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at the draughtsmen continually, but never at the clerks. He never asked the clerks what it was they were doing because he didn’t know what they were doing. It did not suit him to ask a question unless he already knew the answer. Nothing infuriated him more than discovering that someone else knew the answer, too.
    ‘How fast does light travel?’ he asked Henry casually one day. Henry did not know.
    ‘I know, naturally. In our measurement system, 186,000 miles per second,’ said Karl.
    ‘Who asked you?’ said Masterson’s right eye.
    Somewhere inside Karl another eye was closed forever by a foot squashing it; it spewed forth a grapey eye-seed.
    The unpleasant marsupiality of Karl’s eyes was worsened when he smiled. Little sharp shrew-teeth glittered at the ends of big dead-pale gums, and one knew his tongue would also be black. He looked like someone Henry had met before, somewhere, and Karl had changed. He was a spoiled bear, a bear gone finicky – yet how had he got those teeth?
    Section VIII: More Questions
     
    Masterson slapped Harold on the shoulder and asked if he could borrow ten till payday. ‘I’m a little short, heh heh.’ Assuming the boss was joking,Harold began to chuckle.
    ‘No, I’m serious. Had a big weekend with a doll in Boston. I’m flat broke. You know how it is. I could always pay myself my own salary early, but I hate to screw up the book-keeping, see?’ Reluctantly Harold saw. He loaned the ten.
    ‘You’ll never see that again, 4' whispered Big Ed, his face a complete blank. Harold pretended to be unaware of the old man’s existence.
    Henry noticed how blank Ed was actually becoming, as if someone were slowly erasing him. He was not just blurry, like Clark (who was growing a great mouth-devouring beard), but less definitely there at all.
    On the following payday when Art passed around the pay envelopes, Harold did not get his ten. He tried to catch the flickering eye of Masterson when he stalked through the room, but the boss pretended to be unaware of Harold’s existence.
    ‘In the good old days,’ Art said to Henry, ‘I never had to take crap from anybody. Good feeling, being your own boss.
    ‘Why, I used to walk down that aisle and I never even looked at what was on their boards. I just stared real hard at the back of each draughtsman’s neck, stared until he thought he was going to get hit. If he flinched, my rule was, I got to hit him twenty times on the arm. Hee hee, they nearly always flinched.’
    The two men sat in the warm diner speaking to one another through pale yellow clouds of steam from the french fryer: mists of the distant present. On the previous day, window cleaners had appeared at the office and wiped away the winter’s grime. An hour after they had left, a dirty rain began.
    ‘I notice everyone smokes around the office,’ Art said. ‘Not in my day. I never let anyone smoke, and I’d walk around the office all day puffing fifty-cent cigars and blowing the smoke at them. Drove ‘em crazy, especially when I’d dump hot ashes on their drawings. Yes, sir, I ran a tight office in those days.
    ‘If anyone ever sneaked off to the can for a smoke, I’d lock him in there for the rest of the day, then fire him. “Enjoy your smoke,” I’d say as I turned the key. “You got all day, bright boy.”
    ‘Whee, one time a new kid ran in there for a smoke at about nine in the morning. I locked him in till six. Hee hee, the rest of them didn’t like that, I can tell you, working all day without a biff.
    ‘Well, came six o’clock and I opened to let him out, and what do you think that young bastard had done? Hanged himself! Yep, he had that old chain right around his neck and he was stone cold, and the toilet running gallons and gallons. You should have seen my water bill that month.’
    His eyes crinkled with amusement. ‘Yes, sir, that’s the only time anyone ever put anything over on old Art. Hee hee.’ He hugged his new coat around him gleefully, while