Chapter 2

Conference

“Sorry,” said Rachel after a while.

“What?” said Paul, making an effort to stir his mind from a deep and transcendent peace, to remind himself that his situation—lying beneath the lovely weight of a colleague on a hard table in an unlocked conference room, stripped from the waist to the ankles, with bare legs and flaccid pants dangling off the side—was in fact far more dangerous than his body believed at the moment.

“I said I’m sorry,” said Rachel. She shifted and slid off him, to the side. His skin prickled with cold.

“Why would you be sorry?”

“Well, I don’t normally do this,” said Rachel, with just a hint of frost in her voice.

“Well,” said Paul. “Um. Right. Yeah. Of course. But—”

“I’m not in very good control of myself right now, these days,” said Rachel. “I—I think I just needed some kind of human contact, something real and strong, and—”

She sounded more fragile than he ever would have believed. Fragile and yet, possibly, in the process of blowing him off. His mind was still too sex-sodden to figure it out. “It’s okay,” he said, uncomfortable. He put his arms around her.

Rachel let out a long sigh and laid her head on his chest. Her chin dug into him slightly when she spoke. “My husband’s dying,” she said.

There were too many ways to respond to that statement; Paul was certain no one of them was right. He said nothing.

“It’s just a matter of weeks now,” said Rachel. “He’s in hospice. He’s been in hospice for a month.”

“What is it?”

“Cancer. What else does anyone die of these days?” She gave a low, bitter laugh.

“Oh,” said Paul.

“It was an astrocytoma, at first,” she said, “a brain tumor. They operated. They did all the chemo. Then it came back—these tumors are very aggressive; they send out these arms into the brain, they don’t just grow, they invade—that’s what it means, astrocytoma, it’s star-shaped—and—well, basically, they said they could lobotomize him or just let him die now. He said, Okay, then, I’m going to die—he could still make decisions then—and so—so—” She broke off. “So he’s dying.”

“That’s terrible,” said Paul.

Rachel made a noise that sounded like a laugh.

“I mean it,” said Paul. “I had no idea.”

“It is terrible,” she said. “You’re right. It is. It was terrible for a long time and then for some reason it just—it changed. It’s a contest of wills, now, me against life. And it’s kind of funny.”

“I don’t—I’m not sure I see how,” said Paul, his brain still too befogged to follow her.

“It’s funny that I’m here with you,” said Rachel. “Isn’t it?”

Funny did not seem to be a terribly flattering concept.

“It’s funny that most people would say I’ve just cheated on this man, this man I have been completely, entirely faithful to. Most people would look at this and look at me like I had hurt him. But the thing is, I can’t hurt him. I can’t hurt him any worse than this has, and I can’t hurt him, any more, because what was him is pretty much already gone.” She sniffled, and again her face felt damp through his shirt. “It’s funny that I have just cheated on him because I love him so much, because watching him go through this—this stupid, pointless agony—has pretty much convinced me that love is a scarce, scarce commodity, and you should jump on it every time you find it—and I haven’t found it in a long, long time—”

“It doesn’t seem all that funny,” managed Paul.

“I have to look at it that way,” said Rachel. “Or I’d go insane. I’m close enough to crazy as it is. I’m not in control of myself—well, like I need to tell you that. But it still just comes over me at times, all at once. You know, right before you came by my desk, I’d been in the bathroom. I’ve been pretty good about only crying there. I’ve kept it together at my desk. But today I got in there and I sat down in my little stall and all of a sudden I realize there’s somebody in the stall to my left and there’s somebody in the stall to my right and all three of us are crying. We’re all trying to be quiet about it, of course, but it’s a goddamn echo chamber in there, and it becomes this weird thing of crying but not crying because we’re really paying a lot of attention to how much the other two are crying. Then the one on my right just starts flushing. Over and over. To mask the sound, drown herself out. And I just thought: You know, this is ridiculous. I’m going to my desk like a sane, brave woman, and if I cry there, I cry there.”

“And you did,” said Paul.

“Of course I did. By that time I’d put so much effort into it, I had to.”

“Oh,” said Paul.

“That was a joke.”

“Sorry,” said Paul. “I was thinking about why the other two people would be crying.”

“Probably the usual reason,” said Rachel. “I mean, you’ve heard the rumors, right?”

“What rumors?”

