She was a quiet, slender person of thirty five, unremarkably dressed, pale apart from the vivid magenta welt across her forehead. It was, somehow, already mid-December, and she could have easily hidden the mark under a hat. Jamie, watching her from across the width of the conference table, thought that the refusal to cover up the mark in any way was more intriguing than the mark itself. 

Jamie did not know her. He was, conservatively, ninety percent certain he’d never seen her before. He allowed himself only a moment to dwell in the discomfiture of the other ten percent – that he had seen her before, perhaps multiple times, perhaps more than that – and had simply forgotten her unmarked face. 

He waited for the final people to take their seats. The head of creative strategy (or was it experience strategy?), a tall man, enviably broad-shouldered, named Kip or Keaton took the unoccupied seat besides the woman. Kip/Keaton clapped shoulders with the head of experience to his right before nodding in a friendly way at the woman. “Hey there,” she said. Her voice was unexpectedly low. Gravely. A smoker’s voice; a voice less at odds with the marking. 

The pleasant, fluted voice of Belinda Eckles, Jamie’s chief of staff cut in, announcing the beginning of the meeting. Technically, it was Jamie’s meeting, a standing weekly review of performance and new initiatives, but Jamie was not above willing to admit (to himself) that it, like his department, was run by other people. His role was to be generally congenial yet inscrutable, to choose a different senior manager or associate director to be singled out for praise, to ask questions that sounded leading and to nod self knowingly at the answers. Above all, his role was to be the one person everyone else reported into.

Throughout the meeting, the woman kept her laptop closed; she took notes in a small, black notebook, using a felt-tipped pen that had already stained the underside of her hand. Jamie found himself listening with far more attention than usual to the updates on creative tests and the launch of a new order form; the woman took nearly an entire page of notes on the latter, which had been released with some sort of security vulnerability on the address field – a potential legal nightmare, had anyone tried to buy the $400 a month membership during the hour it was live. Perhaps she was in engineering. The company did make an effort to hire women engineers, who were much cheaper, and more loyal, than their male counterparts. 

There was no direct update from engineering in Jamie’s meeting. Product spoke for both departments. Engineering operated several substrates below what any typical department in corporate ought to be expected to understand. Jamie doubted he could name any of the engineers; the woman, if she was an engineer, was most likely their sole representative. The engineers wore tee shirts cheaply emblazoned with the names of obscure conferences or video game companies, along with running sneakers and the sort of anonymous, unironic jeans Jamie didn’t even know where you’d go to buy these days, whereas product wore readily available brand names, and crewneck sweaters; (and design – that was easy: sharp blazers over striped dress shirts or black turtlenecks, and severe, Damer glasses and lug-soled boots; the women favoring bold lipstick in scarlet or plum). 

The black block print letters on the maybe engineer’s sweatshirt spelled out 

METROPOLITAN 

MUSEUM OF ART

NEW YORK

Which might be exactly what a woman engineer would wear (the ambient temperature in the office was always 62 degrees – ideal for blazers), but hadn’t Jamie’s ex worn the exact same sweatshirt? Was it considered, along with the notebook (though it was an ordinary notebook, spiral-bound, and the pen, too, was one of the white and blue bics from the supply closet). 

“Thank you, Julian,” Belinda said, to the man giving the order form update. “We’ll look for a readout on the updated form in two weeks. If no one has any further questions for Julian, we have just enough time for –”

“One moment, Belinda,” Jamie cut in. The woman had set her pen down, signaling disinterest in the final update.

“Did any of you happen to see –” desperately, he wracked his brain for an op-ed or headline  relevant to order forms.

“To see–” he repeated. Wing it. 

“What happened to the bond market this morning?”

The maybe engineer’s eyes were trained on Jamie’s, and he smiled at her. 

“Something very unusual occurred,” he said. Why hadn’t he chosen a better adjective. “Disturbing.”

“Incomprehensible.” Still, she continued to watch him, carefully, with a hawk’s quick, coruscating eyes.

“The yield on ten year treasuries disappeared.”

He sensed blank stares; he sensed mass befuddlement.

“Sorry, mate. Cards on the table: I understood all of the words in that last sentence individually, but none of them together.”

