Exceptional

The review said exceptional.

Adam read it twice in the glass-walled meeting room while his manager explained what would come with it — a salary adjustment, additional scope, a more senior title that would be formalised in the next cycle. His manager was clearly pleased. Adam was clearly pleased, or performing clearly pleased, and after nine years the gap between the two had become small enough that he no longer measured it.

Afterwards he went to the bathroom. He stood at the sink. He looked in the mirror for a moment with no particular expression.

This was the seventh exceptional review.

The word had lost its texture around review four. By now it was simply a category, a column in a system, a designation that meant: continue as you are.

He was thirty-nine. He had been continuing as he was since he was twenty-seven, when he had joined the company because the salary was good and the work was technically demanding and he had told himself he would stay three years and figure out what he actually wanted.

Three had become five. Five had become nine. The figuring out had been consistently deferred in favour of continuing to be exceptional.

He dried his hands. He went back to his desk. There were fourteen things requiring his attention before the end of the day and he attended to all of them with the precise, quiet competence that had generated seven exceptional reviews in nine years.

At 6:30 he closed his laptop. He thought: I could do this in my sleep.

He thought: I think I have been.

He walked to the train. The evening was mild. He thought about a conversation he'd had ten years ago, with a lecturer he'd liked, who had asked what Adam wanted to do with his mind.

Not his career. His mind.

Adam had given an answer that had satisfied them both at the time. He couldn't now recall what the answer was.

He wondered sometimes about the version of himself that had taken a different path at twenty-seven. Not the dramatically different path — he was not built for drama, and he understood that the fantasy of the radically altered life was usually just boredom looking for scenery. But the slightly different path. The one where the first question at each decision point had been: does this need what I actually have to give?

The train arrived. He got on. He held the overhead bar and looked out at the dark of the tunnel.

Exceptional, he thought.

The train moved. The city moved around it. He got off at his stop and walked home through streets that were entirely familiar and thought about the version of himself at twenty-seven, who had been uncertain and alive with it.

He made dinner. He ate it. He was, by all measures, fine.