The Darkness - Jason Pinter [19]
bought for five cents a share, that the employee stock
purchase plan was essentially worthless. Oh yeah, and
that they were all out of a job. They would not be permitted back to their desks, and any personal items would be
mailed to their forwarding addresses.
Morgan blinked. It was all he could do. They would
receive one month's severance for each year they'd been
with the company. For Morgan, that was three months.
Three months that would cover his mortgage and BMW
payments until he could find a new job. Surely that
wouldn't be hard. He had his MBA, his CFA, and had
graduated from Wharton in the top five percent of his class.
Whether that severance would pay for the nearly
thirty-three thousand dollars in credit card debt he'd
The Darkness
57
racked up...he didn't even want to think about it. Uncle
Sam giveth, and Morgan would be damned if he'd let
Uncle Sam taketh away.
Then the next day another bank closed. And suddenly
the terrifying realization hit Morgan that he would be
competing for jobs in a market where opportunities had
just been halved, and his competition increased by two
hundred percent. In less than a month there were nearly
twenty thousand young men and women just like him,
many of whom were just as qualified if not more, looking
for the same opportunities he was.
Suddenly those monthly payments, over eleven thousand a month, loomed like a pile of bricks about to rain
down on his head.
He went out that night to a dive bar in his neighborhood, fully intent on getting stinking drunk and hooking
up with whatever girl noticed the two grand in jewelry he
wore. Brianna be damned, she was going to break up with
him anyway. He had no illusions about why she was with
him. She didn't care about cuddling or having doors
opened for her. She wanted the gold. Literally.
Just like Morgan, Brianna would be getting a severance package, maybe a small diamond necklace, no more
than a grand. Morgan was a big fan of The Sopranos, and
he always thought Tony was brilliant for giving his jilted
paramours a small token when he divested himself of
them. The kind of women who dated Tony Soprano were
the kind of women who dated Morgan Isaacs; they loved
the money, the power (granted with Morgan it was on a
slightly smaller scale). Once Brianna learned the truth,
she'd be gone and in the pocket--and pants--of some
upper manager who managed to hold on to his sevenfigure job.
58
Jason Pinter
So it was a morning like this, a Monday, a day where
he should have already been on to his third Red Bull and
second cigarette break, that Morgan Isaacs couldn't bring
himself to unwrap himself from the fifteen hundred
thread count Egyptian cotton sheets.
He'd let his dirty blond hair grow too long, and
whereas he used to weigh a trim hundred and eighty
pounds, Morgan was now threatening to blow past the
two bills mark. In fact, there was a pretty good chance
he'd already done so, but was too frightened to step on
the scale and know for sure.
Maybe he'd fix a breakfast. Toast with peanut butter
and strawberry preserves sounded good. There were some
good judge shows on in the afternoons. For some reason
watching brainless poor people fight with some condescending judge over twenty-three dollars made Morgan
feel better about his own situation.
Then he heard the chirp of his cell phone, still set to
The O'Jays' "For the Love of Money." He didn't recognize the caller ID, and assumed it was a telemarketer. He
was about to spin the dial to Ignore when he considered
the faint possibility it could be one of the firms that still
had his resume and had sworn to get back to him.
He answered the phone with a peppy "This is Morgan," hoping to sound like a man who'd been awake all
morning and not someone trying too hard to sound like
he didn't still have sleep schmutz in his eyes.
"Morgan Isaacs?" the man on the other end replied.
"That's right."
"I was referred to you by a former colleague, Kenneth
Tsang. I hope you don't mind my calling."
"Kenneth, yeah, of course,"