The Mirage of 1400 Smith Street
In a tower of glass and steel, ambition shimmered like gold—until the illusion shattered.
Part I – Smoke and Light
Houston, Texas – August 2000
The elevator doors whispered open on the 49th floor of the Enron Building, and Daniel Rhee stepped into the heart of the machine.
Polished glass, brushed steel, white orchids. The offices stretched outward like a spaceship hovering above the city, bathed in natural light from the panoramic windows. Below him sprawled the endless flatness of Houston—smog-glazed roads, slow-moving freeways, and a sun that looked like it had been poured directly onto the concrete. But up here, in the skybox, it felt like another world.
A perfect one.
He adjusted the knot on his tie—double Windsor, neat but not too eager—and followed the hum of voices toward the trading floor. Around him, young men in rolled-up sleeves barked into phones. Flat screens flickered with real-time commodities data. There were no cubicles, only clusters of desks and glass walls. The energy was physical, like static electricity in a thunderstorm.
Daniel had spent two years at Goldman. He’d thought that was intense. But Enron was something else entirely.
“Rhee!” a voice called out.
It was Jackson, his manager—barely thirty, slick hair, slicker smile. “Come meet the team.”
The team was already five deep in Diet Cokes and inside jokes, analysts with resumes from Wharton, Stanford, Harvard. Someone handed Daniel a badge with his name and ID. Another slid him a stress ball shaped like a gas pipeline.
“This isn’t Goldman,” Jackson said. “Here, we don’t just ride markets—we make them.”
Daniel nodded, trying to absorb it all. There were no boundaries. Everything was fast, urgent, constantly shifting. They talked in acronyms: MTM, VAR, SPEs, EBITDA. At lunch, someone casually mentioned they’d just closed a deal worth half a billion dollars.
“Easy week,” he said.
Daniel’s first project was simple: track asset exposure across a portfolio of natural gas contracts in California. But the models were strange. They projected ten-year revenue from contracts that hadn’t even started yet. When Daniel asked about it, Jackson shrugged.
“Mark-to-market. Everyone does it now. It’s aggressive, sure, but we’re Enron. We think ahead.”
Later that day, he sat in on a team call with Skilling himself.
Jeffrey Skilling—CEO, genius, prophet. The man spoke like a preacher on Red Bull. “The industrial age is over,” he told them. “We are the future of energy, the capitalists of chaos.”
People clapped. Literally clapped. On a conference call.
Daniel clapped too. How could he not? Everyone wanted to believe it. That Enron wasn’t just a company—it was a revolution.
The perks helped sell the vision.
$100 lunches at Vic & Anthony’s were expensed. Town halls featured sushi, champagne, and private concerts. One night, Jackson took their whole team to Vegas to “celebrate Q3 pipeline optimization.”
“You made it,” Jackson slurred over vodka tonics. “You’re in the building now, Rhee. You don’t ask how the sausage gets made. You just eat.”
Still, Daniel couldn’t shake the numbers.
Every month, their division booked hundreds of millions in projected revenue from contracts that wouldn’t yield cash for years. Then there were the “special partnerships”—off-balance sheet deals with names like Chewco, Raptor, and LJM. They weren’t in his purview, technically. But sometimes he’d see massive internal memos where Enron seemed to be selling itself… to itself.
“Don’t worry about it,” Jackson told him. “That’s Fastow’s game. CFO stuff. It’s all structured.”
Structured.
That word came up a lot.
Daniel mentioned the concerns to another analyst, a quiet woman named Marie in Internal Audit. She’d raised an eyebrow.
“You think it’s weird too?” she said.
He laughed, unsure if it was a joke.
They started chatting late at night via email—half flirtation, half paranoia. Marie was sharp. Sharper than him, probably. She had started tracing how Fastow’s partnerships allowed Enron to hide debt while boosting income.
“It’s not illegal. Just… engineered,” she wrote once.
Daniel replied: So was the Titanic.
She never responded to that one.
Enron’s stock hit $90 in August 2000. Wall Street couldn’t stop praising them. Skilling appeared on CNN predicting the “death of brick-and-mortar utility companies.” Fastow was called a financial wizard. Even President Bush, a friend of Ken Lay’s, talked about Enron like it was the future of American enterprise.
And maybe it was.
From his desk on the 49th floor, Daniel looked out at Houston’s sprawl, the city buzzing below like circuits on a board. He’d never made this much money. Never felt this important. Never worked so hard.
