An Account Executive walks into a bar. He’s a young man still, in his late twenties and relatively healthy, with the look of a polished and sturdy businessman. To see him, slipped snugly into a Gitman Bros bespoke tailored dress shirt with chinos creased to a knife’s edge, is to understand the phrase “business casual.” This particular bar is one the Account Executive visits often. With its thick mahogany countertops and sharp light fixtures rescued from the modern art world, he can sidle up to a barstool and order a drink—a rusty nail with Aberfeldy 12 Year, his regular—and scroll through his phone without looking out of place. On occasion he’ll talk with nearby patrons, offering well-to-do tourists his opinion on the best seafood in town, or else chatting up his fellow working professionals in their arid social language, all salary and scope creep. But more often than not, it is the Bartender he converses with.
“Another drink?” the Bartender asks him, to which the Account Executive nods.
“Your regular?” The Account Executive nods again. The Bartender, too old for his stubbled chin and spiked hair, is nevertheless a Food & Bev lifer, a consummate server who, even on a slow night, will brandish his strainers and muddlers and church-keys with the perfect blend of flair and effortlessness. He is, in the opinion of the Account Executive, the best bartender in the city.
“You’re the best bartender in the city,” he professes after his third rusty nail.
“What makes you say that?” the Bartender says, wiping the counter.
“Well,” the Account Executive says. “You’ll cut someone off if you’ve already heard the story they’re telling. That, and you hate the Yankees.”
On his way home from the bar, the Account Executive asks his Uber driver to drop him off three blocks north of his apartment. He prefers to walk these three blocks, to breathe in the sting of the crisp city air. Also, there’s a homeless man known to perch atop a nearby stoop and offer advice to passersby in exchange for a dollar. The Account Executive can vent about anything he’d like—his frustrating work accounts, Ohio State’s failure to cover the spread, the embarrassing song he lost his virginity to—and the man will sit and listen patiently.
“I was recently promoted,” the Account Executive reveals after handing over a crinkled bill. He now has a window-paned office, an extra digit in each paycheck, and twice as many angry emails to address each day.
“They never slow down. Some guy down in sales retired last year. Apparently he convinced IT to blind copy him on emails from all his old accounts. To help with the transition, he said, but really, he’s doing it for entertainment. I heard he just sits there, down at his condo in Florida, secretly watching the emails go back and forth all day. I mean, can you imagine?”
The homeless man nods, before offering the same advice he always does: “A boat which sails with the current will miss the most poignant moments of the night. You know what I mean?”
The Account Executive has no idea what he means. He’s never understood the phrase, though he’s Googled it on numerous occasions. Still, the advice sounds comforting enough, so once the homeless man has dispensed his wisdom, the Account Executive thanks him, returns to his apartment, and drifts off with the image of an ambiguous, allegorical watercraft swirling in his head. He suspects the phrase means nothing at all, but he’s already committed close to thirty dollars in singles toward its validity. To question things now would only serve to ruin what little sleep he gets.
One day at work, an invitation to the Account Executive’s ten-year high school reunion shows up. It arrives not in the mail, as his 18-year-old self imagined it would, but via an email link to a digital invitation service, requesting his presence on a Friday night in late February for a “celebration of all that’s transpired in the ten years since we graduated.”
The Account Executive doesn’t respond right away but instead sits in silence, letting his work emails pile up while he watches his computer screen, following along as his classmates reply. Within the hour nearly everyone has sorted themselves into a category: those who will attend and those who won’t.
He finds it amusing to track the predictability of his classmates’ decisions. These are people he could have cataloged in high school as the Hads and the Had Nots. The Hads are those who post with great eagerness about attending the reunion. They cannot wait to see everyone again and catch up. It won’t be a problem, they assure the group, to change their work shifts or arrange for a sitter to free up their schedules. But the Had Nots, by and large, post only their regrets. Their loud and complicated lives will not allow time for a class reunion this year. Maybe at the twentieth.
