II

K&K

Ellie Knight-Cameron oversaw the suggestion box at Kolodny & Kolodny, a small insurance brokerage company, and in all the many years of discharging this humble task, she’d never come across a suggestion like the one she discovered Monday nestled in that cardboard container: If they’re going to close lanes on the parkway, they ought to actually repair the goddamned road.

K&K, as they abbreviated themselves, were located in the sprawling suburban municipality of Stamford, CT, a mile or so off the High Ridge Road exit of the Merritt Parkway, and for some years now this verdant stretch of pavement had been a maze of lane closures, especially west of town. The majority of K&K’s ten employees commuted into town against the prevailing traffic, and it was here that they often encountered the dreaded file of orange cones.

Without a doubt, this suggestion she found was reasonable. Excepting the split infinitive and the profane language. People complained about traffic. It was one of the things they talked about. Still, it was hard for Ellie Knight-Cameron to imagine what she, as office manager, was supposed to do about it.

Ellie had nothing much in the way of organizational power. In fact, the suggestion box existed mainly to enforce camaraderie at the K&K coffee station. Usually, therefore, the suggestions were kind of routine. Can we possibly get a blend with a little hazelnut in it? Just once in a while? Even if Dolly Halloran hated the vanilla hazelnut variety that Ellie later selected, the suggestion in this instance had met with general favor in the office, bringing good cheer to the lounge area.

Ellie Knight-Cameron was thirty-four, and she was a bit heavy for her age, or maybe it was just that despite years of workout regimens and exotic diets she had never once resembled a svelte, cosmopolitan type of woman, and she was a little self-conscious about this, despite her brown ringlets, which took an awful lot of work to maintain, and the mole above her upper lip that she thought was one of her best features. Her eyes were as gray as flagstones. She had an easy smile. People liked her, just not in that flinging-off-clothes kind of way.

Ellie’s hyphenated surname, to broach a sore subject, was the creation of her parents, who were as yet unmarried. These free spirits had met in the early seventies, out in the Sun Belt. The conception of Ellie Knight-Cameron, according to the story, had taken place during a festival gig by the venerable Allman Brothers Band. There’d been a particularly adventurous solo by Dickey Betts. In the far distance, beneath a tattered blanket, love conjoined the not terribly illustrious families Knight and Cameron.

Every Saturday, Ellie cleaned her apartment in Rye, and she started in the bedroom and worked her way north in order to avoid disturbing her cat, Nails, for the longest possible time. Ellie had ridiculously strong feelings about her vacuum cleaner, which was British, purple, and designed by an aeronautical engineer. Her excitement about vacuuming depressed her, though if you are going to be depressed about your enthusiasms, you should at least have a reliable vacuum cleaner as consolation prize.

On Saturdays she cleaned, and then she went to the organic market, and then she tried to arrange pastimes that involved her friends from the office or from college. She’d gone to school in the early nineties, those go-go years, as far away from the Southwest as she could get, which turned out to be Westchester County. What she liked to do with her friends from college—most of whom had crazy, arty ambitions—was play miniature golf. She also loved minor league baseball. At some hazy point in the future she intended to learn the tango.

Because Ellie Knight-Cameron was orderly in her habits and in her thinking, she’d been a natural hire for Kolodny and Kolodny. The name of the firm was a little misleading, actually, because there was only one Kolodny, and that was Duane, who had long ago hoped to lure his boy, Mark, into the business. Mark had gone into real estate instead, though he nonetheless presumed to inherit the business, perhaps so he could sell it off. Duane Kolodny had begun life as a contractor in Fairfield County, but he’d become fed up with the lawlessness and Darwinism of contracting. The gravel business was controlled by the mob, the cement business was controlled by the mob, the building permits were controlled by the politicians, the politicians were on the take, and so forth. Duane was a low-key person. He’d settled on insurance because it was pragmatic. He didn’t have to sell too hard; he just had to believe in his product. Which was another way of saying that Duane believed that you should take care of yourself and your family and move gingerly through life, on the lookout for trouble.

According to Ellie Knight-Cameron’s K&K psychological profiling, it was extremely unlikely that Duane Kolodny, who was seventy years old and couldn’t bring himself to retire, had written the petulant suggestion about the lane closures on the Merritt Parkway. Duane kept to himself. For example, no one had known about the problems between Duane and his wife, not until that rash of days when his office door was very firmly closed. Duane had emerged one afternoon complaining of allergies and gone home early. Not long after, he was a bachelor.

It wasn’t clear that Duane even knew there was a suggestion box. The aforementioned Dolly Halloran, Duane’s executive assistant, knew there was one. She’d lobbied for it in the first place. Ellie herself knew about it, of course. She checked it every day or so. As for the rest of the staff, they knew of the suggestion box because it was sitting right there, enfolded in pink wrapping paper, by the coffee machine. It had originally served as a box of bathroom tissues and would have been recycled as such had Ellie not plucked it from obscurity and festooned it.

She looked closer at the offending suggestion. There was the goddamned part of it: If they’re going to close lanes on the parkway, they ought to actually repair the goddamned road. The word goddamned, more forceful than its rather dainty abbreviation damn, was kind of antique when you thought about it, a little bit like something you’d say if you were an older person. But there just weren’t that many older people at K&K, not counting Duane. Goddamned. Women didn’t say it that much, or maybe they only said it in the 1950s, when it was arguably the curse of choice, or so Ellie believed. Her mother used to say it to her when she was a girl. Ellie’s teenage attempts to wear exactly what everyone else was wearing to school were something her mother swore about with muscular decisiveness. One time Ellie just put her foot down, so to speak, saying she had to have leg warmers, whereupon her mother told her she was just like some rich bitch from the goddamned suburbs.

K&K employed nine eager, self-motivated professionals, in addition to Ellie. Of the nine employees, seven were women. One was Duane Kolodny and one was Neil Rubinstein, who couldn’t possibly be a heterosexual type of man, because there was no sexual wattage coming off him, no romantic chemistry, no nothing. How did the women of the office come up with these sorts of hypotheses? How did they have the time? Neil was responsible for bookkeeping and payroll, and he kept to himself, and when you looked deeply into Neil’s eyes, you saw they were like the molded plastic eyes of a stuffed animal.

Neil was interested in weather patterns. If you had to pass Neil Rubinstein on the way to the bathroom three times a day, which you probably did, because his cubicle was right by the bathroom, then you wanted to have something to offer him. Neil followed the Weather Channel through the regional forecast two or three times before bed, this was assured. He could discourse about airport closings. If a freak storm in Detroit had grounded much of the Northwest Airlines fleet, Neil would know, and he was always excited when the weather news was particularly bad, even if in his case excitement was hard to gauge. If three inches of rain were promised, and maximum sustained winds topping fifty miles an hour, it would be a very good day for Neil Rubinstein.

What’s more, Neil dressed as though he had never yet been allowed to change clothes after Hebrew lessons, and his shirts always had French cuffs, and the payroll checks were always on time, and there was never a problem with accounts payable or receivable. Neil Rubinstein was a knot that resisted untangling. Ellie Knight-Cameron believed, therefore, that Neil was very likely the person who’d typed out the suggestion about the lane closures, at least because goddamned seemed more masculine, and Neil seemed as if he was maybe a tyrant secreted away in the outfit of an inoffensive accountant. Maybe there was a body bricked up in his cellar, or a series of bodies, or maybe he’d had an unfortunate episode of frottage with an elementary school teacher.

There was just one problem with her theory: Neil Rubinstein didn’t drive.

Recently, Ellie had been in a Greek diner in Riverside, a couple of towns over. Above her booth, above her duct-taped vinyl banquette, hung a reproduction of a painting of Athens, Greece. Forget the rest of the interior. Don’t even worry about the circumstances. A coincidence is when two clients can be sourced to the same finder, or when two brokers woo the same institutional prospect. This time the coincidence was as follows: she’d seen the same artistic reproduction of Athens on the night of her college graduation! What an eventful night that had been! A boy kissed her and told her that no woman was ever as beautiful. And the same picture hung nearby, a depiction of some rubble in Athens or Rome. Ellie Knight-Cameron had definitely kissed a boy, no one could dispute it, and the boy was called Eric Banks, and Eric Banks was a little bit hirsute, and he sported a chronically strained expression. He believed the worst about people and events. Most nights, Eric Banks was hunched over a viola that he couldn’t bow properly.

