One Financial Center, part 2

Jean is in the third floor boardroom, stuffing ribbons of shredded paper into extra large garbage bags. Piles of the stuff cover the long table and spill on to the floor, softly mounded up on the chairs and around the standing lamps like fresh snow. He half-smiles and tosses Zosia a roll of garbage bags, and they cram paper into the bags, pressing out the air and cramming more, then tossing them into wheeled garbage bins. After an hour or so they take the bins down in the freight elevators, dump them and start over again.

"Did you know this is the last day of work?" Jean asks. "That the owner of the building has gone bankrupt?" He is the darkest man she has seen. When she started the job she imagined everybody in a row, Jean at one end and Zosia at the other. La Polacka gonna disappear in the snow, Filomena says. We're all like this back home, Zosia tells her.

"Do you know what they did, the geniuses in this building?" Jean says. Zosia shakes her head.

"Imagine that you buy a little house," he says. "You borrow money from the bank, and then I go to the bank and say look, this young lady is not such a fine credit risk for you after all. Let me sell you insurance so if she can not pay, I will. I have no house, I have nothing, only my suit and my briefcase and my talk. You understand me OK?"

"Jean, I don't know," Zosia says, smiling so he'll keep on. When he's like this she can't follow half what he says but it's nice to hear the even voice while she works.

"Do you know what they did? Do you know what all of this paper is, the people in this building and all these other office buildings, over and over and over again? How can the credit insurance be more than the credit, even more than the all stock markets in the entire world? These are the people that told us they knew how the whole world should work, and that we should adjust our countries the way they said. All of our economic and fiscal policy the way they said, in Poland too, in Colombia and El Salvador too, and all the time they were burning their own house down. My goodness," he says, "I am an economist, I am supposed to know about these things, and I could not tell you what fifty trillion dollars means."

"Do you know what they said to us in my country, when people from my office went to the World Bank? They said it is time for you children to grow up, and to put away all of your toys. Put away your silly price supports, and unions, and municipal water systems, and capital market controls, and unemployment insurance, put away your silly agricultural economists. Now your country has to stop being a baby and become a man, and it is time to put away these childish things. You have to be realistic like us, like our banks that are powerful and strong."

Zosia puts on an apologetic smirk because doesn't know what to say, but Jean isn't looking. He walks around the walls, grabbing handfuls of paper and stuffing them in a bag, bending and stuffing, his voice calm and steady. "I met Mister Summers in Washington, do you know what he said to me? He said, 'I know it will hurt for a while, little baby, to take your medicine, but you need it to be big and strong like us.'"

He blows air slowly like someone breathing out cigarette smoke. "And you know, I saw his face in the Wall Street Journal yesterday, and he is saying that still."

They toss the last of the garbage bags in the loading dock and start wiping down the tables and the wall molding, then Zosia mops the bathroom floor while Jean goes down to the big closet for the vacuum. When the carpet is done it's nine-thirty, time to start packing up. Filomena sticks her head in the doorway. "The union marching here tomorrow on six," she said. "We all going, for our jobs. For our jobs. OK, please you come."

It's not a question but Jean sighs. "Sorry, I will not go. Me voy a mi país, OK?" He glances at Zosia. "It is time for me to go home soon." Filomena sighs, her shoulders sagging down a little. Her lips looked chapped and under her eyes it's dark. "I go, Filomena," Zosia says.

"OK gorda, we will see you." Filomena turns back to Jean, and lays a hand on his cheek. "Prenez soin de vous-même, mi negro."

"Et tois, Fila," Jean says. When she goes they stuff the last of the bags into the rolling bin.

At the swipe clock, Sue Ellen clutches Zosia's hand with damp fingers. "Go on down to the personnel office honey, they need to put you on the list. I'll tell them you're a good little worker, not like the rest of these. Here in America that will always see you through."

"Goodbye, tępa cipa." Sue Ellen's hug stinks. "Oh honey, I don't know what that means but I'm sure it's something sweet like you."

"OK," Zosia says.

