The Awkward Black Man

1

Laertes Jackson showed up at the human-resources office of Martin, Martin, and Moll at 10:37 on a Tuesday in March. The midsize investment firm was located on Maiden Lane in the Wall Street area of Lower Manhattan. There was no ostentatious sign outside, and only the initials MMM appeared on the legend next to the elevator. Even there just one floor, the fourteenth, was identified as housing MMM, when the firm actually occupied seven floors.

In the past two years MMM had been sued by various individuals and government agencies for multiple civil rights and sexual harassment violations. The CEO and several VPs had been relieved of their positions, and the corporation itself had been fined millions of dollars in restitution and reparations.

The new CEO, Miss Winsome Millerton-Pomerantz, had made a public statement vowing that the investment firm, which oversaw more than a dozen multibillion-dollar retirement funds that, either fully or in part, served public-employee unions, would make a supreme effort to right the listing ship of our intentions.

Taking this intelligence to heart, Laertes decided to apply for an entry-level job at MMM.

Arriving at the fourteenth floor, Laertes encountered B. Chang, a young Asian woman sitting within a semiopaque, azure circular desk.

“HR is on the twentieth floor, Mr. Jackson,” she said with a lovely red-stained smile. “Take the elevator to the right.”

On the twentieth floor Clarissa Watson, a woman whose skin was even darker than Laertes’s, gave him a confused, turquoise-tinted grin, saying, “But your appointment isn’t until one forty, Mr. Jackson.”

“I’m usually early,” Laertes said, cocking his head and smiling softly. “My father always told me to get there before your competitor, because you can never tell what will be left over later on.”

Young Miss Watson smiled and nodded. She said, “We have magazines and bottled water. You can sit in the waiting area, and I’ll try to get you in early. Ms. Rodriguez is interviewing applicants for the trainee broker position all day, but sometimes the interviews take less time.”

Laertes picked up the Wall Street Journal, turning pages until his eyes fell upon the phrase trying to define the first stock transaction. It seemed that there was a great deal of disagreement among economic scholars about the age of the idea of stocks, investments, and interest.

“Mr. Jackson?” a woman said, so softly that Laertes wondered if indeed he had actually heard the utterance.

He looked up and saw a roundish woman with pale skin, dark locks, and eyes that seemed to see past him into some other realm beyond his comprehension — and maybe hers.

“I’m Jackson,” he said.

“My name is Rahlina Rodriguez. I’m supposed to interview you.”

“OK,” Laertes said. “I took the day off from work, so I have as much time as you need.”

“Where do you work?” Rahlina Rodriguez asked as Laertes rose to his feet, clutching a pint-size plastic bottle of water in his left hand.

“Maritime Merchants Bank over on Twenty-Third.”

“Savings and loan,” she stated.

“It’s pretty much mom and pop,” he said. “Mostly residential mortgages. I’ve been a teller there for more than twenty years.”

“Have you worked with investments?”

“Not really.”

“What does that mean?” The expression on Rodriguez’s wary face was a leftover from childhood, when she was too cute for her parents to punish; at least that’s what Laertes surmised.

“I’m supposed to ask new clients opening savings and checking accounts if they want to connect their money to an investment account, and if they do, I check that box on their online form. But whatever it is, I don’t understand it or have anything to do with where the money goes.”

Something about what Laertes said seemed to bother Rahlina.

“We should go to my office,” the bank officer suggested.

“OK,” Laertes replied, with a forced smile. He followed her down a gray-tiled hallway toward a bright yellow door. Rahlina moved through the doorway like a dancer, swaying from side to side, creating an aesthetic out of mere walking. Laertes followed her the only way he knew, with a dogged, straight-ahead gait.

The yellow door led to a room that was drained of any hue. The white floor, walls, and ceiling contained an ivory-colored desk and a whitewashed pine chair where the candidate who was to be interrogated had to sit.

“Have a seat, Mr. Jackson.”

He knew where to go. In his mind, because he didn’t need to ask where, he’d answered the first question correctly.

Rahlina Rodriguez settled in the seat behind the smallish pale desk. She placed the fingers of both hands on the ledge before her, giving him a wan smile.