Yet when Eric spoke to Ellie about all the strange music that he liked—a guitar played with chopsticks, a piano plucked from the inside—it was like he was shedding his papery exterior. She enjoyed listening to him. When he felt better she felt better. It went back and forth like that for a couple of weeks, until the night of graduation. They were together when they shed their graduation gowns, when they threw their tasseled hats into a big pile by the coatrack. Together they were sitting in the reception hall where the party was in full swing. The music was incredibly loud, and Eric was worried about his hearing. He wore earplugs on the train into the city; he wore them on planes, at rock shows, at amusement parks. Ellie shouted in one of Eric’s temporarily deaf ears that she thought something great was going to happen to him.

And Ellie Knight-Cameron wasn’t just believing in Eric in order to believe. They looked away, oppositely, and while she pretended to be deep in metaphysical speculation, watching dancers flail in the center of the room, she happened to glance at a painting on the wall. It was a painting of the Acropolis in Athens, or some kind of ruin from early western civilization, which made sense, right? This was graduation. Ancient Greece, higher education, Athens. When she faced Eric again, he was reaching out to her, he was fitting his callused hand around her chin, pressing his mouth against hers. The taste was of hummus, Dr Pepper, and green olives. Later, she wished she had made love with him, because you should take advantage of the chances you get. They kissed and then they held each other. The dancers flailed. Eric told her that she was a beautiful woman. They made oaths. She went back to Arizona for the summer. Eric went to music school in Boston.

And then, depressingly, they didn’t really stay in touch.

So: it was a melancholy night at the diner. In fact, Ellie had been trying to talk with her mother by cell phone about her luck with the male of the species. Her mother was the wrong person to ask. “Why don’t you buy some sexy outfits and go out to a bar or something?” This from the self-described feminist who’d borne three out-of-wedlock children by three different self-employed men. Ellie’s brother, Len, was doing a short stay in the Big House for selling marijuana to high school students. Her older sister was living in Taos, tattooing.

What she was meant to be doing at the Greek diner in Riverside was writing a want ad. There was a vacancy among the brokers at K&K. There was always a vacancy. K&K could carry four brokers but had trouble keeping four on board. People had priorities that did not include loyalty to their small-business employers. So Ellie Knight-Cameron was taken up with the process of advertising, of interviewing applicants, of making hiring recommendations. In a company like K&K there wasn’t a genuine director of personnel. Ellie was certified in computer networking and telephone routing. She had opinions about desk chairs. When Ellie had the applicants narrowed down to two, she’d send them along to Duane.

She was impressed, at first, with a guy from Greenwich. His name was Chris Grady. He hadn’t managed to go to a great college like a lot of young men from Greenwich, not even a midlevel college, really, but she believed on the basis of their telephone conversation that Chris had the selling gene. Duane had told her to look out for this. It was about energy, it was about enthusiasm, it was about hunger, it was about patriotism, it was about vision, it was about the big picture, the wide spectrum, it was about refusing to say no.

Not long after, Chris visited the office. Chris wore light blue socks that matched his handkerchief. This may have been a strike against him. Excessive matching. There was a shy way that Chris folded and refolded his hands in his lap, even as he was displaying his thousand-watt smile. He was a beautiful young man from Greenwich and he wore a suit from Brooks Brothers or from some other preppy haberdasher. Chris probably had a brother who was better than he was at everything. This older brother tortured Chris and never let him win at any game.

During the first interview, Ellie Knight-Cameron asked Chris if he had suggestions for her about how K&K might improve its business. Chris didn’t hesitate.

“Acquisition,” Chris said. And then, emboldened, “Economies of scale. Insurance is a good business, and it’s, uh. There’s always going to be, everyone needs insurance, but you could really, uh, go head-to-head with some of your competitors, you know, and you could, then you squeeze them out of market share, and then you’d, uh, you know, you’d have more market share. Here in the . . . the . . . Connecticut area. Because then you wouldn’t, uh, you wouldn’t have as many competitors. Here.”

“Great!” Ellie said.

She introduced Chris around. She introduced him to Angie Roehmer, Astrid Lang, and Bonnie Stevenson, these being the brokers who remained; she introduced him to Maureen Jones, the mail room worker, and Christina Niccoli, the filing clerk just out of high school who harbored dreams of becoming a buyer at one of the big department stores. Ellie passed right by Neil Rubinstein. Then there was the enigma, Annie Goldberg, who was supposed to be a part-time researcher for K&K but who was also, everybody knew, a compulsive gambler. She was often missing on one of her sprees at the Indian casinos.

The women in the office would prefer to have another man around. Gender equity was a motivator in the workplace. This was what Duane always said. Ellie believed him. When she was young, she’d thought she would be a psychologist. Not the kind where you did experiments on rats but the kind where you got to interact with people and hear about their lives. Though she hadn’t followed through on her dream, her psychological studies were excellent preparation for interacting with her crazy family and the people in her workplace.

A strange thing happened. With Chris from Greenwich. During the office tour, she showed him the new wall-to-wall that they’d laid down in the lounge–conference room. (Dusty rose, because suggestions in the suggestion box had indicated that this color would make happy the majority of K&K employees.) Then, after she showed him the carpet, she showed him the suggestion box. This caused her, of course, to remember what she’d mostly forgotten, that bizarre suggestion, the one about the Merritt Parkway. She never had figured out who could possibly have written it. All she had done was rule out Duane and then cast some suspicion on Neil Rubinstein before moving on to her daily tasks, which were more important. But as she was explaining the suggestion box to Chris from Greenwich—“This is where people in the office are free to come up with suggestions about how to streamline the office in order to make it more efficient and responsive”—Chris snickered a little bit. There was no other word. He sounded like a cicada, and his shoulders trembled in a masculine, self-satisfied way. That was when she really looked at his, what do you call those, those little beard things. Just on the bottom part of his chin. The beard thing proved that Chris would be exactly the type to put something dreadful in the K&K suggestion box.

Chris couldn’t have written the suggestion about the cones and the lane closures, of course, because she had never heard of him nor even seen his name on a résumé until just three days before, and this was his first visit to the office. Yet she was certain, somehow, that he’d done it. And that meant, to Ellie Knight-Cameron, that there was something amiss with this applicant. He wasn’t telling her the whole truth about himself. In fact, at that very moment she became passionate about the other applicant, a disabled girl called Lisa Weltz. One of Lisa’s arms was a little withered thing, like Bob Dole’s arm. Still, Lisa was ambitious, presentable, and smart.

It wasn’t that Ellie Knight-Cameron never listened to her mother, counselor on all things romantic, when her mother told her to dress herself up and go to the bars. She had done so, just as advised, in certain desperate moods. She would go to the bars and strike up a perfectly nice conversation with a bartender. One time she met a sweet paralegal called Rhonda, with whom she stayed in touch. The two of them, in outfits so tight that breathing was out of the question, sat at one end of the bar, gabbing about everything there was to gab about. Later Rhonda came to K&K for her personal insurance needs. And Angie Roehmer split the commission with Ellie, which was really generous.

The complicated allure of singles bars gave Ellie acid indigestion. She found herself wearing things she would never wear and thinking about cleavage. She put up her hair, she used a lot of eyeliner, she thought, There are so many things that indicate that this is the night: the moon is bright, the air is crisp, and lost causes are not lost on nights like this one. She tried to convince herself. It was spring, after all. She had recently won the office pool on the Oscars. The Red Sox were in first, even if it was just the beginning of the season. She went to the bars in a state of hopefulness. Later she felt crushed. When the morning came around she still had the pillow over her head and she was convinced that there were bugs crawling on her and the room was painted with fungi. There was no good reason that she should go outside.

