Abe came by before I left. “How was it?”

“I think it’s gonna work out.”

“Good,” he said. “I’m glad.”

I thought maybe he’d stay for a while, sit down and chat, but he made one jerky lunge forward, a kind of bow, and walked back to the elevators. He worked ten floors up. I tried to picture his view. Down here, in North America, we didn’t even have windows.

In total, there were five temps working under Sylvia. Stan had been there longest. “Debt doesn’t go away by itself,” he said. “Plus, I keep making more of it.” But I sensed he had an exciting life outside the office. He showed me photos from the Castro parade. In one of them, he wore a big paper hat that had empty beer bottles glued onto the rim. They pointed outward and made him look like the Statue of Liberty. “Come one, cum all,” he said. “Isn’t that the idea?”

There were two other men in our division: Omar, who was sending money back to his wife and daughter in Nicaragua; and Ted, an actor who’d been on several television programs. He was quick to share. “I guested on two seasons of Law and Order: Pacific,” he said. “You might remember me as the piñata bomber’s estranged son?”

I’d never seen the show or even heard of it. I said, “I don’t think I saw that episode.”

“Episodes,” he said. “Plural.”

I let him keep going.

“It was a recurring role,” he said, rapping his fingers on the desk. “What’s your story, anyway?”

“I just wanted a decent job, that’s all.”

“Well, this isn’t that.” He laughed. “I hope you know.”

The only other woman was named April. She had short hair like a pixie, and from the back, you could mistake her for a very young boy. She moved across the carpet without seeming to touch it, gliding past cubicles toward the communal bathroom. She often wore shoes that looked like ballet slippers, like Stella’s. One time I asked her, “Are you a dancer?”

“Ha!” she said. “Wait till my therapist hears about that!”

She came from a teensy little town in the center of California, which made me feel like we had something in common. I’d been living away from cities for so long. “Goddamn buildings around here!” she said. “You can’t see the sky anywhere.” She was a woman who cussed in the office. You wouldn’t guess from looking at her, her velvet skirts and gossamer scarves, but other people noticed, and I could tell it bothered some of them.

I was trying to improve my own talk a little. I wanted to sound respectable. I could see how hard Sylvia worked on how she spoke. I actually felt a little shy around her. She was the boss, after all, though Abe laughed at me once when I called her that.

“She’s not the boss,” he said. “She’s got bosses and bosses and bosses above that. She was probably a temp a couple years ago.”