The writers were the first to go, the most easily outsourced. They were followed in short order by Legal and HR, those services absorbed by existing divisions at the headquarters of the new owners, a media conglomerate in a bigger city in another state. Most of Editorial and IT and Sales jumped ship before they could be laid off, the building leaking personnel all through winter and into spring until there was only one car left in the lot. This car belonged to a senior accountant named Ernest Fry. He let himself in each morning, his loafers echoing him across the abandoned lobby. Alone, he rode the elevator to his office on the sixth floor. Nobody would have noticed — or cared — if Ernest had moved into one of the executive suites on nine or ten, but he knew where everything was in his desk drawers and he'd grown partial to his view, a satellite university campus across the street, students in their backpacks slouching off to class.
Time zones being what they were, it was not infrequently the case that his first task of the day was logging into Zoom for his meeting with Fatima Reddy, head of the Mumbai team. They would be taking over bookkeeping and payroll and it was Ernest's job to bring Fatima up to speed. She had an agile mind and wisps of hair like sideburns at her temples, and he looked forward to their meetings. During one particular session, a Thursday in late April, he was clarifying the nuances of revenue recognition when he noticed how tired Fatima's eyes looked behind her glasses.
“Is everything all right?” he said.
Her eyebrows pinched and her face drew back a few inches from the screen. Fatima stared directly into the camera when she replied.
“Excuse me?”
“It's just — ” He stopped himself. The last thing he wanted was to offend her. “Here,” he said instead, “let me show you something.”
He unplugged his laptop and clutched it against his chest, camera facing away from his body. “That's my desk,” he said. “That's my diploma. That's a picture of my family.” He carried the laptop over to the window and held it close to the glass, though he doubted she could make out much detail. “That's my view,” he said. He was moving on impulse as he walked her out into the hall and let her look through open doors, an occasional stray something left behind — a mateless bookend on an otherwise empty shelf, a framed Employee of the Month certificate hanging crooked on the wall. “This is Pete Wu's office or it was, and this was Margot Pratt's. She's the person who hired me. That seems like a long time ago now.”
“What are you doing, Ernest?”
He rotated the laptop so that he was looking at the screen, Fatima's expression difficult to read. His own face wobbled in its box, his hands unsteady. “Listen,” he said, raising the laptop over his head like that might amplify the silence.
“I hear nothing.”
Ernest lowered the laptop to eye level.
“I know,” he said. “I've got the whole place to myself.”
Fatima blinked and tugged at her earlobe, a habitual gesture, always reaching her right hand across her throat to her left ear. He felt a flicker of concern that he'd miscalculated, but once he'd returned the laptop to his desk and steered the subject back to revenue recognition, they fell into their usual rhythm, and before long, their hour together had passed and Ernest busied himself with the final quarterly report