The night after Chris Grady’s interview, she was fed up enough to go barhopping. She went to one of the watering holes downtown, a block from the homely modernist train station, a bar where the SUVs rolled up, and professional men and women from the offices tumbled out in search of drinks with parasols in them. She’d called Rhonda and told her that she might go barhopping, but the plan never developed the crust of genuine intention. Sometimes two smart girls together just embarrassed each other.

Ellie stood at the bar, breathing shallowly, in a skirt that looked as if it had been sprayed directly onto her from a vat of petrochemicals. She ordered a screwdriver, though she almost never drank anything strong. Then another. Then the evening slowed. Olives were being placed in the mouths of lipsticked women by their opposite numbers, and it was as if asteroids were rolling imperceptibly through space. Glasses that were plunked down on the bar sounded like kettle drums. Hoarse laughter rang out from the interior of a canyon. Ellie imagined a peacock striding toward the bar and screeching its mating call. Eventually, this bird would display its ridiculous plumage.

Out of the crowd, a man. A sideburned sort of a man. He shouted something in her ear, but she couldn’t hear. She could tell, though, just from his style what he wasn’t saying: he wasn’t saying could he have her number, please, or would it be possible to get to know her better? Ellie nodded vacantly. Then he gently tugged at her elbow, and she followed him toward the booths in the crypt beyond the bar, where the light from the overhead bulbs glowed with the dim blue of industrial subbasements. She found herself, against her better judgment, jammed into a booth with three or four football enthusiasts and two or three ditzy girls who had half the inhibitions she had. Among the predatory individuals assembled was none other than Chris Grady.

She said, “What a surprise!”

“How about that!”

“Well, um, do you come here often?” How long would she have to formulate this inoffensive banter? “My friend Rhonda—” She pointed toward the bar, though Rhonda was not actually present.

“Right,” Chris said.

One of Chris’s pals inquired, “You work at the—?”

“Insurance,” Ellie said. “Chris was—”

“Yeah,” Chris Grady said. There was a lot of nodding. A conversation followed about which was the best kind of bar, the dingy kind or the really dingy kind. Ellie had no opinion. She could imagine bulldozing all of the bars in the Stamford area. Civilization would continue. The best kind of bar was one where you didn’t get attacked before, during, or after your appearance there. The best kind of bar was one where you didn’t go home feeling you’d been emptied of everything that was substantial about you. The best kind of bar was one where you didn’t feel like a yearbook summary of yourself or like a bunch of measurements. There was no such bar. Even though the conversation was not, you know, particularly malevolent, Ellie felt again that there was something she didn’t trust about Chris Grady. He talked about cars a lot. And sale prices of things.

Not two days later, she got to work early, like she almost always did, opened the suggestion box, having neglected it for a number of weeks, and found: You ought to throw this fucking coffee machine out the window and run over it with a car.

She reread it a couple of times to be sure she was seeing what she believed she was seeing. This fucking machine. Fucking machine. Fucking. Fucking. Fucking. The decorum that had been characterized by goddamned in the earlier suggestion had now given way to the vulgar word fucking. Of course, it was also true that in this case the suggestion did fall under Ellie Knight-Cameron’s professional jurisdiction. She was responsible for the coffee machine. Bad coffee, in her view, was almost a public service, because it gave people a problem to solve. If weather, traffic, baseball, and coffee were universally agreed upon, if everyone decided these things had been made perfect and harmonious, then there would be no reason to use human language at all. People would walk around like monks, saying nothing.

Interestingly, there was an automotive implication in both of the offending messages. In the first, it was about traffic on the Merritt Parkway, and in the second, there was the suggestion that someone should run over the coffee machine. With a motor vehicle. Whoever was writing the messages was certainly interested in cars, or had a car, or was a regular rider in a car. Users of mass transit were out.

Astrid Lang, for example. Astrid’s refusal to drive somehow went with her mouse brown hair, her bowed legs, and her grown son who still lived at home with her. She was sort of anxious about things, and that was maybe why Astrid worked in insurance. She hadn’t fallen into the business by chance. Astrid had strong feelings about disaster. She braced for impact. She was good at persuading people that they didn’t have enough insurance. Who knew what was going to happen in this era of climatic change and earthquakes and tsunamis and hurricanes? Astrid was convincing about these things because she was worried about asbestos in her house, or else her boiler was making that awful noise, or one of the tree limbs was going to come down, and global warming was going to bring about a precipitous ice age and a forty-foot storm surge.

Ellie stood sentinel-like by the suggestion box. She was still holding the piece of paper in her hand, a piece of unlined scrap paper, when Astrid Lang happened by. It occurred to Ellie that she should hide the suggestion, and it was this impulse that reminded her: she had told no one about the first note. The suggestion about the parkway. She hadn’t told a soul about it, and why not? She tried to think back on what she had done in the weeks that had passed. She tried to retrace her steps. Was there some kind of shame associated with these notes? Because it was her suggestion box? She was the one who believed strongly in the democratic values of the suggestion box. She was the one who had wrapped it in pink wrapping paper. She was the one who emptied it. It was as if the first note was addressed to her.

She wished Astrid good morning too loudly. She smiled brightly.

“What do you have there?” Astrid asked. Astrid was on the alert for any event, any snippet of gossip, any off-hours visit or collective dinner that could be said to have excluded her, even though she rarely attended when invited and never offered invitations in return.

“Look at this, Astrid,” Ellie said. She felt a bit of relief in handing it over, in making the suggestion a public problem, even if just with Astrid.

With a brisk certainty, Astrid fetched lavender-framed reading glasses from her weather-beaten purse. She read the message over carefully, penetratingly, before handing it back. Her expression never changed.

“That’s overreacting.”

“I’ll say,” Ellie said.

“It’s typed,” Astrid said.

Which ruled out certain people. For example, Bonnie Stevenson, who filled out most of her forms by hand and who made Christina type them into the system for her. Bonnie’s nails were too long for typing, that was her argument on the subject. She just couldn’t type, and that was the end of the discussion.

“Did I ever tell you,” Ellie said to Astrid, “what my father would do to us if we used that word?”

“What word?”

“That word. The f word.”

“No,” Astrid said, “you never told me. But I don’t really have time.”

Astrid was on her way to Duane’s office. She was intent upon the Duane Kolodny gatekeeper, Dolly Halloran, to whom she would make clear her need to see Duane. After which she would wait as long as it took. Duane was never available. If you wanted to take up something confidential or important with him, the moment to do it was right when he got in. Astrid knew this.

Ellie stood by the suggestion box for a while, shaken, as though standing by it would persuade it to pity her, and then out of desperation she turned her attention to some of the things posted on a nearby company bulletin board. A note from Duane directing the staff to use express mail services sparingly. A handbill about a time-share in a condo on Sea Island. How to recognize a choking incident.

In fact, at that very moment, Astrid Lang was resigning from K&K. Astrid had been on her way to quit when Ellie stopped her for her suggestions about the offending note. That Astrid had said nothing about quitting did not surprise Ellie. The employees of K&K had precious little information about Astrid Lang.

Astrid hadn’t let on that she was going to quit, nor did she let on about what she was going to do next, how she was going to pay her monthly bills, and, except for telling Ellie that she could keep her commemorative mug from the AAIB conference in Cincinnati, Astrid left behind no sign that she had ever been at K&K at all. Her exit was fully accomplished by lunch.

In the PM, Lisa Weltz and Chris Grady came back for additional interviews. The mood in the office was expectant but worried. The office pulsed with the electricity that is incipient change among personnel. The women suddenly were restless in their client contacts, unable to focus on new solicitations. The women of K&K now seemed to favor Lisa Weltz, though they didn’t want to risk irritating Duane, king of all he surveyed, who, it was rumored, preferred Chris. Never mind that K&K could have used both of the candidates.

During her big interview with Duane, in the afternoon, Lisa Weltz had complained about K&K compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act, noting (this was what Dolly reported) that this noncompliance was likely affecting K&K’s ability to attract large institutional clients. They had no ramp to the office and no railing in the bathroom. The plumbing fixtures needed attention. Everyone in the office, Lisa Weltz observed, was able-bodied. And having delivered these pronouncements, Lisa Weltz cradled her withered arm under her breasts.

