After work, Leo followed Dave to his office.
Dave sat behind his desk. He didn’t beat around the bush; he only sighed and turned his computer monitor toward Leo.
On the screen was an email from the “Daily Grind Dining Group—Atlantic Region—Human Resources Department.”
“Subject: Guidance Regarding the Maintenance of Brand Image Consistency and the Proactive Avoidance of Potential Public Relations Risks”
“Body: To all branch managers: To ensure that our company’s brand maintains a consistently positive and neutral image in the current complex and volatile public opinion environment, headquarters recommends that management at all levels conduct a proactive review of store employees. Please closely monitor and assess any employees who may present a risk of ‘values non-alignment.’ In order to achieve forward-looking risk management, it is recommended that relevant positions be optimized in a timely manner, so as to maintain team cohesion and brand security…”
Leo’s gaze skimmed over those tortuous, pretentious phrases. He could even imagine what the person who had written this email looked like.
A vice president of human resources in a suit and leather shoes, probably making two hundred thousand dollars a year, whose creed in life was to reduce every living, breathing person into risks and returns on a balance sheet.
At the end of the email, there was a PDF attachment.
Dave moved the mouse and opened it.
The contents of the PDF were even more direct.
Inside were screenshots of several tweets, and the one at the very top was none other than that tweet by “New Deal Ghost” about Omni Corporation.
His ID and the profile picture of Roosevelt’s silhouette had been precisely marked out with a glaring red box.
Everything was clear now.
“Leo,” Dave said, his voice filled with exhaustion and helplessness. He didn’t even dare look Leo in the eye. “I’m just a branch manager. Above me there’s a regional manager, and above the regional manager there’s a district director. My son has to see the dentist next month. You know dental insurance doesn’t cover everything. I still have a mortgage to pay every month. I don’t have a choice.”
He did not say the word “fired.”
The word was too direct, too devoid of human feeling. He merely pushed a white envelope from his side of the desk to Leo’s.
“This is your pay for the month. And, according to company policy, an extra week’s salary,” Dave said.
Leo did not get angry. Nor did he argue.
In that instant, what he felt was not rage at being targeted by some individual, but a bone-chilling cold and an immense sense of absurdity.
He had not been fired by Dave. Dave was only the terminal responsible for carrying out orders. He had not even been fired by some invisible vice president of HR.
“Take care, Dave.” Leo picked up the nearly weightless envelope, turned, and walked out of the office.
He turned and walked out of the office, passed through the back alley, and merged into the night of Pittsburgh.
This city, once known to the world for steel, now had only the glass towers downtown belonging to banks and high-tech companies still glittering in the night sky.
Most of its neighborhoods, however, were sunk in a heavy, rust-colored darkness, just like its forgotten glory.
Back in the apartment permeated with the smell of cheap coffee, Leo turned on the light.
He placed the envelope containing his severance pay side by side with the “Final Delinquency Notice” from the “Federal Student Aid Office” on his desk.
One from capital.
One from the government.
Despair surged in like a tide.
Leo staggered to the cabinet and dug out a half-empty bottle of cheap whiskey. He twisted off the cap and took a huge swig straight from the mouth of the bottle.
The pungent liquid burned his throat, but could not ignite the slightest warmth in his heart.
His gaze fell on the yellowing Roosevelt poster on the wall.
In the photograph, Roosevelt sat in an open-topped car, smiling, waving, his eyes filled with the unshakable confidence unique to that era.
Alcohol and long-suppressed fury detonated with a roar in that moment.
Leo grabbed the half-empty whiskey bottle and raised it high, the muscles in his arm knotting from the force.
He had meant to smash it against the wall, against that damned, hopeful smiling face.
But at the final moment, he stopped.
With all the strength in his body, he let out a question—a despairing roar that crossed nearly a century.
At the eternally confident smile on the poster, he bellowed:
“Do you see this? This is the world you left behind! If you’d hanged all those bankers and monopoly oligarchs on Wall Street back then, we wouldn’t have all this goddamn bullshit today!”
