The Contract

The post had been up for five minutes. I knew this because they'd sent me an email at 9:08 PM, when it was published, and another at 9:13 PM, to confirm its deletion. For all intents and purposes, one might very logically conclude, it had never really existed. It was a momentary lapse of judgement - albeit quite a public and well-considered one - but then I had retracted it.

I had retracted it and it was over.

"Ela?"

A hand was waving in front of my face.

"You okay?"

A rush of sound and color came to me all at once: metal screeching against metal, bright, fluorescent light from every which way, a dizzying array of reflective metal surfaces and chairs made of moulded orange plastic. I caught my reflection in the glass of an advertising hoarding and began instinctively reapplying lipstick.

I nodded in the hopes of reassuring them, reciting back to myself the small packets of information that I knew for sure, like a kind of unspoken mantra: I was on the D train, we were heading to Willem's housewarming, we were kind of late but we didn't care - and we'd been pre-gaming maybe a little bit too enthusiastically.

"Hey, uh - do I know anyone at this thing?" I asked, finally snapping back into myself and finding Grace: standing in the space above me, intermittently grabbing the pole above my head, wearing an improbable combination of faux fur coat, shiny metallic bra, and skirt.

"Uhm, yeah..." She trailed off.

A definitive no, then, I thought.

"Oh! You know that guy that Kellie was dating when we came here? You know the one? We kind of hated him. He was always talking about supplements or something."

"Uh, sure."

"He's gonna be there." She said, laughing and diving off on some tangent that involved her phone.

"Oh, great."

I liked people. I could turn it on if I had to, even. I mean people wanted me at a function, you know? But God was it exhausting sometimes. Especially with these NYU kids. Sometimes you just wanted to be home. Sometimes you really just wanted to double check something from your computer, even.

...

It was hot.

The room was so dense with bodies that you could have opened every window on the floor wide to the night air and still done nothing to dispel the fog of heat, smoke, and sweat that accumulated. Flying Lotus - or something that sounded like it - was playing at such a volume that it no longer registered as music so much as a pulsing, reverberating energy. People were dancing, shouting in each others' ears, kissing, drinking, grinding, checking their phones, swaying in a kind of waking daze.

I was wearing a brown twill boiler suit: a zip extending from around about my navel up to my neck that I was edging progressively southward as the night progressed, revealing more and more of more my skin - cocoa brown, slick with sweat, and smelling slightly of shea butter - as I did so.

This had been a bad idea. Not only because of the heat and the relative inability to vent, but because I know had to deal with a dangerous combination of ADHD and multiple pockets.

Brief panic when I can't find my phone.

Relief and then utter panic when I do find it.

"Fuck." I realized Grace and the others had drifted from my orbit. When I found them I pointed at my chest and mouthed "bathroom" a few times until it seemed to settle.

"Oh! Want me to come with?"

"Uh - no, no. I'll be right back" I said, flustered, already fording a path through the crowd, announcing my sorries for every few seconds of transit.

The bathroom was like another world: an operating room attached to a night club. The light was harsh and the walk-in shower was overflowing with half-emptied bottles of shower gel and conditioner and the like. There was a window above the toilet, opened just a little - its hinge preventing much more than that. The cool air felt like heaven.

I focused in on my phone, trying to stop the world from swirling around me quite so chaotically. I'd caught a glance of a notification out on the floor that had almost sent my heart shooting out of my chest, but I hadn't read it. All I'd seen was the Gmail icon, "RE: Looking for-", five minutes ago.

I opened the tap to cold and ran it over the wrist of one hand while the other pulled up the email, unable to hold it exactly still.

Subject: RE: Looking for a Tight Leash

Dear E,

I am writing on behalf of my employer, who wishes to express their interest in the offering you recently listed on the torboard platform.

My employer, a distinguished professional in the financial sector, has requested that I make initial inquiries while maintaining confidentiality at this stage. Having reviewed the details provided in your listing, they believe this opportunity aligns well with their own objectives and they would like to proceed quickly with the matter.

I am attaching a non-disclosure agreement, an informational brief, and a short questionnaire. Please take the time to read, fill, and sign these documents and upload the completed copies to the link provided. The link will expire in 23 hours.