Duane, the way he told it, when they were all gathered in the conference room, tried to be polite about Lisa W., but in the end he’d made up his mind quickly, noting that he would never avoid hiring someone because she had a disability. He would, however, avoid hiring someone because she was sour, had crumbs on her blouse, and exhibited bad manners at a pivotal juncture in the interview process.

Chris Grady took Astrid’s position as broker, effective the next morning.

Further weeks passed, and Ellie knew what this meant. The passage of time meant that it was likely the perpetrator of the creepy suggestion box messages, the two messages that violated the civility of the K&K offices, was none other than Astrid Lang. And yet there was something mysterious about this. There was something inexplicable about a woman who had no car making hotheaded suggestions about lane closures on the Merritt Parkway. Would a woman who mostly drank tea complain about the coffee? However, inductively speaking, all the evidence suggested that Lang was the perpetrator. Therefore, Ellie Knight-Cameron forgot about the suggestion box, except once a week when she would reach absently into the bottom of the message receptacle to realize that once again it had gone unused. All was well.

Here’s the story Ellie had never told Astrid. The story about her father and the f word. Her parents, when she was young, had unusual parenting ideas. For example, you didn’t have to go to school if you didn’t feel like it. Everyone should sleep together in the same bed. You should skinny-dip with your family. You should tell your family about any romantic escapades that you had; it was your obligation. And if you were going to use drugs or drink, you should do these things with your family, so that these activities could be properly supervised. It was only later that Ellie found out many parents had quite different ideas.

And even though her parents agreed upon these unusual parenting principles, there were far more numerous principles on which they disagreed. For example, her father hated the f word. If anyone used the f word, if her brother used the f word, her father would become extremely agitated. It was not, her father said, tugging nervously on his beard, that he had any problem with the activity described by the word in question. Anyone who wanted to perform that particular activity should do so, according to the rules of consent, whenever he or she wanted to do it, with whomever he or she wanted. Anyone could use whatever part of his or her body he or she wanted to use, her father went on, as long as this body part gave her pleasure. The skin was the largest organ on the human body. This was what was good about life, the moment in which skin brushed up against skin. The little skin receptors of delight created cascading sensations in the chakras and in the perineum. In conclusion, a person should not use this f word to describe what she or he was doing, her father said, because to use this f word was to denigrate a beautiful and holy act in which waves cascaded to and from the perineum. By denigrating the act you were denigrating one of the few perfect things about being a human animal in this disappointing world, and Ellie’s father would not tolerate it.

Red-handed, that’s how her father caught her brother using the word. In fact, it was one of many times her brother called Ellie a “fucking idiot.” Soon the punishment was meted out. Her father made her brother read through the dictionary, and not one of those little paperback dictionaries but actually an old mossy copy of Webster’s Third International, after which her brother was tasked with writing down every single adjective in the f section of the dictionary, so that her brother might be able to call up possible alternatives to “fucking idiot,” such as “felonious idiot,” or “fastidious idiot,” or “fungible idiot,” or “funereal idiot,” or “fetishistic idiot.” Furious idiot, free-spirited idiot, fiduciary idiot, floral idiot, fucaceous idiot, foehnlike idiot, fluorescent idiot, foliiform idiot, facetious idiot, falsetto idiot, funicular idiot, feathery idiot, freelance idiot, fugitive idiot. It took her brother half a day to perform this expiation, during which time he wasn’t allowed to go to school. He went through three number two pencils, his hand developed a horrible cramp, and Ellie felt triumphant. A triumph that would be short-lived.

That night her mother came back from interviewing migrant farm workers, and she took one look at the pages and pages of dictionary entries Ellie’s brother had copied out onto a legal pad and began calling Ellie’s father an “uptight prude asshole.”

During the period of weeks when there was no action at the K&K suggestion box, Ellie was in fact making ready to visit her family in Arizona, a trip she did not want to make. Her father had called to tell her that her mother had turned up, after going missing for several days, in Tempe, a town that Ellie found particularly melancholy. Ellie’s mother had been detained by the authorities on a charge of drunk and disorderly behavior, somewhere near the campus of the state university, where she was not registered for classes.

Chris Grady demonstrated, in his first months on the job, that he was a man on the go. The offices rang out with the banter of Chris and Duane in the executive office in the mornings, talking about the golf they had played, about the basketball tournament they had bet on, or about an impending football game. At first this fraternity seemed like a good thing, based on Duane Kolodny’s theory that a mixing of the sexes resulted in a productive workplace. Chris was always in the office early, before Ellie arrived, and when she threw her trench coat over the couch in the lounge and turned on the coffee machine, Chris always called out to her, “Hey, babe, how the hell are you!”

To which she replied, “Don’t call me babe!”

Nonessential employees were the first to go. Christina Niccoli, the filing clerk, decided that she needed business school in order to realize her dream of working as a buyer for one of the larger department stores. Ellie herself wrote the advertisement for the Advocate in which they invited applications to replace Christina, experience a plus. She returned to the restaurant with the painting of the Acropolis in order to draft the text. Christina was a sweet kid, and when Ellie conducted her exit interview, Christina complained that Duane didn’t seem to care about the office the way he used to. In the old days—they weren’t so far in the past—Duane would occasionally call a halt to the business day and take them all out for ice cream.

Then, Annie Goldberg, the staff researcher and unrepentant gambler, disappeared. And it was a few days before anyone even noticed. Ellie asked Dolly Halloran if she’d seen Annie, and Dolly said truculently, “Who?” Of course, in the present business environment, the big decisions were made by the parent company—about rates, the deductibles, that sort of thing. Clients had begun complaining about the wind deduction, especially on the region’s marshy coast. Hurricane season was longer with the greenhouse effect. And there was the risk of terrorist activity. Annie used to keep statistics on claims, but computers could do all that now. People and their foibles just clotted up the system. The big imponderables appeared on the horizon, wrought their havoc, and left claimants to reassemble shattered lives. Price tags were in the tens of billions. Kolodny & Kolodny didn’t control the Atlantic hurricane season or the winter cold snaps. Didn’t matter what a bunch of salespeople in Stamford thought about anything; they could all drive off a cliff. Their families would collect.

How many people had worked at K&K in the twenty or thirty years that Duane Kolodny had managed the company? Maybe he no longer cared. The only constant, besides Duane, was Dolly Halloran. How could a woman with such a hoarse, acid laugh be called Dolly? Who’d ever thought she was a Dolly? She was too skinny. The skin hung off her elbows. She penciled in her eyebrows. Dolly favored tissues in little plastic packets, and she was always using these tissues to dab at her rheumy eyes. People said that Dolly had been Duane’s mistress, or at least Bonnie Stevenson said so. Yet this implied that at one time Dolly had loved someone.

What really concerned Ellie Knight-Cameron was not whether Duane and Dolly had conducted a bittersweet office affair. What concerned Ellie was that Astrid had now left the company, and Christina was gone and Annie Goldberg was gone, and with Annie went the room freshener that she used in her cubicle, one of those plug-in jobs. A hint of cinnamon. Christina had listened to music on her headphones. She was always tapping on things. She wore too many earrings. Christina was pear shaped, but in a cute way. Considering that Ellie Knight-Cameron, according to statistically sound methodologies, had in prior weeks removed Duane and Neil Rubinstein from consideration in the matter of the suggestion box, and considering further that Christina and Annie had now abandoned the K&K family, and discounting Astrid Lang, that left as potential suggestion box culprits only Angie, Dolly, Bonnie Stevenson, or Maureen Jones. These people had opportunity and access, but did they have motive?

Angie Roehmer cornered her by the water cooler. Down the hall from the bathroom. They were both working late. Business was so good Duane was thinking of expanding. Ellie was trying to get prices on a larger suite in the same office building. This despite the fact that they had never hired a fourth broker and the rest of the staff was actually shrinking. It had been raining for days. A yowling stray cat in the parking lot had scuttled all attempts to locate and muzzle it.

