Behold, the office of low-level Nutricorp R&D man Stab Backner. In size, it lies somewhere between a coat closet and the coat check at a decent nightclub. There is just room enough for Stab’s tin desk—badly dinged, thickly bepapered, offensively beige— the creaky swivel chair where he sits for most of the day, and a purposely smaller and less authoritative chair where someone else might sit, but seldom does. There is a framed photograph of a snow capped mountain on one wall; it was already here when Stab inherited the office. On the other side of the room, a narrow window faces out over the wide Omaha street that separates the head office of Nutricorp from that of VitaMind, Nutricorp’s primary competitor in the vitamin and nutritional supplement space. Occasionally Stab will open the window, lean out, and flip VitaMind the bird. 

It’s just past 9 p.m. Stab left his office over an hour ago, so we should too. At this hour, the Nutricorp building is an empty capsule. Admire the long, lonely corridors of flecked orange linoleum and smooth concrete (fortified with the highest quality asbestos!) as we make our way to the elevator. The octogenarian operator is still working—does he ever go home?—and happy to take us wherever we’d like to go. Shall we visit the C-suite up on six, where Stab hopes one day to reign supreme? Shall we stop by the labs on five, where he oversees a small but canny coterie of pale, sexless scientists, one of whom is right now hunched sexlessly over a spreadsheet, sexlessly checking one column against another and frowning at the implications? Or maybe you’d like to visit the secretarial pool, though it’s much too late now to watch those young and vibrant guys and gals play the massive Nutricorp switchboard like Horowitz at a Steinway. (Note the two flashing lights: the aforementioned scientist attempting to contact the aforementioned Stab Backner, who, as has been aforementioned, is no longer in the building). 

Then again, perhaps it’s premature of us to go anywhere but the basement, where there are no windows through which mailroom employees can mark the passage of the sun across the sky, where time is measured in parcels received and parcels delivered, where correspondence is sorted and sent hurtling through the pneumatic tubes that are Nutricorp’s very veins. This dreary shrine to drudgery represents the bottommost rung of the corporate ladder, the Go square on the Monopoly board, the proverbial dues that must be paid. It is also the place you’ll be reporting for work in just thirty-six short hours. 

On second thought, there’s no need for us to tour the building at such a late hour. You’ll visit all those places soon enough, and besides, we have somewhere to be. The golden doors of the elevator slide open to reveal the high-ceilinged lobby, all marble and brass and oil paintings of horses. The night receptionist offers us a curt goodbye as we exit the building by way of the revolving door. Snowflakes the size of goose feathers fall heavy and slow, like somebody up there is emptying out a bunch of pillows. The leather shoes of Omaha’s most diligent company men and women crunch forlornly along the icy crust at the edge of the sidewalk. Those with families will be heading straight home, of course, but those who have only cold apartments and cold-cut leftovers waiting for them turn their feet instead toward Douchie’s Bar & Grill—cozy as your mother’s chicken soup, bustling as a subway car at rush hour. Follow these enervated revelers through the frosted-glass doors, into the fug of cigarette smoke and nascent adultery, and all the way up to the bar, where at last we find our hero: low-level Nutricorp R&D man Stab Backner. 

Admittedly, he looks less than heroic at the moment— tired and anxious, rumpled and irritable. He slides a small white pill back and forth along the bar, stopping it with one hand and then batting it back to the other, like a slow and netless game of tennis. He remembers flying out to New York a few years ago to watch the US open at Forest Hills Stadium, how he’d mostly ignored the game, choosing instead to focus on the crowd, their heads swiveling back and forth with every shot, like an army of synchronized swimmers who’d only mastered a single synchronized stroke. As an experiment, he’d tried taking the opposite tack, looking left when they looked right and right when they looked left, always keeping his attention where the ball wasn’t. Stab has always liked the idea of seeing things other people can’t. 

“Another martini, Mr. Backner, as dirty as I can stand to make it,” says Jimmy, placing the cloudy glass on a green felt coaster and the green felt coaster in front of Stab. “I don’t know how you drink ‘em like this.” 

Though he doesn’t look a day over twenty-five, Jimmy has been working at Douchie’s for years. Sober, our man Stab wouldn’t have bothered to acknowledge the fellow if they ran into each other on the street, but after a few drinks, he becomes convinced that the bartender is one of his best friends and closest confidantes. And this in spite of the fact that he’s only about 40% sure the man’s name is actually Jimmy. 

“The trick is to swallow,” Stab says, and then does so. The martini tastes like a pickle with a drinking problem. 

