It might have been Sharon, or maybe Susan—from the Copy Room, or Communications, respectively—who first mentioned it on our floor, who said in passing, as if it were idle information, that Credible Threats had been made, that we are not as safe as we think. I didn’t actually hear the word “thief” for another week or so. A shrug, a chuckle, a mumbled bullshit—that was pretty much the collective response (except, now that I think about it, Christof—note name again—who nodded in agreement and said something about cosmic irony). He was one of those college interns who at first behaved as if he were doing us a favor by allowing us to exploit his unpaid labor in exchange for a reference, until his unemployed and underinsured father died of exposure on an ill-conceived mountain climbing adventure, a preventable tragedy which forced him to quit school and suddenly need full-time work. He probably did know more about the inner workings of the machine than the rest of us, since he spent most of his day at the shredder, a job Tony used to do in about an hour each morning, time now freed up to do “routine web searches” (as he calls them) on the company, the executive team, and a mix of industry keywords, which he compiles into a report circulated each morning. Anyway, who do you guess became all about how much he had yet to learn, how much he appreciated the opportunity, how hard a worker he was (his grandpa was a vet with a farm or something like that) when given real responsibility? We never doubted they’d hire him; he probably would have been our boss (or the equivalent elsewhere) in five years if events had been on his side or if his father had known not to eat the snow. Still, the middle managers took noticeable pleasure in stringing him along for a month or two, keeping him on ice (sorry) until after his father’s remains had been recovered (hat tip to taxpayers—don’t let anyone tell you Americans don’t value life and the living when, out of an abundance of respect, we’ll spend tens of thousands of dollars searching for a corpse to bury long after any hope of rescue is abandoned). This allowed them to squeeze him for an extra peck of dirt-in-mouth gratitude and a few thousand less per annum. He’ll probably start picking up a class or two and in ten years be section leader with a corner cubicle. He probably is better than the rest of us, all other things being equal.

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Once strangers feel free enough to address you, to accost you, to publicly impose a narrative upon you, to incarnate you into their wooly imaginaries with a word, with a touch on the shoulder, and once you give a standing-order yes to playing this role—nothing can be the same as it would otherwise be. The first time it happened she was twelve. Disney World, within earshot of Jungle Cruise: a distraught woman convinced that she is her daughter, abducted ten years earlier, runs up, accosts her parents, can they prove she’s theirs, etc., suggesting before accusing them of adopting her off the black market. Attempts at restraint were made, park police called. The raised birthmark by her ear, she said, vaguely clover-shaped, how could there be more than one? She has my nose. What are the odds? Fast forward, years later, top story: the governor of Michigan, the most prominent orphan in America, raised by hardscrabble

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The foster parents, who became the adoptive parents, were excruciatingly kind, and every neglect and cruelty visited upon Byrn and his sister Melba they counteracted with the spells of patience, care, and love. Thanks to years of therapy, rehab, and a string of churches she chewed through before settling down a Unitarian, Melba ended up well-adjusted enough, a bit OCD with doors and windows and a rule for perfect symmetries, but capable of sustaining relationships well enough and a day-to-day life, sufficiently stable. Her bar-bet trivia answer is that she makes a tiny residual on “Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters,” for which she was hired as a script consultant after a blog post went viral.

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