It was all about Chris Grady. Everything was different for Chris Grady, Angie Roehmer said. Things had been easier before Chris Grady. There were certain things that women did for one another, Angie said. One thing they did was they tried not to be cruel, and they tried to remember to clean the dishes in the sink in the lounge if the dishes piled up. They didn’t leave old coffee cups around with a three-day-old paste in the bottom. They didn’t ignore one another. They weren’t out for another person’s job. Even when the women were disrespectful to one another, they tried to do it in a graceful way where nobody had to go to the bathroom and cry. And if someone did have to go and cry, they’d offer her a hug after.

“I heard him in there, and I think he’s trying to get people fired. He’s trying to make us look bad.” Angie filled yet another paper cup with water from the cooler and downed it in a swallow. “You think I don’t notice stuff?” Crushing the cup emphatically. “I wasn’t hired yesterday.”

Angie suggested they booby-trap Chris Grady’s clients. He was offering discounts that he shouldn’t have been offering. On bulk enrollments. He took days off without marking the time sheets, which meant he was stealing from the company. He was always going sailing or waterskiing with his richer and more successful relatives. They could catch him in it, and things would return to their earlier, calmer state, where women coexisted peaceably, working together for the common good.

“Angie,” Ellie said, “I can’t do anything like that. That wouldn’t be right. I—”

Look at the organization chart! Read her job description! She was just an office manager. She ordered carpet remnants. She telephoned plumbers.

“I always thought you were a goody-goody,” Angie said.

How to make sense of this embittered remark? Well, for one thing, Angie’s daughter was going to college soon, and Ellie happened to know that her kid barely spoke to Angie, the single parent. Ellie had watched this daughter as she went through her sullen adolescent patch before graduating into a full-fledged hatred of her mom, which had been much on display at both the summer office picnic and at the Christmas party. Last Christmas, the daughter, whose name was Maria, got sloppy drunk, and later, when everyone was climbing into their cars behind the steak house, Maria could be heard berating her mother: You’re so fucking boring, why don’t you go take a boring pill or something. All I ever wanted was a little fun. Ellie gazed at Angie, and she saw herself in another fifteen years, desperate to hang on to a job she didn’t care about so she could pay for college for a daughter who hated her.

She may have been wrong about Chris Grady and Astrid Lang, but now she was right. It was Angie Roehmer. No question. Angie was the one who had written the suggestions. How could Ellie have missed it before? Angie was willing to do anything. She was willing to say whatever she had to say to protect her small, miserable family. You controlled or you were controlled, and if you didn’t control, if you saw life and liberty slipping beyond your grasp, then you began doing things you would regret later, like beating up on your girl’s soccer coach or embezzling company funds. You grabbed a Starbucks employee by her green apron and told her you were going to knock all her teeth out if she ever again put whipped cream on your half-decaf mochaccino.

Angie’s inexplicable sick-out started soon after the unpleasant conversation above. Duane Kolodny couldn’t understand it, because Angie was one of his best workers. He’d hired her away from a dead-end job long before Ellie had joined K&K. Why would Angie go unreliable on him? Dolly covered for her for a few days, and then Dolly told Duane, or this was what she told Ellie, that Angie just couldn’t take another minute in an office that featured boy wonder Chris Grady. “Oh, bullcrap,” Duane had said. “He’s our number one earner.” In fact, Chris was one of the top earners in the whole region for K&K’s parent company. And he was about to pitch the head of personnel at a local Fortune 500 conglomerate on their entire health insurance plan. If he got the account, it would secure K&K until well after Duane Kolodny’s demise.

Ellie was meant to conduct a new round of job interviews the next day. It was a rainy, angry morning in late summer, and the applicants would probably be coming in late. She took off her raincoat and her hat and put them in the coat closet, and she pulled the umbrella stand out of the closet and set it by the front door. Her duck-handled umbrella was comical, protruding above the rim of the faux-wood-veneer umbrella stand as if it didn’t want her to leave it behind. She loved ducks.

The unpleasant smell coming from the minifridge was as it always was. There was a leak by the front door where Ellie eventually set a metal bowl to collect the rain. And, after much disuse, the suggestion box, it seemed, contained a suggestion, one folded into eighths or sixteenths by some obsessive party. Here were the words of the new suggestion that Ellie now held in her hand: Worldwide revolution now. Throw off your chains.

The stress was beginning to get to her. The stress of the office, of the office that was changing so fast during the Chris Grady regime. You could see it all, as plain as the cancerous mole on your forearm. This piece of paper she held was practically a Communist suggestion, like you’d expect from someone who had read too much Marx in college. Still, Ellie couldn’t seem to talk about it with anyone else. She couldn’t seem to bring the suggestion box up with Dolly or Bonnie, because now that Angie was on sick leave or fired or whatever she was, now there were only three plausible authors, and two of them were her remaining friends in the company, namely Dolly Halloran and Bonnie Stevenson.

She couldn’t talk about it, and so she lay awake at night, thinking about the idea of worldwide revolution. If she could just figure it out, if she could just slot the right people into the equation, then she could do something useful for this company she had so ably served for six years.

Her back really hurt a couple days a week—a throbbing, disquieting pain—and she couldn’t seem to find a desk chair in the catalogue of office furniture that had the right kind of lumbar support. There was a trainer at the gym she kind of liked, and he would have recommendations for an ergonomically designed chair, but she hadn’t spoken to him about it, and she kept imagining something was going to happen to her on the StairMaster. She would be ground up in it. People got swallowed whole by escalators, after all. People who’d just gone to the mall to buy shoelaces.

She called her father, told him she was looking forward to coming home, though this was not true. He told Ellie that he’d heard her mother had been released from the detox. And she hadn’t answered his telephone calls, he said. While this was not an unusual situation, since they were unmarried and separated, it was worrisome. Ellie told her father she just wasn’t getting what she needed from her job. Her house, she said, was fully outfitted with furniture that you assembled from kits. She bought foods that were low in calories, and she tried to eat only organic things, and everything was straightened up, she had straightened everything up, she liked to have the magazines on the coffee table at right angles, she told her father, she understood that celebrities were marrying and divorcing at alarming rates, and that people would do anything to be on television. But this was not, it turned out, enough.

“Honey,” he said, “try volunteering.”

Everyone had stayed in the Southwest except the youngest child, and in the interrogative sun, the unrelenting sun of the desert summer, they had their upheavals and their difficulties, rarely regretting. Meanwhile, she was here in this state where she was always expecting to round a corner and find a scorched valley below her, empty as far as she could see. She was expecting vistas of cacti and the sounds of coyotes, but in the East everything was claustrophobic and heartbroken, especially after the third suggestion.

Bonnie Stevenson announced that she was going into business with Angie Roehmer. The two of them intended to start a boutique that competed directly with K&K on some large accounts. They had a catchy name for the operation, which was Reconstruction Inc., and they had a really great logo, sort of an antebellum southern porch in a pale blue, on the top of the letterhead. The business plan had been in place for some time. Maybe the insurance sector needed to be reconstructed, the way these two campy entrepreneurs saw it. Rates spiraled upward and drove everything in the region, drove the way people did everything they did, the way they walked through a building lobby or played on a swing set. You could easily trip in a mall stairwell and disfigure yourself. A scary ride at the amusement park might cause you to go into a tailspin of depression and affect your earnings potential.

It was Bonnie and Angie, and they were in it together, they had taken the whole office for a ride with their negative attitudes and their hatred of men. Ellie Knight-Cameron wasn’t one of those people; she kind of loved men. At any rate, the women’s conspiracy was figured out, or it would have been all figured out if Ellie had not found yet another suggestion in the suggestion box the very next day, the first full day after Bonnie left the firm, having been ordered out by Duane, ordered off the premises and her laptop taken away from her and her pens and paper clips impounded.

Still, when you tallied only these dramatic incidents at K&K, you missed the rhythm of work, the flow of how people lived, which was in eight-hour increments, or really in four-hour increments because of lunch. Everyone went out for lunch at a place up the block, even if the cappuccino machine was on the fritz. The women of K&K, back when they were in it together, they all went out. It looked bad if you stayed at your desk for lunch. It looked like you were showing up the other women of K&K by working harder than they were working. This was the unspoken agreement. There was a rhythm of work, and it was all about insuring against the unpredictable. Of course, there were other things that were as difficult as office life: church, local politics, the playground, high school dances, but all Ellie did was work.