Before long, the Account Executive is one of only a handful of invitees yet to respond. In his head, he’s been crafting the post that he himself will write:
Dear Class,
I regret to inform you that my professional obligations as an Account Executive will keep me from reuniting with you all. February is one of our busiest months, and my role is vital to the long-term viability of our firm. Thank you, however, for thinking of me.
It’s a pompous reply, he realizes, and also not all that impressive. Many of the Had Nots have excused themselves with rather exorbitant regrets. They claim they’ll be presenting at academic conferences, or trekking across Europe, or closing on a new house. It’s as if a game is being played to see who can concoct the loftiest cop-out, and the Account Executive feels he can do better.
Dear Class,
I’m writing to you from my villa in Aspen.
I’m writing to you from atop the Pyrenees.
I’m writing to you from aboard the international space station. I won’t be back on Earth for some time, so regretfully I’ll miss the ten-year reunion. Raise a glass in my honor. PS—the view up here is to die for.
Ultimately, he decides against posting anything. He worries that as soon as he clicks send, he’ll come up with something better. He can sort his reply out later, and he needs to get back to work. In the hour that’s passed, fifteen new crises have escalated in his inbox.
On Halloween the Account Executive goes out dressed as himself.
“Who are you supposed to be?” a blonde-haired Powerpuff Girl in a form-fitting dress asks him. “Patrick Bateman?”
They’re at a costume party staged in a converted warehouse, and her eyes dance with mischief behind face paint. She begins to playfully massage the twill sleeve fabric of his Gitman Bros dress shirt between her fingers. “That’s not very original,” she says with a smile. “I’ve already seen three others in here dressed just like you.”
“I came straight from work,” the Account Executive explains. “I didn’t have time to find a costume.”
“That’s too bad, Patrick,” the Powerpuff Girl says. She pirouettes her hips to return to the costumed throng assembled all around them. “One of my rules: never trust a boy who can’t be bothered to dress up for Halloween.”
On New Year’s Eve, the Account Executive goes out dressed as a success. He buys a $250 ticket to a rooftop party with towering heaters, bonsai trees, and dim lighting. At the party, he meets a colleague, as planned. But the colleague brings along his fiancée, and by 11:45 the entirety of the party appears to have coupled up. The Account Executive buys a drink and circles the party, stumbling along beside a brick parapet in search of a stranger he can lock eyes with. When he finds no one, he returns to the bar, buys another drink, and conducts another lap. He comes up empty once again and returns to the bar where he asks a female caterer if she’d like to dance.
“I’m working,” she explains. “We’re not really allowed to dance with patrons. But I can get you another rusty nail if you’d like.”
On a Tuesday night, the Account Executive goes out dressed for a funeral. At least that’s what a group of flannel-clad college girls think.
“Who died?” they ask him, giggling at how out of place his black Givenchy blazer is in their grimy dive bar.
“It’s business casual,” he says. “So, what’s your major?”
The girls roll their eyes and slink away. He finishes his drink quickly and leaves. He takes an Uber across town to his regular spot where he orders a rusty nail with a double shot of Aberfeldy.
“What have you been up to tonight?” asks the Bartender.
“Acting my age, I guess,” the Account Executive replies, before ordering another drink.
The Account Executive doesn’t understand why the reunion is scheduled for a random weekend in February rather than Thanksgiving, as is customary. He tries to convince himself that he cannot afford to fly home so soon after the holidays. Or that it would at least be financially imprudent to do so. He’s been meaning to cut down on his expenditures. He often wakes on Sunday mornings and winces upon review of his credit card activity. But somehow, these late-night dents to his bank account never linger. Within two weeks everything has been replenished like magic. He uses this process as an example to help explain the worldwide banking system whenever his dry cleaner asks him about stock derivatives.