“That we’re being bought out? Everyone on this floor is convinced they’re about to lose their jobs. It’s a big deal every Tuesday.”

“Tuesday?”

“That’s the best day to lay people off.” She seemed startled that he didn’t know this.

“There’s a best day?”

“The thinking goes, if you do it near the end of the week, they spend the weekend wanting to look for jobs but unable to do anything about it, and so they wind up killing themselves.”

“Well, it isn’t a rumor,” said Paul. “We are being bought out.”

Rachel sat up and looked down at him. “What?”

“By Johnstone.”

“How do you know?”

“Reg just told me.”

“Is that the gay guy in HR?”

“He’s not gay,” said Paul.

“Are you kidding?” said Rachel. “He works in HR!”

“He’s straight,” said Paul, at the same time wondering how genuine Reg’s fantasies about Kelly Poindexter really were.

“Isn’t he always hanging out with Becky Turndike? She’s a fag hag if I ever saw one.”

“She’s married,” said Paul.

“Maybe she’s a closeted fag hag,” said Rachel. In the darkness she seemed to be buttoning up her shirt, briskly shutting him off from a world of bliss. “So it’s true then? No more P&B?”

“I don’t know about that. Reg didn’t say anything.”

“Well, he doesn’t have to, if Johnstone’s buying us.” Rachel felt her collar, putting it to rights, and groped for her blazer. “We actually did some M&A consulting for them a few years back, right before they acquired Rankin Phyle, that other HR consultancy. They’ve never acquired a company without laying off at least twenty percent of the workforce.”

Twenty percent. Twenty percent was a lot. Paul wondered whether he was among the eighty percent of P&B employees who could be deemed unexpendable. Probably not. He didn’t seem to do anything that any other junior actuary couldn’t do. Johnstone probably had its own actuaries already. They had no reason to pay for his continued training, nor Sheldon’s, nor that of the twelve other junior actuaries whose educational program was one of Artie Branks’s innovations, his legacy at the firm. “Maybe that’s why Branks jumped,” he murmured.

“What?” said Rachel, clambering off the table, shimmying her skirt back into place around her thighs.

So he told her about what he’d seen, about the security guard, about what Reg had whispered. Her face was grave. “Did you know him?” he said.

“Not really.”

“Yeah, me either.”

“But it—I don’t know what it means,” she said, “but it can’t be good.”

Paul nodded.

“I mean,” she said, half to herself, “if I wanted to jump out of one of these windows, I wouldn’t even know how to go about opening it. It’s not something you could do on the spur of the moment—unless you threw yourself through the glass—but I’d like to think it’s stronger than that—”

“Reg says he was supposed to be in the meeting with the Johnstone people when it happened.”

“Oh,” said Rachel. “That is not good. That is definitely not good.” She looked down at him. “Are you going to go to sleep?”

It was, in truth, rather an appealing proposition. Paul sat up so quickly his head swam. “No, no, of course not.”

“It’d probably be okay as long as you pulled up your pants first,” said Rachel. “I don’t think anyone ever comes in here but the cleaning staff.” She put her hand on the doorknob, her posture impatient. “Ready?”

“Uh,” said Paul, struggling with his shirttails and pants in the dark. “Hang on a second.”

“Do you want the light on?” Without waiting for his answer she flipped a switch, and fluorescent panels flickered on over half the room. In the washed-out light it was the least sexy setting imaginable. Paul cringed against the livid brightness, against the sterility of the corporate–Danish modern cabinets along the wall and the blank whiteboard and the flipchart still bearing the scrawled notes of some ancient meeting in orange magic marker. He squinted at them. Were they blurry, even this close, or was that just the effect of his eyes getting used to light again? No, he could read the notes—Try shift est. to 8.1625%—but the edges did seem watery. Maybe as a matter of habit he read with his face too close to the page. Maybe all the sheets of numbers in eight-point type were finally taking their toll—or maybe it was, plain and simple, macular degeneration, and he had only a matter of months before the world darkened forever. He fumbled with his belt buckle. His hands felt clammy.

He looked up and Rachel was watching him intently. He gave her a grin that was less confident than he wanted it to be. “You know,” he said, “if you—if you ever need to do this again—”

She let out a low chuckle. “I’ll keep that in mind.” Well, then, that was that.

Rachel opened the door and they made their way back through the warren of desks. Across the tall windows the shadows of buildings fell like twilight.