Among her interviewees on this particular day was Chris Grady’s friend with the sideburns, one Noel Goodrich. The guy she’d met at the bar. He was dressed in khakis, blue blazer, loafers without socks. He had a cyst or something, some kind of permanent skin blemish beside his nose that she hadn’t noticed in the light of the bar.

“What are your hobbies?”

“What are my—”

“We feel that hobbies are indicative of keen appreciation for life’s—”

“Well, I guess I like to—”

“Cooking?”

“Cooking, hell no!” Noel said. “Well, I like to grill. I like to wear the chef’s hat outside. Really my hobby is . . . my hobby is, uh, professional sports memorabilia. Shoulder pads, for example. I have signed shoulder pads. Sports have come a long way, you know, in terms of neck injuries.”

“You’re concerned about neck injuries?”

“And fire prevention.”

“What kinds of insurance do you carry?”

“Paternity insurance?” Sensing it was an ineffective joke: “Actually, I don’t have any insurance.”

“You don’t have renter’s insurance? Dental insurance?”

His eyes were bloodshot. His future was in the bag. Almost immediately after Goodrich left the office, Chris came over to Ellie’s desk. Somehow she had failed to notice earlier that his fingernails were a bit longer than a guy would normally wear them. And there was a strip under his nose where his razor had not performed effectively. Not to mention the damp spot on the elbow of his shirt.

“I can’t live with the coffee around here.” Maybe he blamed coffee for the spillage on his elbow. “Could you go out and get me my half-decaf mochaccino? With whole milk? And, uh, don’t forget a receipt?”

She watched his trim figure bob away. His foppish Hollywood hair. The floppiness of this coiffure elicited contempt in the majority of K&K employees. Ellie would beat on Chris Grady with a stick in the puppet theater production of dreams. Now that the office was really shorthanded, Chris had no natural predator. He didn’t have to worry about the office manager. He’d been waiting most of his short, privileged life for this turn of events. He’d sat in the stands at various athletic contests, as though he had webbed feet, cheering his pathologically narcissistic brother, and now was his chance to shine. At last he could begin upbraiding waitresses and using the phrase “Don’t you know who I am?”

On the way out the door she stopped in the office lounge and she decided, just because, to check the suggestion box. In retrospect, questions could be raised as to her timing. Had she checked the box on some other day, maybe the result would have been different. Had she been more willing to get Chris’s half-decaf mochaccino. Maybe the suggestion box was some kind of context-dependent prognosticatory device. If she’d approached it when feeling upbeat about things, then the box would have provided her with quite different advice.

Because, on the day in question, what the suggestion box found to say to Ellie Knight-Cameron was All of you should be lined up and shot.

The first death threat in a person’s life is so memorable. Ellie Knight-Cameron had never received a death threat before. In fact, the worst verbal abuse she had experienced in her life involved her brother telling her he was going to kick her ass. She had also, in her youth, been called fat. Yo, caboose! Everyone had an opinion: Was your mother eating for four? The worse things got—the more weight she put on in high school—the more she was told that this was not going to be tolerated. The more her parents remonstrated with her, the more she snuck downstairs in the quiet part of night and raided the larder. Night was the time when the clamoring in her skull was silenced, when there was no soap opera of her appearance.

How could she be thinking of food? With this murderous suggestion burning a hole in her palm? Yet she was thinking about food, however briefly. She couldn’t concentrate on the words she’d just read. Her mind glanced off onto other things. In a couple of weeks now she was going to have to fly into Sky Harbor International Airport and face her family. In the meantime, she was cat-sitting the neighbor’s cat and it had begun leaving droppings in unusual locations. She stood there holding the typed piece of paper, as if the list of possible interpretations was so vast as to freeze in place any human being. You should be lined up and shot.

At some point, Ellie’s perturbed mind elected to catch up with her shuddering physique, which was now on its way to Dolly Halloran’s cubicle. Her body clutched the note, wadding it, and her mind trailed after, wondering about the legal significance of the moment as she simultaneously catalogued the number and variety of telephone rings on the K&K handsets.

“Dolly,” she said, “can you just—”

“Not now.”

“I found this in the—”

“Later.”

Still, with a kind irritation, Dolly took the note out of Ellie’s hand. Ellie noticed, in this instant, that the edges of the note she handed Dolly had been scissored from some larger piece of heavy office bond. The scissoring hadn’t been done very well. There were stray hairs, the split ends that you get with an inferior elementary school tool. Therefore, the author of the suggestion was either a lefty, like many poor operators of safety scissors, or he was simulating left-handedness in order to confuse.

Dolly’s rugged face flushed. She mumbled What the—, after which she seemed to drain precipitously of all color. Dolly let out a plangent moan before hugging herself, strangely, as if she were the actual scissor operator and was somehow protecting the arm that had cut out the offending portion of the message. But no, her distress seemed to have little to do with scissoring. Dolly fell to the floor. She called Ellie’s name, then Duane’s name. In a kind of befuddlement, Ellie heard phones cradled in the other cubicles. She heard Chris Grady getting up from his desk. She heard the new filing clerk, Sheila, tripping on some textured rubber matting as she came running. Then Duane rushed out of his corner office as Dolly was beginning to tremble on the floor. Duane shouted at Ellie to call 911, and Ellie stood there like an idiot before at last reaching down for the phone on Dolly’s desk. Yes, yes, someone in the office was having a heart attack, yes, and here was the address, on High Ridge, yes, please, come quick. Duane held Dolly’s wrist, muttering, and then he climbed athwart her chest as the rest of K&K gathered. Duane pumped away on her rib cage, pausing to force air into her lungs in the time-honored way, then he was back on her chest, and it wasn’t hard to see that, yes, he must have been her lover. Now, in the distance, the call of a siren drifted near. It occurred to Ellie to wonder what Dolly was thinking. Was Dolly thinking about her grown children? Were the dead calling to her from their four-star accommodations in the afterlife? Was Dolly regretting that she had written this horrible suggestion and put it in the suggestion box only to be found out by the unsinkable Ellie Knight-Cameron?

Soon paramedics cleared everyone out of the area around Dolly’s desk. Only Duane was permitted to stand and nervously watch. Ellie gaped at Duane from over by the coffee station, and the others were peering above the baffles that demarked their cubicles as Dolly Halloran was removed from the premises for her emergency bypass surgery.

It was Duane’s decision, taking the rest of the day off, and the cubicles emptied quickly. Ellie Knight-Cameron, in her capacity as office manager, made an outgoing message for the voice mail. She checked her e-mail before leaving the office, in case there was some last task she needed to discharge. And she did have a message, which was: Ellie, Noel Goodrich is hired. Look after the paperwork. Thanks, Duane.

She was weeping uninhibitedly as she put on her raincoat, and not because of Dolly’s brush with mortality. On the contrary, she was weeping because she now had a practically foolproof method for identifying the demonic author of the most recent suggestion. How had she failed to think of it before? The font of the notes. She turned off most of the lights in the empty office, to confound anyone anywhere who might be monitoring her activities. Then, in an interior cubicle where they usually put the filing clerk, she fell into the role of surreptitious system administrator.

First, she examined the default fonts on various people’s computers. She noted in passing that a number of K&K employees (Dolly included) did not observe company policy, which held that all the interoffice documents as well as all external correspondence should be composed in the font known as Times New Roman. This was a policy that Ellie Knight-Cameron herself had brought about—with slightly distracted blessings from above.

She ascertained that the last two suggestions in the suggestion box were in a font called Century Gothic, a sans serif typeface. The mere appearance of Century Gothic was at odds with the general policy of Kolody & Kolodny. Sans serif typefaces, Ellie had argued, embodied a disreputable design style from the feel-good seventies. Sans serif typefaces were for organizations that favored unethical business practices. People who used sans serif typefaces would eat frozen diet dinners. These sorts of people subjected chimpanzees to horrific medical testing and they watched television interviews featuring Larry King.

