Fulfillment Center  

It was early spring of our senior year and nobody except the business school guys had jobs lined up, the ones who woke up every morning and put on ties and loafers just in case they ran into a PwC recruiter on the way to Kinesiology 201. The rest of us maintained composure by doubling down in affirmative ways. We partied more, partied less, went camping, got tattoos, wore Hawaiian shirts, and checked books out of the library. Afternoons we’d ride to the state park down the peninsula and sit out on a little spit of beach even though it was still too cold.

They were refinishing the hardwood in the rec center so we tried to move our Thursday pickup game to an outdoor court by the golf course, but we didn’t have everybody’s number and only a couple guys showed up. After months of twice-weekly runs we all knew the three or four things each one of us might conceivably do with the ball in his hands, so we pretended we were better friends than we were. That afternoon we had to pull a high school kid off the playground and played a few half-speed games of three-on-three before we agreed to bag it.

My roommate and I were playing Madden and listening to Pandora on his laptop speaker when the other guys in our house started trickling in. They’d already decided to go to the shitty, which was good by me because during happy hour the shitty had dollar beers and an old townie with a guitar who played requests if you tipped him a buck or two. That semester there were three bars off-campus. The shitty was a cowboy bar, and the gritty was a decent sports bar if you could look past the questionable state of the floors and surfaces. The titty actually wasn’t a strip club—they were going for more of a dance club vibe—but we called it that because townies had bachelorette parties there, and the girls on the women’s soccer and lacrosse teams would get all dressed up to go there the night or two a year their coaches let them go out. There were a few nicer restaurants down the block that might have been promising date spots if we ever took girls on dates, which we didn’t.

By quarter to seven the other guys were hovering around and kept changing the music, so we tabled the video game and started patting down our pants legs to check for wallets and keys. Once we’d all piled down the porch steps and through the front gate, my roommate announced that he was just going to grab a sandwich around the corner and stay in. He had an interview scheduled for the following morning, he said, and had to get up early. One of the guys asked him who he was interviewing with.

“Consulting firm,” my roommate shrugged.

Another guy asked him what kind of consulting firm it was.

“Kinda hard to tell,” my roommate admitted, not having considered that there might be different kinds. “Mostly data analytics, I guess? I think they have some government contracts.” A few days later he showed me the job posting on the online portal maintained by the undergraduate career center. Like every other listing on the website, it was vague and officious.

We got back around midnight and I fell asleep on one of the couches in the den, marooning half a lukewarm beer as the muted TV announced winning lotto numbers between local news segments. I heard my roommate trundling down the stairs just as the sun peeked through the crooked blinds at the front of the house. He’d arranged to borrow a car from a girl he tutored in econ and had planned to drive the 150 miles north in the direction of the city, park at a commuter lot in the suburbs, and take a local train in to the consulting firm’s offices.

As he emerged from the train station into the downtown business district, he stuffed the directions he’d printed out into a folder with a dozen copies of his résumé, which scrupulously detailed his overall and major-specific GPAs, references, campus activities, and volunteer positions. He hadn’t worn an overcoat for fear of wrinkling his black suitjacket, and shivered as he set off on foot toward the address. He was still forty minutes early a few blocks away from the office, so he ducked into a coffee shop for a bagel and a pack of gum to mask the cream cheese on his breath. He ran cold water over his face and straightened his tie over the bathroom sink, then walked the final quarter-mile to a nondescript brick building between a police station and an Irish pub.

The lobby didn’t have any security, but a placard affixed in the elevator bank listed the building’s various tenants: law offices, a physical therapist, and a restaurant management group in addition to the consulting firm on the fourth floor. He stepped out into a small reception area with an unoccupied front desk. Five people waited expectantly in a row of institutional-grade chairs along one wall. A kid in a polo shirt who couldn’t have been older than eighteen sat tapping his feet next to a wiry young man who wore a blazer and khakis and clutched a gym bag with the name of a community college printed on it. A heavyset older guy, his wispy hairline back on the crown of his head, sweated in a boxy brown suit. In the corner, a girl in a sweater and long patterned skirt whispered with a guy my roommate recognized, a frat kid who showed up to play pickup once in a while and barked at his teammates even though he couldn’t hit an open jump shot to save his life. My roommate nodded to him and took the open seat in the opposite corner.

The group lapsed into a preoccupied torpor once the girl and the frat kid’s hushed conversation petered out. After ten minutes the door behind the reception desk glimpsed open and a woman’s head momentarily swiveled out; no one remarked upon it. A few minutes later the door opened again, and a thirtyish guy in a navy windbreaker strode into the reception area. He stopped in the center of the thin carpet, unsmiling, and surveyed the row of chairs.