Chapter 1, part 2

The elevator lurched slightly and then debouched upon the glass and marble of the lobby. Paul made for the front of the building. Through the atrium windows he saw a knot of people, elbowing and jostling, out on the plaza, jockeying to get a better look at something in their center. There was a splash of red across the window glass.

“Hey, man, sorry,” said a security guard, stepping in front of Paul.

Paul looked at him, trying fruitlessly for a moment to connect the man significantly with his life. No: just a security guard. Okay. He took another step forward.

“Sorry,” said the security guard. “You can’t go this way. There’s all kinds of cops taking pictures and things. You got to use the back way.”

“What happened?” said Paul, trying still to see past the guard into the plaza. Was the red streak on the glass—was that—could that happen?

“It’s a crime scene,” said the security guard.

“But—”

“Look,” said the guard, as though that was all he needed to say.

“But what happened?”

“I dunno. It’s a crime scene.”

Paul’s legs were still trying to carry him forward. The guard planted himself and stood, folding his arms, his feet wide apart. “I—” said Paul.

The guard met his eyes. Another siren squalled at the curb outside.

“Right,” said Paul. He turned awkwardly, wondering if he could make it look as though he had forgotten something upstairs. Probably not. What: a little snap of the fingers, a jerk of the head, an “Oh!” at a barely audible volume. Not so hard. He tried it. Snap: jerk: “Oh!” And for good measure: “Paul, you dummy!” But he was already en route to the elevator so it lacked what actors would call motivation. He pressed the call button and stole a glance back at the lobby. The security guard was staring at him, no longer forbidding but simply perplexed, curious. Paul realized he had, to all appearances, tried repeatedly to enter a crime scene, then turned and suffered a mild epileptic fit and begun talking to himself. “Good one, Starling,” he said to himself, before realizing that talking more would not improve the situation.

The elevator door opened and three rabid, eager-looking people filed out. So the word had spread, or everyone on the east side of the building had seen. At least Paul would not be the only one to try to see past the security guard. If he were really lucky, some of these people would go into spasms on their way to the back exit. He stepped into the empty elevator.

He looked ill in the pallid light, reflected in the polished chrome of the front panel. Beat the tortoise to the finish line. The news headline above read “Johnstone to spin off consulting division.” Johnstone spun off a division every other week. He hadn’t even known Johnstone had a consulting division. Did it matter? Did he care? Who could really, in their heart of hearts, say they cared about consulting? And yet he had heard someone say—a young woman, too—that she had a passion for human resources. He had laughed then, assuming she was joking, and she glanced over at him, injured. Soon after that he’d come across the word in a P&B proposal. “We have a passion for actuarial work and we have what it takes to get your job done.” He’d read it aloud to Sheldon. “And that,” said Sheldon, “is why we are losing money.” Didn’t these people realize how ridiculous they sounded? Was Paul the only one who knew that you simply could not, could not, work in an office for any length of time and still take office work seriously?

The elevator opened and Paul stepped out before realizing that he wasn’t on his own floor. He turned for a moment in a neat circle. If only the security guard could witness this—! He was on 33. Thirty-three was still a P&B floor. Had he not even pressed the elevator button? Thirty-three was Reg’s floor. Reg would know what was going on.

Reg was not exactly Paul’s friend—they’d had a beer or two after work, with a larger group—but he was an underling in P&B’s human resources administration (as opposed to the apparently passionate human resources consulting team) and that meant he knew every shred of office gossip before almost anyone else. It was his job to type up the transcripts of exit interviews, which meant he learned of every possible scandal, every website that shouldn’t have been visited via the intranet portal, every pending sexual harassment case, every feud. Perhaps this was where the passion truly entered human resources; perhaps if you had the inside scoop like this HR became as riveting as the history of the Tudors. It still seemed, to Paul, like getting paid to gossip.

Reg was on the phone when Paul approached his grimy-beige cubicle, which was directly above Sheldon’s in P&B’s depressingly unvaried layout. Reg had the same mingy view of the lake, only he had lost less of it, so far, to the new construction on Dearborn. “Yeah, but I don’t know, Becky,” he said. Becky was one of the senior secretaries and, despite her girlish name, a mountainous woman with a permed mullet. Becky collected Barbie dolls in her spare time and—incredibly—wore a wedding band with a colossal diamond. Becky called Reg at least three times a day. He claimed to resent her but they seemed to have a strange and halfway friendly dependence on one another.

