Glass Wall, Chicago After Hours

The glass wall behind her showed the city — or what the city had become at this hour, which was mostly the dark and the cold pressing flat against the building's face. She had noted the reflection twice already: once when she sat down, once when the monitor in front of her went dark from disuse and showed her nothing useful. That was the word she used, internally. Useful. The dark monitor was not useful. The glass wall was not useful. The small object in her blazer's left interior pocket had, until eleven minutes ago, also not been useful.

She had been precise about the eleven minutes. She had checked the time when she pressed the button — 8:47 — and checked it again when she pressed it off, and she had sat with that number the way she sat with any data point worth keeping. The cleaning crew had started on the floor below at 8:31. She had heard the elevator, then the distant percussion of a cart. They were systematic, that crew. She respected that.

The trouser fabric across both thighs was heavier than she usually registered. She registered it now. The flat-front crease had held all day, which was the point of that cut, and the lining of the blazer was cool where it touched the inside of her left wrist — her right hand was on the table, palm down, not gripping anything. She noticed this without deciding what it meant.

She had not planned the eleven minutes. She had planned to finish the deck. The deck was finished. The object had been in the pocket since morning, carried the way she carried anything she might need — without expectation, without drama. She had pressed the button the way she pressed any button, which was to say with one finger, deliberately, to see what happened.

What happened was that she sat very still for eleven minutes and did not finish anything else.

The breath she released at 8:58 was longer than the one before it. She did not plan that either. It arrived ahead of her, the way certain facts do — already true before she had formally acknowledged them. Her right hand stayed flat on the table. Her knees did not move. The trouser crease held.

She looked at the glass wall. The city did what the city does, indifferent, lit in patches, the cold making the glass contract almost imperceptibly. Her reflection was not there — the angle was wrong, or the light was wrong, and she was grateful for this in a way she did not examine.

The cleaning crew was one floor below. Systematic. She could wait.

She put her left hand on her thigh — the outside of it, through the wool, nothing yet — and looked at the glass wall, and considered the number eleven, and what she now knew it meant.