“You all have eleven o’clock interview appointments?” he asked, looking at a point on the wall above the sweating man’s head. The group made a single, silent assent.

“Come on back with me,” he said, and disappeared through the door. Not looking at each other, the group stood and followed, the kid in the polo shirt walking in front. The hallway behind the door had a drop-tile ceiling and a few planters with waxy, fake-looking ferns. The line of closed office doors along both walls ended in an open lounge area with a linoleum floor and the same stackable steel chairs arranged in a half-circle. The guy in the windbreaker introduced himself as a program coordinator and motioned for everyone to sit.

The six candidates had been selected from a competitive pool of applicants, the program coordinator told them, and the next step in the process was a fieldwork assessment. My roommate had heard about companies conducting group interviews during early-round recruitment and wasn’t exhilarated by the science-fair aspect, but, looking around the room at his fellow contestants, felt he could hold his own. Besides, he’d come all this way, so.

“Today’s activity is a client engagement exercise,” the program coordinator continued, standing before the half-circle of seated candidates. “You’re going to be navigating the first step of the marketing conversion funnel. We’ll be assessing your communication skills, and your ability to think on your feet.” The applicants remained silent and attentive, none pointing out that funnels didn’t have steps.

The coordinator moved to grab a stack of clipboards from the counter along the lounge’s far wall and passed one to each of the candidates. My roommate leafed through the printout on his clipboard, which listed a vertical series of residential addresses with blank columns for names and phone numbers. The final page was a double-spaced script—like what a telemarketer would use, my roommate thought. The coordinator passed another clipboard—standard interview procedure, he said—with a waiver specifying that the undersigned had agreed to the application process and understood that disclosing details of the consulting firm’s selection methods to the press or competitors would be subject to legal prosecution. My roommate signed below the illegible scrawl of the guy in the blazer and khakis, who had handed him the clipboard, then passed it along to the man in the brown suit on his right.

“We’ve identified a demographic of prospects for our services based on residence and household income,” the program coordinator explained, taking the clipboard with the waiver from the girl in the patterned skirt. “Conquesting is the initial phase, a critical one. Using your list of addresses, you’ll be engaging your prospects for contact information. That way they’ll have a basic familiarity with our brand, and our inside marketing team can provide them with a curated phone pitch.”

“Hold on,” the frat kid interrupted, rifling the pages of his printout. “You’re making us go door-to-door?”

 The coordinator was unperturbed. “The candidates who successfully engage the highest volume of their assigned prospects will be considered for the next round.”

“Fuck this,” the frat kid stood up, flinging his clipboard down on his vacated seat. “I missed a full day of classes for this shit.” He looked to the girl in the patterned skirt, who remained seated, her gaze trained on her lap. Then he stalked out of the lounge fuming.

“We’ll be providing transportation to each of your assigned territories,” the coordinator went on. “Unless anyone has any questions, please follow me.”

The five remaining eleven o’clock candidates followed the coordinator back down the hallway, through a heavy fire door, and down a flight of concrete stairs. My roommate listened to the older man in the brown suit chatting eagerly with the kid in the polo shirt as they descended in front of him. The man was talking about his last outside sales job, which went to hell when management capped their quarterly commissions. The kid mumbled something about health insurance in reply.

The stairwell opened onto a parking lot behind the building. As his eyes adjusted to the daylight, my roommate was startled to attention by the revving engine of a late-model sedan speeding through the parking lot. As it roared past the group my roommate saw the frat kid behind the wheel, his brows still drawn in disdain. He peeled out of the lot and into traffic, tires screaming.

Watching the car shift into the distance, my roommate felt a pulse of rage mixed with grudging respect. He hadn’t received callbacks for any of the other applications he’d sent through the career center portal, and after spring break there were only six weeks left in the term before final exams. A career counselor had told him that companies’ recruiting arms were often autonomous from other internal departments, and stressed that a hiring manager would provide the best insights into the role and corporate culture. It made sense, sort of, that the consulting firm would try to weed out some applicants before beginning the interview process in earnest.

Like a teacher shepherding second-graders on a field trip, the coordinator led the candidates around a phalanx of parked police cars to a green Chevy Astro van. He fumbled with a ring of keys, unlocked the van on the passenger side, and slid open the gliding rear door. The rest of the group stood motionless in a huddle.

“Well?” the coordinator said impatiently. “Everyone ready?” The kid in the polo shirt, his bare arms clutching his clipboard to his chest in the cold, climbed in first. My roommate clambered into the third row, where the girl in the patterned skirt strapped in next to him.