“I’ll come back,” Paul mouthed.

“No, no, no,” said Reg. “Sorry, Becky. Yeah, that’s really all I can tell you. You know I’ll call you if—well, yeah, of course. Okay. Bye. Yeah. Bye.”

Reg hung up and interlaced his fingers across his belly like a man who has just drunk the digestif of a superb meal. “She wants me,” he said.

Paul laughed, but it died in his throat. Suddenly he felt hollow. He wondered if his stomach had really stabilized as much as he thought it had. He leaned on Reg’s desk, hoping it looked casual.

“What’s up?” said Reg.

“Did you see it?” said Paul.

“I might’ve,” said Reg, coy. “Depends on which it we’re talking about.” He reached over to his mouse and clicked it idly. “Dammit,” he said. “I think the Internet’s down. Anyway. Go on.”

“Which it,” said Paul, confused. “I’m talking about the guy.”

“The guy. The guy from Johnstone?”

“The guy,” said Paul. Was he the only one who had seen? The hubbub in the plaza was real, wasn’t it? He hadn’t imagined the security guard. “The guy who—the guy who fell out of the building.”

Reg’s eyes opened wide and he started to laugh. “No one falls out of buildings.”

“You hear that?” said Paul, louder than he meant. He pointed in the general direction of the plaza below. “That’s—not fifteen minutes ago—a guy fell—a guy in a suit—fell past my window.” An inept swimmer, sinking, drowning. “I just looked up from my desk and—”

“Jesus,” said Reg. “Really?” He stared at the window as though hoping for a repeat. Several squares of paper drifted down, riding tricky drafts. “Where was I?” murmured Reg. It obviously pained him not to have witnessed the single biggest scoop of his career at P&B. “I must’ve been in the kitchen or something,” he said. He shook himself and looked at Paul again. “Hey,” he said, “are you okay?”

“I don’t know.” Paul’s voice was reedier than he wanted it to be. “I thought I might puke there for a minute.”

“Yeah,” said Reg. “I would’ve.” His phone rang the single trill of an in-office call, and he answered it automatically. “Reg Henry.”

Paul heard a woman’s voice rising and falling in rapid, agitated tones.

In a moment Reg’s mouth fell open. “Jesus!” he breathed. He covered the mouthpiece with his hand. “Paul!” he whispered. “It was Branks! You saw—”

Branks—Arthur Branks—cofounder and still president, at 67, of a privately owned minor empire of consulting—Branks who had earned the right to smile generously at anyone in the elevator, certain of his status above them—Branks with an old-man belly still proudly covered by a three-piece suit every day, and a silver swimmer’s cap of hair—

Reg uncovered the mouthpiece and spoke into the phone. “Yeah, yeah, of course. I’ll find that for you. No problem. And we’ll send out—” He clicked his mouse several times, upset. “Of all the times for the network to be down!”

Tremors took over Paul’s limbs and they were not the aftershocks of what he had seen but a very new kind of fear, a sense that something large was happening on the upper floors, something that would affect his life and his livelihood in ways he might anticipate but could never prevent.

Reg said a mild obscenity into the phone without apology. “Yeah, then, okay,” he said. “You talk to Vijay, and I’ll—okay. Okay.”

Paul found himself cupping both hands over his mouth and nose. The musty heat of his breath was strangely comforting.

“Okay,” said Reg again. “Yeah. Okay.” He hung up. His eyes met Paul’s and for once he seemed truly staggered by what he had to say. He leaned forward and beckoned Paul toward him. “Do you know what was going on upstairs?” he said. His voice was the voice of someone who has just discovered a coiled, extremely poisonous snake and does not know whether it is sleeping. “There was a meeting today. We’re being bought out.”

Paul felt his eyes stretch open. The part of his face covered by his hands was the only warm part of his body. He’d heard something like this—in an economy this bad, in a sector this fragile, there was a new rumor every day—but if Reg was saying it it was as good as fact.

“Or we’re supposed to be. It was supposed to be final negotiations today.”

“Who’s—?” managed Paul.

“Johnstone,” said Reg.

Johnstone. Why was that familiar? He’d heard of the company, of course, but— “Elevator,” he said.

“What?”