Eventually the Account Executive decides to purchase a flight home for the reunion weekend. His regular business trips afford him enough frequent flier miles to travel almost anywhere in the continental US for next-to-nothing. He also purchases tickets to LA and Miami for the exact same weekend. Just to keep his options open.
He calls his older brother to ask if he attended his own ten-year reunion.
“I sure did. If I recall correctly, the old wrestling team got together and did a ton of blow in a bathroom stall.”
He asks the Bartender the same question.
“I went to mine,” the Bartender says. “We had a class of 200 kids, but it felt like everyone I knew ended up becoming a bartender. I spent most of the night talking about work.”
On his way home, the Account Executive stops and asks the homeless man on his block if he attended his high school reunion.
“A boat sailing with the current,” the man replies. “Will miss the most poignant moments of the night.”
“Can’t you give me something different, once in a while?” the Account Executive asks, but the man only shrugs.
“When you stop paying for this one, I’ll come up with something different.”
On the reunion event page, his former classmates have taken to posting updates on the last ten years of their lives. There are, by the Account Executive’s estimate: forty-three marriages, twenty-one babies, and three divorces. Titles acquired include Staff Sergeant (estimated annual salary: $46,000), DPW Administrator ($54,000), Field Service Engineer ($76,000), and Miss March 2012 ($115,000). His own salary exceeds nearly all the estimates he computes, and he’s ashamed, slightly, by how giddy this makes him.
He’d like to think he’s done a better job staying in touch with his college friends. Many of them live among him in the city. They have brand name possessions, accountants for their taxes, boats they never use, season tickets, annual passes, Labor Day cookouts, Holiday gift swaps, Kentucky Derby parties, bouts of restlessness, and neuroses about the future. The Account Executive meets them occasionally for lunch or coffee or drinks, so they can ask each other how work is going.
“Work is a joke,” a Senior Content Producer reveals at one such rendezvous. “At this point I’m just mailing my projects in.” Her work lacks fire, lacks purpose. She has semi-seriously considered quitting, selling her possessions, and moving to Montana to work on a farm.
“Totally off the grid,” she informs the Account Executive between bites of kale salad. “With any luck, this is the last you’ll see of me. You won’t hear from me ever again.”
The Account Executive goes out on a Friday night and meets a Junior Data Strategist. They talk, buy each other drinks, and eventually go back to his apartment, where she examines all five hundred fifty square feet of studio space. She studies the framed W. Case Jernigan painting on his wall, strums the strings of the Fender guitar he never plays, and wraps herself in the Arsenal F.C. scarves he collects on his London business trips.
“You’ve got some nice things,” she tells him.
Afterward, lying in bed, the Account Executive asks her whether she’ll attend her ten-year reunion. She laughs.
“God, that’s so far off.” She’s twenty-three, she reveals, and hasn’t thought about tomorrow’s workout, much less her ten-year reunion. When he tries to explain that time will accelerate for her over the next five years, that her twenties will pass by before she knows it, she wrinkles her nose at him.
“You’re not one of those people, are you?” she says. “Live each day as if you might die tomorrow? Anyway, the type of person who would go to a high school reunion isn’t the type of person I’m interested in reuniting with.”
The Account Executive can’t think of anything to say to this, and their discussion ebbs. Before long they are both absorbed in their phones, only occasionally trying to reignite a conversation. Eventually the Junior Data Specialist summons an Uber to take her away, and the Account Executive is left alone once again.
Unable to sleep, he thinks back to his first apartment, a dull and creaky brownstone basement. When he first moved in, as a reward for finally living on his own, he signed up for a subscription to the Wall Street Journal. It was a status symbol, he posited at the time, to have such a prestigious newspaper delivered to his door. Only he never read it. The papers stacked up and cluttered his coffee table, so he canceled the subscription and stuffed the unread papers into unused drawers in his kitchen. It wasn’t until three years later, when he began to pack for the move to his current apartment and was wrapping kitchen items in newspaper, that he finally began to read the news. It took him three hours to box two shelves of glassware. “Pluto No Longer a Planet,” one headline read. He could only imagine what else he’d missed.