“To each his own,” Jimmy says, setting himself to drying some freshly cleaned glasses. “So you wanna talk about it?” 

“About what?” 

“Your day.” 

“What makes you think I need to talk about my day?” 

The bartender gestures with a rag. “You’ve got circles under your eyes so dark it looks like you’re testing products for Max Factor. Your suit’s wrinkles have wrinkles. You were already reeking of liquor when you showed up, and the smell hasn’t exactly improved—” 

“All right, all right. You got me. I may have had a few rough days.” 

Except the truth is it’s been more like a few rough years— of twelve-hour days shuttling between his office and the labs, of sleepless nights agonizing over research reports and experimental data, of a monomaniacal (and frankly just maniacal) obsession with developing the best damn vitamin supplement the world has ever seen. And now here he stands on the precipice of victory. All that suffering has finally paid off. Unless… 

But he won’t let himself think about that. 

“Work life or personal life?” Jimmy asks. 

Stab laughs until he realizes the bartender isn’t joking. “I’m a Nutricorp man, Jimmy. I don’t have a personal life. I haven’t earned one yet.” 

“Everybody deserves a bit of fun.” 

“Nobody deserves anything. We all get exactly what we’re willing and able to pry out of God’s stingy, balled-up fist—and not a penny more.” 

Jimmy smiles, as if at a funny misunderstanding. “I wasn’t talking about money, Mr. Backner. Life is about more than money.” 

“Of course. Life’s about a lot of things. And you can buy pretty much all of them with money.” 

“You can’t buy love.” 

Stab laughs again, this time because Jimmy isn’t joking. “That all depends what you mean by ‘you’. If you mean people generally, we absolutely can and do buy love. It’s easier to find than a reliable car. But if you’re talking about you, Jimmy the bartender, then you’re probably right. You can’t buy love.” 

“I’m not sure I follow.” 

“What do you make here, anyway? Two thousand a year?” Jimmy’s face tightens. “Less than two? Jesus, kid. So let’s say one-five. You know what kind of love you can get for one-five a year? Picture your one-five-a-year wife standing in line at the market with those two shiny nickels you gave her for groceries, trying to plan out the week’s meals to feed your one-five-a-year children, who hate your guts because you send them to school in cheap one-five-a-year hand-me-downs. You following me now, Jimmy? You can’t buy love because you can’t afford it.” 

Jimmy’s knuckles are white where he’s got a death grip on the handle of a beer stein. For a moment, Stab wonders if he’s about to get smashed in the face, and if that means he’ll finally be able to get a few hours of shut-eye. 

“I got some work to do in the back,” Jimmy mutters, and disappears through the batwing doors into the kitchen. 

“Can I at least get another drink before you…?” But the kid’s already gone. Stab is left to suck what liquor he can out of the crevices of his martini olives.

Out of boredom, he starts batting the pill back and forth again, but after a brief rally, it catches on a Douchie’s coaster and vaults over his waiting hand, sliding a good ten feet on down the bar to stop in front of a woman who’s writing something in a journal. She sets down her pen and picks up the pill, holding it up like a jeweler examining a diamond for imperfections. The light over her barstool is out, casting her face in shadow, and the color of her hair seems to change with the angle of her head—dirty blonde to red, auburn to chestnut. “This aspirin?” she says. 

“Better than aspirin.” 

“Opium?” 

“Better than that.” 

She tilts her chin up and tosses back the pill. Stab leaps up out of his seat, as if by doing so he might inspire the pill to do the same trick with her esophagus. “What the hell are you doing, lady?” 

The woman smiles, a white Chiclet crescent in the darkness, and reveals the uneaten pill in her right hand. “The trick is not to swallow.” She slides it back down the bar to him. “You sure jumped though. This poison or something?” 

Stab takes his seat again. “Of course not,” he says, and drives the point home by putting the pill on his tongue and gulping it down dry. 

The woman closes her notebook and taps her temple with her pen. “Hey, I think I recognize you. You work at Nutricorp, right?” 

“Guilty as charged.” 

“I knew it. I never forget a pretty face. Tad, was it?” 

“Stab. Stab Backner. You?”

The woman smiles, almost to herself. “So you got any resolutions, Mr. Backner? For 1950, I mean.” 

He’d almost forgotten that tomorrow was New Year’s Eve. “I try not to make any resolutions until after the company party. Otherwise I just end up breaking them…at the company party.” 

“We do throw a wild little soirée, don’t we? Remember Dick Wickman and Lenny Hughes last year, up in the executive bathroom?” 

“How could I forget?” 

“Whatever happened to them, anyway?” 

