I SEE M. and L. smiling and talking in the lobby again. They both see me this time, but neither of them smiles at me or motions me over, so I keep going, roll my cart onto the elevator and head upstairs. Let them have each other. I have an entire floor.

There’s a new knitted coaster on Coaster Woman’s desk. This one is a splotchy pattern of reds and oranges, no cat in sight. It’s in better shape than the last one, so maybe she appreciates Yarn Guy’s efforts more this time—or maybe she hasn’t had her way with it yet. I think of her mindlessly picking at the other one while she’s on the phone, frizzing the yarn, ruining the cat’s little whiskers and all Yarn Guy’s careful work. I have to put the coaster down, so I won’t damage it myself, thinking of the entitled way she moves through the world. I sit at her desk and straighten her sticky notes, so they aren’t pointing this way and that, a confusing overlap of angles that, if intentional, point to a kind of madness. Who could work in these conditions? And who is she that Yarn Guy should make her a second coaster? What does she have going for her?

I dig through her desk, and it’s mostly work stuff: semitransparent delivery forms, notepads full of names and numbers, and a few jumbo paper clips that she’s almost completely straightened into little silver rods. She has a lot of nervous energy, maybe a kind of dissatisfaction with herself. No wonder she’s damaging things around her. It’s easy to take that anxiety and direct it outward. Certainly, Yarn Guy deserves better.

In the very back of her top drawer, I find a piece of hard candy, unwrapped and stuck to the inside of the drawer. I try to pry it off with one of the unbent paper clips and then with a pen, but it’s really stuck, and I’m worried I’m going to noticeably damage the cheap plywood the drawer is made from. I give it one more try, and accidentally touch the candy with the side of my hand—it’s still sticky. I wipe the side of my palm on her chair, rubbing away the stickiness, and then spray disinfectant on my hand and wipe that on her chair too. She probably doesn’t wash her hands after she goes to the bathroom. She doesn’t care what she touches or ruins. Here’s a woman who doesn’t care about anyone.

I go to the breakroom, open the fridge and stare for a few minutes, and then grab the mayo. It’s in a squirt bottle, over half full. Even the condensation on the outside of the bottle feels gross, sickly. I know this moisture is only water, but I can’t help imagining that the mayo has thinned and is somehow seeping out of the bottle. I sit at her desk and in the back of every drawer, I squirt a glop of mayonnaise.

The bottle makes a sickening noise, and even though no one else is here and no one could possibly hear me, I feel embarrassed. I use an envelope to smear the mayo, so it won’t be noticeable. Then I wipe the envelope nearly clean on the underside of her chair. If she does figure out where the smell is coming from, she won’t be able to pinpoint the time of the crime, would never guess it was me. Maybe she won’t even notice it, so careless and self-absorbed. Other people will, though, and they’ll keep their distance.

The jars of gray water have become clearer, and I wonder if that was the goal. Leave something alone for long enough and it’ll brighten and clean itself? I pick them both up and shake them until the water is murky gray again. Even though I know there are no cameras, no security system, L.’s gotten into my head, and I look around to be sure. I wouldn’t want to work somewhere people monitored me via video. If I wanted that kind of oversight, I’d work at a larger place, or during the day, but here, the night is coolly my own.

I glance out at the cityscape and instead of stars, I see buildings dotted with little squares of light, even at this hour. All that reflective glass is lovely, crafting an artificial night sky that dips low enough for everyone to see. I couldn’t bear the constraints of the daytime, people working side by side at the same task, an unspoken marathon stretching out ahead of them. They sprint and fall back, sprint and fall back, none of them really going anywhere, racing around the same inconvenient loop of their workday. No time to appreciate anything or even enjoy their work.

I make sure to leave another flaxseed cookie for the intern, to keep her regular. It’s hard to get anything done if you aren’t. I also have a vanilla candle for Yarn Guy. Ultimately, I decide to leave it in his bottom drawer, under all his yarn. A gift from the heart. I don’t need any kind of reciprocation, but the coaster I took from Coaster Woman is still there, and I think he’d want me to have it. A little piece of him, a piece of the office, nestled in my apartment. So, I stick it on my cart, beneath some trash bags.

