There were three old men wedged around a grey pedestal table. The table was undersized and for a moment, it seemed as if their heads possessed a single stalk. They glanced up all at once and I noticed that the light reflecting on their ripened faces came not from the humming bulb on the ceiling but from its reflection on the tabletop. The light was dull and fat and it softened the cobwebs on the rafters and made the walls seem flabby and viscous. It also gave the table the illusion of rotating. “I am sorry,” I told them. “It was not my intention to interrupt.” I should have added that they might have properly locked this room for their conference or whatever was going on, as it was indistinguishable from the line of abandoned office cells that seemed to be lined with a prefabricated corkli