The coordinator adjusted the driver’s seat and keyed the ignition. As they pulled out of the lot, he passed a map to the young man in the blazer, who rode shotgun. “I’ll be dropping each of you off at the beginning of your territory,” the coordinator said to the rear-view mirror. “You’ll have four hours to complete the exercise. At five o’clock we’ll reconvene at the cross-street circled in red on the map.” The guy in the blazer passed the map behind him to the man in the brown suit.

Leaving the lunchtime traffic of the commercial center, they emerged from a tunnel northwest of the city and veered off onto a two-lane service road, following the blacktop for another few miles. Beyond the city limits the neighborhoods became sparse and residential, isolated cookie-cutter subdivisions with cul-de-sacs and above-ground swimming pools. Light green buds yawned from the branches of second-growth trees bordering the road, and traces of runoff from a storm earlier in the week stretched between sewer grates on the shoulder. The kid in the polo shirt flipped through the printout on his clipboard, while the man in the brown suit next to him underlined his script with a hotel pen. My roommate and the girl in the patterned skirt watched the housing developments drift by on either side.

They were alerted by the snapping of the van’s blinker signal. The coordinator braked and steered off the service road onto a narrow lane with split ranches built close together on both sides. Ahead, the lane was intersected by a perpendicular street with identical houses extending past both corners. At the stop sign, the coordinator slowed the van to an idle, then nodded to the rear-view mirror. “First stop,” he announced, eyeing the kid in the polo shirt’s reflection. The kid glancingly consulted his clipboard, jerked the sliding door open with a few yanks, and nodded to the man in the suit. After closing the door behind him, he bounded across the street to engage his first prospect.

A half-dozen blocks later, the guy in the blazer hopped out on the opposite side. Knowing he was next up, my roommate pushed forward the seat in front of him and waited for the coordinator to drop him off. My roommate checked the mailbox numbers against the addresses on his clipboard as they rolled into the next intersection, then stepped over the van’s collapsed middle seat and let himself out. He watched the van drive off, a puff of exhaust dissipating against the cloudless afternoon sky.

Of the first twenty houses on his route, he was able to engage occupants in seven of them. Two women and a high school-aged boy endured his spiel but declined to give their phone numbers, two men told him to get lost, and a young mother carrying a baby in a sling said she’d be happy to read some marketing material.

“Don’t you have any in your folder, there?” she asked my roommate, evincing polite interest. My roommate didn’t, but said he’d be sure to follow up.

He obtained his first number from a friendly fiftyish bottle blonde who proceeded to invite him in for coffee. My roommate affably declined, feeling morose as he ambled back to the sidewalk and considered that, put in her situation, he’d have never invited himself in. By the time he reached the beginning of his fourth block, traveling, as best he could tell, in a northeasterly loop, he had memorized a condensed version of his script so that he didn’t have to keep looking down and stumbling over the ambiguous language.

The cluster of houses in this part of the neighborhood were newer construction, a number of them clearly unoccupied. As he waited on the doorstep of a house with freshly painted vinyl siding, he heard faint shuffling from an upper floor. He could see where the factory stickers had been ripped off the new front windows.

A barrel-chested man in a gray t-shirt and wind pants opened the door, squinting quizzically as my roommate embarked upon his curtailed script.

“That’s it?” the man said when my roommate had finished, giving him the once-over. “What are you, still in school?”

My roommate replied that he was.

“Where you studying?”

My roommate told him.

“Christ,” the man groused, rolling his eyes. “Tax dollars at work.”

My roommate asked the man if he’d be willing to provide his phone number so that a marketer from the firm could follow up with a consultation. The man scratched his stubbled chin.

“I tell you what,” he said, propping a shoulder on the door jamb. “You’re trying to work in advertising?”

My roommate gave a rough affirmative.

“I got a friend runs sales for the lumber supply chain. You know the big one downstate? Hold on, I’ll get you his card.” He disappeared into the gloom of the house, where my roommate could hear him careening around what he assumed was the kitchen.

“Here,” the man said, returning to the open front door and shoving a business card at my roommate. “Call this guy, tell him I gave you his info.”

My roommate thanked him, then meekly asked the man whose name he should mention.

“Mine,” the man huffed. “George. Jesus Christ.” He closed the door as my roommate deposited the business card in his folder.

As my roommate rounded the next corner, he noticed the Astro van pulled over in front of a house with a sagging roof and tarps strewn over the lower windows. Approaching from the sidewalk, he peered in and saw the coordinator stretched upon the reclined driver’s seat, his head flopped to one side and mouth drooped wide. My roommate rapped on the passenger window. The coordinator roused himself awake, glanced at his wristwatch, and lowered the window, glowering at my roommate.