I’ve taken enough over the last few years to make my apartment into a mini office. I have a small corkboard and a matching dry-erase board hanging over my bed. I left the text on the dry-erase board, a few columns of numbers and a figure at the bottom circled in fading red marker. But I keep the corkboard fresh. I pin various handouts and notices to it that I find on the fourth floor. Company Growth! Exciting Opportunities! Mostly it’s things from desks or the copier room. I have a few sticky notes from Yarn Guy’s desk, reminders to himself about meetings and a phone number that turned out to be for a nearby restaurant. His handwriting is small, slanted and intimate. I also have a few pairs of scissors that I can’t help but laugh at, a three-hole punch I’ve never used, some pens, and then a few more personal items: a brassy key with an antique look, a birthday card, and a mug with a three-dimensional face. The nose protrudes and it has eyelashes and even a little concave mouth. I also recently took Neck Massager’s device, because who would she complain to about that, and it’s really been helping me work the cricks out.

Then, in the drawer of my nightstand, I have a photograph of the woman who used to be my favorite. It’s her and her mother, I think, outside somewhere. Their heads are inclined toward one another, and they smile softly. Imagine someone feeling that way about you. She was so earnest in everything she did. All of her notes were written in longhand. I liked her immediately, but when I first started working here, she was really struggling. I hated to see anybody really try at something and just miss the mark. She wasn’t unmotivated—just ill-prepared for the job. Her desk was disorganized, and she missed deadlines, even meetings. I spent months helping her get on track, straightening things, jotting down small notes in her handwriting to prompt ideas she could take credit for. It took me hours to learn to mimic her handwriting, but now it’s easy. I could still do it if I needed to. But in the end, I helped too much. She was promoted and then promoted again, fully out of our office. After she moved, I considered trying to move too, but in the end I stayed. I mourned her and learned to help people in smaller ways, to pace myself.

Now, I dole out punishments with rewards, circle my flock, keep them in line. It’s important not just to help them get ahead but to endear them to the office, the floor as a whole, and to me. I’ve seen what can happen when people don’t care about their jobs, when they just let themselves go. The whole thing crumbles. And maybe the intern has been markedly difficult, but I love a project.

I’ve been reading one of her self-help books. It claims to be about self-actualization, but seems to be mostly about standing up for yourself and not accepting the smallest and least of everything. She’s folded the corners of a few pages that she clearly thinks are important. One of these pages includes a list of ways you might interject into a conversation: “That reminds me of ,” or “I agree that is a great idea and we should also ,” and on and on. Templates for how to talk. Somehow, she’s reached her twenties, and she doesn’t yet know how to be a person in the world, how to make herself heard. She’s marked another page that has a list of affirmations, very basic stuff: “You deserve happiness,” and “You are worthy.”

I made up a few of my own and tried them on her, not all in one night, but scattered across a few weeks, though I haven’t really received the positive reaction I was looking for. “I really appreciate your focus on work,” I told her. She looked down at herself and then at me, waiting for me to say something else, but I only smiled at her. I also tried keeping it very short. “You look smart,” I said, but she looked confused by that too.

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“Oh, I’ve got to get something to remove this stain,” I said, pointing a toe at the rug, which wasn’t stained, as far as I could see. She always seems to shirk at any mention of my work.

She can’t watch me do it. Any task too noticeable unsettles her and she leaves. As though rugs normally vacuum themselves and the floors are self-mopping. She’ll tolerate dusting and sometimes my emptying the trash, but she can’t easily speak to me while I do it. Her reactions are slow, pained. Even if what I’m doing is very quiet, she acts as though she can’t hear over it. She can really only look me in the eye and talk if I sit at one of the desks. Maybe she’s pretending I’m just another office worker. Maybe I remind her of one of her coworkers.

