“But I still don’t see how-”

Markham slid a two-page interview report across the table. On top was stamped the word Classified and the initials D.D. “That morning, at 7:12 A.M., soon after arriving, Ms. Selios called in a repair order for the laser printer on her floor. At 7:48, the technician arrived, as you’ll see by his interview. The technician had always found Ms. Selios to be-” Markham looked at his notes. “ – smoking hot. That morning, he flirted with Ms. Selios, who was, he claims, not entirely unaware of his intentions or unimpressed by his mac-daddy game. Dude was workin’ it, when March suddenly received a telephone call. She appeared agitated by the call. The technician was removing a jammed sheet of paper from the laser printer when he looked up and saw March Selios walking toward the elevators, crying. The technician himself left a few minutes later, arriving on the main floor, and was, as far as we know, the last person to get off that floor before…” Markham mouthed the word boom, and shrugged, as if that explained it.

Remy was surprised to hear himself asking questions. “Did anyone see her leaving the building? Or afterward? Is there any other evidence that she’s alive?”

Markham looked pleased. “These questions are why we brought you in.”

Remy looked down at the interview transcript. “I don’t know. I mean – couldn’t that call have been anything?” he said. “An argument with a boyfriend? Maybe she wasn’t going to the elevator. Maybe she went to the bathroom. What have you got here – a horny repairman and a recipe. And that’s supposed to prove she got advance warning?”

Markham pointed at the close-up of March Selios’s cubicle. “Imagine the walls of a young woman’s cubicle. Covered in pictures and recipes, Cathy cartoons, and Buddhist koans. Now, let’s say she has a fight with her boyfriend, as you say, and she runs off to the bathroom. Would she really stop to strip the walls of her cubicle on her way out? Would she grab recipes and pictures? Why would it occur to her that she was not coming back?”

Markham held out his palms again, then began collecting his papers. He glanced up at Remy. “Any questions before you get started?”

Remy didn’t know where to start. “This all seems so… sketchy. Maybe it’s just me, but…” He rubbed his eyes, trying for the millionth time to clear the streaks. “I’m having a lot of trouble… connecting things.”

Markham stared at him for a long moment and then nodded and looked like he might cry. “I know. It’s hard. I forget sometimes that you guys went through hell that day. I can’t know what that was like. None of us can. This is tough. And it never gets easier. But that’s precisely why we wanted you.” Markham reached back into his briefcase for the index card in the baggie. “Read the last line of this ‘recipe.’”

Remy read it: Garnish with two twisted orange slices.

Now Markham handed him another detail blowup, this one from the photo of March and Bishir Madain at dinner on her roof. On the platter between them he could clearly see what looked like a piece of fish garnished with two twisted orange slices. Then Markham cocked his eyebrows, as if he’d made another ironclad case, and took the picture back. “Look, this is going to be tough. I’m not going to kid you. But we’ve got to find March Selios. And if it turns out she is, in fact… dead… well, then everything is copacetic. Not for her, obviously…” He laughed uncomfortably. “But for the record. That’s our federally mandated charge, after all – to have a pure record. All the columns adding up. But if, in fact, she’s alive – well, then, we’ve got a problem. In fact, we’ve got a big problem.” And he closed the briefcase.

“A FORMALITY,” said a woman in her fifties, tall and professional, staring over the rims of stylish glasses up at Remy. She sat at a wide desk, next to a rooster-haired man roughing up his nose with a wet handkerchief.

“There are no right answers,” the man said. “Relax.”

The woman asked, “Chronic back pain?”

“What?” Remy asked.

“Just to get the paperwork flowing,” the tall woman said. “A formality. We just have to check a box.”

The man asked, “Chronic back pain?”

Remy looked around the room. There was a poster on the wall behind him showing a cartoon man with a push broom through his head like an arrow and the caption: Industrial Accidents Are Nothing To Laugh At. Remy leaned forward. “My back is fine,” he said. “I mean, if I need anything, I guess it’s some kind of counselor. See, I’m having some trouble… focusing. There are these gaps. I lose track of things.”

They stared at him.

“And my eyes… my eyes are flaking apart. Macular degeneration and vitreous detachment. I see flashers and floaters.”

A few seconds passed. Remy laughed nervously. “My son’s been telling everyone that I’m dead.”

They stared.

“And I… I drink a lot. Most days, I think. And… uh…” He rubbed his eyes. “I shot myself in the head. But I think that was an accident. Or… maybe a joke.”

They stared.

“But… you know… I’m fine.”

They stared.

“Well… except for the gaps, obviously.”

After a moment, the man chewed his pen and looked down at the file, running his finger down a list of some kind. “Chronic back pain,” he said.

“I WATCH a fair amount of television, Mr. Remy,” said the nervous woman with a silver skunk streak in her black hair. She glanced over at a set in the corner of her small apartment. Remy looked from the woman to her TV. On the screen, a man in coveralls was holding a piece of wood against a lathe. The sound was turned down. The skunk woman continued: “I haven’t turned off my TV since it happened. I was glued to the news coverage for the first few days. I even turned the TV so I could see it from the bathroom. I ordered out every meal and just went from channel to channel, watching it from different angles, listening to the newscasters and the public officials. Then, just like that, a few days ago I saw the first thing on TV that wasn’t news coverage. It was four in the morning.” The woman took a drag from her cigarette. “It was an infomercial. For a psychic. You know, that Jamaican woman with dreadlocks who tells people what’s in their future? Everyone’s either going to find a new job or fall in love, right? No one’s going to get cancer or fall down a well shaft. No one’s going to have a day just like the day before, lonely and sad, watching TV and ordering takeout. No one’s going to be burned to death on the eightieth floor of a building. It’s all new jobs and hunky new boyfriends. I suppose there was part of me that still hadn’t given up on March coming back – but I’m watching this psychic and she’s saying she’ll read your future for fifty bucks and they’re showing these people reconciling with their mothers or falling in love or getting promotions at work and it just hit me that I was never going to see March again. And I just lost it. I yelled at this TV psychic: Okay motherfucker! Where the hell were you?”

Remy shifted. He looked down at his palm-sized notebook. Written on the page in his handwriting was a series of fragmentary notes: the name Ann Rogers, an address on the Upper East Side, the words neighbor and family money. Remy looked around the apartment, a simple postwar studio. She was stick-thin, with long, black hair and that perfect gray stripe. She was wearing baggy pajamas. She had two cigarettes going, one pinched between her long, manicured fingers, another smoldering in the ashtray.

Below Ann Rogers and neighbor was a short list of abbreviated questions, also in Remy’s handwriting. He looked at the first one: That morning? “That morning,” he said.

“That morning?” Ann Rogers took a deep breath and sighed. “That morning, March and I went off to work. Like any other day. We walked to the subway station together. It was… six-thirty. We got a bagel at the World Coffee place on Lex. She had a cappuccino. I don’t drink caffeine, myself.” Ann Rogers set one cigarette down and picked up the other one.