Although she couldn’t prove that any locally networked desktop computer had authored the Century Gothic messages, she did feel she was making progress. As the hour ticked around to 8:45 and then 9:30, she riffled through people’s drawers and looked at their pens and pencils. Everywhere there were signs that the official K&K orderliness was a sham, a veneer. Maybe she was crying about Dolly, of course, or maybe she was crying about not wanting to go back out to Arizona, or maybe she was crying because she was still in the office so late, having read, among other things, private financial data about her friends and coworkers.

“Hello, Eric? It’s me, Ellie.”

“Ellie?”

“Ellie Knight-Cameron?”

“Oh, wow. Hey. What a surprise!”

“I’m just . . . How are you? I’m just here in the office, working late. So I thought I’d give you a ring and see how you were doing.”

“I’m . . . I’m good.”

“I’m just calling to say hi, really. But we are celebrating an anniversary soon, and I—”

“We are? What is it? Our—”

“Eric, I was kind of wondering if you had any special feelings about that time in your life, now that it’s almost twelve years since we graduated. I mean . . . Well, I guess it might seem a little abrupt me calling you like this after all this time.”

“It does a little bit.”

“I’ve been thinking back on that time, and I was thinking about how innocent I was then, and I’m wondering what you remember about that time. Maybe you remember some things about me that you’d be willing to share.”

“Ellie.”

“Eric, the right thing to do, you know, generally, is to develop some kind of life outside the office, right? Don’t you think? I have some things I like to do, you know, on weekends, but I haven’t really been doing any of those things. It seems like I’m just always thinking about the problems at the office. It’s kind of horrible. . . . Well, you know what? I don’t want to talk about myself. I’d like to hear what you are doing. Are you still playing the viola?”

“Uh, actually, the viola is under the bed.”

“Oh, that’s too bad.”

“Well . . . ”

“But you’re still trying to write music?”

“Not really. I guess I’m—”

“What are you doing, then?”

“I’m in pharmaceutical sales.”

It hadn’t occurred to her before that he could be some kind of Eric impostor. His voice was similar but maybe a little huskier and flatter, with fewer nasal resonances. The voice of Eric if he’d put on forty pounds. The thought disturbed her.

“Have you been smoking?”

“Not that I know of, Ellie.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means I haven’t been smoking at all. But why do you ask?”

“Your voice sounds different.”

“Maybe when you haven’t talked to someone in eleven or twelve years—”

“I’m going to ask you some questions that only Eric could answer, okay?”

“Ellie, are you—”

“What color was the sweater I bought you?”

“I don’t remember any sweater that you bought me.”

“That’s correct. And what was my favorite brand of cigarettes?”

“Ellie, we’re not going to do this.”

“Eric, if we don’t I’ll start worrying.”

“You’re sounding a little distraught to me, Ellie.”

“Cigarettes, Eric. Or I’m going to have to—”

If she were to remember the conversation in its best light, she would remember it ending with an effectively deployed feminine ultimatum. But in fact it didn’t end as shown. What happened next was that her boyfriend from college, who no longer resembled the romantic violist of her recollection, interrupted her, began to lecture her—“Ellie, I’m a little concerned about the way you’re talking right now”—commencing to give a long, not entirely related motivational speech about pharmaceutical sales, and how in pharmaceutical sales, when you were about to “close the deal” with the “mark,” you had to read the client “just the right way.” You had to look deep into her eyes, Eric said, to see the layers of frailty everywhere in her. This moist expression of frailty was where she was “unfinished,” Eric observed, where she still needed something, where she still had some residual bit of longing that hadn’t been wiped out. This was the point at which pharmaceutical sales became important, Eric said. “Ellie, I know I’m not doing what I thought I was going to do back then, and I know I’m not doing anything very memorable, but one thing I have learned how to do is read the client. I can tell you the truth about a person from twenty yards away. I can see the little things that are hidden.” There was only this dollar-store world, with its petroleum-based geegaws, awaiting the flood, and in this world there was just Eric and his mark, the doctor or druggist who was going to realize that he really needed to prescribe or stockpile a virility drug or a treatment for male-pattern baldness, and he needed to do it now.

Ellie Knight-Cameron had now been awake many hours. This was the essence of being alive. She intended to investigate one last person, namely Maureen Jones, who was in charge of the mail room at K&K. The impartial observer might have imagined that the mail room was not an important division of the K&K organization. He or she might infer from Ellie’s investigation that the mail room was somehow an afterthought in the important day-to-day activities of Kolodny & Kolodny. But this was incorrect. The mail room, which was not a room but a mail alcove, was where the contracts were sent out and where they were received, later to be signed and notarized by relevant parties. It also dispatched holiday cards and gifts.

Ellie catalogued the facts she knew about Maureen.

Maureen was the one and only African American employee of Kolodny & Kolodny.

Naturally, Ellie had been loath to conclude that Maureen was guilty of crimes relating to the suggestion box. She had avoided this supposition. Ellie had always imagined herself sensitive to the needs and wishes of people regardless of race, creed, or sexual orientation. In her elementary school, for example. There were some Native American children. She had this one friend, Deanna, a Native American girl. Her folks were poor, even by the standards of a hippie girl whose own parents barely worked. Ellie liked Deanna a lot. She was gentle. Deanna wore braids and big homely glasses. The one unusual thing about Deanna was that she never talked. Her parents rarely did either. Still, their friendship lasted for a time. Then, suddenly, it was the middle school years, and you know what happens then. A big wave comes and washes over the sun-dappled beach where all the kids are standing, and the kids are sucked into the sea, flung down into the murky backwash, upended, cast upon the rocks, battered, concussed. Some never emerge from the rip. Some are so badly shaken that they will never go near the water again. Some are proud, some are brought low, some forget everything that befell them. Of the vast majority of kids you know or love, you suddenly realize you know nothing at all. Now that these individuals have the ocean of hormones calling to them, lighting up their neglected circuitry so that their bodies look like the pink physiognomic overlays from old encyclopedias, all is different. Through the actions of this middle school tidal wave, completely different kids have been washed down to your section of the beach, with different needs and desperations, and you’re stuck with them, at least until college.

To put it another way: Deanna, the Native American kid, developed other interests. Her interests no longer included Ellie Knight-Cameron, or Ellie Knight-Cameron’s collection of paper dolls, or Ellie’s 45 rpm vinyl records of soft rock favorites. This all became apparent one night with her at a convenience store. At this store, which was more inconvenient than convenient, there were older boys and convertibles. There was strategic shoplifting of slushies and pornography, and some use of the word pussy.

Therefore, Maureen Jones needed to be dealt with thoughtfully. Maureen was stuck in an office full of older, bitchy white ladies. Maureen had to drive all the way over from the other side of town, from an area now ringed entirely by corporate headquarters in foul glass boxes, companies that had abandoned New York City for the advantageous tax policies of Connecticut. Maureen drove across this color barrier into the suburban part of Stamford, where the white people were. It was a trip Ellie now had to make in the reverse. And this was how she came to be camped out in front of a modest town house tucked in beside the projects. A stone’s throw from the homely Amtrak station, five minutes from the backwash of Long Island Sound.

Having made it all the way here, having parked across from the residence in question, Ellie found, however, that she was unable to knock on the door. She was afraid to knock; she was even afraid to get out of the car. She’d locked all the doors. It was after midnight now, and tomorrow was another workday. It would not be the right thing to do, to wake Maureen Jones in order to make a citizen’s arrest. Well, maybe it was the right thing to do. Maybe the right thing to do was to call the police and barge into the building, wake Maureen Jones, and then quickly get on a plane back to Arizona, where her mother was to enter a halfway house.

Ellie had been staked out for a couple of hours, trying to vanish into her contoured driver’s seat with meager lower-back support, when a sinister-looking man who probably wasn’t sinister at all came walking along the avenue toward Maureen Jones’s house. He was wearing clothes of astonishing bagginess. Everything about the bagginess of his outfit was meant to facilitate the concealment of contraband items. Or not. Ellie Knight-Cameron watched the man look both ways before crossing the street. He strode to the door of Jones’s house, knocked, was admitted, and disappeared inside.

