On Monday morning the subway car doors opened and Zoey became a drop in the ocean of commuters as it poured through Fulton Center, carrying her along the gray-tiled passageway and out into the huge open space of the Oculus.
In photography, she thought as she traversed the six hundred feet of pure white Italian marble, the oculus is where you place the camera. Because you see the picture first, in your mind’s eye.
She passed the freestanding concierge desk with its oversize displays of fresh-cut flowers. Today the selection was all white roses and white Madonna lilies.
Where you stand, and what you see from there, is the key to putting together the right picture. That’s what creates the perspective you want. You know what I mean?
“I think I do,” she whispered as she walked.
She thought again, for the hundredth time, of her mother saying, “But there was so much more I meant to do.”
She entered the West Concourse passageway and walked by the enormous LED wall display. Today it showed a huge panorama, a gorgeous purple-and-orange sunrise over some stunning mountain range in the American Southwest.
She paused in her journey just long enough to take in the ad message scrolling across the football-field-length screen.
You know how to make your dreams come true?
You buy them . . . a dollar at a time.
She stepped onto the escalator that carried her two stories up and into the sunlit glass atrium, then walked outside and turned back toward West Street, the sun in her eyes, and faced the building where she worked. She tipped her head back and looked straight up, her eyes searching.
Today she could just make out the top of the building as it stretched toward the sky.
That morning Zoey met with Dave in HR. Right then and there, he walked her through setting up her 401(k). It was easier than she expected, and Dave also gave her a few suggestions for how she could put her new plan into practice. When she got home that evening, she went online and set up two new savings accounts at her bank, which she labeled PHOTOGRAPHY COURSE ACCOUNT and ADVENTURE ACCOUNT. In a matter of minutes (following Dave’s suggestions), she also set things up online so that her paycheck would be automatically deposited into her checking account, and two transfers would then go automatically from checking into those two new accounts.
The amounts weren’t much, but that was okay. In time she would increase them.
After saying goodbye to her father and boarding her train the night before, Zoey realized how much more she had gotten out of her conversations with Henry than just a new financial plan. She came away with a new sense of clarity about her life’s purpose, about what really mattered to her. She saw now that she, like Henry in his youth, was toiling away for hours a day to pay for things that weren’t bringing her any closer to the life she genuinely wanted to be living.
And once she realized that, it occurred to her that it might not take nearly as much money as she’d thought to start living that life. Perhaps it wasn’t that she needed to be earning more. Perhaps she just needed to get clearer about what she was doing with the money she was already earning.
On the train ride home she had texted Jessica.
Jess, TY so much for the amazing oppty—but I decided 2 pass. Happy @ Frdm Twr.
The truth was, she was happy at her job, loved the work and loved the people there. She just needed to make some changes.
After meeting with Dave, she met with Barbara and told her she wanted to take time off to travel, as Henry had done. To have her own radical sabbaticals. It would mean she’d be absent once a year for an entire issue, but she could take her laptop with her and maybe work remotely. Did Barbara think she might be able to work with Zoey on that plan and help make it happen?
After she finished making her pitch, her boss was silent for a moment. Then Barbara gave a shrug and her trademark blank expression and said, “Sure. On one condition.”
“Which is?” prompted Zoey.
“That you send me postcards.”
That night Zoey had a dream.
She was drifting lazily in a small boat along the coast of Maine, eating wild blueberries from a bucket. “Look!” her mother said, pointing. “Haliaeetus leucocephalus,” added her father. “American bald eagle.” Zoey looked up, shielding her eyes from the sun with one hand—and saw the big bird arcing and wheeling around the top few floors of an enormous tower as it stretched through the clouds and upward toward the sky.
She awoke and lay still on her back. Looking up into the semidarkness, she wondered why it was that her little apartment seemed so quiet. It took her a full minute to figure it out.
The place itself was not, in fact, any quieter than usual. It was the noise inside her head that had suddenly gone quiet. That constant unspoken sense of worry. Like a refrigerator hum you get so used to that you forget it’s there until it goes click! and shuts off, leaving nothing behind but a sudden hush.
She smiled in the semidarkness.
Nothing was different, in one sense. It wasn’t as if those automatic deposit accounts had already earned her a fortune in the twelve hours since she opened them. But she felt different. Just knowing that they would chug along on their own steam now, month after month, year after year, had made that background anxiety pop like a bubble.
Zoey laughed quietly, then drifted off to sleep. She slept straight through till morning. When she awoke, she couldn’t remember the last time she had felt so refreshed. She had slept the sleep of the dead, so to speak.
No, she thought, amend that. The sleep of the free.