Out of Mind Read Online Free Page A

turfed me out. My new and unauthorized accommodation had the added advantage
     that I rarely had to talk to a manager, because for a long and delightful time, the managers hadn’t a clue where I was.
    Then, a full month after I’d moved in, another face appeared around the door. True to form, there was the sharp intake of
     breath, but this time the face, chin jutting aggressively, was followed by a substantial body, shoulders thrust forward.
    “What are you doing here?”
    “Can I help you?”
    “You’re sitting at my desk!”
    I eyed him. A mass of black hair peppered with white falling over his eyes, stomach running to a paunch, but a familiar and
     not unpleasing face with a dimpled chin. He was solid and vast, his skin the color of honey, his lips almost feminine. Sal
     Ghosh, back from the Middle East to reclaim his territory. Not a man to take on head-to-head. He was giving me the same once-over,
     and there was recognition in his eyes.
    “Hi, I’m Goldilocks.” I extended my hand.
    “Sal Ghosh. Get your butt out of my chair, Goldilocks Ballantyne.”
    My butt left his chair but not the room, since there was plenty of space for both our butts—although Sal’s was frankly a squeeze—if
     not for both our egos. What followed was a couple of weeks of very dirty warfare, which ended with a truce when we realized,
     although we’d rather have died horribly than admit it to each other, that actually we were both quite pleased to have the
     company.
    Under the terms of the peace treaty, I moved to another desk and Sal and I constructed a wall of newspapers between us that
     threatened to collapse one day and bury one or the other of us. Occasionally I nudged it in his direction. He moved his producer,
     Penny, into another corner of the room, and then there were three of us. On top of this there was a rotating population of
     camera operators who filled shelves with cameras and cords and mikes and then plastered the shelves with hands-off posters,
     warning death by disembowelment for anyone nicking camera batteries. There was an editing suite next door, where raw footage
     could be processed into a logical sequence and a voice recorded over the top in a matter of minutes when necessary. Sal was
     chronically untidy, and Penny and I rounded off each working day by gathering together the detritus that had found its way
     onto our desks from his and piling it precariously onto his chair. He complained that it was like living with a roomful of
     cleaning ladies. I think he had not noticed that the person who was actually charged with swabbing down our empire was male
     and called Joe.
    Sal was asleep at his desk when I walked in on Monday morning, his leonine head on his plump arms.
    “Hi,” I said into his ear, just loudly enough to rouse him. It was cruel, but he’d have done the same to me. He groaned and
     shuddered. His head reared up, and he regarded me balefully through long-lashed eyes.
    “I just got in from the airport,” he complained, stretching, so that I saw patches of sweat under his arms. “Foul flight,
     storms all the way from Jerusalem. Struck by lightning three times, aborted landing, lucky to be alive.”
    Sal’s ability to create a story out of nothing is legendary in the Corporation. But he does hate to fly. To do him justice,
     there may even have been turbulence.
    I sat down and logged in. I checked my e-mail and saw that a couple of dozen messages had stacked up over the weekend. I cast
     an eye down the list and grimaced. A dozen were from family members of people who, like Melanie, had disappeared without a
     trace. Their desperation steamed from the cold face of the monitor.
    Sal was watching my face.
    “I seem to remember that I warned you,” he said. “You brought it on yourself. You will be followed by wailing and gnashing
     of teeth and rending of garments for at least the next decade.”
    I ignored him, but I feared he was right. I had even brought the deluge on myself by