Sleeping around with strangers from the workplace, didn't feel good anymore. Not that it ever felt good.

Then again, far as Kutone knew, nothing had been good since about a year and a half ago, but she had a knack for finding the bottom beyond rock-bottom. Rain shimmered outside, blinking with the streetlights reflecting up to her balcony window. She was lying in bed, some guy—his name was Nathan, or something like that—above and supposedly "making love" to her limp body. Yet he never lifted his eyes, eagerly watching his own action down below. If he were making any sounds, the rush of cars through the pelting rain muted him—a blessing of silence, Kutone thought, and simultaneously counted the ticks of her clock. He really needed to finish soon—customer service calls in the high-rise offices of Joja Co. started ringing in at eight in the morning, and she needed to catch the 7:15 shuttle leaving from two blocks down the boulevard, at a bus transit center in the innermost parking lot of the local mall.

"Hey, babe?"

She flinched at his rasping voice next to her ear, and then turned, disgusted by the smell of Joja Co. cigarettes and Joja Co. beer on his breath.

"You're not gonna kiss me?"

She'd be a cold-hearted bitch if she refused him this. Yet, Kutone made no move to turn her head back to him. "It's only this one night," she replied.

He stopped. Laid a hand on her cheek and turned her face toward him. The flecks of sweat in his hair glowed, like the winking city lights outside. A thin, shining sheen on his face highlighted the ridges of his brow, contorted in confusion. "That's not the attitude you had at the bar."

Cheekiness laced his voice, trying to tease levity into her body. A stale trick. She sighed, shallowly, and pushed up on his chest. "Must have been the drink then."

"Come on. At least let me finish."

Yet he pulled even further back, as Kutone sat up. She gathered her disheveled hair over one shoulder, and sighed again.

"Was I that bad?"

"It's not you." The proper follow-up to that statement would have been, "it's me," but Nathan didn't seem to need the explanation. He dragged his hand through his hair. Groaned. Kutone decided on a different follow-up statement. "Your girlfriend's gonna wonder where you got to."

He gaped at her like a boy denied his favorite toy car. "But," he stuttered, "at the bar. You said. I said I was gonna…"

"You're not."

"I'm in love with—!"

"You're not." Kutone watched Nathan's shoulders slump, like a balloon losing all its hot air. Like his colors were graying out. Like he was returning from a dream. She hurt to see him like this, but, as her older coworkers would say, "that's real life." She tried to soften her voice. "I'm sorry. You can use the shower. Freshen up a bit."

He didn't answer. Dragged himself out of Kutone's sheets. Gathered his clothes from the floor. Trudged to the bathroom, and closed the door.

The rush of shower water meshed with the whish of cars through the rain. Then, and only then, did Kutone finally press her palms to her face. Tears tugged at the corners of her eyes, but she would not let them come. She didn't deserve to cry: Nathan was the third person, in two weeks, that she'd done this to.

Yet all she thought about, as Nathan wordlessly left her apartment, was the number of hours of sleep she could manage to get in before running to the shuttle the next morning.

Not even lunch with the girls was good anymore. Not that lunch with them was ever good.

Lunch at the cafeteria of Joja Co., Zuzu City Branch HQ, was a lot like sitting at a public confessional, especially on Mondays. The Girls circled the catering tables first, chirping the prologues to each of their weekends.

"Oh, my god, you have to hear what happened to me on Friday…"

"Girl, I bet your Friday was nothing like my Saturday!"

"But you've got to hear what happened when I went to…!"

They picked out a full lunch. The only full lunch: spongy meatloaf, dry roasted potatoes, watery carrots and broccoli, runny applesauce, and a coffee. All Joja Co. branded. They commented on having a wine or champagne later in the evening, to wash away this "god-awful lunch," and then they turned against each other.

"Did you hear? Jessica and Nathan had a fight!"

"Yeah, poor thing! She didn't deserve what Nathan did to her…"

"I heard Nathan met someone at the bar. Someone who works here…"

They'd pick at their food a little bit, down their coffee, and then turn to Kutone.

"Do you know, honey?"

"Yeah, Kutone would know! She's the most knowledgeable out of all of us here!"

"You still need to tell us about that other thing, you scandalous devil, you…"

That other thing. The words physically hurt, and even after a year and a half, the memories made her nauseous. Kutone sighed, grimacing. She traced the rim of her coffee as The Girls watched her, waiting with bated breath, for Kutone's input. It needed to be a response that lived up to her notoriety, and got The Girls riled up, excited to continue the topic. At the same time, honesty had netted her that massive demotion, after that other thing. And yet, "Call me the Goddess of Scandal, then," she replied, shrugging. "I think I slept with him."

A chorus of gasps and "No, you didn't!" echoed around her. In a sane world, Kutone thought, this would also be the part where she was publicly humiliated. Figuratively crucified. If only it led to her termination.

But she worked in a dimension of insanity. The Girls huddled close, and brought their voices to a whisper.

"Well, Nathan's hot. You were drunk. And you're a pretty girl, Kutone."

"Jessica might need to learn something from you, about keeping her man!"

"But this is Kutone we're talking about! Nathan's easy pickings compared to what she had before!"

Kutone downed her coffee. Winced. Joja-brand black always made an acidic flare boil up behind her nose and throat. Then, "You guys are terrible. You're supposed to be shaming me, aren't you?"

"Well, yeah, shame on you for seducing a taken man, but shame's no news to you, is it? Besides, that's real life, right there."

"Real life," Kutone echoed. "Sure…"

Not even the Department Exec's compliments could perk her up anymore. Not that they ever did.

