The woman with the sign came every morning at seven and left at noon. Karl Olesen could see her from room 412 if he stood near the radiator. She wore a coat the color of a wet sidewalk. Her sign said WE WANT TO WORK in marker on the back of an election poster from a campaign Karl couldn’t quite place.
He’d given her a life. A school administrator, he had decided. Cut by a procurement vendor in 2028. Three years of public anger, learned slowly. He didn’t know if any of it was right. He knew she was why he had taken the job.
The room smelled of pool coffee and someone’s microwaved lunch. The radiator clanged twice and stopped. Down on the street the woman was talking to a man in a suit. Karl watched her gesture toward the building, then toward herself, then dismiss him with a hand. The man walked on. She stayed.
Davis came in without knocking. Davis was sixty-one years old and had been working the Hill for thirty-five of them and looked, at eleven in the morning, like a man at the end of a long shift. He set a folder on the table.
“They’re going to ask about audit staffing,” he said. “Not labor. Vail wants the framework. Inspectors. Certification path. Cost recovery.”
“That isn’t what I prepared.”
“You prepared the right thing.” Davis didn’t smile. “It’s the auditors who get the labor groups to vote yes. They want to know how many of their people we’re putting to work.”
Karl looked at the folder. He understood, fully and at once, what the auditors were. Not a footnote. Not a side effect. The auditors were the trade. The Ban refused the machine and built, in the same gesture, an industry of compliance officers and certification reviewers and inspectors that would, by next year, be the third-largest employer in the country. The auditors were the engine the Ban hid in its own basement.
“How many,” he said.
“Three million by year five and you get Hoxha and Reyes and the IBEW. Less and you don’t.”
“Three million is.”
“Don’t say it. Write the brief. You have an hour.”
Karl took the folder. He thought of the woman in the wet-sidewalk coat. He thought of his own salary, which he had earned for three months now and not quite spent. He thought of his father, who had been laid off twice in his life and had said nothing about it either time.
“Three million,” he said.
Davis nodded and left.
Karl sat at the table and opened the folder and began to write.
He gave the brief at one. The number was three million by year five, scaling to eight by year fifteen. He didn’t say scaling to eight. He said with steady-state expansion in the eight-to-ten million range over the medium term, and the senators wrote this down. Hoxha smiled, briefly. Reyes asked a clean question about cost recovery and got a clean answer and sat back.
At one-forty he was excused. He drank water in the antechamber. A senior staffer ate a sandwich a few seats away and did not look up. The hallway smelled of carpet cleaner. Karl thought about how rarely, in any room he had ever been in, anyone ate openly while someone else was waiting.
At two-fifteen Vail opened debate. At two-twenty-eight Krieger gave the speech Krieger had been waiting his whole career to give, the one about the centrality of human labor to human flourishing, written for him in fact by his nephew the philosophy major. Karl watched from the gallery rail. He cried briefly when the gavel came down, in a way he hoped no one would see, and the woman two seats over saw, and patted his shoulder, and said we did good. He wanted to say I’m staff. He said we did good back. She turned her face toward the floor as if she had said it to a son.
Outside, the protesters were celebrants. The signs had been past-tensed in marker. WE GOT TO WORK. Karl looked for the woman with the wet-sidewalk coat and didn’t find her. Maybe she was gone home. Maybe she had been someone else by now, on to a different cause. Maybe she had never existed in the way he had needed her to.
Davis was at the curb with the sedan.
“Drink?”
“Yes.”
They went to a place on K Street that didn’t card Senate badges. Karl drank three Old Fashioneds in a row and listened to Davis describe the next six months. Rulemaking. Audit staffing. Certification standards. Davis kept saying what we built today. Karl kept agreeing.
He thought about the woman who had patted his shoulder.
He thought, distantly, about the model he had written in an hour. Three million. Eight by year fifteen. He thought about it the way one thinks about a poem one has memorized and has not yet decided whether to believe.
He went home around eleven. He took off his shoes and lined them at the door. He brushed his teeth and got into the bed where his girlfriend, Allison, was already asleep. She made a small sound and did not wake.
He slept badly.
At four he was awake. Something was wrong somewhere he couldn’t place. Not the apartment, not Allison, not his stomach or his head or his throat. He lay still for a while and listened to her breathing. He got up at five and made coffee. He read the morning news on his phone. The Ban was the lead story in every paper.
He felt better.
He went to work at seven and was at his desk by seven-thirty and stayed until ten.
He did not, when he was old, remember what had woken him at four. He remembered the Ban had passed. He remembered the woman in the gallery. He remembered the three Old Fashioneds. He did not remember the four o’clock feeling. That, perhaps, was the most important thing about the day, though he would not have called it that at the time and would not have called it that fifty years later either, by which point he would have lost most words for what could no longer be undone.