“Before we begin,” she said, “do you have any questions?”

“Are you Mexican?”

“Um,” Rodriguez said, maybe as a criticism.

“I said, are you Mexican?” Laertes repeated.

“We don’t ask questions like that here at Triple-M.”

“If not, then how do you plan to right the listing ship of your intentions?”

“That is a corporate-wide initiative unattached to any individual’s nationality, race, age, or gender.”

“But still you have a black man named Laertes meeting a maybe Hispanic woman named Rodriguez during a hiring period where the cultural tendencies of the company in question are not serving the makeup of the unions that that company represents.”

Rahlina Rodriguez was not happy with the direction of the interview. Laertes’s little paragraph sat his interlocutor up straight in her chair.

“The facts that you are African-American,” she countered, “and that my name has roots in the Spanish language have no direct bearing on your application for the entry position of trainee investment advisor.”

“The letter I got from human resources said that this interview might be recorded,” Laertes said. “Is it?”

“It might be.”

“Is that the answer you’re supposed to give me if the cameras and tape recorders are turned on?”

The flesh around Rahlina’s dark eyes darkened. The locks of her raven hair took on the appearance of razor wire.

“I don’t know,” she said. “We have both signed away our right to privacy in this conversation, and so we may or may not be recorded.”

They gazed across the white expanse of the desk, under the pallid ceiling.

“That’s the other thing,” Laertes said, after a minute of this white-walled silence.

“What is?”

“You called me African-American, and I don’t answer to that description. People who come from another country to this one use the hyphenate name. You know, Italians who came over a generation or two back calling themselves Italian-Americans. Maybe they kept up contact with home or followed cultural norms that are particularly Italian. But a man like me, a man whose ancestors were kidnapped, chained, and dragged over here centuries ago is not, cannot be, a hyphenate. At least not the kind of hyphenate that you say. You might call me an Abductee-American, an originally Unwilling-American. You might say that I’m a partly Disenfranchised American. But African-American? I mean, even if my mama was from Guinea, you’d do better to call me a Guinean rather than an African-American. Africa is a continent, not a country, not even one race. You don’t use the term White-American because that has no cultural basis; even saying Euro-Americans makes very little sense.”

“We say African-American because that is the parlance,” Rahlina interjected.

“Used to be the parlance was colored, Negro, Afro, nigger, coon, jigaboo. Parlance don’t make a word right. And I refuse to be called after a continent that no one in my line remembers.”

“Well, Mr. Jackson, if you say that you are not African-American, I suppose this interview is over.”

“Why is that?”

“The commitment of this firm is to hire and promote peoples from various ethnic backgrounds, including African-Americans.” With that Rahlina Rodriguez stood up and waited.

After a moment or two Laertes realized that he was being asked to leave.

He stood also, raised his eyes to the ceiling, and said, “If this conversation has been recorded, I want a copy of it delivered either to the address on my application form or to the e-mail address thereupon.”

After that he exited the white room on the twentieth floor of the offices of Martin, Martin, and Moll.

2

Three Thursday afternoons after Laertes’s failed interview, he was offered what turned out to be $112.37 in change from Madeline Chan — a seven-year-old child. Her mother, Angelique, had presented the child’s canvas bag of coins while little Maddie pulled her head up over the ledge where the money was being passed from mother to teller.

“You know, Ms. Chan,” Laertes said. “We aren’t supposed to take loose change in these amounts.”

“But that’s my money,” little Maddie called over the banker’s counter.

“I know your rules, Mr. Jackson,” Maddie’s mom said. “But you and I both know that one day, when she has money of her own, Maddie will remember the bank that made an exception for her Christmas savings.”

Laertes noticed a short man in a black suit standing at the front of the line for the next free teller. The window belonging to Ms. Becky Blondell opened up, and the short man offered his place to the bulbous woman behind him. She smiled and moved ahead.

“So will you take my money?” Little Maddie asked, hoisting herself up once more.

“Of course,” Laertes told the medium-brown child. “Leave it here, and we’ll count it in the machine overnight.”