Kip/Keaton’s casual tone belied the apology; he was neither sorry for his ignorance, nor embarrassed by it. Jamie knew this stance would be infectious; he was, unexpectedly, on his heels.  Nonetheless, he tried to summon the affect of his old labor economics professor, congenial and generous by dint of so much well feted competency. Dr. Petuniak. An elegant Hungarian in single-breasted Italian suits; he paced the dias like a pitcher, stretching, prowling, zeroing in on one student who was nonetheless surprised when the ball snaked left at the very last second. Jamie had resolved, after one excruciating whiff, to devote the majority of his efforts to studying the professor himself. It didn’t take extraordinary powers of observation to guess that five minutes of expounding upon the Bowles-Gintis theory of human capital would lead to a request for an example of said theory in action, and that the example must be them, the students in the room, all of them striving to be upper-level managers of late-stage capitalist concerns (“successful,” in their own words).    

“So a treasury – that’s you loaning the government money for a fixed time period, right? And the government promising to pay you back after that time, with interest.”

Kip/Keaton looked as if he were about to say something lazy and disruptive re: taxes, so Jamie hurried on. 

“Typically, the longer the loan duration is, the higher interest it will earn you. So a three month note might be below 1%, and a 2 year ranges from 3-5%, and so on. The ten year treasury has been coming in at 4-5% this year, at least for most of the year. And it’s been coming in consistently below the 2 year, which historically has meant…” he looked, meaningfully, at the engineer.

“Recession.” 

“Precisely. Hence all those doomsday headlines – closer to home, the hiring freeze.” 

He hadn’t intended to borrow Petuniak’s vocabulary. The overformal adverbs hung on Jamie like a loaner suit.  

Someone else, further down the table and on Jamie’s side, piped up. 

“But there hasn’t been a recession.”

“Yet,” Jamie nodded. He would not need to look up to know that other heads were following along – the heads that genuinely agreed with Jamie and the heads that genuinely wanted to nod. And yet he sensed the usual ripple effect had not occurred.

“You don’t really think that’s still a possibility?”

Jamie longed to swat away this unwelcome, unseen questioner. 

“It’s not about what I think. The FED and the IMF and a plurality of market analysts have forecast a 60% chance of a recession before the new year. But moving on to what happened this morning –”

“Like there was a 70% probability of Hillary winning the election.” 

Laughter, for an outdated and irrelevant counterpoint? Jamie shook his head.

“And a ten percent probability of my finishing this explanation. You know what –” he sensed he was losing the room. 

“Make that a 0 percent chance. Those of you who are so inclined should google it while there’s still time.”

He forced one final pleasant smile, making no effort to direct it to the end of his side of the table, and placed his own, empty notebook on his laptop and pushed his chair a few inches away.

Why was no one else moving? 

“Belinda?” He might as well have been five, calling out for his mother – that much fear he’d packed into her name. 

“While there’s still time to what, Jamie?”

This from Belinda – and Belinda’s questions were goads, never genuine; they were never said sharply; they were never asked sharply to Jamie. The sharpness, no doubt, was for the room, borne of anxiety over Jamie’s loss of it, perhaps, too, over that foreboding phrase. While there’s still time. But Jamie was, briefly, unable to answer. 

“I think he means while there’s still time to read about it. What’s happened.” 

He was grateful to her for coming to his defense. Pinch hitting. Then annoyed. That wasn’t how the sentence ended. In speaking for him, she’d misspoken.

“I don’t understand.”

“Think about it.” The engineer paused, leaving room for Jamie to jump back in. When he did not, she tucked some of the hair that had been hanging around her chin back behind her small, shell-like ears. There was another marking towards the back of her neck. Jamie looked down at his own unmarked hands, and found, to his surprise, that they were pressing hard against his thighs, the tendons as articulated as spiderwebs.

“The ten year yield – that’s the government looking into its crystal ball, deciding what the future’s worth.”

“He said it disappeared.”

Why were they talking about him as if he wasn’t there? 

“Overnight, yes.”

“I’m not finding anything about this,” Keaton said, dubious. 

Jamie was anxious, now, but also impatient. “Go to the Journal. Go to Bloomberg!”

“Let’s see what ‘the journal’ says,” the engineer echoed, and Jamie could tell, somehow, that the words meant nothing to her, that she was typing ‘the journal ten year treasury’ into Google; that –

“Hmm. No results,” she said. 

Without asking, Jamie swiveled Keaton’s laptop around. Loudly, he typed “wsj.com” into the browser bar. The browser redirected to google. No results. “Did you mean ‘welch grape juice?”