With only weeks to go until the reunion, the invitation page reveals dissension. A faction of classmates want a venue change. Another group is demanding gluten-free catering. The organizer of the event, their former class president, implores the procrastinators to RSVP so they can have an accurate headcount.
The Account Executive’s name is one of those still listed under Yet to Reply. His avatar—a giant white question mark backlit by a stock blue outline of a human head—is nestled among the handful of other non-responders. Their digital inaction has linked them all together, an odd assortment of alumni who would have rarely interacted as teenagers, and who he’s rarely thought about since. Most of them, the Account Executive can barely remember.
For a long time, he considered himself to be above his old classmates. It’s an opinion he can trace back to at least high school, when they voted him Most Likely to Change the World and then immortalized the accolade in their yearbook beneath a photo of his eighteen-year-old-self holding aloft a classroom globe. But in the ten years since, all he’s managed on the Change the World front is an MBA from a safety school and a few tax-deductible donations to the ASPCA. Now, every time he recycles a soda can or passes the organic foods section in the supermarket, he wonders how beholden he is to his title. He can’t help but think of a former classmate who missed out on all the yearbook superlatives, but who did accept a dare at a house party to lick dog shit on someone’s front lawn. At the time, the kid probably assumed he was participating in some sort of trade-off: a swap of temporary oral discomfort in exchange for fifty dollars and a few laughs. Instead, he’d unknowingly entered into a lifelong pact. Fast-forward ten years. This kid could stand in front of his former classmates, nametag on chest, Heineken in hand; he could regale everyone with any number of impressive post-high school accomplishments—he’d blossomed into a brain surgeon, into a United States Congressman, into the point guard for the New York Knicks. None of that would matter. He was and would always remain a shit licker, in the same way that the geek, the jock, the popular girl, the nerd, the dweeb, the doofus, the ditz, the introvert, those most likely to succeed, to become a star, to fall flat on their ass, have all remained frozen in the Account Executive’s memory, unable to escape what they once were.
Which is why the Account Executive still feels obligated to change the world. Or at least put in more of an effort to recycle.
Dear Class, he writes.
I very much want to attend our preordained, bound-by-tradition class reunion. I fear, however, that I’m not yet capable of saying what needs to be said. I’ve spent the last ten years working on my conversation topics—well, working on my apologies. To [NAME REDACTED], for laughing along with everyone else at your wardrobe. To [NAME REDACTED], for staring back in cruel silence that time you asked me to prom. To all the friends I abandoned and let slip away out of arrogance; to all of you, really, for losing touch, for not once ever truly being there when you needed it, I know I need to apologize. But I’m still not sure how to. Perhaps some sort of extension is in order. What I’m really asking is, can we reschedule?
Yet again, he deletes the message.
After the homeless man fails to appear for three straight weeks, the Account Executive has his Uber driver transport him from the bar to the police station so he can file a missing person’s report.
“I don’t know his name,” he admits to the officer who takes the report. “Or his age, or his height or weight. I would describe him as ragged looking.” When asked why he wants to file a report, the Account Executive explains that the man owes him an explanation.
“Or I should at least get my money back,” he says.
Back at his apartment, the Account Executive catches up on non-work emails. His mother has sent him one with the subject line, “Classmate of Yours?” linking to a news article from her local paper. The headline: “Feldman High Alum Passes Away at 28.”
“She labored in quiet dignity,” the article explains, “before finally succumbing to her illness.”
He immediately checks the reunion page for confirmation and discovers the news is true. The page has been turned into a sort of digital shrine for the deceased student, with thoughts and prayers pouring in, post after post. He scrolls past those entries to the RSVP section. He wants to confirm how she’d been categorized, whether or not she’d been planning to attend. He finds her name right below his own. Another Yet to Reply. Another question mark, an unknown who, right up until he heard about her death, could have been anywhere, doing anything.