“Yaaaaaa!” Maddie cried.

“Thank you,” said her mother.

“You’re from Jamaica, Ms. Chan?” the teller asked.

“Yes, I am. How did you know?”

“Your r’s.”

The next visitor to his window was the short man in the black suit who had let the woman behind him go to Becky Blondell’s window.

“How can I help you, sir?” Laertes asked.

“Howard Sansome,” he replied. “I started a regular checking account at your Fort Greene branch a short while ago, but now I wish to upgrade it to investment-plus.”

The man calling himself Sansome handed Laertes a plastic card designed in metallic gold, red, and blue colors. His name was superimposed in lowercase black lettering across the middle of the card.

“I’ll need to see some ID,” Laertes told him.

“Of course.”

Laertes checked the New York State driver’s license and entered the bank number on his computer.

“Changing your account would be easy enough,” the fifty-something teller advised. “But the order has to be OK’d by the manager of the branch where you started the account.”

“I moved from Brooklyn to Manhattan since then,” Howard Sansome said, with something approximating an apology on his wide face. “Can’t you just make a note on my file or something like that? It would be inconvenient for me to try to get out to Fort Greene at the hours the branch is open.”

“You could make the change by mail,” Laertes suggested.

“I don’t trust the post.” Sansome’s eyes were searching the teller’s face.

“I’d be happy to make the update...” Laertes said.

A canny look came over the bank customer’s face.

“...if you just talk to the manager here and have her call your branch,” the cashier continued.

“Can’t you call him?”

“No phones at the windows.”

“I could let you use mine,” the customer offered. There was the hint of a smile on his face.

“Also against the rules.” Laertes shrugged to underscore the apology.

“Well,” Howard Sansome said with a sigh, “I guess there’s a trip to Brooklyn in my future.”

With that he turned and walked away.

Friday was much like Thursday. Eighty-six customers with 216 transactions, a zero balance, and a trip to the vault to install his cashbox.

On Saturday Laertes had lunch with his ex-wife, Bonita, and their eleven-year-old daughter, Medea. Bonita and Laertes had met at the Twenty-Third Street branch of Maritime Merchants Bank when they were both tellers. Now she was a senior vice president at National Trust Investments and Loan. They divorced because she claimed, and he agreed, that he had little ambition in his banking career.

“How’s history coming?” the father asked his daughter after the first few awkward moments amongst the three at Jammy’s Diner on Eighteenth Street.

“It’s great,” the child said. She was a deep brown color and had big eyes and an infectious smile. “I just read everything three times like you told me to, and then I know it without thinking.”

“You always have to think,” Bonita corrected.

Fifteen years younger than Laertes, Bonita was slender, tall, and strong. He was still attracted to her, even though she’d married Hero Martin, a German-American from Pittsburgh. He had nothing against Martin except for the fact that Medea called him Daddy.

“There’s nature, second nature, and thought,” Laertes said, in response to his ex-wife’s criticism. “The first is physical, the last of the mind, and the middle is something you know so well that it’s just there, like a sleeping fish in calm waters.”

Medea’s big eyes seemed to be fixed on her father’s words. At moments like this he liked to think that she saw something worthy in him.

“Are we going to order?” Bonita asked. “Medea promised her father that they’d go to the Met together this afternoon.”

On Sunday, Laertes went to the All Saints Rest Home in Nyack to visit Helena Havelock-Jackson, his mother.

“Pompey!” the ninety-one-year-old matriarch exclaimed. For the past five months or so, Helena had seen Laertes’s father’s face when looking at him; another kind of fish in a different depth of water, Laertes thought.

“Hi, Mom.”

“You look so tired, honey. I’ll make us some marrow soup, and we’ll go to bed early.” She placed four fingers on her son’s left hand, and a sigh came unbidden from way down in his throat.

“How are you, Mom?”

“You know nothing’s wrong with me,” was her rote reply. “Are you having trouble at work?”

“No.”

“Are you gonna get that promotion soon?”

“They went with somebody else.”

Helena’s skin was dark like her son’s and similar to long-deceased Pompey’s. Her eyes were both assertive and vulnerable.