Paul took his hands off his mouth. They hovered, uncertain, around his jaw. “They were just in the elevator news. They’re spinning something off. Their consulting division.”

“Oh,” said Reg. “Well, yeah, that’s probably so they can buy us.” He looked sad about being right.

“Do we still have jobs?”

Reg shrugged. “They say so, but everyone always says that.” He narrowed his eyes and stared at the window again. Another sheet of paper drifted past; this time it blew against the glass, and the P&B logo was briefly visible. “Branks was supposed to be at that meeting, though,” said Reg, “so I wonder. I wonder.” He contemplated his phone.

It was odd, sitting on Reg’s desk with nothing to say, with Reg himself in a pensive silence. The tremors in Paul’s legs grew worse.

“Hey, I have to call insurers,” said Reg, remembering himself. “Though if he jumped——anyway, anyway, you should go.”

“Right,” said Paul. “Right. Sorry.” He rose and made his way slowly down the hall, watching the carpet pass beneath his feet, feeling that his eyes had never seemed so close to the floor before, that surely he was shrinking. Out of habit he took the long route back toward the elevators, the hall that took him past the cubicle of the Hot Compensation Consultant. The Hot Compensation Consultant was in her early thirties, he guessed, and she wore suits with skirts that hit her leg just above the knee, in the slender part that hinted at but did not reveal the swell of her thigh. There was something about a suit with a skirt, something that reminded Paul of a film noir woman—not the slinky femme fatale but the fiery, independent journalist with absolute morals and fierce loyalty. Most of the women under 40 at P&B favored the Lincoln Park Trixie look—black pants, pointy shoes, a snug sweater set—and in the world of Business Casual, few people wore suits unless they had to meet a client face to face. But not the Hot Compensation Consultant. No, she wore her tailored little jackets and skirts almost every day—never too showy, just poised—and she left her dark curly hair loose, in marked contrast to the Trixies’ locks, which were highlighted, straightened, twisted into chignons, and then carefully mussed. Plenty of people went for the Trixie look. Reg himself lusted for a blonde junior consultant named Kelly Poindexter—though he claimed he would never actually sleep with her, since so many other people in the office had already done so. Reg referred to Kelly as The Hub. Reg had no idea about the Hot Compensation Consultant. As far as Paul knew, he was the only person who found her irresistible. But this had to be wrong; she was stunning, just not by P&B conventions.

He was coming closer to her desk. He saw a mess of curly hair and a bent form in pinstriped gray wool. The Hot Compensation Consultant was sitting in her chair, facing away from her computer, with her elbows folded over her knees and her head resting on her forearms. Her shoulders shook.

Maybe it was the strangeness of the day, the tremor in his own limbs, that made Paul knock on the wall of her cube and say, “Are you all right?”

She lifted her head and met his eyes. Her face was puffy; her eyes and nose were red, and tearstreaks ran all the way down to her neck. She seemed to be summoning strength to speak.

“Oh,” said Paul, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” and automatically he stepped into her cube and wrapped his arms around her shoulders. This is a Bad Idea, said some part of his mind. You don’t know this woman. You’ve only fantasized about touching her. You are not allowed to touch people in the office. You never know who will sue you. Bad, bad, bad idea.

But to his surprise the Hot Compensation Consultant put her arms around the small of his back, and she rested her head on the lower part of his belly. Paul, taken aback, patted her shoulder awkwardly, and let his fingers give in to the urge to stroke her curly hair lightly. He hoped the gesture came off as comforting. It probably didn’t. She could probably tell. Women could always tell. She was probably memorizing his belt buckle right now so that she could report him, saying: I didn’t get a good look at his face, but this is the belt buckle of a pervert.

Against his belly came the shudder of a sob, and Paul felt the damp of tears leaching into his shirt. “Uh,” he said. “It’s okay. It’s okay.”

She leaned back and looked up at him, baleful and bloodshot. “No it isn’t.”

“Sorry,” he said. “Right. Sorry. It’s—I’m sorry.”

She narrowed her eyes and seemed to be calculating something. Her lips narrowed. She sniffled once, but it seemed to be an after-sob, the noise of the body getting itself back under control. “I’m Rachel,” she said.

Oh, he knew that. Rachel Greenberg, Hot Compensation Consultant. “Paul,” he said.

“Paul,” she said. “I think I knew that.”