All correspondence will be directed to you at this email address.

Respectfully,

The doorknob rattled and I jumped like I'd just heard a gunshot.

"Sorry, one minute" I shouted - feeling, and probably sounding, exasperated - and drank hungrily from the tap, finding my mouth suddenly and agonizingly dry.

I fired off a text to Grace, a messy, error-laden process in which every word was rehashed about five times before she reached what she intended to say.

- heading out sorry, feeling off, I'll text you when I'm home

...

The brief was exactly that: I would fill out the NDA, the questionnaire, and sign the initial contract and, in turn, I would be remitted a nominal sum for the purposes of validation and my own expenses and receive countersigned copies of each document along with additional instructions.

The NDA was mostly boilerplate and the first page, which presumably identified the other party (thereafter referred to as "the employer", she "the employee"), had been redacted. It forbid her from sharing almost all meaningful details about the relationship, the NDA itself, his identity, the company, or anything else in a long list of clauses and examples.

The contract and the questionnaire was where things took shape. I read these in the darkness of a quilt tent in my bedroom on the dazzling screen of an old Chromebook, the door locked to the common area where one of the five roommates, Simon, seemed to be in the process of making quesadillas at two in the morning.

It felt like I was doing something wrong. Like someone was going to find me out and expose me. Occasionally I peeled the covers back from my head to look and listen, as if I were a prairie dog emerging intermittently from its hole, expecting a hawk to swoop down any moment and end everything.

I would be committing everything. Within limits, of course. But effectively everything. The contract spelled this out explicitly and at length. I read along in rapt silence, tracking my finger along the touchpad at a mindless crawl: financial and communication arrangements, the broad waiving of rights, scope of her service, consent, severability...

I was struggling to keep myself together. Pulses of anticipation coursed through the lower half of my body - mild tremors of feeling that left me squirming, fighting the urge to claw about beneath the bed for the wand and satiate that mindless need.

Not now. Not yet.

I opened the questionnaire last. "Questionnaire" was a misnomer in this case, at least by virtue of the sheer length and depth of the questioning. The PDF resembled something closer to immigration paperwork, prompting me to give away everything from my name, birthday, and address to my social security number, sexual history, soft and hard limits, banking information.

Wait. Come on, Eleanor. You're smarter than this - aren't you?

I pulled up the email again. Read and re-read. Typed and re-typed. Flirted with hitting send and buried my face into the pillow. I managed a quick follow up, finally:

- I'm sorry, but I really can't share all of this with a complete stranger.

I hit send and threw my phone across the room, immediately scurrying to retrieve it and retreat again. An auto-generated reply:

- This email and the associated secure upload link will expire in twenty hours and three minutes.

"Fuck. Fuck. Fuck." I whispered, falling backward, splaying my hands against my head, intently examining the ceiling.

If I did this and I lost everything who was to blame here if not me? There were probably dementia sufferers in nursing homes that wouldn't have fallen for this. How would I explain any of it? The posting? Everything I'd said?

And then what, if this is all real? Can I even go through with this? I don't even know who this guy is. Was any of this remotely safe?

No, obviously.

But for every logical lens I could apply to the matter there was the same, enduring want. Something enticing me toward the forbidden and the unknown, like a medieval maiden making a pact with a devil, driven by little else than a revulsion for normal life.

I started typing.

...

By the next morning the whole thing felt like a distant fever dream - a delusion that my drug-addled mind had invented and furnished with just enough details as to render it at least semi-realistic. I stumbled out of my room on a kind of auto pilot. Whatever I had done there was no reply. If it was real, after all, I would need to start the chain of emails and calls required to cancel and freeze anything and everything in my life before the coming financial oblivion.

But first I needed coffee.

In the living room, Grace was sprawled on the couch, swaddled in a woolen blanket and nursing a Gatorade. She craned to look at me in that pitiable way that people have about them when they realize, all at once, a fragility in themselves they'd not yet encountered.

"Oh, hey girl." She croaked, smiling weakly and retracting her legs to cede some territory on the sofa. "We missed you last night."

"Awh, I'm sorry. I just didn't feel right, you know?"