“What do you mean?” she asked, pain tucked in with the words.

Holding her hands, Laertes explained to her about his harebrained scheme to get a job at MMM. And though she thought she was talking to her late husband, Laertes knew that she heard and mostly understood his words.

“That’s always been your problem,” Helena Havelock-Jackson said to her son through the medium of her husband. “You think bigger than the people believe they already big. That’s why you called our children by them Greeks and why your daddy named you for a general to freedom.”

On Monday afternoon at 4:21 p.m., Laertes Jackson departed Maritime Merchants Bank. He left behind a zero balance and a cashbox containing $6,627.14. He had executed in excess of four hundred transactions that day.

“Excuse me, sir,” someone called. “Mr. Jackson.”

Laertes turned and saw a short man in a muted maroon suit trundling toward him. There was something familiar about the man, but because he saw people all day long, Laertes had learned to disregard faces, features, and names.

But now he was shaking hands with someone who at least knew his name.

“Uh?” Laertes said.

“Howard Sansome,” the small but powerful man said.

“Um?”

“Last Thursday. You told me that I had to go to Fort Greene to update my account.”

“Either that,” the teller said, “or send it by mail.”

“Can I buy you a drink?” the man with the wide face asked.

“Excuse me?”

“I know,” Sansome said, with an air of confidentiality. “It seems kind of odd for someone who just knows you from a single encounter through a window of bulletproof glass to act like we’re friends.”

“Yeah.”

“But we have a lot more in common than that.”

“And what is it we have in common?” Laertes asked. In spite of himself, he was intrigued by Sansome.

“Martin, Martin, and Moll,” the man said, a glimmer of conspiracy in his eye.

“What?” Laertes said. “What do they have to do with you?”

“My title is VP in charge of investigations at Triple-M.”

“Investigating what?”

“Right now, you.”

“Me, for what?”

“Can we get a drink? There’s a bar down the street called The Dutchy. They serve a great Manhattan all afternoon for half price.”

Half an hour later, the drinks had been served to the short white man and his much taller black guest.

“This is very good,” Laertes agreed after his second sip.

“They use bourbon instead of rye, and the vermouth they got isn’t nearly as sweet as most.”

“So,” Laertes said, hoping to prime the explanation of why they were there.

“You know the cards are stacked against just about everybody in America,” Sansome said instead of complying.

“You including all of North and South America, or do you just mean the United States?” Laertes couldn’t help himself.

“So, is that your thing, Jackson?” the pickup host asked. “You need to argue with every word the bosses or their representatives say?”

“No, not at all.”

“You told Ms. Rodriguez that you weren’t African-American,” Sansome offered.

“Is she Mexican?” Laertes asked. “Either that or any other kind of New World so-called Hispanic?”

Howard Sansome downed his drink and gestured at the bartender, a sallow woman of middle age who had the look of having lived hard. He told her to bring two more.

Then the man turned to Laertes and said, “No.”

“No to what?”

“Rodriguez is not any kind of New World anything. Her people are French, but her ex-husband was Puerto Rican.”

“So it just happens that she’s Triple-M’s drive for integration?”

“I doubt it.”

The drinks came, and Howard asked the haggard mixologist to keep them coming.

“So it’s like a, like a capitalist conspiracy,” Laertes said. “They put somebody there who will represent their needs and fuck mine.”

Sansome sipped and thought. After a minute or so he almost said something but then decided to drink a little more.

Finally he said, “I believe that the head of HR thinks that Rahlina really is Puerto Rican. The only thing that matters to Mr. Hawthorne is that all the employees dance to the same beat. So it’s kind of like a conspiracy, but one that nobody is quite aware of.”

Laertes felt as if a light had been turned on in his chest, casting a brilliance that traveled everywhere.

“That’s what I mean when I say that I’m not arguing with everything the bosses say,” Laertes averred. “If you told me that the sky was blue or that this drink was good, I wouldn’t argue. But if you tell me that the word American only meant US citizens or that I am in any way the cultural outcome of the continent of Africa, that I’m African-American before I’m Slave-American, well then, I’d have to argue.”