He was 27 years old, driving a new black Lexus, calling his immigrant parents in San Francisco to say everything was going well. More than well. Enron had just rolled out a new plan: broadband trading. Internet bandwidth as a commodity. Like gas. Like electricity.
“You can trade anything,” Skilling had said. “Because everything is a market.”
Daniel believed it. Or wanted to.
Because once you were inside the machine, it was hard to tell what was real—and what was just smoke and light.
Part II – Cracks in the Glass
Houston, Texas – February 2001
The first sign came quietly. A memo disappeared.
Marie had copied Daniel on a draft—an internal audit flagging irregularities in a partnership called Raptor III. The entity had been “hedging” Enron’s assets, but Marie’s analysis showed that Raptor itself was funded entirely by Enron stock. If the share price dropped, the hedge collapsed. It wasn’t protection. It was a house of mirrors.
Daniel had read the memo, heart pounding. But when he searched for it again a week later, it was gone. No trace. No email thread. Marie’s access to the audit server had been revoked. She was still employed, but her office had been moved to a “temporary” space three floors down. She stopped replying to emails.
One afternoon, Daniel passed her in the lobby. She was holding a box of personal items.
“You leaving?” he asked, trying to sound casual.
She smiled thinly. “Taking some time off.”
“Because of—”
“Daniel,” she interrupted, lowering her voice. “Be careful. You know how this place works.”
He didn’t ask what she meant. He already knew.
That quarter, Fastow walked the trading floor.
He rarely showed up in person, preferring backrooms and power lunches, but now he was smiling, shaking hands like a senator on election day. Daniel was introduced briefly—Fastow’s handshake was surprisingly weak. His suit was expensive but ill-fitting, the fabric bunching oddly around the shoulders. He looked… tired.
“Keep up the good work,” Fastow said. “We’re on the cusp of something huge.”
When he left, Jackson leaned in. “Guy built a billion-dollar black box with nothing but spreadsheets. Total legend.”
Daniel didn’t respond. He just stared at Fastow’s retreating back and wondered what exactly was inside that box.
By March, the broadband trading desk was quietly shuttered.
No memo. No explanation. The floor just got a little quieter one Monday, and the signage was removed by the next. Daniel heard rumors—massive losses, no customers, bandwidth that couldn’t be priced because no one wanted it.
But Enron didn’t announce failures. It pivoted. Rebranded. Obfuscated.
Internally, though, the mood was shifting. Departmental budgets were slashed. Layoffs were whispered about. Jackson started scheduling more one-on-ones. Bonuses, once guaranteed, became “pending executive approval.” People cashed in stock options faster than usual.
“Just diversifying,” someone laughed. “Nothing to worry about.”
But Daniel noticed that even the baristas downstairs had stopped accepting Enron stock in the employee drink lottery. They preferred Starbucks gift cards.
In April, Skilling promoted himself.
That was the joke. Technically, he became CEO, replacing Ken Lay, who moved to the Chairman role. But it felt like Skilling had crowned himself. He gave a speech in the auditorium, quoting Nietzsche, talking about disruption, praising “creative destruction.”
“We are not bound by the old models,” he said. “We are the model.”
Daniel clapped, but it felt hollow.
After the meeting, he lingered in the lobby with a few other analysts. Someone joked that Skilling had the charisma of a televangelist. Someone else muttered, “Fastow’s the one we should be worried about.”
Daniel went home that night and opened Marie’s last email again. It was just two words.
It’s unraveling.
In late summer, it did.
Skilling resigned unexpectedly in August. “Personal reasons,” the press release said. Ken Lay returned to steady the ship, but everyone knew what it meant. The market didn’t like surprises. Within days, Enron’s stock slipped from $45 to $37. Then $33. Then $30.
Officially, there was no panic. Lay gave interviews on CNBC. The company issued glowing projections. But on the floor, everyone was tightening their belts. Coffee machines stopped working. Catering was reduced. The sushi fridge on the 6th floor vanished overnight.
Daniel checked his 401(k) and stock options every morning like a patient checking a tumor.
By mid-September, the number was half of what it had been six months ago.
Then came the Wall Street Journal story.
October 16, 2001. Enron announced a $618 million loss and a $1.2 billion reduction in shareholder equity tied to “structured finance arrangements.” Translation: the SPEs weren’t working. The hedges were vapor. The partnerships, once praised as cutting-edge financial engineering, had become liabilities. And Fastow? Quietly fired. No farewell speech. No press photo.
