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stood at the head of the table there, his hair brush-cut, his eyes showing pleasure in his ability to put these people together, his confidence filling the room like a gas. Everyone there was reassured by the fact that this man had personally picked each one of them, and that he had done so— or so his attitude seemed to imply—with the conviction that each of them was perfect for the job. Mashita’s handshake was firm and dry (at least it had been in the beginning), his clothes gray and well cut, and he wore a black shirt and a white tie, like a gangster, but he did it in such a way as to appear cool. No one at the meeting looked twice at the people who were cleaning out their desks to make room for the new team.
    Until Leslie Carr met Wendell Blaine, she hadn’t worried about much aside from where was she going to be in two years, in five years, in a decade. But as things progressed, she found that she was easily bored, and while she thought she had made her peace with boredom, this was only one stage in a metamorphosis that progressed as smoothly as light seeping into a room at dawn. She didn’t want to admit that her boredom had turned into loneliness. Her plans reassured her, and each new position, each advancement, had a wonderful quality, a glow that had a romantic component, as though everything were possible after all. She clung to this sensation, although from previous experience she knew that it drained away, not suddenly, which she could have accepted more easily, but with a constant, unstoppable progression until one day what had seemed grounds for self-congratulation and pleasure was just another confinement. Secretly she longed for an ally.
    Carr walked along the avenues at night. The windows in the office buildings above her were filled with a blue, almost starlike light, as though the power of the people who worked there lingered as a sidereal tint. Her sense of romance increased when she saw the upper floors of the buildings in an island of clouds, and then, in the blue haze of vapor, the light in the windows seemed even more illusory. One night she looked down from the blue, diffuse lights above her to the window of Tiffany’s. Behind the glass, diamond bracelets were hung from the limbs of a leafless tree to suggest glittering fruit. Then the scene changed, and the tree sprouted green leaves as the jewelry morphed into crystalline flowers. Still, she liked the diamonds the best, like some fruit harvested in the depths of winter.
    After six months at Galapagos, Carr often woke up in the middle of the night and sat listening to the silence of her bedroom. Then she told herself there was nothing wrong. She was being silly. She had a new job. She knew precisely what to do with it. She had often felt this way, and she had always been able to define herself as someone who did not give in to momentary fear. Yet in the morning she decided that something was wrong with the coffee she was drinking, that it was too hot, or too bitter, or too cold. Clothes that she had always liked seemed too dowdy, the skirts too long or too short, or somehow they had stains that were hard to see, but that she was convinced had ruined them. The way she looked in them, or the style of her apartment (brown leather chairs, green window shades, blood-colored carpets), or the touch of the sheets in her bedroom left her with a strong but only dimly understood claustrophobia. Sometimes when she was in this mood, she took a bath, but the water turned cold and led to that moment when she heard the harsh gurgle as it spun around the drain and disappeared like finality itself. Then she would look in the mirror to see if there were any lines around her eyes. Not yet.
    A friend gave her a ticket to the Philharmonic and she went, not really caring much about music, but hoping for an evening in which she would be distracted. She had never really liked crowds, since they made her feel somehow diminished, and yet the ones at the concert hall