A former colleague always decreed smarmily that he wanted to make a similarity, not a difference. His eyes were rimmed pink with sleepiness; he spoke under his breath for fear perhaps of being overheard. He certainly was a paranoid motherfucker. Days would pass, he was right, where not one staff member made a difference. He wore a wedding band dating back to a marriage with a wife he'd abandoned for another woman who — in turn, and not much afterward, at that — abandoned him for another man he had claimed to hit with a two-by-four in the parking lot behind his apartment. Seemed like a scene where dogs would be barking at a healthy distance. Moths all but obscuring floodlights and so on.

He was maybe about forty-two.

Owing to a nebulous stomach condition, he carried Alka-Seltzer in his nylon lunch bag and was fond of offering it to anyone to cure any ailment. Those words on the box: DISSOLVES IN WATER! Well but everything does, given enough time and resolve to leave a place.