Two more drinks came.

“So,” Sansome said. “You’re on a quest for justice and not a job.”

“Not justice,” Laertes said, and then he downed the cocktail in one swallow. “Not justice, no. Uh-uh. The expectation of justice would be like waiting for the Second Coming. It would be like thinking I could absolve myself of all the pain that is the true inheritance of my ancestral history.”

Laertes could see that his answer was unexpected. Sansome had thought that he understood why Laertes said the things he did. But now he could see that he’d been wrong.

“If not justice then what?” the vice president in charge of trouble asked.

There was yet another Manhattan before Laertes.

“I would just like,” the bank teller said, “for the words people say to have some modicum of truth to them. I’d like it for people to see that some folks are named after countries and cultures, whereas others are ill-defined by race and continent. That’s all.”

Having told his truth about truth, Laertes downed his fifth cocktail.

“Your records say that you only have a high school diploma,” Howard Sansome said.

“Education is simply the process of thought being applied to knowledge,” the bank teller said. “Thought... applied to knowledge. Most people just say things having never thought about what what they say means. You got presidents do that.”

Sansome turned on his barstool so that he was facing Laertes.

He said, “So you’re saying that you bollixed up your interview because the woman was white with a Spanish name and she called you African-American.”

“I’m saying that the words I hear and the words I speak should make sense. You can’t live a life in terms that are wrong — not a good life.”

“And are you living a good life?” Howard Sansome asked.

Laertes felt the full force of the five cocktails upon hearing that question. He blinked and shook his head, trying to find an answer that he felt should be second nature.

“I’ll be in touch, Mr. Jackson,” Sansome said.

Watching the short man in the dark red suit walk from the bar, Laertes felt that the room was tilted to the right. This impossibility made him smile.

3

Weeks later Laertes’s life had changed in small ways that promised to be large. Are you living a good life? The question resonated at the back of his mind, through every activity, and even in his sleep. There was certainly goodness in his life. Medea was a beautiful child, and she loved him even though she called another man father. Things had been good with Bonita before her ambition cast its gaze on him. He was good at his job, rarely had other than a zero balance. His rent had gone up twelve percent in the last three years, and another hike would necessitate a move. He needed more money but didn’t want an officer’s position, because he felt that they misrepresented the value of the accounts and loans they pushed on customers.

He hadn’t been on a date in six years — since the divorce. So now he bought his first computer and start trawling dating sites for companionship. His explanation of who he was and what he wanted was seventeen pages long, and his photograph was of a dark-skinned man who wasn’t smiling and seemed confused by and leery of the camera.

The few responses he had online were tentative but interested.

Agnes327 wrote, “Your profile was so serious, Laertes8, what do you do to have fun?”

“I read the Times,” Laertes wrote, “and take each story apart, imaging how what they say happened could have happened. Then I write responses when I feel that I’ve struck upon a contradiction.”

Lucy!! asked, if he could change the world he found so problematic, how would that look?

Laertes wrote a sixty-two-page response over a three-day period in which he addressed the economic system, the problems of a standardized education, medical care, the environment, the misconceptions of race and gender, and the waste of human potential on distractions created to keep human passion limited.

Laertes got only sixteen responses to his dating-site profile. After answering all of them he got only one second response. This was from Mona_Loa_Love. She had asked him where he’d retire when he could. He replied that the notion of retirement in the animal kingdom was tantamount to exile and not something one should pursue.

“I believe that when we age we lose our physical edge but gain wisdom and patience. I’d like to become an advisor to younger members of our nation; that and maybe I’d like to tend a flock of sheep.”

Mona_Loa_Love had written to Laertes in the second week after Howard Sansome had asked his devastating question. He used a facility on the site to allow her to read his answers to the other fifteen conversations. By the fifth week she had crafted an intricate reply.

Laertes was devastated by Mona_Loa_Love’s response; your resolute inability to compromise was the most painful phrase. She saw something in him that he had not seen himself. As a matter of fact, even though he saw the truth of her words, still he did not understand how to leave, or live with, them.

