Page 4 of The Girl with No Name

The things we all seek—love, money, health—are on the other side of boring, everyday actions: going to work, making dinner, calling your girlfriend (I’m long distance with mine), completing a hard workout, and keeping tabs on good friends.

That’s my philosophy, anyway, and I find myself thinking it over on this hot day in the latter part of July as I walk to work. I take my usual route along the riverwalk through the rebuilt streets of downtown Chicago, like I do twice a week these days,on Wednesdays and Thursdays. On the other days, I’m able to work remotely from my apartment.

A light breeze this morning makes the heat tolerable—refreshing even. The ‘L’ train screeches along the tracks overhead, cars honk, and I can smell the air from the Canadian jet stream that flows south from the northern forests over the water of the Great Lakes, its freshness saving this city from being just another dirty old town.

After the majority of the city burned down in 1871 in the Great Chicago Fire, the leaders of the city got together and re-organized, then—through the years—reconstructed, the city. Instead of the charming but sometimes logistically difficult we’ll-just-put-another-random-road-here-because-we-need-it structure you see in old American cities like Boston, they gave birth to an organized Chicago, using a planned grid system for maximum efficiency.

As an efficient guy, I appreciate that.

I cross the Chicago River and look up at the building where I work. My job is in technology sales with a big corporation, and our offices are in an ugly, thirty-seven-story black box with little decoration.

An architect would remind me that it was built in the late 1960s, during the brutalist architecture boom. Some people say the goal of that building movement was to demoralize and humiliate the working population, to remind them that they’re working-class scum. I guess if they made the buildings too beautiful, the worker bees would get distracted?

Personally, I think that’s going a little far. I think the architects of this building were probably just blindly guided by the trends of the era.

Still, itisa mildly demoralizing structure to walk into every day.

I take a moment to myself on the walkway by the river before I head in. The Sears Tower (I still call it that) rises on one side of me, so I pause the self-help podcast I’m listening to—Tim Ferriss—and marvel at its magnificence for a moment.

7:35 a.m.

I’m twenty-five minutes early. Excellent. I am a man of habit.

The early-morning commuters walk in swarms around me, headphones on, everyone on the way to their nine-to-five. There’s a certain beauty to the bustle of it all.

If I smoked cigarettes, I’d smoke one right now. But I don’t. Your chances of lung cancer accelerate by up to thirty times when you smoke.

I smile, looking up at my building. Even if they did build it specifically to look ugly and demoralize the population, bring it on. I like a challenge.

Like I said, I’m a structured guy. I run my life by the numbers.

Two.

The number of months until my girlfriend gets back from grad school. Sam just has to finish her summer program. Thenboom.

Three.

The number of kids I’m going to have with Sam. (We’ve talked about it.)

Twenty-eight.

The number of years I have left to work in tech sales—starting now, at age twenty-seven, assuming $100,000 a year with steady pay increases—to retire comfortably if I live until age ninety-six. These numbers allow for two major recessions, but reflect an overall uptrend in the stock market. I admit, I set myself behind two years by serving in the Peace Corps, but I’m okay with that, because not everything in life can be quantified.

Ha, that’s just a little jokey joke. I’m hilarious, I know. Look, I might enjoy my routine, but I’m not a total stiff.

Also, there’s still some math that needs to be worked out depending on whether my kids go to college or not, and whether I pay for that.

See? I can be flexible.

Before passing through the door, I glance at my reflection in the building’s glass. I own two suits, and today I’m wearing the navy blue one with a blue tie and white button down. Tomorrow will be the gray one.

I pass through the doors, becoming one of thousands of anonymous worker bees.

In the elevator, I press the button for floor twenty-eight and wait politely while the others come inside.

Maybe it was my father who instilled in me this appreciation for structure and stability. My father’s father died when my dad was seven. My father remembers watching him pass away, helpless to control what was unfolding on the couch while the man suffered a heart attack.

When he grew up, my father got a job as a paralegal and worked for forty years in the federal building here downtown—stability and a federal pension and all that.