The Account Executive wishes, suddenly, there was someone else beside him, anyone, a stranger even, who might register the reaction on his face, who could glance down at the screen on his phone and comprehend the gravity of the exposed headline. The stranger could ask, “Was this your friend? Was this your childhood sweetheart?”
“No,” the Account Executive would reply. “I really didn’t know her at all.”
But it’s the middle of the night, and the Account Executive is alone, so he stumbles out of his apartment and heads down the street to a 24-hour deli that serves late-night food drenched in grease.
“To say I didn’t know her at all isn’t really true,” he says to the deli clerk after he’s ordered and paid. “We knew each other, went to high school together, hung out with the same crowd. Same parties, same bonfires, same beers. Only we weren’t friends, not really. We never spent any time together, just hung around in the same vicinity. I never cared much for the girl, if I’m being honest. I always thought she was catty. I probably called her a bitch behind her back on several occasions. And now she’s dead. How wrong was I? So, yeah, I guess I didn’t know her.”
The deli clerk slides the sandwich across the counter. “Take sandwich and get fuck out, pal,” he says.
The Account Executive walks outside. The sandwich meat has the feel of rubber in his mouth, but the hoagie roll is fresh and warm. He opens the roll like a book, dumps the meat and toppings onto the street, and engorges the bread in a succession of quick bites.
His stomach begins to ache, so he turns and walks back to his apartment where, once he arrives, he doesn’t post on the reunion page, doesn’t search for flights or arrange for funeral flowers, doesn’t text his oldest friends or call his mother. Instead he slumps onto his couch. His sits there listless, slouched to the side, for what feels like days, weeks even.
Sitting and waiting for another decade to pass.
An Account Executive walks into a bar. He is weary and ragged looking, or at least as ragged looking as one can get in a Gitman Bros bespoke tailored dress shirt. A thousand miles away, his former classmates walk into a function hall at a Days Inn. One by one they enter, and from a check-in table they pluck nametags adorned with their high school yearbook photos. They congregate and mingle, hesitant to interact at first, but slowly, as drinks are consumed and people relax, they begin to talk and laugh. Before long, they are all dancing together.
“You look upset,” the Bartender says once the Account Executive has settled onto his barstool. “Can I get you your regular?”
“I’d like to switch it up, actually.”
“Sure thing,” says the Bartender. “What would you like?”
The Account Executive pauses. “Something new,” he says, finally. “Anything. You pick.”
The Bartender mixes him a drink, a clear, fizzy concoction garnished with a lemon peel, and sets it down in front of him on the bar.
The Account Executive takes a sip and purses his lips. “Have you ever been to Montana?” he asks.
The Bartender shakes his head. “Why do you ask?”
“I’m thinking about moving out there,” the Account Executive says. “Go off-the-grid for a while.”
The Bartender chuckles. “You don’t strike me as an off-the-grid kind of guy.”
“No?” The Account Executive asks. “I think it’s exactly what I need. Sell everything I own. Simplify my life. Live off the land or something. What do you think?”
The Bartender shrugs and picks up a rag. “Just let me know if you want to close out.”
The Bartender drifts to the other end of the bar. Alone again, the Account Executive spins the base of his glass atop the counter, slowly, watching the liquid within gently oscillate. He reaches into his pocket and retrieves his phone. The final message on the reunion page, posted over three hours ago, reads, “Can’t wait to see everybody tonight!”
He pockets the phone and returns to his drink. After each sip he places it back on the counter, where he can gauge the liquid level’s progress as it gradually descends down the glass. He pulls out his phone and calls up the reunion page again. He hits refresh a few times, but nothing changes.
Nicholas Plasmati is originally from Massachusetts, and now lives in South Carolina. He is a graduate of William & Mary and the College of Charleston’s MFA program. This is his first published work of fiction.