He had no idea what to say, so he gave her what he hoped was a smile that said he was happy to meet her. He was swimming in such a wash of confusion and agitation that it probably came off as a sickly, wan smirk. She probably thought he was dying to shake himself free of her touch. He was inept, inept, hopeless. He squeezed her shoulder.

“Can you come with me?” said Rachel, rising abruptly. Without waiting for an answer she strode from her cube.

“What?” said Paul, half running after her. “Wait—what?”

She cut a brisk path between the desks, giving her eyes one or two businesslike wipes on the way. Nobody seemed to notice. The news of Branks’s fall—or else of the buyout—or at least some distant rumor of trouble—seemed to have reached every cubicle, and the very air was electric and agitated. Paul caught glimpses of hands cupped secretively over telephone mouthpieces, of neighbors standing to talk over the dividing walls in the fashion typically called prairie-dogging. The receptionist’s voice on the overhead paging system carried a note of desperation: Reginald Henry, please pick up 9252; Reginald Henry, please pick up 9252. In a second she paged someone else, then a third person, and Paul realized that she had been paging nonstop for some time. All around him the word was spreading. I saw it first, I knew it first, he thought. There was a strange sick happiness in that. He was so rarely the first to know anything, especially at P&B.

Rachel rounded a corner in the warren of hallways. They seemed to have entered a rather deserted area: only a few consultants were scattered here and there, typing glumly—they’d be the last to get the news—and one patch of fluorescent lights hadn’t even been turned on, giving the six cubes beneath it a funereal, suburban cast. Paul’s heart pounded. Rachel hadn’t looked back once to check whether he was keeping up with her. Had he heard her right? Had she asked him to come with her, or was she even now attempting to shake him from her trail? (Pervert even followed me to the bathroom! she would say in her official complaint.)

One more corner: then they were at the dark, heavy door of a conference room. It was ajar; the lights inside were off. Rachel Greenberg, the Hot Compensation Consultant, the imminent sexual-harassment plaintiff, stepped through without hesitation.

Paul followed her and then stopped, uncertain, just inside the door. The room was windowless, somewhere near the center of the building, and frigid from disuse. He made out the pale square of a whiteboard on the far wall. From deep within the building came the low creaks and whooshes of elevators in their chutes.

All at once Rachel was right next to him, pushing the door to. Paul squinted hard, and then opened his eyes wide; his pupils would have to adjust all over again—and then she seized his face in both hands and kissed him so hard he forgot to breathe.

She released him for a moment. He gulped for air. “Are you all right?” she said, low.

“Uh huh,” said Paul faintly.

“Are you going to sue me?”

“No,” said Paul, “no, but what’s—?”

She kissed him again. “Later,” she said.

He tasted lipstick, the kind expensive enough not to taste like chemicals. He licked his lips, gasping. She bore him back onto the conference table and he fell inelegantly, his knees hooked over the edge. Then she was up on the table herself, straddling him. “Good thing this is so sturdy,” she said.

“Um,” said Paul. It was a pathetic squeak.

“Please,” she said.

In the dark, his stinging eyes made out her pale face, the mass of her dark hair, the great deep shadows that were her eyes, and—as she pulled off her jacket—the white of her blouse.

“Yeah,” he said; “okay.”

Chapter One, Part One

The View from the Thirty-First Floor

Paul Starling was going blind. He shut his right eye and focused his left first on the feeble potted Dieffenbachia on his desk, then on the horizon, where down between the buildings and the self-park signs a narrow sliver of Lake Michigan merged with the sky. The horizon was blurry. Or the day was hazy. He shut his left eye and repeated the exercise with his right. The horizon was blurrier. Even the hard glass buildings mere blocks away, at the intersection of State and Madison, had soft edges. He opened his left eye and focused both eyes on the Dieffenbachia. Now the plant was blurry and his eyes stung from concentration. He was definitely, without question, losing his vision.

The view from the thirty-first floor would encompass a blue-gray sliver of Lake Michigan for perhaps another month. Then the new building going up several blocks east, on Madison Street, would obscure it forever, and Paul Starling’s desk—if it was still Paul Starling’s desk—would look out on nothing but other buildings, each full of nothing but other desks and thousands of other Paul Starlings staring out every day at the gray doom of the city. In the corner of the window a spider dipped and swung lazily on its silk.