“You’ve got another hour and a half to go,” he sneered.

“Why are we even asking for their numbers?” my roommate asked, ducking his head to the level of the window. “Can’t we just look these people up in the phone book?”

“This is the first step in the conversion funnel,” the coordinator repeated. “If they offer us their information, they’ve opted into a relationship with our firm. Which allows us to engage them for the next step. Marketing 101.”

“We don’t even have, like, brochures to give them,” my roommate protested.

“That would be accordant with the second step,” the coordinator replied boredly.

“I’ve gotten three numbers,” my roommate said, raising his clipboard to the coordinator’s eye level. “You can submit these for my assessment. Or don’t. I’m done.”

“I can’t take you back now,” the coordinator said. “I’ve got four other people out here. Besides, you signed the waiver. Come back here at five.” The window rolled back up.

My roommate paused in recounting his story to me, shaking his head in bewilderment. He took a bite out of his tuna sandwich and looked across the courtyard where we were taking our lunch break, sitting atop a scarred picnic bench in the late-August heat. We’d both been hired into the rotation program at the regional fulfillment center twenty minutes west of campus. He was halfway through the sales training rotation, and I was biding my time in inventory planning before beginning my stint with the customer service team at the end of the month. The wholesaler had recruited at one of the campus job fairs in April, and once we had offers we’d renewed the lease on our house, only having to replace two of the guys.

He’d given me the shaggy outline of what had happened when he’d gotten back to campus the day after his interview with the consulting firm in March, but he was rehashing it in detail because the firm had, incredibly, just reached back out to ask him to come in for another round of interviews. This time, they trumpeted, he’d be meeting with senior members of their marketing organization, who’d been impressed by his resilience. My roommate hadn’t responded to the overture.

“There’s no way you’d actually consider it, right?” I asked him.

He said he probably wouldn’t. But, he allowed, getting to live in the city would be pretty cool.

The houses in the subdevelopment cast long shadows across their brown lawns. My roommate checked his wristwatch: only forty minutes to go. He figured if he got another phone number or two, his yield might not be the worst among the group. Not that he really had a choice anyway. By this point, it was almost a game: how little effort could he expend and come away with a phone number? Could he do it without caring? While enraged at the consulting firm, at the college, at the job market, and most of all—a sudden, deep-seated loathing he hoped but couldn’t swear would pass like a tickle at the back of the throat expelled by a wet, vocal sneeze—at himself?

He turned into a driveway with a beige Corolla stationed before a closed garage door. How appropriate, my roommate remarked to himself. Every house, every life in this neighborhood was a beige Corolla: steady, utilitarian, good enough for now until fortune improved or worsened, getting the job done until it could be traded in for the next model or scrapped for parts. And still, somehow, better than anybody had a right to expect.

My roommate spit into the weedy mulch which gave onto the house’s cement foundation, and kicked at a loose brick in the front walkway. The doorbell made a limp, aluminum ping. He pondered the diminishing returns of standing before the locked door, whether the odds of securing a phone number increased or declined with each minute, each hour he stood waiting for his prospect to open his home to a stranger.

The door handle quivered from within; someone was working the padlock with a key from the other side. Finally the door lurched open to reveal a tiny, ancient man with thick gray hairs protruding from both nostrils, hunching forward into the fading daylight. His cloudy eyes found a point on my roommate’s chest and fixed on his paisley tie.

My roommate mumbled his way through the abridged script, then waited for any response from the old man, whose mouth trembled as he worked his upper teeth into place.

“Phone number?” he rasped. “You need my phone number?”

My roommate said he’d appreciate that, if it wasn’t too much trouble.

“Yes,” the old man seemed dazed. “I...I have it written down somewhere.” He shuffled in his slipper feet as if trying to find the solid ground beneath him, then with a hand on the doorknob rotated his back toward my roommate and began the arduous journey through the shallow front foyer.

My roommate knew the old man was going to fall even before his unsteady foot descended upon the tasseled edge of the worn persian rug. The left slipper skidded forward, abandoned by the traction afforded it on the foyer’s shiny hardwood. The old man’s stooped posture unclenched as he cascaded backward, airborne just long enough that the rear of his skull thudded against the hardwood a split-second before the rest of him did. The sigh which escaped his parted lips echoed of relief, then curdled into an abysmal moan.

