Safety and Accountability

In five years, a man named Quentin that I met briefly in a coffee shop might come to work in a windowless office. His job will be to examine expense receipts in manila envelopes marked “process and file” with a red stamp. He will lick the tip of his pencil before he writes anything. In the bottom right hand drawer of his desk, eighty-seven un-mailed love letters to a woman in Safety and Accountability named Irma Wentshire will lie hidden under boxes of paperclips. Quentin will never know her as more than a page of numbers, but he will fall in love with her expenses. One day, one of his co-workers will go nuts and shoot him in the forehead with an AR-15 assault rifle. The story will run on the evening news, but even though Irma will watch the report while eating dinner, she will never know who Quentin was. The story will say nothing about the letters. Maybe, instead, the story will focus on the killer, on the isolation or childhood trauma that drove him to violence. Irma will think, “What a sad, sad, man. If I had met someone like that, I’d listen and maybe understand just enough to make all the difference in the world.”