I waved her legs back, making clear I was kitchen-bound. From the island, I clattered about with a basket full of aeropress paraphernalia, embodying all the grace and alacrity of a stop motion character, while Grace descended back into a hypnotic routine of scrolling and stopping, scrolling and stopping, the room filling occasionally with the blaring sound of looping reels, AI voiceovers.

"Oh." She said, still locked into her phone, calling back over her shoulder. "A like uh... Courier?... Came earlier? Simon signed for you on his way out. There's something on the table in there for you I think."

I'd been grinding beans in one of those little glass burrs with the handle you cranked manually over and over. Simon said doing it that way was best and that, anyway, we didn't have the counter space for something bigger and that really the whole process was meditative, grounded you while you were grinding the beans. I froze, and suddenly the racket of crunching and whirring stopped all at once.

"Really? I think I ordered some flu stuff in a panic." I called, nervously, but, mercifully, Grace wasn't paying attention anyway.

I moved like something between an operative and an Olympic-level race walker, then, making a bee-line between the table by the door and the bedroom, where I could close myself in again and freak out in something approaching privacy.

The package was enclosed in plain, gray plastic. There was nothing she could see to indicate its contents. Or anything else, for that matter: no shipping label, no courier logo.

I hesitated for a second, looking over my shoulder, expecting Grace might have been alerted to me sneaking across the apartment, looking like Link shuffling around inside a barrel.

Nothing.

Inside the bag was a white box and inside the white box was an iPhone, new. I sat on the bed with my back against the wall, trying to tame the shallowness of my breath while I waited with my thumb on the button, waiting for the Apple icon to appear.

It was a square instead. At first I thought it was broken, glitching, but it disappeared suddenly and the screen prompted me to set up fingerprint and face recognition - stubbornly, such that all I could manage was to swipe between the two prompts or otherwise turn the whole thing off.

"What the fuck?" I mouthed, turning the phone over in my hands a few times, expecting to find some tell-tale sign of mechanical interference or forgery, something that would give me enough pause to forego this altogether. Nothing. Just smooth black metal.

I proceeded. Why not? Why stop now, right? They had pretty much everything, whoever they were, this wasn't exactly giving them much more.

On completion the screen blinked in and out of initialization for a few seconds before opening to a white home screen populated with five icons: a messagenger, a phone, a checklist, something that looked sort of like Google Maps, and a bank building.

Buzzing. Once, twice. Notifications popping into view - new messages, both marked EA - Janine:

"Good Morning Ellie. Thank you for acting promptly to get those documents completed. You should have received this device at 5:32 AM this morning. Please take a moment to familiarize yourself with the utilities. I will be available to answer any questions you may have."

"I just want to draw attention to an assignment you will have received in your tasks application. A driver will be coming to collect you shortly. Please have yourself ready to leave by 10AM. He will meet you at your building entrance. Vehicle license number CVX207."

9:20 now. Fuck.

I swiped through as quickly as I could. The UI was austere, unfamiliar. Clean but clearly not commercial. Easy to use but far too specific.

In the tasks app I saw an assignment marked "Hospital - Physical", my stomach doing a somersault the moment I saw it. There was nothing else, yet.

I traded the phone between my left and right hands, trying to shed the sweat that was accumulating on the blankets.

In the maps app I saw my own location, a pulsing dot that alerted me "four tracking" when I pressed it, and another dot moving steadily in my direction out from somewhere in Long Island.

The bank app was both familiar and bizarre, alien: both the interface, which was, again, utterly sparse and devoid of 20-odd years of UX bells and whistles, and the content itself. The name something presumably swiss that she didn't recognize and the number - 150,000.00 on the dot - absolutely inconceivable. Her own bank account, when she could muster up the wherewithal to look at it, had $300 and a $150 savings buffer that she moved back and forth with futile regularity.

But this was her account. At least, it had her name.

She messaged EA - Janine, expecting a mistake or a prank or some cruel joke and receiving an immediate reply, the same cold professionalism as ever:

- "Sorry, this account, this money. Is this mine?"

