My new fiction in the Vassar Review
"CEO Roy Noyes Is Typing..." is about office friendship, widespread delusion and how, when people are so predictable, nature 🌿 continues to surprise
I have a new short story out in the world. It’s in the latest issue of the Vassar Review, which has gathered some riveting poetry, art and prose under the irresistible theme “Frame and Forgery.”
“CEO Roy Noyes Is Typing…” is the fiction I brought to the table. It’s about a workplace friendship at odds with a chaotic return-to-office mandate and a group delusion driven by yes-men and a CEO who has no idea what the hell he’s doing.
I’ve been working on this short story — off and on — for the last few years. In the early stages it had a botanically driven plot involving a houseplant (rare begonia from the Andean cloud forests!) with fantastical powers, but during editing rounds readers suggested I “do some pruning” and focus more on the human friendship and office dynamics.
Not having plants in my writing is a tall order, though. So there’s still some nature in this story, but it’s more subtle. Hikes in Griffith Park are a rare source of surprise amid predictable coworkers. The natural world also plays a role in shifting the balance of power between the main character Sonya and the CEO Roy Noyes.1
It’s told from the second-person POV. My friend Mitzi Rapkin — the force behind the First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing podcast — has talked about how hard it is to pull off the second-person POV, so when she read a draft of my story and dug the POV, I knew I was onto something.
Here’s an excerpt. You can read the whole thing by downloading the gorgeous and free 2025 issue of the Vassar Review.
CEO Roy Noyes Is Typing…
by
Chantal Aida Gordon
All employees—with the exception of the engineers—are now required to return to the office five days a week, Monday to Friday. With no exceptions (except if you’re an engineer).
You’re not an engineer. You’re the lead UX designer at Cemend, an app that erases the clutter, bric-a-brac, tchotchkes, pet hair and crumbs from photos of rooms inside your home. With Cemend you can replace your furniture and decor with better, virtual versions of your furniture and decor. If you’re interested in midcentury modern or a look called travertine moon, which will make your room look slippery and beiged-out like a palmful of vitamin supplements, that’s great, you’re encouraged to upgrade. The company got $17 million in funding.
Don’t tell anyone this is coming from me. No one else is getting this benefit, Cemend’s CEO Roy Noyes allegedly said two months ago, during an Eng standup when he gave the engineers permission to live and work from wherever. Roy has the tall gloom and fading curls of a 19th-century piano composer and you can imagine him using his long arms to wheel himself from one corner of his dining table to the other as he talked.
But how will we adjust your ascots? Seamus the lead front-end engineer probably said.
Oh my god, Roy said, lifting his current ascot to cover half of his face. The pandemic has been like a renaissance for my ascots. I have one for every day of the week.
Things came to a head last month during Cemend’s beach outing. Non-engineers mobbed Seamus’s towel and got all in his face. Swerving from people’s light slaps on the cheek, Seamus tried to explain, Roy sees the engineers as extensions of himself. If we quit, it’d be like replacing his vital organs. He lightly rolled his eyes with his mention of Roy. Still, no one has dared to call out the C-suite yet, the men who float around in puffy sneakers and one-pocket t-shirts.
Being in the office makes you, a non-engineer, feel spectacularly self-conscious. You miss looking into folks’ bedrooms during video calls. You miss your own humid apartment filled with colorful papers, where you arrange your couch pillows by joyfully throwing them from across the room. Sometimes you’ll be standing by the creamy chicken caesars (catered lunches are management’s idea of pouring sugar all over the house fire), when it’ll hit you. At the office you feel like you’re living inside of a great big inhale, inside of one man’s hallucination.
*
CEO Roy Noyes eventually took his own cue and also stopped coming in.
But just because Roy isn’t in the office doesn’t mean he isn’t here, spiking the bloodstream of everyone who looks down at the company chat and sees the words CEO Roy Noyes is typing. You all know to gape and nod—vigorously—in response to whatever he says in meetings. You do it too. For once, you know how to be collectively safe. And you value it.
*
Today you wake up and send a work chat to Maureen, your one friend in HR.
> Look, I’m not coming in, you write. But I will be MORE THAN PRESENT working from home.
> Sonya please don’t do this. You’re not the only one begging, Maureen writes.
> Tell them I switched roles. I’m an engineer now, you write.
> You know you’re not supposed to know about that, she replies. Maureen’s a baby witch with many active and healed-over piercings and plum makeup that deepens the angles of her shaved head in a way that suggests she can see right through your body to identify objects you’ve swallowed. Despite the fact you’re a decade older than Maur and look nothing like her, your white coworkers regularly interchange you.
> Because engineers are very special boys from a very special land, but the rest of us in Product, Legal, HR, we grow on trees, you continue. And it’s a Friday, who cares??
> Imagine me living out of a van again, but because I have TOO MUCH money, you bash.
You’d be in traffic right now. Your commute consists of 95 to 120 minutes each way on surface streets where local homeowners will coolly step into traffic to photograph the preponderance of tents (and the unhoused people living in and between them) on the sidewalk. Swerve, sudden brake—What are you doing...? Honk at them though and they’ll think you agree. These homeowners are taking photos to send to the new 311 app; the homeless encampment with the most photos will get swept. The new mayor also intends to lower the minimum wage to $12 in his first act of inflation relief. CEO Roy Noyes likes to claim Cemend inspired the mayor’s app. He and I are clearing out decadent distractions, Roy has said.
> You can try that, see where it gets you, Maureen writes.
> Huzzah, Mom, maybe I will, you write.
Maur strikes the tone of one of those let’s-give-it-a-whirl parents even though she’s younger than basically everyone, a fact you’re reminded of when you chase Maur and her dog Twinkie up the trails most weekends in Griffith Park. One time on the edge of Bee Rock as you were gasping for breath Maureen told you that her own mom owes a hospital $200,000 for a surgery the insurance company decided not to pay for after all. So Maureen’s paying for it. She tells you about dreams she has—of trying to fight off a total solar eclipse—on the nights before payday when her checking account is on fumes.
*
You open your laptop at your kitchen table. The hottest channel at the moment is #HR, which has a bolded (10) next to it on the company chat platform.
A new hire is praising Maureen for her thorough onboarding. Maur is being showered with high-fives emoji, 12 then 29 then 36 changing before your eyes.
> Had a last QQ, the new hire writes. What’s the policy on perfume in the office?
> SO glad you asked, Maur replies in no time. While we’re proud to have a casual dress policy, we ask that employees refrain from wearing any kinds of perfume, cologne or strongly scented deodorant due to potential sensitivities. So please save your spritz for the weekend ;)
Many thumbs-up emoji. But they stop dead when words appear at the bottom of your screen: CEO Roy Noyes is typing.
> @Maureen that is absolutely false, CEO Roy Noyes writes.
Your stomach craters. Just imagining how Maureen must feel right now, her face reflected on the dark screen, oxblood nails on the keyboard, knowing the public firehosing is only beginning. You can feel your coworkers silently crowding into the #HR channel now to spectate, because isn’t that really why you all come to work, not to tinker on an app that only 14 people have downloaded so far today?
Read more at Vassar Review.
For years even decades I’ve wanted to give the name Noyes to a dangerously mercurial character.