Back in her room in Eastie, she doesn't try tonight to think about the forest, about the movies she likes where cars race the wrong way on freeways jumping bridges with boys shooting the heads off boys on the fly, about the fairy tale where Zosia is some kind of angel on a cool journey, a clever pirate: she just shuts off the light and cries. A cold draft blows across her feet. On the seventh floor of a crappy council flat in Warsaw, water is dripping on to the metal siding. Her mother's teeth are floating in a cleaned-out jam jar, her sisters are laying their school uniforms over the tops of chairs, and Zosia's cat is looking for the warmest place he can find, sneaking across the bed covers to nestle on somebody's head until they shove him away.

After crying she can sleep. It's a cloudy night and the planes are roaring low over the house, to the runway a quarter mile away. Zosia wraps up and feels herself a small, pretty shell, polished to a dull shine: a button on a coat.

3

It never seems like two years: sometimes half a year, sometimes almost her whole life. The plan was a a year, maybe. At the last minute, before getting on the plane she even thought in a panic about the army, but the idea of Afghanistan, where her classmate ended up-ended- or someplace worse, and they hardly even pay anyway. Mama says it'll be better, with the European Union, everything costs more but you can work in London, Munich, anywhere. And come home to visit all the time.

Zosia's neighborhood in Warsaw was not like the ladies talked about at work, like Ana told her one night about some of the Colombians' towns: the army then the narcos, shooting everybody, raping everybody. Burning the gardens and the houses. The Dominicans and the Haitians too, Ana said, and in the DR the money all of a sudden was worth like half, so you could stay and give tourists blowjobs or you could get some money from your cousin and get on a plane.

Her building, at least, wasn't like that. The neighbors were nice but Zosia and her sisters heard guns, and cops: blood puddled on the ground. Mostly it just kind of fell apart: people moved out of flats and nobody came in, the cement broke and crumbled, glass dropped out of the window and hit the deaf child. And the water pipes all started leaking, and after a while nobody came to fix any of it any more. That's how it went.

She's finally figured out the buses and trains. After her day job she watches the warm rain patter on the window, sipping a paper cup of sweet coffee that steams up her nose. Someone has left a newspaper on the seat and she slowly reads the headlines, thinking of what Jean said the day when he was doing floors in her area, spreading wax with a wet mop. The way he went on sometimes reminds her of the boy, who talked about being a tycoon, coming over to American where you can start a business without the whole goddamn world on your case.

I'll come right away, he said, I don't care about my mother and them's crap, every single year she's on her last days, she has only a little while left on the earth. In an old-lady voice, All I have left are my memories. His pale rib cage and concave belly floating up and down, talking talking talking until she finally said, you got another condom?

The headlines are all about banks unwinding, and Zosia imagines a giant sweater over the city, the threads loosening and the arms and back melting away. At the laundry the old white women and Vietnamese men say good morning, and she works by the radio, and at noon the lunch truck comes. All day she sent text messages to Ana: R U still going? In the day, on the bus or the subway, Zosia likes it here, where she doesn't hear all the time from Mama and the other unemployed ladies all day long, her sisters needing braces, the crappy toilets, the politicians, everybody's aches and pains.

At night it's different, she knows.

She feels the drums from the march in her stomach when she walks up out of the subway, shouting and air horns getting louder as she walks the two blocks toward the corner where they're meeting. Already a big crowd in front of their building, spilling in to the street where the cops' motorcycle lights twinkle in the dusk, setting up a barricade, and there's Filomena and Ana with their little flags and hats. Filomena is talking to two other women from their crew, making a story with her hands in the air. Filomena and Ana put their arms through hers and they walk up the street toward the crowd. Zosia was always in the middle, her sisters on either side, trying to stray off at the bakery or chase after their little friends so she clutched their arms and pulled them in and mama said that's a big girl, looking after everyone. She wrenches her arm away and drags it across her eyes.

"Don't worry, girl," Ana says, and then Gustavo's leaning against the building, blinking his red eyes at her.

"No te preocupes llorona." He grins. "Your man here to you."

"Cállate, dupek," Filomena says. "No talking now, marching."