that.”
        “Do you remember how I answered?”
        “Not really.”
        “I said that if you’d started talking to that woman, I’d have been happy for you and just sat back and let you talk. I don’t know why you think I wouldn’t let you do that. I want the best for you.”
        He shrugged and shook his head helplessly. “I don’t know.”
        I wasn’t sure where to go now. “You were really pissed when you called. I thought that was why we haven’t been visiting lately.”
        He looked tired, bloated, like he had a hangover and hadn’t slept. “Oh, I guess I was just being Kyle.”
        I digested this. You mean the obnoxious, asshole guy who gets drunk and hurts others but always feels like the victim? But instead, I watched an elderly Asian couple seat themselves at a nearby table, then after a noisy motorcycle roared past, asked how things were going at work.
        He cleared his head and sighed heavily, then beginning slowly, recounted various episodes from the past week: A new supervisor had replaced the one who’d gotten a promotion, several new staff transferred into his unit, dealing with an employee with a mysterious disability who was exempted from using his computer even though his job was to use the computer.
        “So, what does he do all day?”
        Kyle shifted uneasily. “Oh, I guess he busies himself sorting paperwork and going on job interviews, and he spends a lot of time on his phone.”
        He told me about a supervisor who had advanced diabetes and heart disease who slept at her desk four to six hours a day but was very knowledgeable about office procedures if you could ever catch her awake.
        I remembered her from previous conversations. “She’s still there? Why doesn’t she retire?”
        “I guess she wants to work until she’s sixty-five. She says that if she quits, she’ll die.”
        “Would that be a bad thing?”
        “It wouldn’t really bother me.”
        “It sounds like she’s going to die anyway even if she keeps working, like sometime soon.”
        He told me about two other impossible situations at work and his sense of inadequacy, and the fact everyone else seemed to have a better grasp of office protocols, but also about a successful training manual he’d completed, and his success at arbitrating an explosive conflict between