Laertes did not go on the dating site for a week after this last response. He went to work, visited his mother and estranged family, and read the Times but did not perform his usual exegeses on its articles. On that Saturday, around midnight, he felt very much alone in his studio apartment on the third floor, next to a woman whose hound dog howled every evening from six to just about seven. The bank teller felt the urge for a Manhattan cocktail. He took a shower and put on his medium-gray suit. He buttoned the white shirt up to the throat but forwent a tie. He took sixty dollars from a manila envelope in his writing desk, pocketed the house key, and went to the door.

His hand was not yet on the knob when the landline rang. He rubbed his fingers together, and the second volley of sound pealed. He turned to look at the phone he had no intention of answering. This would be the third and last ring. After that the automated answering service would take over.

The fourth ring surprised him, as did the fifth, sixth and seventh. By the eleventh ring Laertes was certain that the world he’d known, and despised, had fallen off its axis.

“Hello?”

“Mr. Jackson? Laertes Jackson?” a woman’s soothing voice asked.

“How come my phone didn’t send you to voice mail?”

“Our technology sidesteps that process,” she said. “Mr. Jackson?”

“Yes. I’m Jackson.”

“So pleased to meet you, sir. You have been on my mind for quite a while now.”

“And who are you?”

“My name is Winsome Millerton-Pomerantz, CEO of Triple-M.”

“It’s Saturday night, Ms. Pomerantz. Most people are taking it easy around now.”

“Money never sleeps.”

“My little bit of change been nappin’ my whole life.”

“Exactly.”

Laertes felt that there was deep meaning in the words they shared, but he still hankered after a well-made, not-too-sweet Manhattan.

“Ma’am, I was just about to go out. So if you want something, just ask, and I will try to answer.”

“Monday morning, seven forty-five, seventy-ninth floor,” she said. “Number two Broadway.”

“What are you talking about?” Laertes asked.

“I wish to discuss your job interview at Triple-M.”

“I’ll be there.”

Laertes didn’t remember much about the rest of that Saturday night. There was a bartender and a woman named Briance. He bought quite a few drinks, and someone might have helped him up the stairs. His sixty dollars were gone, but that was all, and in two days, on Monday morning, he had a meeting set with the CEO of Triple-M.

The hangover kept him from seeing his mother the following day. He wondered if Helena Havelock-Jackson would miss her husband’s weekly visit.

Laertes arrived at number two Broadway at 6:10 Monday morning. The security guard let him in after verifying his identity and looking his name up on the computerized schedule.

Howard Sansome sat at the receptionist’s desk on the seventy-ninth floor.

“Hey there, Laertes,” the squat, powerful vice president greeted him.

“This your job too?”

“Ms. Pomerantz wanted to make sure that it would be you who came.”

“Who else could it be?” Laertes asked.

“You got any listening or recording devices on you?”

“No, sir,” Laertes said.

The VP in charge of trouble grinned, then took a device from his pocket. It looked somewhat like an extra-thick cell phone.

“I’m just gonna run this around you to make sure,” Sansome said.

When he was finished, he asked Laertes if he wanted coffee “or something stronger.”

“No. I’ll just sit here and compose my thoughts.”

“Suit yourself.”

Sansome gave Laertes a nod and then departed through a doorway that had no door.

Laertes expected the man to return, but he didn’t.

Later the bank teller would see that brief space in time, the moments between Sansome’s departure and his interview with Millerton-Pomerantz, as the most important span of his life. He wasn’t concerned with a future job. What he thought about was Mona_Loa_Love and her, if indeed it was a woman, deep understanding, in simple language, of the thought processes he’d been swaddled in for so many years that he could no longer separate the bondage from the man.

I am my own prison, he thought. The truths I’ve wielded have hidden that fact from me. Whatever I do from this moment on will derive from those unassailable facts.

“Mr. Jackson,” a strong and yet melodious voice pronounced.

She had soft red hair and eyes the color of pale blue diamonds. Ms. Winsome Millerton-Pomerantz was tall and Laertes’s age but much younger-looking. She was slender like him, and there was a smile on her lips letting him know that she had been anticipating this meeting. She wore a blue and white woman’s business suit that might have been made from silk or maybe, Laertes thought, some space-age material.

