Table Stakes Pt. I: The undead

Part I of a serialized telling of a disillusioned corporate cog who rises to the occasion as a vampire hunter, saving lives—including his own

Carter Deng laid still in his bedchamber, where the crisp morning October air, with its hints of smoke, gently permeated through the cracked open window. The radial, alien-like alarm on his iPhone chirped like a robot early bird, pecking at him to wake. Another day. He’d stayed up much too late rewatching Physical: 100 the night before, escaping to a fantasy world of straight-forward and fairly rewarded tasks, with supportive teammates all aligned to one clear goal. Truly, a fictional dream. Going to bed meant capitulating to the work that awaited him post-slumber; each morning’s alarm, the daily knell. He rose, scratching at his once-six-packed paunch. This isn’t me, he thought, as he thought everyday, but an honest read of his body’s energy told him he must conserve all that he had to withstand the day’s soul-siphoning, and continue his impressive streak of Barry’s non-attendance.

He leaned against the doors of the A train, squashed behind a giant finance bro’s backpack and caged in by a Chinatown auntie’s metal cart full of multiple plastic bags of rambutan. With his arms scrunched up such that his phone was two inches from his face, he managed to scroll through his Instagram and Reddit, mindlessly absorbing the news and pop culture happenings. New Tame Impala album, sweet … Hurricane Melissa, sad …$4 trillion market cap for Apple, sheesh … two MBA consultants hospitalized after marathon 100 hour weeks? Carter paused. Plenty of his friends went into consulting recently, especially those who’d gone off to business school. He knew the hours could be bad, but it shouldn’t be like post-undergrad I-banking. Weird. “Next stop, 14th street.” Carter heard his cue and began shoving his way through the crowd.

”We’ve got a new client for you, Carter.” Tom, Carter’s boss, hovered over his desk, pausing and pressing his lips together, staring off in the distance, eyes rolling slightly back, in thought. A quick tap of two fingers on the desk ended the silence. “Yup, just check the deck and SOW I sent you, should be all the info you need to get started.” He’d turned and was ten feet away before Carter could absorb what he said and respond. Sigh. Certainly he couldn’t complain about being micromanaged. Top skills he’d gathered over the last 8 years of working here? Self-starter. Can handle ambiguity. Independent. With a boss that was often nowhere to be found, he’d had to learn to be cool with making a ton of mistakes, and trusting even the faintest whisper of his own instincts to navigate a broad swath of client personalities.

The one saving grace of being in consulting himself, just in the strategic design world, was the small dopamine hits of learning about new industries with each project, and that he was only ever a few weeks away from escaping whatever he was working on and continuing to entertain the delusion that maybe this project would be different. His hope was wearing thin; it’d been the same pattern over and over. “Build us an app,” they’d say, on his last project (and everyone before) though everyone knew that an app couldn’t save a dying 80s shoe brand with literally not a single soul internally who cared about fashion, even remotely. There he was, building an app for a company that reported abysmal losses quarter after quarter. He felt himself further dissociate every morning, in order to funnel his precious creative energy into what ultimately boiled down to padding shareholder pockets just a bit more. It’d gotten worse over the past year; he couldn’t even muster the energy to finish his one creative project of his own, the hand-carved spoons he was hoping to gift to his sort-of-friend, sort-of-more, Alina. He missed last birthday; April was only, what, 6 months away at this point? He swore he’d get back to woodworking soon.

“The Ferrum ring. Intelligence in every drop”. It was giving … Oura knockoff, with an incredibly inconvenient finger prick step that he imagined no user would do. “Weekly at a minimum, daily at best.” Carter internally shook his head, as he scrolled through their pitch deck. He’d been resourced as the lead designer, and the sole designer it seemed. And as a small startup, he’d be working directly with their CEO, Julian Vale. A quick LinkedIn lookup revealed a greyscale photo of a thin, balding man with a goatee and a peaky air about him. Fuck. They were based in Romania, which meant horrific hours. Those sharply honed instincts poked at Carter’s insides. This wasn’t going to be good.