Steve worked in a four-person office one half block from the Stuyvesant P.O. It was on the third floor, where the sounds of the traffic on 14th Street amplified and the rumble of the L train passing by deep underground subtly shook the building at five to eight minute intervals. The vibration slowly dislodged more than a century's accumulated dust and filth which collected on the tops of the desks and filing cabinets. The computer screens became fuzzy and a small coffee spill soon became a small mud pie. The two-room office had to be swept at least three times a week or dust bunnies grew to unruly proportions behind the doors and under the creaky steam radiators. Amid the dirt and the noise, they produced a literary quarterly called Expression which sold for $5.00 a copy. It was a labor of love for the editor and publisher, Janet Lawrence, who had started the magazine on a shoestring eleven years before. Janet handled her enterprise with an intensity that secretly amused Steve. She favored wall charts, push pins, and Post-its. Her profit margin, if any, was minuscule, but she often stated that relating profit to product value was an error primarily made by money grubbers with no taste, no sophistication, and no sense of aesthetics. A big brunette going grey, Janet spent all her time reading unsolicited manuscripts, fussing with the page layout of the next edition, and moving her color-coded push pins from one mysterious square to another. She had hired Steve three months before, after he answered a classified ad she'd placed in a free downtown newspaper. "Look," she'd said, sliding her faux-leopard skin glasses up her nose, "I'm not gonna ask you why you want this job or how you're gonna live on the money. That's your business. But I want to make it clear that just because you work here, it doesn't mean you're automatically gonna get published in Expression." She'd looked at him and paused, and something about the density of that pause and the position of her head indicated a question. Steve wasn't sure what it was, but he felt expected to answer. Finally he mumbled, "I'm not a writer." "O.K.," she said, her shoulders dropping a fraction of an inch. "For five bucks an hour, I don't expect you to stay forever. Just give me two weeks notice, that's all I ask." She'd stood up and extended her hand. "See you Monday at nine. That's in the morning." He'd smiled at her little joke and let himself out into the dimly-lit landing. He went down two long flights and pushed through the metal door to the street, stepping over a full-time stoop sitter with a buzz cut and silver rings in both his nose and his upper lip. "Spare change for beer?" the stoop sitter asked, thrusting his hand toward Steve. "Why should I pay for your beer?" Steve answered, ignoring the fingers that nearly poked his leg. "Fuck you," said the stoop sitter. "I want money, not conversation." Steve disengaged. He walked around the corner to a bagel shop and got himself a cup of black coffee. He had a job, his first in eighteen months. As he stirred three packets of sugar into his coffee, he found his mind drifting back to the stoop sitter. The facial rings and studs were distracting, but Steve had noticed the derailed intelligence that leads to total cynicism behind his muted grey eyes. Steve gazed up into the cracked, gilded mirror tiles glued to the wall behind his table and considered his own eyes. Shit brown. Dull. He shifted in his seat and tapped his fingers on the Formica table top. A job, he thought. A crummy job, but a job.