Paul’s computer chimed and he glanced at it: the forty-fifth new e-mail of the day had arrived. He could guess its contents. The secretarial pool had been slow to learn—hell, still had not learned—of the number of hoaxes and falsehoods circulating on the Internet. Nearly every week the entire office was treated to the grainy picture and misspelled story of yet another missing moppet, or an ominous list of all the things drinking Coke would do to your body, or a dire warning of an imminent computer virus. Usually such missives were follower immediately by a terse e-mail from Vijay, the sole IT guy, begging people to check their sources before clogging the server with pointless forwards (“THIS CHILD HAS BEEN MISSING SINCE 1997 AND IT IS HIGHLY UNLIKELY SHE LOOKS LIKE THIS ANY MORE. PLEASE DO NOT E-MAIL PHOTO ATTACHMENTS”). Vijay always ended his e-mails with a link to the official Pillory & Branks E-Mail Policy, which made a point of saying:

Some incidental personal use of P&B systems is acceptable, but excessive personal e-mailing is abusive of our system and will be grounds for discipline up to and including termination.

Lately that warning had been appearing in larger and larger type—it was now at least six points larger than the rest of the official E-Mail Policy—but Paul rarely even read it. When he started working it had struck fear into his heart, and he made a point of keeping personal e-mails as clipped as possible, even to the point of unfriendliness. There had been no reprisals. His personal e-mails had grown friendlier. There had been no reprisals. Now personal e-mail accounted for approximately 95% of his use of the P&B system. There had been no reprisals, just as there had been no reprisals for the secretaries. At Pillory & Branks, bold type was reprisal enough.

The window glass rattled with a thud several stories up, and—before Paul could focus past the spiderweb, before he could blink or even gasp—a man in a suit plummeted past his desk.

Paul pushed himself back reflexively, bile rising in his throat. The man’s body had been curved, belly down, knees bent, arms out in front of his head, an inept swimmer sinking faster than expected. Paul closed his eyes and saw it again. The man had been wearing a swimming cap! No—no—he was—this was what shock did to your mind. Not a swimming cap: a silver fringe of hair hugging the scalp.

Shrieks and shouts and hubbub rose from the plaza thirty-one floors down. Paul stared at his window. Had he really seen—? But yes—but if not that, then what?

The spider scuttled across the face of the glass, monstrous and repellent, somehow irritated. The falling man had ruptured its web.

“Shel?” said Paul. His voice sounded weak, whiny, childish. “Shel? Did you see that?” He was on his feet. He couldn’t remember standing up. “Hey, Shel?” He stood on tiptoe to see into the next cubicle. It looked deserted.

A muffled voice issued from beneath the desk. “Did you say something, Paul?” In a second Sheldon Metzger emerged, lumbering to his feet and shoving a stray shirttail back into the straining waistband of his Dockers. His face was flushed. “I’m just”—he gulped for air—“adding a few things down there.” To the casual glance Sheldon’s cube looked like any other, but beneath the surface of the desk lurked a profusion of wires and plastic casings and instruments that would not have looked out of place in the cockpit of a space shuttle. He had quietly been souping up his computer for two years; at last count it had had four hard drives. Vijay, far from being annoyed, seemed to admire Sheldon’s technical prowess, or at least to feel a kinship with his impatience with the P&B standard system. Also Sheldon never e-mailed forwards, and he had managed never to cause a major server outage. Sheldon was in no danger even of bold type.

“Were you talking to me?” said Sheldon now. “I can’t hear so good down there. All the little fans get loud up close.”

Paul stared at him. If Sheldon Metzger was talking to him, red-faced and sweaty—if somewhere beneath Sheldon’s desk a new chip was humming in the chorus—then things had to be normal after all, didn’t they? Then maybe hadn’t seen what he thought he had seen? “You didn’t see the,” said Paul. “The guy fall?”

“What?” said Sheldon, squinting at him.

“I could have sworn,” said Paul, “I just—some man just fell past the window.”

“What?” said Sheldon, laughing now. “What, just now?”

“Yeah.”

Sheldon laughed harder. “Well, who was he?”

“No, I’m serious,” said Paul. His stomach had constricted itself into a tiny ball, quivering with its own tension.

“Like,” said Sheldon, “like a jumper?”

“Yeah,” said Paul. Down on the street a siren grew louder and louder.