Daniel stared at the numbers, the new quarterly report, the footnotes like landmines.
“Everything’s fine,” Jackson told him, though his tie was askew and his desk was half-empty.
But Daniel knew. He wasn’t an intern anymore. He had learned how to follow the money—and now, there wasn’t any.
The next day, Lay emailed all staff.
“These are challenging times, but I want to assure you that Enron remains fundamentally strong. We have the best people in the industry. We have weathered storms before, and we will again.”
Daniel read it twice.
Then he opened his trading dashboard, stared at the plummeting ticker: ENE: $19.12.
It was a long way down from $90.
He sat back in his chair, heart pounding, a single thought repeating in his head like a drumbeat.
This isn’t a company anymore. It’s a fantasy—and we’re the ones dreaming it.
Part III – Freefall
Houston, Texas – October to December 2001
The panic began quietly, like a cough in a crowded theater. A few traders left early. Jackson stopped wearing a tie. The floors emptied out a little earlier each day. But by Halloween, it was no longer subtle.
One morning, Daniel arrived to find two desks near his empty—monitors still on, coffee cups half-full, chairs tucked in as if their owners had just stepped away.
“Who was sitting there?” he asked.
Jackson didn’t look up from his monitor. “Doesn’t matter.”
The numbers didn’t lie anymore.
The stock had fallen below $10. Then $6. Then $4.
Enron held a company-wide town hall in early November. Lay stood at the front of a makeshift stage, microphone clipped to his collar, smiling like a politician visiting a burning village.
“I know there’s fear,” he said. “But I have over a million shares of Enron stock. If I believed the rumors, would I still be holding that much?”
Daniel stood near the back, arms crossed. He remembered hearing a quote once—“You don’t go broke all at once. It happens slowly, then all at once.”
This was the “all at once” part.
That weekend, Lay sent another all-staff email encouraging employees to “buy more stock, show your confidence in the company.” Meanwhile, executive stock sales surged—millions in Enron shares were being liquidated quietly, legally, under the cover of pre-approved trading plans.
Daniel watched in disbelief.
His own 401(k), once worth over $120,000, was now under $7,000—all locked into Enron stock. He wasn’t alone. Many employees had been encouraged, even pressured, to invest heavily in the company. “It shows loyalty,” Jackson used to say.
Now? Loyalty was bankruptcy with good intentions.
On November 8th, Enron restated earnings for the past five years.
The correction wiped away nearly $600 million in previously reported profits. That same day, the SEC formally announced an investigation.
The following week, Marie emailed him again.
Subject: Told you.
Message: I’m sorry. I wanted to warn you more. Be careful.
Daniel replied instantly, fingers shaking:
It’s not your fault. They made us believe.
No reply.
The office started to resemble a ghost ship. Desks were abandoned. Whiteboards still listed projects that had been killed weeks ago. The elevators made long, empty runs between floors.
Daniel started staying home more often, checking the news obsessively, watching the story shift from financial coverage to political scandal. CNN ran headlines like:
“Wall Street Darling Enron Implodes Amid Fraud Allegations”
“Arthur Andersen Under Fire for Shredding Documents”
“Senate Hearings Expected”
He saw Fastow’s photo on the screen—perp-walked out of his house, pale and blinking. Then Skilling, denying wrongdoing. Then Lay, hands raised in defense, saying the board had failed him.
And then it happened.
December 2, 2001.
Daniel was in his apartment, lights off, phone on silent. He’d just finished reheating leftover takeout when the news alert hit his screen:
Enron Files for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy. Largest in U.S. History.
The message landed like a punch. Even though he knew it was coming—even though every part of him had braced for it—he sat there in silence for a full minute.
Not moving. Not breathing.
Just staring.
The next day, the Enron building was surrounded by reporters.
Some staff showed up for work anyway, unsure of protocol. Others cried in the lobby. One woman handed out donuts to security guards, as if kindness might slow the unraveling. The security badges stopped working by noon.
Daniel didn’t go in. He sat in his car across the street, watching through the windshield.
He saw Jackson being interviewed by a local news station. He looked older now. Paler. Smaller.
“You worked there,” the reporter said. “Did you know?”
Jackson’s smile was brittle. “We believed what we were told.”
Daniel turned the key and drove away.
His parents didn’t understand what had happened.
“How can company disappear?” his mother asked over dinner that weekend.
His father just shook his head. “Big men lie. Government watches?”
