Flip Gamble was a man of a few words. In board rooms, at least. He had a wistful way about him, uncommon for a CEO. You could say it wasn’t ever really Flip’s choice to join the board of Charmin. He was the great-grandson of James Gamble, and it was akin to inheriting your family’s hardware store. Flip’s father Woody had been quite buttoned-up. Everyone had adored him in the office. And yet, Woody had a gnarly gambling problem that ultimately, in a series of eerie circumstances, had taken his life. Eerie not only because of his surname, but for other reasons as well. And yet, he was a great dad.

Now, Flip, for all intents and purposes, was the man of the house. The most languorous man in Paperland. Flip had overheard after-hours calls his entire life, and he had learned to mock the arch-ness of a boss man by the age of seven. He would march through the hallways of their aerie Park Ave. loft and yell, “There is simply no company with enough architecture to carry deadweight! We have to let that whole department go. Now go!” His mother would giggle, sunshine yellow kimono dripping on the floor as she prepared cacio e pepe for their small family. It felt like yesterday. But now, Flip was 63.

As these thoughts of childhood whimsy floated into his mind, he gently fingered his abacus. One. Two. Three. Four. His office overlooked Time Square, and he could see two revolutionaries lit up in a moving billboard for Hamilton. They looked so liberated from monotony. For Flip every day was exactly the same. His favorite ritual was dropping his daughter off at school, but now he had graduated from even that simple joy. He still hadn’t seen it. Hamilton. Of course, he’d heard great things. A hurried knock on the door.

It was Gracie, his nineteen year-old intern from Harvard Business School. Flip found Gracie completely fascinating. She had all the buttoned up charm of an air hostess, but the eyes of a visionary. Her half-Japanese, half-Jewish hair could not be contained by a single elastic or any apparatus, really. So, her thrifted Gucci suit and loafers tidied her up, but her hair remained completely and utterly unchained.

“Flip, uh, Mr. Gamble, we have to have a meeting with Supply Chain, remember?”
“Hello, Gracie, won’t you go get us some cappuccinos from Balthazar and then we can discuss this?”
“Balthazar, in NoLiTa?”
“Yes.”
“That’ll take about an hour.”
“Perfect.”

Gracie was befuddled but certainly not about to go back to her parents, who owned a beloved restaurant in Chinatown, and tell them that she couldn’t hack it at her internship at Procter & Gamble. They already thought she was weird.

It was a hundred degrees. Gracie grabbed her wallet, took the elevator 49 flights down to the chaos of 7th and 42nd, and hailed a cab. She smiled at the Hamilton billboard. She knew one of those boys, from Berkeley. As Gracie exited, Flip pulled a white piece of A4 paper from his printer and a pen his father had gotten him for his 18th birthday. Messy prep school cursive, as could be expected. Stuck in a flesh prison of his family’s design. Some things old. Some things new. Some things borrowed. Everything blue. He started jotting something down.

When a crow gets home
Does she rattle with joy or with sorrow
When she howls at night, is it for a good time
Anger bathtime rock & roll
Sound is the ultimate currency
Perhaps love is, in fact, a good thing
Sheryl Crow can swim
Share in silk and listen in
Every spirit can see
There is no such thing as white noise,
Just secret messages
Magic lives in negative space
Gods know that
Angels know that
& even birds know that

He crossed out the last line. Then, he ripped up the page and threw it in the bin under his desk.
He resumed his abacus-ing.

Forty-eight minutes later, Gracie was back in Flip’s office, two creamy cappuccinos and a gorgeously flaky croissant balanced tenderly in a coffee carrier. She placed it on his desk, winded, and took a seat. He smiled at her confidence. 

“Oh Gracie,” Flip mused, “You are a gem. Now, where were we?”
“Okay, so, Mr. Gamble, the thing is, Supply really, really needs to speak with you.”
“Great. How about Thursday?”

“No, no, Mr. Gamble. It really needs to be today.”
“But, I’m scared of that woman,” he offered. Quietly, honestly.
“Who, Roberta?” Gracie whispered, shocked.
“Yes.”

Gracie cackled, hair flying back and flowing behind her chair, like a cartoon Rapunzel. “Stop, you have to be kidding me.”

Roberta Reyes was kind of a hard ass. Flip wasn’t wrong. She was a beguiling Dominican woman who had a reputation for empowering young Black girls to become “leaders.” She believed in astrology. She was 40. She was the “new” kind of executive. Gracie had reached out to her through the Harvard Women of the New World Facebook group, and Roberta had given her the internship. Gracie’s allegiance was now tested, torn.

“She’s not so bad, Mr. Gamble. It’s just that women have to really prove themselves in these kinds of environments. Charmin is so old-school, in some ways. You know?”

He did not know. He had no clue of the outside world. He had been raised on ivy-covered, leafy green lawns his entire life. He had played rugby and worn signet rings. He had done everything right. And now he felt clueless. It started to weigh on him, the veil of ambiguity and alienation that privilege can provide, and he started to spiral. He looked Gracie straight in the eye. “Send her in.”

As Gracie buzzed for Roberta, they both took a gander at the plaque on his wall. “Be bold, and mighty forces will come to your aid.” Goethe, then quoted in Almost Famous. He loved them both. The philosopher and the film. Equally.

