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.