“Wait,” said Sheldon. “You’re fucking serious?”

“That’s what I’ve been saying. You don’t—”

“Nobody actually says anything they mean here. You know that.”

“But I—”

“Increase productivity ten percent annually. Model the virtues embodied in the P&B mission, vision and values. Live the brand. Walk the talk.”

“Sheldon,” said Paul.

“Walk the talk,” said Sheldon again, laughing, and shaking his head.

“Really,” said Paul. He waited until Sheldon met his eyes and remembered what they’d been talking about. The siren crescendoed and then shut off abruptly at its loudest point.

“Really?”

“Yeah,” said Paul. “A guy in a—in a pinstripe suit.” For some reason it was thinking of the suit that did it. Paul’s knees buckled and his stomach bucked like it was trying to escape his body. He fell awkwardly to the floor, clenching his jaw and his throat, forcing the sick back down.

“Hey, are you all right?” said Sheldon, looking genuinely concerned for the first time.

Paul shook his head no, violently, squizzling his eyes shut.

“You want me to, like, get someone?”

Paul kept shaking his head no. His skin was cold and sweaty and he was suddenly aware that his clothes were damp at the insides of his knees and elbows. Come on, Paul, he thought, come on, come on, you can do better than this, Starling. He parted his lips just enough to allow a thin breath of cool air. Now he was almost okay, now he was coming back, now he was a man again.

“You sure you’re okay?” said Sheldon. Sheldon was marvelous at commenting on situations but rubbish at actually participating.

Paul trusted his throat enough to relax into a nod now. He opened his eyes. The cubicle looked even shabbier at floor level, where the drawers and cabinets revealed all the nicks and scrapes and gouges from the vacuum cleaners of the four different cleaning services P&B had tried out in the past year. The cords for the phone and the computer lay in a formless black and beige heap. The carpet—a faded teal-blue industrial horror from the 1980s with a small diamond pattern in the pile—was pilled and stained black where his desk chair rolled back and forth. Were his patterns so predictable: a three-foot web of tracks—not even an interesting one—the drawing of a beginner on a Spirograph? Or, perhaps, were the tracks so worn into the carpet that he could not roll in new directions now if he tried?

“Man, you still with me?” said Sheldon.

“What?” said Paul. “Yeah.”

“You’re all staring off into space with your lips moving.”

“I’m fine,” said Paul. “I’m fine, I’m fine.” He reached up to brace himself on his chair and pulled himself to his feet. It would have been wiser to sit for another five or ten minutes, but it was frankly more appealing to risk dizziness than to endure any more of Sheldon’s tender ministrations.

“Okay,” said Sheldon. He bent over his own desk and clicked his mouse automatically. “Aw, man,” he said after a moment. “Is your Internet down?”

“I,” said Paul. Internet? Sheldon still cared about Internet? What was the Internet? “I don’t know.”

“Mine’s fucking crawling.” The sounds of repeated clicking, then the jabbing of an index finger on a mouse button, rose from the cube.

“I have to go downstairs,” said Paul.

“Okay,” said Sheldon absently.

Paul, too preoccupied with leaving to think about his trajectory, collided with the dividing wall. That was going to leave a bruise on his shoulder—but he had to get downstairs—

He made for the elevator bank. More sirens were approaching the building. Nadine, the receptionist, was talking to someone on her headset phone, wide-eyed. Did she know? How could anyone not know? And yet it had just happened—if it had happened—but it must have happened—a falling man in a pinstripe suit, a swimmer in air, a belly flop—don’t think, Starling—

The elevator dinged and lit up red to signal a voyage down. Paul stepped in and the doors slid shut. He was the only one in the elevator and as soon as the doors closed he smelled the fear and nausea coming off his skin. The news screen blithely ran some stock numbers, most adjacent to down-pointing triangles. Across the bottom of the screen ran an ad for a retirement fund management service: Let the tortoise beat you to the finish line. The tortoise was definitely going to beat Paul to the finish line. It wasn’t even close. Paul was never going to reach the finish line. He had never stayed in a job longer than a year before joining Pillory & Branks; now he was two months away from vesting in the P&B pension plan, but he had never contributed a dime to the 401(k), never deposited much on the side. Retirement was as alien a concept as chopping off a hand. He could do it: but why? The difference, though, was that he knew why his hands were useful. About his employment he was far less certain.