The meeting was in the conference room on the third floor. It had started at two. At three-thirty the director was still on the second-to-last slide. He was looking at the pie chart and nodding. He had practiced the sentences on the walk over from the parking lot so that when his name came up he could produce them. When his name came up he produced them. They sounded like his voice. His brother had been dead for two weeks. The slide advanced to a bar chart. The team nodded in the pattern teams nod. Inside him there was a room without furniture where sound went and did not come back. The meeting would end at some point and then there would be another meeting.