Daniel didn’t have the heart to explain how the auditors—the ones meant to catch the fraud—had been in on it. That Arthur Andersen, one of the world’s most respected accounting firms, had shredded documents to protect Enron. That watchdogs barked only when it served them.
All he said was: “It’s gone.”
His father nodded, chewing slowly. “You still have us.”
It should have been comforting. It made Daniel want to cry.
The interviews started soon after.
Not for jobs—there weren’t any. For lawyers. For investigators. For class-action lawsuits. Daniel was called to a deposition, sat under fluorescent lights as men in suits asked questions he could barely answer.
“Did you know about the LJM partnerships?”
“Did you approve mark-to-market valuations on contracts?”
“Were you aware of Fastow’s dual role as CFO and partner beneficiary?”
He answered honestly: I suspected. I didn’t understand everything. I was afraid to ask.
They scribbled notes. They moved on.
No one wanted to know how it felt. What it meant to believe in something so fully, only to discover it was built on nothing.
Daniel called Marie again that December, just before Christmas.
She picked up. Her voice was quiet. She was living in Austin now, working for a nonprofit.
“You okay?” he asked.
She laughed bitterly. “You know what someone told me last week? That we should’ve known better. That it was obvious.”
“Was it?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. But we were just trying to do our jobs.”
They sat in silence on the line for a few moments.
“Want to get coffee sometime?” he asked.
She paused.
“Yeah,” she said. “Maybe in the new year.”
Part IV – The Reckoning
Washington D.C. – February 2002
The hearing room smelled like cold coffee and old carpet. Daniel adjusted his collar, trying not to fidget under the harsh glow of the overhead lights. Cameras lined the back wall. Rows of politicians faced forward like statues carved from suspicion.
The nameplate in front of him read: Daniel Rhee, Former Financial Analyst, Enron Corporation.
A senator leaned into the mic. “Mr. Rhee, during your time at Enron, were you aware of the financial arrangements being used to conceal the company’s debt?”
Daniel swallowed hard. “I… I was aware that there were off-balance-sheet partnerships. I didn’t understand their full structure. I was told it was standard practice.”
Another senator cut in. “By whom?”
“My supervisor. Other analysts. The culture was… not open to dissent.”
The room was quiet for a beat. Then the questioning continued.
Daniel wasn’t the main attraction. That title belonged to Lay, Skilling, and Fastow—three titans who now faced indictments, subpoenas, and public disgrace. But people like Daniel were still called to testify. To explain how a company with a $60 billion valuation had collapsed overnight. To account for their silence.
He did his best. He told the truth. But the truth felt hollow. There were no smoking guns in his inbox. No damning documents. Only a thousand tiny compromises, a thousand moments where he hadn’t asked the right question.
When it ended, no one clapped. No one offered thanks. He stepped out into the hallway, past reporters shouting names he didn’t recognize, and kept walking until the marble faded into concrete and the cold hit his lungs.
Back in Houston, the Enron building still stood tall.
Empty now. Gutted. Most of the signage had been removed, though you could still see the faint outline where the blue “E” used to shine. Squint, and it looked like a ghost hovering over the skyline.
Daniel drove by once, late at night, headlights cutting across the glass facade. It looked like a mausoleum. Or a lie, crystallized in steel.
Inside, abandoned whiteboards still bore project names. Passwords. Doodles from people who had once believed.
He parked for a moment, engine running. Then he reached across the passenger seat, opened the glove box, and pulled out the last remaining stock certificate he had kept. Just one, for $0.12.
A souvenir of faith misplaced.
He folded it, placed it under the windshield wiper, and drove away.
The months passed slowly.
The news moved on to other scandals—Tyco, WorldCom, Global Crossing. Enron was no longer unique. It had just been the first domino to fall.
Daniel applied for jobs, but doors were harder to open now. Everyone in the industry knew where he had worked. Some were sympathetic. Others were not.
He took a job at a small regional bank, processing credit risk reports. The pay was half what he’d made at Enron. The cubicle was beige and silent. No champagne Fridays. No sushi bars.
But there was honesty. And peace.
He reconnected with Marie that spring.
They met at a coffee shop in Austin, both looking a little older, a little tired. She wore jeans and no makeup. He wore a shirt that didn’t quite fit like it used to.
They talked for hours. Not just about Enron—though it hung over them like smoke—but about everything else. Family. Books. Silence.
“I thought I’d be angry forever,” Marie said. “But it’s just… grief now. For the people who lost everything. For the ones who trusted us.”
Daniel nodded. “I still feel like I should’ve done more. Said something.”