Not one minute later, the door opened, no knock. Roberta slinked in like a Prada muse and sat next to Gracie on the arm of a chair, brand new Macbook Air in hand, clasped by her Kelly green gel-manicured hands. A human gazelle.

“Flip, good afternoon.”

“Is it afternoon already?”

Roberta rolled her eyes. 
Gracie smiled deeply, attempting to create diplomacy with a silent manifestation, a stare. 

“Listen, Flip. Supply is having a very big issue at the moment, and we are frustrated because we don’t really feel seen or heard by senior leadership. We need you to liquify funds from Q2 so that we can back stock. Right now we are down to the wire. It’s truly marvelous that sales are through the roof, congratulations, but we don’t even have one month of supply in mothership at the moment.”

“With all due respect, Roberta, I don’t really understand why that’s a problem.” Gracie could see now how his apathy could be mistaken for snobbery. In this flick of a moment, she could see it all.

“Well, Flip,” Roberta continued, “We could have a bubonic plague. And be unable to supply people around the world, not just America but across the universe, with toilet paper.”

Across the Universe, Flip mused to himself. Great song. Mediocre film.

“Flip!” Roberta’s patience had utterly frayed, and rightfully so. “Listen to me.”

“Roberta,” he offered, attempting to be comforting but it might have sounded pedantic. “Do not fear, you wonderful creature, we are not going to suffer a new Spanish Flu, anytime soon.”

Roberta stood up, shocked. 
She looked at Gracie. “I can’t, Gracie, I mean, where am I supposed to go with this?” 
Gracie nodded, sending her vibes of encouragement. 
Roberta found her strength.
“What if we did, Flip? I want you to really answer that. What if we woke up in the midst of a global pandemic?”
“Well then, people could wipe their tushes with banana leaves.”
He smiled and took a foamy sip.

Roberta started for the door.

“Wait!” Flip yelled to catch her.
“Yes?”
Beat.
“Would you like a croissant?”

Roberta was inflamed. She strutted across his grand corner office and right out the seafoam glass door, accidentally elbowing a marketing director on her way to the elevator. 
When Roberta was out of earshot, Gracie let out a quiet giggle. 
Flip did, too.

Soon, they were laughing unstoppably, croissant flakes showering the office with carbohydrate sparkles. It was golden hour, and the sun was shining through the office. Gracie found it charming that Flip could render himself so obsolete with an egoless banana leaf. Even the Hamilton billboard boys seemed to be smiling at them.

The next morning, as the angry canaries in the jacaranda tree outside Flip’s bedroom awoke him, he reached over to his cedar bedside table and checked his phone. Rumors had started buzzing of COVID-19. The eeriness of Roberta’s foresight sent a shiver down his spine. And in a moment, he realized his fate had been sealed. He would be fired, from his own business, practically from his own family. And he would deserve it. He had shirked his duties. He would be fired within the month, if not sooner. He was certain of it. He could be replaced by Roberta, and her by Gracie. This part pleased him. Procter & Gamble, the new class. Saved by the Bell: The New Class. That show had been a guilty pleasure.

Would his father be disappointed? Maybe. And yet, he remembered the Goethe quote that had so moved them both. He remembered how his dad had melted into a cast of a man to please shareholders, had quieted his Palo Santo spirit so intensely that he, ultimately, disappeared. He thought about his father’s yearning to gamble. To trust in the fated and uncertain. He thought of Kant. When would his own critique of pure reason come into play? When would he learn to be bold? He remembered the storybook his dad would read to him as a child and he, in turn, to his daughter. Hey, Al. It was about a man who became so fascinated with wild animals that he let them live in his home, which ultimately became like a rainforest, a feral sanctuary to these worldly, effervescent beasts. And Al in turn unraveled, grew savage, and they all lived happily ever after, eating with their hands. 

Flip put his phone down, opened up every one of his sixteen bedroom windows, unbuttoned his silk pajamas and lay on his bed, letting the morning light streak his body and letting the birds from the park scream in his ear. He thought, These subtle songbirds of Central Park, we have something to learn from them. The planet needs us, and we need each other. We need to listen. I need to listen. I need to listen. He reckoned it was abnormal that his brain had started to associate the echo of live birds with the chirping of his ringtone.

Enough.

There must be a land, he thought, where you can exchange expectation for embodiment. He thought of words like sensitive and sensory. The phrase go beyond came to mind. He pictured beach houses where the stilts get rusty from the sea salt. Broken and unapologetic. He thought, for a moment, of wiping his bum with a banana leaf, as celadon parrots flew above his head, in a small wooden hut, overlooking the ocean. Genderless teenagers with shaved heads playing the sitar next door and a sunroom to write in, naked, as the pink sky brightened above his silver head and homemade coconut milk dripped down his belly. All his life he had never seen the dawn. This worst case scenario didn’t sound so bad. 

It sounded fantastic.

He opened his “Jetsetter” app; he had a timeshare on a jet with some buddies from childhood. He booked a one-way ticket to Eleuthera, a Bahamian island known for its wildlife. He wandered down to the kitchen and pulled a shot of espresso. And he began to pack. His phone chirped. A notification. “Flip, it’s time to fly.”

“Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.
I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,
Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?”
Robert Hayden