It was my third time back at the temp agency in as many weeks. They hadn’t found me work yet, but the lady, whose name I forgot as soon as I finished reading her business card, said that they’d gotten a new test they wanted me to do. I’d already taken the typing test, the spreadsheet test, and the data entry test, but she told me the firm’s clients were clamoring for more statistics and diagnostics, the percentiles and charts with which they could make the most informed hiring decisions in the history of business.
A kid from my hometown fell to his death from a cliff in California three years ago. His name, same as mine, was Peter Barnes. He was there on a trip with his family, running ahead with his younger brother as they hiked along the bluffs overlooking the ocean. The brother said that Peter had sat down on the edge to get a better view, but either he slipped or his perch gave way, and down he went. The father climbed down after him, but there was nothing that he or the Coast Guard could do.
The lady led me toward the back of the office, weaving between empty desks and swivel chairs abandoned at odd angles in the aisles. As far as I could tell there wasn’t another person in the office, but the computers were all on, their monitors flashing screen savers of grinning children and lighthouses reflected in the ocean. The lady opened the door to a testing room and waved me in. The room was empty. The blinds were drawn, but they might as well have not been. A pall of fog had been milling around the Loop all morning, and in the warmth of the afternoon it had retreated upward, crowding around the tops of the buildings like clouds squatting on a mountain range.
“All right,” she said. “How about some push-ups?”
“Neat. Like what?”
It was evening by the time I took my stop in Uptown. My girlfriend, Molly, would be home. She worked for an ad agency, where she put together images of beautiful people drinking beer on boats, editing the bottles they had barely touched so the labels all faced forward. She told everyone that she hated it, but the money was good enough to keep us both in the apartment while I pitched in whatever I made at my increasingly sporadic nights at the bar. I knew Molly wanted to break up with me, because she acted like I did with the girlfriends I’d wanted to break up with, barely kissing back, sleepy wherever we went, quick to annoy at my jokes. But she stayed, maybe because we’d been together for two and a half years, or because I’d have to move back with my parents if she called it quits.