“You’re not the only one who stayed quiet.”
They sat in that silence for a long time, sipping slowly, as if each cup might fill the gap between who they had been and who they were becoming.
That summer, Daniel moved to a smaller apartment, sold the Lexus, and stopped checking the news.
He started volunteering at a local high school’s financial literacy program. Once a week, he taught students about budgeting, saving, and understanding risk.
“Don’t invest in things you don’t understand,” he told them. “If someone can’t explain how it works in one sentence, don’t put your money there.”
The kids rolled their eyes sometimes. But some listened. And when they asked what he did before this, he just said: “I worked at a company that forgot what the truth was.”
Part V – What Remains
Los Angeles – Ten Years Later
The lecture hall buzzed with conversation as students filtered in, backpacks slung over shoulders, phones glowing in palms. The course title was printed in small letters on the whiteboard:
FIN 347 – Corporate Ethics & Risk Management
Instructor: Daniel Rhee
He stood behind the lectern, sipping lukewarm coffee, waiting until the room settled.
Today’s topic was on the syllabus as Case Study: Enron.
He pulled up a PowerPoint slide.
Slide 1:
A company worth $60 billion. 20,000 employees. Ranked #7 on the Fortune 500. Gone in 24 days.
The class quieted.
Daniel looked out at the room—young faces, some curious, some skeptical. They had been in elementary school when it happened. To them, Enron was a term on a test. To him, it was a scar. A bruise that still colored the way he saw the world.
He clicked to the next slide: a flowchart of SPEs and accounting loopholes. Raptor. Chewco. LJM.
He walked them through the mechanics. The mark-to-market distortions. The conflicts of interest. The cult of personality. The complicity of banks, auditors, and analysts.
Then came the questions.
“How did they get away with it for so long?”
“Weren’t the auditors supposed to stop it?”
“Didn’t anyone inside know?”
He answered patiently, but one hand in the back stayed raised until the end.
A young man with glasses, sharp voice.
“Sorry, but… how could you not have known? I mean, people inside—smart people—had to realize something was wrong.”
Daniel nodded slowly.
“I did,” he said.
The room went still.
“I didn’t understand everything, but I knew something didn’t feel right. And I stayed quiet. Because I liked my job. Because I liked the money. Because I told myself someone else would speak up first.”
He paused.
“Sometimes, the most dangerous lies are the ones we tell ourselves.”
The student lowered his hand.
That night, Daniel walked alone across campus. The air was crisp with early autumn. Students laughed in the distance, chasing deadlines and dreams. He passed the library, the quad, the economics building with its limestone façade.
He stopped near a bench and sat down, watching the wind play with a row of paper flyers.
His phone buzzed—a text from Marie.
Just read your interview in the Chronicle. You sounded like yourself. Proud of you.
He smiled.
In the years since Enron, she’d started a consulting group focused on corporate transparency. They stayed in touch. Coffee when she was in town. Holiday cards. Occasional memories they didn’t quite know what to do with.
He typed a reply:
Took me a long time to learn how to tell the truth. Still practicing.
He stayed on the bench for a while longer, staring up at the stars.
He thought of the building at 1400 Smith Street, long since sold, renamed, rebranded. The old Enron logo scraped away. But the glass was still there. Still shining. Still reflecting the city around it.
And he thought about all the people who had walked those marble halls—ambitious, brilliant, afraid. People who believed. People who lied. People who didn’t speak up until it was too late.
He didn’t feel anger anymore. Or shame.
Only this quiet thought:
That the truth, once buried, always finds its way to the surface.
And when it does, it asks a simple question:
What will you do now?
Author’s Note
The Mirage of 1400 Smith Street is a work of fiction inspired by the true story of Enron Corporation’s rise and fall. While the characters in this story are fictional, the events mirror the real-world collapse of one of the largest and most complex corporate frauds in American history. In 2001, Enron filed for bankruptcy after revelations of massive accounting fraud, marking the end of an era—and the beginning of profound change in corporate regulation.
This story is not only about financial collapse, but about human nature: our capacity for self-deception, our hunger for success, and our fear of truth. It’s about what happens when ambition is unmoored from ethics—and what it means to rebuild after everything breaks.
— Allen
This is good, girl. Have you published this yet?
Fantastic read. Funny thing, I'm from Chicago, born and raised. We have a very famous meteorologist here who retired not long ago from the station, WGN: Tom Skilling, Jeffrey's brother (and they seem like opposite humans). Another great story. Thank you!