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longer exists. A girl in a navy blue dress is loading knickknacks from her desk into her gym bag. Another guy a few cubes down is talking on the phone. “Mom, I don’t know,” he says. “Seriously. We know nothing. No one does.”
    I suppose I’m nervous, like everyone else, but, in truth, I only half understand what in the hell is going on, or who Lehman Brothers or any of the other floundering and/or destroyed companies are in a practical sense. Terrorism, natural disasters, and little blue erection pills: those things are tangible. But right now, my fear of the economy is like my fear of algebra in high school.
    For no legitimate reason, I take a detour past Katie’s cube, but, sadly, she’s not there. There are a few random files strewn about and an old yogurt carton. The I’ M A P EPPER sign above her computer is crooked, like always, and there’s the picture of Katie and her boyfriend, Todd. In my head, I refer to him as Todd the Idiot, which is a name he earned last year at the company holiday party when he threw up into an arrangement of poinsettias in front of everyone. Next to their picture sits my heart-shaped squeeze ball. If I were a less mature person, I’d steal it back—along with her dancing hula girl bobble head—but I control myself.
    In my office, back at my computer, there’s an unholy amount of e-mails, 97 percent of which can be deleted immediately. There’s one from Katie, buried in the middle, asking if we’re going to 7-Eleven today for our biweekly meeting. She’s also wondering if she should start looking into food stamps. Another e-mail is from my boss, Doug, the vice president of marketing and corporate communications.
    Stop by when you get a second. Need to chat.
    I sit down and am prepared to feel the appropriate amount of anxiety, but I’m interrupted by a knock on my door—my open door. In my career, I’ve found that only annoying people knock on open doors. I know that’s a generalization, but, using my peripheral vision, I can see that my theory remains rock solid. There’s another knock, and for reasons I can’t quite explain, I pretend as if I don’t hear it. Staring at my monitor, I’m a busy professional man totally unaware of the person lurking in the doorway.
    “I know that you know I’m here, Tom, so you can stop ignoring me.”
    When I look up, I act surprised to see Gregory Steinberg. And then I smile as big as I can. “Hey, Greg, I didn’t see you standing there.” Gregory is one of those guys who insist on being called Gregory, and so I insist on calling him Greg.
    “Yeah right,” he says. His face is an unhappy mix of lines and corporate scowls. “So, I suppose you’ve been in meetings for the last two hours, right?”
    “Well, not that it’s any of your business, Greg, but I was in a pretty important meeting, as a matter of fact. The management team pulled me in to discuss marketing initiatives. You know, with all these little snafus in the financial sector, we should probably lay out an aggressive plan. They just wanted to run some things by me. Brainstorm a little.”
    This is a profound lie, and I’m proud of myself for its boldness and the fact that it came to me so quickly.
    “That’s not true, and you know it,” he says. If such a meeting had taken place, Greg, the director of communications, would surely have been invited, but there’s enough doubt in his twitching jaw to give me a little thrill. His hatred for me is strong today, buzzing around his head in swirls and hisses. Greg is my Dr. Evil. He is my one-armed man. Whenever he enters a room, in my mind I hear the Imperial Death March from Star Wars . He is my nemesis, yet, whenever I see him, regardless of the situation, I smile like I’ve just won the lottery. I do this for no other reason than because he hates it. One of the countless complaints he’s lodged against me with HR reads:
    Dear HR:
    Tom Violet insists on smiling and saying hello to me every time he sees me, even