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several sheets wadded up together into a solid ball, less well with a single page. It was a question of weight; three sheets of newsprint seemed to be ideal. He’d been a decent pitcher as a kid but the hole was easy to miss even with the tie as a marker, and a snowdrift of crumpled paper rose up gradually over the broken glass.
    Anton realized on a Friday that he hadn’t used his stapler in a while, so he threw that out the gap in the window too. It sailed through perfectly. And then he heard a sound behind him, and when he looked over his shoulder Elena was watching him from the doorway.
    “I’ve often wanted to do that,” she said. “Throw my stapler out the window.” She stepped into the room and closed the door behind her.
    “It was a pretty good throw. I’m glad someone saw it. Where have you been?”
    “The proofreading department. Twenty-second floor.”
    “The twenty-second floor,” he said. “Do you ever hear construction up there?”
    “Sometimes,” she said. “I think they’re renovating the floor above.”
    The idea that he might not be stuck in the mezzanine forever made him happier than he’d been in weeks. Offices were being constructed on the twenty-third floor. Jackson had been telling the truth: Anton was moving up there. It was a large company, his supervisors were busy on the New York City water project, and it was a well-known fact that the IT department was perpetually overwhelmed—the fact that he’d been languishing in the mezzanine for weeks might have absolutely nothing to do with his background check after all. He might have just been temporarily misplaced.
    “Why are you grinning like that?” she asked.
    “No reason. How’d you know where to find me?”
    “I know a girl in HR.” The way she said it made him imagine whole networks of assistants throughout the tower, names unmarked in the company directory, passing information silently from floor to floor. She sat down on his sofa. After a few minutes he came and sat down on top of his desk, a few feet away from her, but he couldn’t think of anything to say. She leaned back on the sofa and looked around the room. He could see that she’d been crying, but he couldn’t think of a way to ask what was wrong without embarrassing her. He thought perhaps she just wanted company—he couldn’t remember if she’d ever mentioned a boyfriend—and so tried to silently convey the impression that there was nothing he’d rather be doing than sitting on top of his desk staring into space with her.
    “What’s in those filing cabinets?” Elena asked finally.
    There were five or six old four-drawer filing cabinets in a far corner of the room. He had never opened them.
    “I have no idea,” he said. “We’re just in storage together.”
    She smiled but had nothing to say to this. They sat in silence for a while longer before his phone began to ring. It was Sophie. He heard himself telling her that he was going to be home late again. “Yes, another staff meeting. I know, this evening staff meeting thing is completely unreasonable, but what can we do? We’re right up against deadline for phase one of the—okay, sure, I’ll call you when I’m on my way home. I love you too.”
    When Anton hung up Elena was watching him.
    “I don’t know,” he said preemptively, “I just didn’t feel like going home right now. What time is it?”
    “A little after five,” she said. “You could leave if you wanted to.”
    “I don’t want to. Are you hungry?”
    “Maybe a little.” She made no move to get up.
    “Come on,” he said. “That lunch place in the Metlife Building lobby stays open till seven.”
    They ate expensive Metlife-lobby sandwiches picnic-style in the middle of the room, at the halfway mark between the desk and the broken window. It was the only part of the office that wasn’t too air conditioned; a warm breeze came in through the hole in the window. Anton had closed the door against the empty corridor, and he