Signs and Wonders by Alix Ohlin Page B

treatment for their future well-being. Sometimes, people got fired.
    I was introduced to the staff of ICS, a corporate marketing firm, by Melissa, a short, skinny woman in her thirties whose long curly hair made her look even smaller. An animal lover, she had her employees bring in pictures of their pets and post them in the lounge; this, she told me, created community. At the weekly staff meeting, she said, “This is Janet. She’ll be with us for a month or so, conducting interviews. Janet, you’re welcome to put up a picture of your pet in the lounge.”
    “I don’t have any pets,” I said.
    Everyone in the room shifted uncomfortably in their seats. Afterward, I was shown to my temporary office, and was looking over the departmental flowcharts when a voice said, “Janet.”
    I looked up. Adam Leavitt was standing in the doorway, his hands in the pockets of his black pants. His hair was shorter, darker, with a few gray strands in it. He was wearing a white button-down shirt, and above the collar I could see the claws of his tattoo.
    “You work here?” I said. I was too surprised to sound friendly, though I was happy to see him. “I didn’t notice you at the meeting.”
    “I was in the back.” Stepping forward, smiling, he placed his index finger in one of the flowchart boxes on my desk. “It’s just a day job,” he said. “I still play out at night. You look good.”
    “Thank you,” I said calmly, not without pride, as if he were complimenting my car.
    “Let’s have lunch.”
    “I just got here.”
    “I didn’t mean now. I meant at lunchtime.”
    “Right,” I said. On my notepad I wrote down
lunch.
“You can show me where to go.”
    “I’ll give you all the inside dope,” he said, and before leaving he shot me a look that reminded me of college—a shade more intense, somehow, than a lunch date ought to provoke.
    Three hours later we walked to a deli, bought sandwiches, and ate them sitting across the street in the kind of shoe-boxy Midtown park where corporate workers sit on or next to corporate sculpture. Depressingly, we caught up on fifteen years within ten minutes. Our lives went like this: starter job, disillusionment, graduate school, new job, major relationship, stasis. I asked him about his music, and he shrugged and muttered something about a record deal that fell through. He’d worked at ICS for five years and the line between its being a day job and an actual job had blurred to invisibility. He didn’t say he was miserable about it, but I could tell. After we finished eating he gave me a postcard advertising a show by his band, Das Boot, at a bar in Williamsburg on the weekend.
    “Das Boot?” I said.
    “We pretend to be German,” he said. “But we aren’t.”
    “I didn’t know you spoke German.”
    “I don’t. Well, sometimes I use German words, and sometimes it’s more of a German mood,” he said.
    “I’m not sure I understand. What kind of words and moods?”
    “Angry and guttural. Sad and guttural. Zeitgeist. Weltanschauung. Heineken.”
    “Isn’t Heineken Dutch?”
    “Dutch, Deutsch.” He shrugged, and I sensed he’d had this conversation before. “Anyway. It’s a hybrid Sprockets-revival faux-language poetry kind of a thing.”
    I couldn’t tell if this was serious or not. I smiled noncommittally and said it sounded interesting, and he laughed.
    “Well, if it’s not, at least the drinks are cheap,” he said. “Maybe you don’t care about cheap drinks at this point in your life, but will you come anyway?”
    “I don’t know,” I said, catching in his eye a brief flash of disappointment that didn’t seem ironic. “I’ll try.”
    I showed up alone. The bar was dirty, small, pulsing with recorded techno, and close to empty. I saw some people I vaguely knew—acquaintances from college, some in designer clothes, others in studied vintage, with uncut hair. I made chitchat, wishing I hadn’t come. Then something hit me lightly on the back of my head,