I sit at her desk after reading through her affirmations, trying to think of how to help her. In her top drawer, there’s a new bottle of dry shampoo. I think she hasn’t been showering regularly. She’s in such a rush that she doesn’t have time to get wet, doesn’t even have time to primp at home, so instead does it in the bathroom on this floor, where anyone might walk in and see her. Such expensive clothing and products, and she can’t even be bothered to properly bathe.

I go to the breakroom to see if I can find her a small treat, something to ignite her day, give her a little oomph, and I find a lamp that wasn’t in here before. I could put it on my nightstand at home. There’s overhead lighting at the office, so they don’t really need a lamp. It’s ridiculous to have one and they’ll never miss it. Imagine asking someone what happened to the useless lamp in the well-lit room where people reheat their leftovers.

No one ever reports anything I take. If they notice and care at all, they suspect one another, and quietly harbor that resentment until it becomes large and well-defined enough to act on. In these cases, I think I’ve provided a nice outlet for entirely necessary expressions of dissatisfaction. Too often people swallow these kinds of things and never speak out.

Two men with adjacent desks near the elevator hate everything about one another: their appearances, voices, smells, how they move, the kind of work they produce. They’ve both talked about it in emails to other coworkers and in notes scribbled at their desks. But in emails to one another, they’re very cheery. You’d think they were brothers, or at least good friends: Cheery #1 and Cheery #2. I tried messing with them to get them to blow up and have it out. I took every pen from Cheery #1’s desk and moved them to Cheery #2’s. I left Cheery #2’s trash, with his name on it, balled up in Cheery #1’s chair. But they only got aggressively more cheerful. It made me uncomfortable, so eventually I gave up on them. Not everyone can be saved. I don’t even like to clean their desks anymore.

Back on the intern’s desk, I find a folder full of handwritten notes. There are dates, menu items, themes, and venue ideas, all listed out and then drawn into a chart. It’s her plans for the gala. There’s also a printed email from the CEO. “You’ll have to take care of sponsors, fundraising. Let me know what you come up with and I’ll get you the information to hold the funds. If you could bring in a few new accounts, that wouldn’t hurt.” Then he’s signed off as “C.,” which is both his initial and his title, CEO. Did she think printing this email, hardly an enthusiastic endorsement, would lend a sense of credibility to both her and the gala?

There are no financial notes in the folder, so I wonder if she’s even thought about that side of things. Maybe she’s disappointed to have to raise the money, rather than simply being given a budget. But I tried to warn her. There’s already a party every year. I can hear the higher-ups saying, “How many parties do these people need?” Then they’d discuss the intern. “Maybe she’s not a good fit here. Probably best to start phasing her out. What’s an intern really do anyway? Whose idea was it to hire an intern?” Everyone will look at one another. If it was one of their ideas, they’ll never admit it. They’ll never say anything to set themselves apart from one another. It’s best to be the same all the time. But in an innovative way, they each think, smiling to themselves about how valuable they are. How special.

But maybe if she comes up with the money herself, turns the whole event into a profitable affair, they’ll see how useful she can be. She could bring in more than a couple of new accounts—really throw herself into the work. I give her desk extra attention tonight and let her keep all her supplements. She’s going to need the kind of metaphorical safety blanket they provide if her job is truly in danger. She’s going to need me too.

I think about her gala all the way down to the lobby, wondering if she’ll hold it in the office or somewhere nearby. Maybe it’ll go on late enough that I’ll see everyone, all dressed up, drunk and easy to talk to. With my collared black shirt, I’ll blend right in, camouflaged among their formality. It’ll be nice to see their faces, hear their voices.

The next night, I’m still thinking about it when I let M. into the lobby and generously ask them how their book is going.

They manage to blush while maintaining eye contact. “Still working on it,” they say. “I like having something to focus on, something I’m doing all on my own.”

They must not get that from work. I’m fortunate that what I care about aligns with what I’m doing. Not everyone can be so lucky, I know.