“I don’t know,” Stab says. “Nobody’s seen them since!” 

They laugh for a bit, and Stab starts to wonder if something romantic might be brewing here. He still can’t make out the woman’s features in the low light of the bar, but he likes her style—and didn’t she say something about his having a pretty face? Jimmy still hasn’t emerged from the kitchen, but another bartender has taken his place. (And now Stab realizes that this one is actually Jimmy. Whoops. He would feel guilty, except it’s really on them for wearing those uniforms and not having more distinctive faces.) He’s just about to offer the woman a drink when she sets her head on her hand and asks all casual, “So, Mr. Backner, a little birdie tells me you’ve got some big new product in development. Clinical trials have been running since April or so, haven’t they? That sure is a long time.” 

Stab doesn’t say anything. His blood, which at the moment is a good 20% dirty martini, runs ice cold. The woman goes on: “Any reason we haven’t seen any preliminary results? I’m no expert, but I would’ve thought you’d—”

“Sorry,” Stab interrupts, “but I don’t talk business outside of the office.” 

“No? And here I thought I heard you call yourself a Nutricorp man. No personal life and all that.” 

So she’d been eavesdropping since the moment he came in. He should’ve suspected; this company was nothing but rats, snakes, and stoolies. He stands up, wobbles a bit, stabilizes just in time to maintain his dignity. “It’s been a pleasure.” 

“Oh the pleasure has been all mine, Mr. Backner. I’m quite sure of that. Goodnight.” As Stab waits for the girl at the coat check to retrieve his things, he glances back to the bar. The woman is furiously scribbling in her notebook; he has to fight the urge to run over and rip it out of her hand. What if she’s some kind of corporate spy working for VitaMind, or one of those dull, visionless federal agents always getting in the way of corporate innovation? He laughs to himself. What is he so afraid of? It’s not like he told her anything. Hell, it’s not even like he has anything to tell. Not yet, anyway. 

“Here you are, Mr. Backner,” says the coat check girl, handing over his hat and jacket. 

He slides her a dime. “Thanks, Cupcake.” 

Stab turns to the door just as it swings open. There’s an icy blast of air as a couple enters the bar, clinging closely, whispering like conspirators. Stab forces his way between them, feeling their linked elbows give way like in that schoolyard game where you tried to break your friends’ arms—“Red Rover, Red Rover, send Backner right over!” 

Outside, the chill is a malevolent force, a punishment. A hobo stands over a barrel fire at the end of an alleyway. Stab accidentally makes eye contact. “You wanna know a secret, buddy?” Stab doesn’t answer. The hobo points upwards, toward the sky. “They’re sending numbers. You can hear them if you’re quiet.” He closes his eyes and stands up straight, like a radio tower receiving a transmission: “Seven, Nine, One, Five, Six…” 

Stab walks on, until the hobo’s voice is swallowed up in the quilting snowfall. Maybe it’s the weather, or the liquor, or that woman and her smug smile, but Stab suddenly feels melancholy. Lonely, even. A big city like Omaha, with all its movers and shakers, could make a man feel like he hadn’t made a damn thing of himself. Stab wishes he had someone to talk to about how hard things have been at work, about the long nights you have to put in and the tough calls you have to make if you’re gonna have a hope in hell of making VP before you’re forty.

He knows he doesn’t have time for a sweetheart, of course, but why not a friend, or even better, a protégé? Someone who would look up to him as a mentor, who would listen patiently as he dispensed the wisdom gleaned from nearly fifteen years at Nutricorp, who would have his back. And come to think of it, if things did go south this week, mightn’t it be particularly useful if that hypothetical protégé happened to work in the mailroom? Yes. Yes, it would.

Our hero smiles. For a moment, he wonders if this sudden burst of optimism is a result of the six martinis he just drank, the capsule of Vitamin X he just took, or his bold new plan. Whatever the reason, he’s certain now that 1950 is going to be a good year. Better than that: a great year. A banner year. And as for resolutions, he’s got plenty.

He resolves to single-handedly change the face of the vitamin industry forever. He resolves to see Nutricorp’s competitor, VitaMind, reduced to so much powdered riboflavin.

He resolves to do whatever it takes to climb to the top of the corporate ladder and get that corner office. 

But first and foremost, he resolves to find himself a shiny new best friend at the company New Year’s Eve party tomorrow night.

Watch now as Stab Backner puckers his lips and begins to whistle the melody of Auld Lang Syne, practically skipping through the thick drifts of snow back to his lair, and consider what you would do if a man like this asked to be your shiny new best friend.