Ellie would grant that one man, even at this particularly late hour, was not a conspiracy. But this man was followed by another—a younger, shorter man who, when he was cascaded with the glare of streetlight, appeared to be sporting ornamental braids. This second man, whose garb was an athletic warm-up outfit, he too was admitted into Maureen Jones’s residence. Not fifteen minutes passed before a third appeared, a grizzled older fellow with a mane of impressive dreadlocks. This man must have been an elder statesman of the movement. Although Ellie Knight-Cameron did not have night-vision goggles or any other sophisticated surveillance items, she believed nonetheless that she saw this third man make some kind of eccentric hand gesture that proved him worthy of admittance.

Finally, a woman was allowed into Jones’s house. The situation was no different from those described above except that now a woman was involved. In no single case could Ellie see who was opening the door and admitting these strangers. Yet she could see that people were in fact entering the Jones residence. They would sidle up to the front door, knock once, perform the jazz hands gesture, the door would swing back, and the stranger would then slip into the house.

What exactly did Maureen Jones’s organization believe in? Ellie reviewed. She paged through the suggestions in order. She had saved them, of course, and here they were, in her lap, like artifacts of antiquity:

(A) If they’re going to close lanes on the parkway, they ought to actually repair the goddamned road. (B) You ought to throw this fucking coffee machine out the window and run over it with a car. (C) Worldwide revolution now. Throw off your chains. (D) All of you should be lined up and shot.

Considered in this way, there was a menacing progression to the Kolodny & Kolodny suggestions. In the first suggestion, the government was being called into question, the ability of the government to govern, to make decisions for the public good. In the second, the office itself was being castigated, as well as its daily diet of events: coffee breaks, luncheons, and so forth. In the third suggestion, Ellie thought, the conspiracy was calling upon the disgruntled populace to overthrow the existing order. And in the fourth, armed struggle began.

In the last moment before the necessity for action propelled her, Ellie had a disturbing thought. Wasn’t it possible that a person or persons in the office was colluding with Maureen Jones? Why hadn’t she considered it before? Any number of alliances could figure in this conspiratorial model, alliances comprised of employees present and past: Maureen and Angie, Maureen and Dolly, Maureen and Bonnie, Maureen and Astrid, Maureen and Neil Rubinstein, or even Maureen and Duane himself. Wasn’t Duane’s surname uncomfortably close to the world collude? And if two of the K&K family, why not three of them? What about Maureen and Angie and Dolly? Were there occasions when the three of them had appeared to be whispering conspiratorially? And if three, why not four? With four people, you know, they’d have a lock on office communications.

In the stillness of the street, Ellie felt flushed, confused, ashamed, abandoned by the commonplaces of the day. The reliable items of her adopted landscape, the material things before her—the sickly ginkgo trees of the block, stray cats, a rumbling garbage truck—were not as they appeared. There was a menace to objects and situations that were anything but menacing. She knew at once the likelihood of calamity, as would any good employee of K&K: great vengeful floods, tornadoes, explosions, acts of God. In the desert landscape of this Knight-Cameron fever, men and women lurched thirstily, disaffiliated from their inamoratas. She had never been as alone as this, as condemned. Maybe Eric was right, and she had not learned to read the client, the him or her who was not trying to take from Ellie what little she had, what modicum of serenity she had carved out for herself, thousands of miles from home. Maybe everyone was not trying to take her few possessions and run her out into the street; maybe every man she encountered was not trying to insult her person; maybe the bulk of those she encountered in the dark years of the war on terror were also innocents, people who were just trying to make an honest living and put by a little cash in case of dire accident. She blamed Duane and she blamed Chris Grady. Someone had to be blamed. Because injustice persisted well after the avengers of injustice were rendered impotent by exhaustion, scandal, prescription abuse, and appearances on the talk-show circuit.

In the end, it was this notion of injustice that enabled her to climb from her Dodge Omni. Injustice, and impatience, and a self-destructive need to finish a project even if it was a bad idea. She reeled onto the streets of Stamford, blushing horribly, knees weak, to charge with malicious crimes those persons who would threaten her peaceable office life. Those who would oppress the wage-earners of the new world order. Into the light weaved Ellie Knight-Cameron, lover of minor league baseball and the tango, delusional thinker, energetic misreader of signs and symbols, bound to collide, if not collude, with the mystery of all mysteries, which is the total absence of mystery in a market economy.

In due course, despite misgivings, she reached the front door of the Jones residence. And having girded herself, she was ready to knock. It was some kind of cheap hollow-core door, the sort you expect from a bankrupt home renovation chain, or from a stage set. Ellie Knight-Cameron knocked on it with the force of a patriot.

Merriment was taking place inside. She could hear merriment within. Was it possible that people could find pleasure in causing others hurt and dismay? Because Ellie was hurt and dismayed, and she intended to get satisfaction. It was as if they were laughing about it all. Ellie knocked again, and she heard the giddy excitement in the room diminish for a moment.

Would she be able to go through with it? Would she be able to face with equanimity the perils of revelation? Would there be guns? Should she call the authorities? Before she could change her mind, which she was dying to do, the door swung back, and there was a cry, an éclat, and the cry was enormous, enough to trouble the curtains nearby, up and down the block. And the cry was the word SURPRISE! “Surprise!” they called. “Surprise! Surprise!”

The inside of the Jones residence, she saw, was modest, as modest as the exterior, and it was neatly appointed, and there were streamers leading from the tops of the lamp shades to the curtain rods above, and then again from one of the chairs all the way over to the windowsill, and there was a little dog, a yapper, and even the dog had a ribbon around its neck, and there were some children, toddlers, wearing conical hats, and there were a lot of black faces, African American faces, and all of these faces had evidently been enjoying themselves or at least they were enjoying themselves until they got a good look at Ellie Knight-Cameron. Then something imperceptible vanished from their expressions. Because Ellie Knight-Cameron was not who they thought would be coming through the door when they shouted surprise.

“Can we help you?” said the woman holding open the door.

“I’m looking for Maureen Jones,” Ellie said.

“She’s not here.”

“I’m betting she is there.” Only slowly did the horrible truth dawn in Ellie Knight-Cameron. It worked its way up her esophagus. The revelation.

“Who are you?” the woman said.

“I work with Maureen.”

“Well, if you work with her, then you know she’s still at work.”

“I don’t know any such thing, because I saw her leave work this afternoon, early, along with everyone else.”

“She’s still at work.”

“I don’t think I believe you!”

This argument might have continued escalating, had not Maureen herself happened upon the scene. Yes, Maureen Jones was soon present. As the above exchange was taking place, Maureen was in the midst of yanking her purse out of the passenger seat, locking the car door, and taking her sweet time. Maureen was coming up the street. What she was coming up the street in was a uniform, and the uniform was of her second job, her night shift, where two nights a week she worked as a cashier at a certain fast-food enterprise. And the color of the uniform was teal, and the function of the uniform was to render Maureen Jones selfless, indistinguishable, objectified. Before the situation between Ellie and the woman at the door of Maureen’s house had been resolved, Maureen herself did have the opportunity to mediate, just as the cry of Surprise was altered and became instead the cry of Happy birthday! Happy birthday, Maureen!

Maureen began laughing in an easygoing and careless way that was impossible not to see as beautiful, even moving, because Maureen, despite the fact that she didn’t smile easily, had a sweet smile, at least until Maureen realized that Ellie Knight-Cameron from K&K, her grim day job, was standing on her doorstep at some forbidding hour of the morning. Ellie Knight-Cameron was meanwhile apprehending the facts, namely that she, Maureen Jones, mother of two, was working two jobs, and Maureen was somewhat unhappy that this bit of information was now in wider distribution. But before Ellie could say anything, before she could defend herself about turning up on the doorstep of Maureen Jones’s residence, before Ellie could say anything about it, Maureen was inviting her inside. And so the conclusion was delayed.

Which conclusion? The one in which Ellie was herself the only possible author of the suggestions? And if she was the only person who could have failed to see this, if it was evident to even the most casual observer that she was both protagonist and antagonist, what did this tell us about the way we lived in those days?