching somebody, or something, die in front of me. And although he had insulted and threatened me, I felt almost sorry for him. He was more like his sons than he wanted to believe. They were driven only by having a good time. He was driven only by winning. And he could not see that one party’s victory always causes another party’s defeat.

“Good-bye, Mr. Schrub,” I said.

I pushed the blanket off me and jumped out of the carriage and merged with the Asian tourists just before the carriage restarted.

I walked with them for several feet as the carriage resumed down the path and Mr. Schrub turned back to watch me, and then I ran ahead of the tourists and deeper into the park.

My body was strong. I continued running northwest, even though it was difficult on the snow in my shoes, but I could not stop. I felt as if I could run infinitely. When I reached the Ramble after several minutes, I was the solitary person around, and I finally decelerated, and it was peaceful hearing exclusively the sounds of ice and snow crunching under my feet like almonds in teeth and of squirrels running and a few birds chirping.

I found a stone bridge with a small arch entryway just a few feet wide at its base. Inside the arch, I stood and put my hands on the walls and closed my eyes for a long time. I listened to the wind and inhaled the air and finally deleted my mind of thoughts in a way I had not been able to achieve in all my time in New York.

When I reopened my eyes, I didn’t know how much time had passed, but the sun was setting. I used the snow to wash myself as efficiently as I could, and the coldness of the snow somehow warmed me, and I performed the Maghrib prayer under the arch. The air smelled clean, as if the world had refreshed itself.

I finished and called Rebecca at the office. “I have to leave on my flight tomorrow morning,” I said.

I could hear Dan talking to Jefferson in the background. “You took the fellowship?” she asked.

“I will give you details later,” I said, and I asked her to meet me at my apartment after work. Then I called Barron and arranged for him to drive me to the airport the next morning.

Packing was simple, as my additional possessions were exclusively my new shirts and suits and my juicer. I had to retrieve a cardboard box from the doorman to store the extra suits and juicer.

Rebecca arrived and apologized for being late. I asked her to sit on the couch. It took me a long time to initiate my sentence, and she said, “The suspense is killing me.”

Then I told her everything about Kapitoil and the epidemiology project I was still going to move forward with, and how I had rejected Mr. Schrub’s offer, and that I was fired.

At the end she asked, “Well, can’t you find another job here?”

I explained what Mr. Schrub was going to do.

“Oh,” she said. “Oh.”

Then she took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes and while they were closed said, “This is maybe a moronic idea, but what if — I can’t believe I’m suggesting this, of all people — but what if we got a quickie marriage tomorrow to keep you in the country?”

My body’s interior felt an electric charge. “You would marry me?” I asked.

She removed her hands from her eyes and looked down. “It’s not necessarily how I always daydreamed about my wedding day, but I could do worse.” She laughed slightly. “For the record, I’ve never had a daydream about my wedding.” Then her eyes angled to me and were large and serious. “But, yeah,” she said, and she smiled for an instant before returning to a non-smile.

I knew she was not proposing a fully authentic marriage, but she would not have done it if her feelings were not at least partially authentic. And my feelings for her were authentic. In fact, except for Zahira, I was most Karim-esque around Rebecca, and to boot, I was even learning to be Rebecca-esque, which was possibly what relationships were about more than they were merely about compromise.

I thought about how happy I would be if I went to sleep and woke up next to her daily, and how much I would learn from her, and possibly how much I could teach her, and what it would be like for her to meet Zahira and for me to meet her brother.

Then I wondered what it would be like for her to meet my father, or for me to meet her mother, or to walk around Doha with her. And we had other differences that might make us incompatible for a long-term partnership.

However, Rebecca and I were both intelligent problem solvers, and even though emotions and relationships were in many ways more complex than programs and mathematics equations, I had developed my skill set significantly in these areas in the last few months. Possibly it could work.

But I put my hand on her arm and said, “I value that idea very much. But Mr. Schrub probably has the power to prevent it from helping anyway, and I do not want this to cause problems for you as well.” She replaced her glasses. “And although it is an idea I like, this is not the method to be together. It is like an arranged marriage.” Then I added, “Love cannot be produced by force. It should come from itself,” which is the idea I had when I smoked marijuana at her party, and it surprised me that I stated it now, because most ideas created with the help of drugs aren’t sound, but I truly believed this one.

She nodded and looked at my hand on her arm. “I’m going to quit, too, by the way. Don’t worry, it’s not just about you. But you finally motivated me to get the hell out of Dodge,” she said. “It’s an idiom for leaving a place you don’t want to be.”