His voice echoed through the empty room, cracked and choked with tears.
His strength seemed to be drained away by that one roar. His body went slack, and, mixed with drunkenness and extreme exhaustion, he collapsed onto the floor.
The world began to spin. His consciousness was rapidly sinking into a boundless darkness.
Just as he was about to lose awareness completely—
A voice, one that did not belong to this room, did not belong to this era, steady and clear, with a faintly vintage texture like an old radio broadcast, rang out distinctly in the deepest part of his mind:
“Young man, hanging them won’t solve the problem…”
…
Consciousness was forcibly dragged back bit by bit from a dark, viscous abyss.
Leo Wallace’s first sensation was a headache.
His second sensation was that the voice was still there.
It had not disappeared.
Just as he struggled to distinguish the boundary between reality and hallucination, the voice sounded again, continuing the sentence from last night that had been interrupted by his fainting.
“…But making them serve the people can.”
Those words instantly pierced through his hangover.
Leo shot upright from the cold floor and looked around.
There was no one in the apartment. The whiskey bottle still lay beside him. The Roosevelt poster was still hanging on the wall, wearing that damned, confident smile.
“Who?” he growled hoarsely. “Who’s talking?”
Only the dead silence of the room answered him.
A primal terror seized him.
He scrambled and stumbled to the door. It was locked from the inside.
He rushed back to his desk and shook the mouse frantically, waking the computer screen.
There was no sign of any remote connection. The firewall logs were clean.
He was the only one here.
“I thought my accent was fairly standard. Upstate New York, around there.” The voice sounded again, this time carrying a trace of aristocratic inflection. “Young man, your hospitality leaves something to be desired, even if I admit I am an uninvited guest.”
Leo’s blood seemed to freeze.
All his rationality was telling him this was a hallucination—stress, alcohol, debt, unemployment… a cruel joke played on him by goddamn life.
But he could not explain the quality of that voice.
It was different from other auditory hallucinations. It had direction, a kind of physical presence.
The voice seemed to be ringing from the very center of his skull, yet it was also clearly independent from his own thoughts.
He could hear it as truly as he could hear the honking of cars outside the window.
“Who the hell are you?!” he roared at the empty room, feeling like a complete lunatic.
“Someone who once sat in the Oval Office of the White House and steered this country for twelve years.”
The voice answered, its tone very calm.
“Incidentally, my portrait is still hanging on your wall. Though I must say, that photographer made me look a little too solemn. In person, I was actually much more amusing than that.”
Leo’s neck turned toward the wall notch by notch, like a rusted robot.
His gaze nailed itself to the Roosevelt poster.
Sunlight happened to strike the glass of the poster’s frame from a tricky angle, causing that familiar, resolute face to distort slightly in light and shadow.
A chill ran from the soles of his feet, up his spine, all the way to the crown of his head.
He was not talking to a hallucination.
He was not talking to himself.
He was talking to a poster.
And the goddamn poster was talking back.
Leo’s first reaction was not to scream. He rushed into the cramped bathroom, turned on the faucet, and splashed cold tap water onto his face again and again.
He raised his head and looked at the face in the mirror—pale, with sunken eyes and an unfocused gaze.
“Calm down, Leo,” he said to himself, his voice somewhat slurred because his teeth were chattering. “This is just too much stress… unemployment… loans… plus the combined side effects of alcohol. An acute psychiatric episode. Right, that’s all it is.”
He needed help.
He needed modern science.
He needed a doctor in a white coat to tell him he only needed to take some sedatives, then get a good night’s sleep.
He made up his mind.
And at that very moment, the voice in his mind said leisurely, in an almost pitying tone:
“My boy, if you think seeing a doctor can solve this problem, then go. There’s nothing wrong with that. Think of it as a post-meal stroll.”
That light, casual mockery shattered the bubble of Leo’s self-comfort.
But it was precisely those words that strengthened Leo’s resolve.
He had to go.
He had to prove this voice was fake.
He had to drive this arrogant “ghost” that had illegally broken into his brain completely out of his mind.