Something was wrong with the new Administrator. Marsha knew this right away. He was a very young man, or perhaps not young; prematurely bald, but with a child’s face; argumentative, but conciliatory; with a Southern accent, but who had been born and lived all his life in New Hampshire. He was a sympathetic and gregarious boss who invited the concerns of his staff, but when directly addressed about any concern was cold, dead, and defensive, unwilling to concede any point even by acknowledging it. He smiled constantly, and his smiles appeared horrified, like a death-rictus. His laughter was effortful and histrionic. His face was shiny, pink, and unremarkable, more like the idea of a face; his lips were here and his nose was there.   

Marsha tracked the activity of the Administrator in a red notebook. At one point, he went away to “Wisconsin” for three weeks and upon his return had cultivated a small, triangular beard that was almost black in color and was groomed so ferociously that it lay dead upon his face, as if he had drawn it on with a grease pencil. The beard failed to age his face, as Marsha supposed he had wished. Although bold and striking, the beard also failed to confer upon him any sense of character or determinacy, and eventually the man prevailed over the beard, until it was only the idea of a beard.

Marsha sent him a memo: Why are you like this?  But the Administrator did not respond. Marsha tried all day to find him, to demand his reply, but he made himself visible only in flashes – cantering in a blur across her field of vision or disappearing around a corner like the White Rabbit, laughing shrilly at a joke in which he had not been included. He went through a door that had not been there earlier.        

Next, the Administrator grew handsome. It was a rubbery handsomeness that seemed unspecific to him and which might have been used to model the faces of children’s toys. A police officer. A soldier. What was more upsetting was that Marsha could see the little boy he once was in his bearded decoy face, and it seemed as if this child would emerge at any moment, to no good end. He had a full head of hair now, and he was from Maine. People are never from Maine. 

Marsha sent him another memo, to ask him What happened to you? and Where do you disappear to? She wrote, I won’t laugh at you. He did not reply.

Marsha stayed after work to trap the Administrator at his desk. He was working late and would be alone. No one wanted to be alone. Perhaps he didn’t realize that he could confide in her, tell her what had happened to him. When Marsha went to the Administrator’s office, there was a door that had not been there earlier. She handed him a copy of her memos. She asked only for a similar gesture in return: nothing deep, nothing fatal, but a few words, some small revelation of character. He owed her that much. “Tell me something real about you,” Marsha said.

“I can’t,” said the Administrator, winking frantically to activate some code, or a failsafe. “You were never supposed to notice.” His voice had a pleading tone. 

“But I have noticed,” she said. It was possible to be known. She was sure of this, even now, after all of the Administrator’s shenanigans, all the back and forth. It was possible to be one thing or the other, the enduring self that travels like a message in the blood to the brain. If he was not anybody, it might be the kindest thing to dispose of him. She could lure him to the pier and push him off, into the harbor. She didn’t have to think much about this unpleasantness, though, because he was changing again, shrinking now into the figure of a small, red dog, roughly in the shape of a potato, or of a baby, as drawn by an older baby. Then she knew she was seeing him truly, and she was relieved that he was something real after all.