Jamie tried again, with Bloomberg. This also resolved to google, but turned up hundreds of results, all about Michael Bloomberg. 

“What is wrong with your browser,” he asked. But his own phone behaved the same. 

Jamie stood, and walked over to the bank of windows. The people on the ground, forty floors below – it was hard to really tell, but they seemed to be behaving normally. The coffee and donut cart just past the north lobby had already gone, replaced by the Mr. Falafel truck, and the morning queue inside the vast terrarium-like Blue Bottle had been ported over to the adjacent Sweet Green. Though the truck looked to be already shutting down, the Sweet Green queue was as long and bushy as Jamie had ever seen it, spilling like damned water out the hunter green doors and stretching nearly to Broadway. 

Jamie noticed queues the way his mother, in Jamie’s teenage years, had noticed visible bra straps, the visibility of flesh meant to be repressed, compressed, hidden (that is to say, with dismay lanced by a welcome moral superiority). He had long held a sneaking suspicion that the reconstituting queues were made up of the same people, professional queuers, the working idle, people who equated frictionless payment with free, and loyalty points with currency, when in fact there were all these incremental costs, and the loyalty points, existing as they did in a closed system, were essentially valueless. 

When Jamie had moved to New York, all those years earlier, he would take $120 out of the ATM every Monday and make it last the entire week. He was all of twenty two and alone in this combustible city, and the challenge was not in surviving on $120 – even at twenty two, from bumblefuck F.U., he’d been the kind of kid upon whom free shit, plus ones, comps, were foisted with gratifying regularity – no, the challenge was dating. A couple of drinks each, a shared app, two entrees: it was almost impossible, even then, to spend less than $100. He had his hacks, sure – the second date at McSorleys, sawdust on their shoes, a shared, drunken gyro in Tompkins Square Park to follow; the trip on the 7 out to Jamaica for Nepalese dumplings and salt lassi, the east river ferry ride to Red Hook for key lime pie and live bluegrass – but they only worked against a steadier drumbeat of $105 and $110 and maybe $98.99 dinners. Point being: he knew the cost of things, and what was worth paying for. 

(Which, these days, was very little. He had a corporate card, assiduously managed by Belinda, and the free shit had, if anything, increased in optionality and quality with each promotion. Co-op fees were pretty much the only thing he paid for himself, and he would have asked Belinda to take these on as well had he not been recently and expressly warned against doing so by HR. Chiefs of staff were not admins.) (But the company had largely done away with human admins. Directors and up were welcome to use the new AI assistant, Milligan (milligan? Who came up with these names?) instead, but Jamie could not bring himself to. He liked a physical paper, cash, a human admin who could not only deal with all of his logistics but assure him, verbally, that she had done so. He was old school – so sue him!)

Distantly, he became aware of the touch on his arm, a laying of fingers both light and, in the way they curved, unnecessarily, around his bicep, familiar. 

“They aren’t the same, you know.” 

Even looking straight ahead, his peripheral could not blur the red of the marking into the dull palour of the surrounding skin. 

“Aren’t they, though? When it comes down to it?”

Her grip tightened. He was a fit man, or fit enough: a sporadic runner; a requisite and not unenthusiastic golfer; on the court, his serves, which looked too full of topspin to be effective, tended to break at odd, treacherous angles, but his arms were skinny, undifferentiated. 

“I could snap you like a chicken,” she’d said, once, early on, and they had both laughed at the simile, unfinished or else broken. He had skinny arms – so what? Still, he didn’t need to be so physically reminded.

“I should really get going,” he said. He began to pull away, lightly at first, and then, when the grip remained, more forcefully. When it dropped, leaving his arm pulsing, he saw that the room had emptied. The table was littered with clear plastic bowls half and fourth full of dressing-bloated kale and those little bowties of rehydrated tortilla. 

“J –” she began. 

“Where is everyone?”

“J–”

“Nobody calls me that. An initial.”

She had called him that, though. His idea, because she kept using the spanish pronunciation of his name, rendering it, to Jamie’s ears, unrecognizable. 

“We’ll go to your office,” she said. “That will center you, won’t it?”

“But everyone –”

“Three offices on this entire floor, and one of them is yours.”

He did find that centering, actually. His office had begun like the other two: a small drywall box with a resentful glass door, a knock-off Eames, a modest desk in dispiriting plywood. Now, Jamie’s chair was Howe, his desk a sleek walnut half-moon, and the once-blank walls adorned with –