- "The account operates under a mechanism similar to a trust with yourself as the trustee. If you have an expense request you can submit that through me for approval and the funds will be disbursed to your personal account. Please let me know if you have any additional questions."

Time moved around me like a flood of molasses. I felt bound by an agonizing friction, even as time seemed to jump along in five minute increments.

9:35.

I wasn't used to showering quickly. Or going through my skincare routine quickly. Makeup was out of the window - within reason. And thankfully I'd washed my hair a couple of days ago. I smothered my curls in oil, fluffing them out and trying to get an impression of how crazy I looked from various angles before ultimately tying it back anyway.

9:50.

What do you wear to something like this? What was she even doing? She felt excitable and sick with dread all at once. Should she tell someone? She should probably tell someone.

A white, crop blouse with a ruffled trim that was I hadn't folded, brown, draw-string pants, a pair of running shoes, a voice memo to Catherine letting her know I was going somewhere - cryptically - and I'd be sharing my location, a handful of almonds.

I burst out of the building at 9:59. The car was already there - a black Mercedes with tinted windows - spilling exhaust fumes into the brisk morning air. I thought briefly about going back inside, true crime podcasts, PSAs, trafficking posters at airports.

I got in anyway.

...

I never saw the driver. I don't see where we're going. The windows are tinted on the inside, too. I spend the five minutes to five hours that I'm in the car lunging between distraction techniques: frenziedly crafting and deleting texts to friends, practicing circular breathing techniques I'd seen in a YouTube video during the pandemic, doing the New York Times crossword.

Hospital was a misnomer, I thought. It was more of a clinic. Too clean, too quiet, too unassuming. No one rushed through the halls, no one was convulsing on the floor of the ER, there were no broken people sitting in plastic chairs. Just nice, smiling faces, a Dominican-looking nurse that ushered me through a series of doors and hallways and sat me in a room to await whatever would befall me.

The chair on which I sat, a fluorescent overhead light, a blue stool, a blue examining chair, a window overlooking the Hudson. I looked at my phone. My hands were shaking.

The door burst open.

"Hello Miss Santiago." A booming, friendly voice that simultaneously sent me jumping out of my seat and set me at ease. He chuckled - a white man, black hair, maybe in his fifties if she had to guess, wearing scrubs and a white overcoat. To me he looked a little like Dr. Fauci, but younger, his skin considerably tighter.

"Up here for me if you please."

I sat stiff up on the examining chair, bunching the lap of my jeans into my curled fists in such a way that I threatened to tear them to shreds.

"Now, nothing to worry about here, routine physical, a few questions. Janine's asked me to go over some things..." He was flipping through pages, licking his thumb occasionally to help find purchase. When she caught a glance she thought that she recognized something from the questionairre.

"Do you smoke?"

"No, never."

He set the clipboard down and brought the stethoscope to his hears, listening to various points up and down my back and my chest, prompting me to cough.

"Drugs?"

"Sometimes."

"Okay, what drugs?"

"Uh, you know, just weed. MDMA. Coke sometimes. Not as much now." Then, realizing she might be failing a test without even realizing she was taking one: "Only weed, really, and even then."

"Hm, gotcha. Sexually active?"

And so it proceeded, as intrusive and as uncomfortable as any physical administered to a woman in modern medicine. They collected blood and urine samples, talked over her medical records, noted my IUD, weighed me, took my height, and ultimately left me back where I'd entered, beneath an awning flanked by oak trees.

The car rolled in and again I submitted myself to a kind of low tech teleportation. A message from Jeanine landing almost the moment I managed to clip the seatbelt in.

"The hospital just sent over your report. Everything looks good. You'll need to stop the substances. Cholesterol a little high, weight should be down to 170. You'll have your food schedule shortly.

And then:

"You'll want to send a message to your roommates, you won't be back for a couple of days. I've taken the liberty of preparing you a template to send. Someone will manage your phone for you while you're out."

Out?

...

From the outside it looked suspiciously like the strip mall DMV I'd been taken to many years ago to take my written exam. The only difference - well, there were many differences. But the most conspicuous difference was the absence of anything else around. There was nothing marking the building, there were no windows, no visible entrances or exits save the one I'd been left in front of.