In a sorry emulation of the building' starling chief merchandise executive, he liked to lean against the left side of Kutone's cubicle threshold, wrist flopping clumsily over the upper corner. With his arm raised, his shirt and suit jacket pulled up, revealing his beer-hardened gut. It flopped just as oafishly as his wrist, especially when he laughed.

"Kutone, still the best at this after nearly two years!" he roared. His voice against the tk-tk-tk of other cubicle employees at their keyboards—if only Kutone could scratch her ears off. "Here at Joja Co., we love your consistency. Your calls are always efficient, yet welcoming and hospitable—we record them, remember, for quality assurance."

"I remember, Boss," she replied, hoping the same efficiency would get him to leave.

"And then the customers call back!" He squinched his face to match his squeezed voice. "I was just talking to Kutone, can I talk to her again? She helped me out so much." He relaxed his face. "And then your reports, miss, are stellar! It's difficult to think you're actually taking notes while in the middle of those excellent calls!"

"I've had prior experience."

"Keep it up, then!"

And now for the acting. Kutone leaned back in her seat, and crossed her legs. Like the femme fatale they think I am, she thought, except instead of skirts, I make pants look sexy. "Boss, no raises, nothing?" She put on her fake coy smile, the one that got Nathan into her bed just last night.

The Exec's belly bounced as he harrumphed and lowered his voice. "Kutone, we need to continue seeing these results. I can only talk to the top about it, but I'm not the one who ultimately decides… Besides, you have history." He waddled closer. "I can at least treat you to dinner and a drink or two?"

Kutone, in her wheeled chair, kicked away from him, and coasted back to her desk. "You said that last month, sir. Guess I'll just keep waiting."

He roared again, laughing. "A living she-devil, just like they say up top! Keep up that sense of humor! You'll be seeing that Administrator position again soon enough!"

Then he waddled away. Kutone stopped spinning in her chair. Relaxed her legs. Sighed. It seemed to her that, no matter how much she sighed, she could never alleviate the pressure in her chest. The blue walls of her cubicle, the blue paint of the department room, the blue neon sign above (Life's better with Joja [smiley])—they all wedged a knobby pressure deep under her rib cage, and the drink, the sex, the girls, the boss, none of them could ever relieve it. That's why, she figured, she sighed so often.

"I am an Admin, Boss."

Since roughly a year ago, when she'd finally gotten used to the stumble she'd taken, restlessness jostled her chest at around this time. Every afternoon, after the Exec left her cubicle and wobbled off to blow smoke up some other Admin's ass, at exactly this time when the lull in work stirred that restlessness into a possible fit of crying, a different, warmer, yet nagging memory threatened to surface again.

Dear granddaughter…take this...

She had a memento, the one thing Grandpa Issu left to Kutone when he had last uttered, "Now, let me rest," locked away in the first drawer of her desk. And, like every stale day when the booze and sex and Girls and compliments didn't help, she opened the drawer and stared at the sealed envelope inside. An elegant wax seal on a yellowed envelope, the memento called up Grandpa's voice again and again.

There will come a day when you feel crushed by the burden of modern life…

Real life, Kutone inwardly corrected. This is real life—her current situation, the rumors, the emptiness, was due entirely to herself. But she remembered her Grandpa falling asleep that last time, and with him, the memories and stories of his happy life in some distant country valley. Dad and Mom had never talked much about Grandpa's life, but Grandpa, with Grandma smiling next to him, had so much to say. They'd talked about vibrant colors beyond blue and gray, weathers beyond smoggy and rainy, and people who loved for longer than just one night, people who knew what "love" meant. They had stories about the sky being higher than the city scrapers, so high up and free that the clouds touched the stars. They talked about the soil in that valley always smelling like fresh rain, and the rain smelling like the wildflowers and seasonal fruits—and that, they would say, was their love.

Kutone had only just started working when Grandpa Issu went to rest. As a younger teenager, work was liberation from school, even if it was just scanning the neighbor's Joja groceries across a red light. She was generating income. Saving up with a bank account. Paying credit card bills and applying for her driver's license. Auto insurance. Renter's insurance. Mom had smiled and said, "My baby girl's going out into the real world!"

But…that's it? Work, eat, drink, sleep, repeat? Maybe sometimes people found "love," but love here in the city deflated Nathan's shoulders—every man and woman living the night life in the city had seen that image at some point, like a 1g-gold star on their crumpled "Real Life Certificate." Love, she thought, flickered gold or auburn or red in a cold glass. Love stole the breath of a man and changed it into tobacco smoke. Love iced the surface of a bed and still invited wayward guests. But, "No," she corrected herself. "Love gave me his world, and then took it away."

…your bright spirit will fade before a growing emptiness…

"Am I alive?"

So breathless was the question that she couldn't hear her own voice through her headset, but she felt it. Like cold smoke, it wisped through her hollow chest, and settled at the bottommost pit of her stomach. She couldn't remember the last time she felt happy. Had she laughed at all in the ten years since Grandpa went to rest? Fallen in love since she started working? Mom wanted a career woman out of her daughter, and she was on that path! Full-time work with benefits, and it was a salaried job! She was affording a high-rise apartment in the city, there was no getting better than that—

"I used to be."

Yeah, one time, she did laugh. She did love. She once sat in meetings with the men, offered criticisms and suggestions to her own executives—she was the role model career woman marketers made into empowerment posters for young girls. And now…

Her breath quivered. It vibrated in her throat and stung her eyes. Her hand went toward the first drawer of her desk.

When that happens, my child, you'll be ready for this gift…

She broke the seal.