Chapter 28 : Paper Trail
The CUNY registrar put him on hold for four minutes.
Albert stood at the kitchen counter with the phone pressed to his ear and looked at the notepad in front of him. The column on the left was titled What Devon Needs. The column on the right was titled What Exists. The two columns were not in correspondence. The hold music was a Vivaldi piece rendered in MIDI, which had the quality of optimism that had been processed into something functional.
The registrar came back. "Okay, I'm looking at the file now. Myers, Albert — is that you?"
"Yes."
"Enrolled fall 2004, one full semester, partial spring 2005." Papers shuffling. "Withdrawal processed spring 2005. Reason coded W-F — that's financial hardship. Do you need—"
"Official transcript," Albert said. "Certified, with the withdrawal notation. Rush processing if possible."
"Rush adds two business days to remove, brings it down to five to seven. That's eighteen dollars on top of the eight-dollar base fee."
"Fine."
He gave the current address, confirmed the mailing details, paid by debit card. The transcript would arrive in approximately a week. The deadline was thirteen days out. He had room, barely.
He hung up and moved to the right column of his notepad, wrote CUNY transcript — real, incomplete, W-F — pending. Below it: Covers: education gap (partial). Does NOT cover: graduate degree language on NBC application.
The language on the NBC application had said graduate coursework, Communications. The CUNY transcript would show one full semester of undergraduate work and a withdrawal. There was no graduate program in the file. The delta between what was claimed and what the transcript showed was the question Devon would ask.
Albert made coffee and thought about it while the pot ran.
The honest answer: the application had inflated the educational history. This happened. People wrote graduate coursework when they meant took some classes after a bachelor's degree. The bachelor's degree — SUNY Binghamton, BA — was real and was in the NBC file. The CUNY coursework was real but non-graduate. The distance between graduate-adjacent coursework and graduate coursework on a job application was a matter of degree and a very common variety of resume phrasing that HR typically did not pursue aggressively.
Unless prompted. Devon had prompted.
He filed the CUNY situation as manageable, requires explanation, not fabrication and moved to the harder problem.
The new location of The Daily Grind wasn't in Sunnyside anymore.
It took Albert most of his lunch break to track it down — a new business registration under a slightly different name, Daily Grind Coffee & More, on a secondary commercial block in Woodside. He took the 7 train to the last Queens stop and found it between a nail salon and a cell phone accessories store. Small. The kind of place that had been rebuilt from a closed predecessor and kept its operational DNA.
The owner was a man named Vasquez who was behind the counter making sandwiches when Albert came in at 1:30 PM on a Tuesday. The place had three other customers. Albert ordered a coffee — the first good thing he'd put in his body since the protein bar — and waited.
Vasquez didn't recognize him immediately. Albert explained: he'd worked at the Sunnyside location in 2005 and 2006, was applying for a position that required employment verification, his former manager at the original location would be the correct verifier.
Vasquez squinted. "You said 2005?"
"March 2005 through April 2006."
"Hm." He was making the sandwich with the systematic focus of someone who multitasked by not fully attending to either task. "I had a lot of kids through that place. Quiet. You were quiet?"
Albert wasn't sure if that was a description or a question. "Yes."
"Yeah." Vasquez put the sandwich in a bag. "I remember quiet. Not many of them, actually. Most of them wanted to talk all the time." He handed the bag to the customer. "What do you need from me?"
"A phone call confirming employment dates. If they call, or if I can list you as a contact."
"That's it?"
"That's it."
Vasquez considered this with the practical reasonableness of a man who had run a small business long enough to understand that former employees occasionally needed paperwork. "Fine. Don't get me sued."
"I won't."
He left with the phone number on a napkin and the coffee, which was significantly better than what the NBC craft services cart produced. He sat on a bench on the platform waiting for the train back and drank it and added Daily Grind — Vasquez, confirmed to the right column.
The coffee was good. That was something.
He bought the burner phones at a T-Mobile on Eighth Avenue — two prepaid handsets, the cheapest models, already activated. He paid cash.
The Memory Palace at 9 PM — nine minutes, well under threshold — held a room he'd built that morning for this specific purpose. Not the Host History archive. A different room: bare walls, two chairs facing each other. The kind of space a person designed for rehearsal.
He ran the first voice in the chair on the left: a former supervisor, male, mid-50s, Queens rather than Brooklyn, the particular register of someone who managed hourly employees at a small business and had long since learned to give employment verifications with minimal elaboration because elaboration invited follow-up questions. Albert Myers, yes, 2005 to 2006, good worker, reliable, no disciplinary issues, left voluntarily. Flat. Confirmatory. The kind of voice that communicated that the supervisor had many former employees and this one wasn't especially memorable, which was itself the most plausible characteristic.
He ran it four times in the Palace until the cadence was consistent.
The second voice — colleague-register, peer, female, the kind of professional acquaintance rather than close friend — took longer. Devon was sophisticated enough that a too-eager reference raised flags. She needed to remember Albert clearly but warmly, not glowingly. Oh, Albert. Yeah, we worked on the same account for a few months, he was good at the structural stuff, not the most social person but you knew he was going to do the work properly. Genuine-sounding mild affection. The absence of superlatives. The kind of reference that felt real because real references were complicated.
He came out of the Palace, ran the tap, drank a glass of water. His nose was fine — nine minutes, clean.
He went to the bathroom mirror.
The face he'd been using for three months looked back at him. He'd stopped noticing it as wrong somewhere around week four — it had become the face attached to the morning, the commute, the writers' room, the break room at 2 AM with Liz and the cheese. His face. In a functional, practical sense.
He practiced the first reference voice while looking at it. The face didn't match the voice. He had spent his previous life in advertising rooms, in client presentations, in the particular performance of confidence that professional contexts required, and he had always been watching himself from slightly outside the performance. The face in the mirror now had no such distance. It was just the face, attached to the performance, and the performance was getting more complicated and the face was staying the same.
He ran the voice again. The face watched him.
He finished, turned off the bathroom light, and sat at the card table and assembled the documentation package. The CUNY transcript was pending — he'd drop in a note saying it was en route. The Vasquez contact information. The two burner phone numbers listed as references, with names. The explanation for the educational language: graduate-level coursework referred to advanced undergraduate work taken after a gap year, consistent with the timeline.
He submitted the package to the HR portal at 7:43 PM, three days before the deadline.
Early submission communicated confidence. Devon would note the timing.
His BlackBerry had a message from Jonathan — received while he was in Queens, which he'd missed: Mr. Banks would like to meet personally before HR closes the inquiry. His assistant will schedule.
Albert set the phone on the table and looked at it.
Devon wanted to see his face.
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