“Yes,” Laertes said.

“So happy to meet you,” she replied, holding out both hands.

He rose and took those hands as he had his mother’s on Sundays over the past seven years.

“Would you like to go to my office or meet here at the front desk?” Winsome asked. “I gave everyone else but Howard the day off.”

“I leave it up to you, ma’am. This is your fief.”

The CEO grinned and said, “Follow me.”

Laertes remembered walking but not the spaces through which he traveled. His mind was on the topic of his imprisonment and the unlikely meeting with a woman of both beauty and power.

Ultimately they came to an office, the outer wall of which was a single pane of glass. From there one could see the entire panorama of Lower Manhattan and beyond.

“Let’s sit on the sofa,” Ms. Winsome Millerton-Pomerantz said.

It was a yellow divan upholstered in fabric that reminded Laertes of velvet-like pigskin. It seemed to hug him, to pull him in.

Winsome turned toward her guest and said, “Before we begin, do you have any questions?”

“Rahlina Rodriguez asked me that. Is that a prescribed beginning around here?”

The CEO smiled and shook her head, no.

“Then could you tell me how I got here?”

“Would you like me to start with the Jesus of Lübeck?”

It was Laertes turn to grin. He knew about the slave ship from 1564.

“No, ma’am,” he said. “I’m just interested in why a major firm like yours would have me followed, questioned, and brought to this amazing place. I thought I’d been rejected by Ms. Rodriguez.”

“You would have been,” Millerton-Pomerantz said simply. “But when you announced to our recording devices that you wanted a copy of what had transpired, our lawyers got nervous.”

“Nervous about what?”

“We’ve spent more than fifty million on suits and settlements, lawyers’ fees, and golden parachutes. Our legal team has been trying to stem that flow.”

“So I’m here because you’re worried that I’ll sue?”

“No.” Her smile was lovely. “I sent Mr. Sansome to talk to you, and by the time he’d finished, the legal team said that there was nothing we had to worry about.”

“Then why am I here?”

“Howard likes to make full reports. He was, in his way, very impressed by your mind. He told me that almost everything you said surprised him and that you might be a valuable asset to our firm.”

“I don’t know what he means by that. I’ve been a bank teller for two and a half decades. The only promotion I ever got was from entry teller to senior cashier. Your boy told me how I didn’t have but a high school diploma.”

“He said that you told him that education was merely the process of applying thought to knowledge.”

“He remembered that?” Laertes asked.

“You are a unique individual, Mr. Jackson. You understand a world that most others don’t even suspect.”

“I can hardly walk a straight line without tripping over my own feet.”

“I believe that. Genius, true human genius, has no patience for the mundane.”

Laertes was suddenly aware of his heart beating. There was sweat on his hands, and his hands had never perspired before.

“Would you like some water, sir?”

“Are you telling me that you don’t think I can be a normal person?” he replied.

“Yes.”

“How come you know about the first slave ship?”

“I studied world history at Sarah Lawrence. I met a man from a wealthy family named Jared Pomerantz. We married, he died, and I assumed the mantle that he’d left behind. We are cut from similar cloth, Mr. Jackson. The only difference is that I’ve been lucky with money.”

“Not with love?”

“Jared was a pig. It shamed me that I was happy that he died.”

“OK, then,” Laertes Jackson said.

“OK what?”

“If you got a job for me I’ll consider it.”

4

Laertes explained about MMM, Howard Sansome the Vice President of Trouble, and the CEO Winsome Millerton-Pomerantz.

All that happened six months ago. Laertes still has his job at Maritime Merchants Bank. He still has the most zero-balance days of any teller ever. His ex-wife asks him on Saturdays if he’s taken the new job. His mother has taken to asking him if he’s seen his father anywhere. He and Mona_Loa_Love write to each other every other day. Winsome Millerton-Pomerantz calls on Saturday nights to ask whether he has finally made up his mind.

“I figured if I waited long enough that you’d find someone else,” Laertes told the CEO.

“There is no one else, Mr. Jackson. It is either you or nothing.”