The men with Upstairs Eddie were making a lot of noise. They looked, Bunny noted with amazement, like seniors just graduated from Stanhope, the boarding school where she and her older brother, John, would return in the fall: gorgeous in the aggregate if not individually, white boys with gently shaggy hair, bronzed, golden-furred legs in khaki shorts and dirty running shoes. They were drinking Heinekens fished from a cooler full of lukewarm water, from where Bunny had earlier fished her own tepid Coke.

[...] Some stares were simply from interested people who could tell immediately that Bunny was not from Azerbaijan. Some were pointed but mostly playful: “Hello, beautiful girl!” Some scared her, boys who followed her until she could walk fast and resolutely to a safe and crowded distance. “Monica Lewinsky! Monica Lewinsky!” one of them had yelled, cracking up. Bunny cursed the slutty intern as she broke into a humiliating jog.

Her father considered for a moment. “His view is that since the collapse of the Soviet Union, there’s been a gold rush for resources, and that a lot of unscrupulous people are making money in very corrupt ways. Which is true.” When the Glenn parents were together, she sometimes heard her father lament the quality of men with whom he was now expected to engage, and the variety of work he was expected to do. Bunny, despite her sense of alienation from her father, knew he was a very smart man. His bookshelf was filled with forbidding books by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn that Bunny sometimes tried and failed to read.

Bunny had heard again and again of the Contract of the Century, without knowing exactly what it was. Something about oil, different companies working together, revitalizing decrepit wells, blah blah blah. It was as impenetrable to Bunny as the warren of pipes and factories that ran through the Black City, the industrial east of Baku where she had been told not to go. [...]

After they had finished Lale’s food, they watched several of the Friends episodes from the tape Bunny had been given. Bunny loved Rachel’s and Monica’s outfits—so sleek and put-together. [...]

Maryellen spoke again after a few minutes. “Sue found out she had some kind of inner ear thing, vertigo. She had to quit.” She turned down Poirot. “I felt so bad for her; she was devastated. But then she did this travel-booking certificate program they had instead, and she ended up managing a high-end guest house in Bora Bora for years,” said Maryellen. “She married an Australian guy out there. Now she’s retired. Never had any children,” she said, the matter finished. Bunny admired the way that Maryellen and Ted knew so many people with very interesting lives.

Bunny had even come to love the long Repro nights and their time-and-a-half pay, the way she imagined an athlete would love an away game at a distant stadium. When she looked at her bank account every two weeks and saw that $1,072 was deposited there, she felt a miserly happiness. She spent money on nothing but gas, Zumba, Starbucks, and her share of groceries. She packed spartan and sensible lunches, sating afternoon hunger with salted almonds and La Vache Qui Rit. She was always slightly hungry, the hunger forming a slender iron rebar that held up the habitual laxity of her character and flesh. She ate her peanut butter sandwiches with smug slowness while her colleagues went to Buffalo Wild Wings. Her bank account fattened as her body attenuated.

Ready for her party, her disastrous ombré flowing in sculpted waves around her shoulders, Bunny raced down I-10 until she reached the industrial zone east of Houston, after which the tall towers rose up like Oz. The afternoon sun gleamed off the black mirrored windows of the soaring structures, sleek buildings radiating grandeur, permanence, stability, the solidity of guaranteed infrastructure, piercing the sky and dwarfing the faded beauties behind her in downtown Beaumont. Houston. The City. After more than a year at Miles Engineering Consultants, she thrilled to it, had gotten herself a cheap motel room near the site of the party, planned to treat herself to a nice brunch before driving home the next day.

“You want to talk about technology. You know how they used to get oil?” Frank was explaining to them animatedly. “The Burmese dug a big ol’ hole. And then they climbed down there and dug some more till they hit sands. They couldn’t stay down there more’n a minute at a time, and then they had to recover for twenty once they got back up top. They had the women stay up top and hoist up the cuttings they dug up. They were catching oil centuries before any Rockefeller ever thought to do it. They had to do it naked, with rags around their mouths, these little brown guys, but by god they did it.” He laughed. “Took two years to dig one hole.” Bunny held her face in her fixed expression of listening.

Bunny was surprised at this. Obama was heroic to her, a symbol of the victory of good over evil. And he had gotten Osama bin Laden, whatever that was worth—although after the disasters of Iraq and Afghanistan, it did seem a little beside the point. Frank Turnbridge had said, “Finally, something good out of Obama-nation,” and Bunny bristled within.