Dropping his clipboard and folder, my roommate hurtled across the threshold. Fearing the old man had suffered a stroke, he knelt beside him and gently clutched his right wrist, thumbing the papery, translucent flesh in search of a pulse. A rivulet of blood trickled from where the old man’s head lay on the floor.

“Sir! Can you hear me?” my roommate enunciated. The old man’s eyelids fluttered against tears which pooled on their corners. “I’m going to call for help.” My roommate dug into his pocket for his cell phone as he heard a series of footsteps rushing through the open front door. He rose to his feet just in time to see a furious gray blur launch itself over the hardwood, tackling my roommate to the malevolent rug and pinning his flailing arms beneath him.

“Mother...fucker,” the assailant gasped, striking him with three sharp, heavy blows to the left side of his face before rolling off to tend to the old man. Convulsing in pain, my roommate cupped his throbbing eye with a slick palm and turned onto his side. The middle-aged man who’d pummeled him, already dictating instructions to an emergency operator through his Blackberry, wore a shadow-striped suit, his tie loosened around his unbuttoned collar.

“I get home from work, and walk in on a burglary in process,” he narrated into the phone. “Some kid’s laid out my father in the front hall. Yeah, an eighty-two-year-old man. I swear to God.” With his free hand he stroked the old man’s gnarled forehead. “Don’t fucking move,” he barked at my roommate, seeing him lift his head off the unforgiving floor, before returning to the 911 operator.

The old man was lucid and responsive by the time the ambulance arrived, but his son hadn’t warmed any toward my roommate. Once the EMTs had carted the old man away in a stretcher, the responding officers separated my roommate from the son, pulling them to opposite sides of the front yard. Doors opened up and down the street, neighbors—most of whom, my roommate contemplated grimly, hadn’t answered their doorbells minutes before—taking tentative steps outside to watch the mewling ambulance speed away in the sunset. The cop who’d led my roommate to his corner of the yard calmly asked him questions, his vapory exhalations visible in the gathering dark, and jotted the answers on a scratch pad.

The cops didn’t cuff either of them, but drove the son and my roommate to the station in separate squad cars so that they could each give their statements. The officer who took my roommate’s statement, a graying, potbellied man in shirtsleeves, handed him ice for his black eye and seemed alternately exasperated and entertained as he ushered him into an interrogation room. My roommate could press charges against the son, he told him, but statutes regarding the corporeal rights of solicitors were murky at best, conceived to protect victims of home invasions. A settlement would be unlikely to cover attorney fees, and God forbid a jury were convened to deliberate the fate of a door-to-door salesman. “You’re lucky he didn’t shoot you,” the officer chuckled. The Astro van, my roommate was informed, was nowhere to be found when the cops arrived in the neighborhood.

It was past nine by the time he was released, long after the last commuter train had left the city for the suburbs to the south. A desk officer told my roommate he could crash in a vacant holding cell—“We won’t even lock it, promise!” the deputy howled—but my roommate elected to doze off for a few hours on one of the vinyl couches in the waiting area where a custodian was swabbing the tile floor. He was starving, but the desk officer told him that meals were only provided for those who were being kept on bail.

“Go back out there, commit yourself a petty misdemeanor, and I’ll give you a nice sandwich,” the paper-pusher hooted.

Early the next morning, a patrol officer on duty gave my roommate a ride to the nearest commuter station. The train sputtered into the city as the sun groaned over the horizon, picking up shift workers and day students. He switched to a comparably unpeopled train at the transit center downtown and rode back out to the suburbs on the opposite side of the city, where he’d left the borrowed car he’d promised to have back the night before. He charged the exorbitant overnight parking rate to his debit card, and the swinging gate arm released him to the southbound interstate.

Flipping down the overhead visor to shield his swollen eye against the midmorning glare, my roommate caught a whiff of himself and, pinning the steering wheel between his knees, thrashed out of the suitjacket he’d worn for over twenty-four hours. He coasted into a truck stop to fill the gas tank and seek his first meal in nearly as long, returning to the car with a tall paper cup of coffee and a bag with three breakfast sandwiches he’d liberated from beneath a heat lamp. After accelerating back into the flow of light traffic, he scanned the radio and found a station on the low end of the FM dial playing old songs his mother liked. When he reached campus he steered the car through winding one-way streets, sailing past men in denim work shirts mowing the lawns and pruning shrubbery. He left the car in the same numbered space he’d found it the morning prior and began the trek back to our house, buoyed with the assurance that it wouldn’t last.

Pete Tosiello's criticism, reportage, and interviews have appeared in The Washington Post, Pitchfork, Vulture, and The Paris Review among many others. He lives in New York City.