The soldiers showed up on Mari's birthday, so she thought it was her fault. I told her it was only coincidence, but Lily took her away anyhow. Lily said I was wasting my time; it was never about Mari's birthday. "Mari is a woman now. No matter what you tell her, she's going to think everything is her fault. Your validation is obsolete. From now on, she'll always look for things she can blame on herself." That was twenty-eight days ago. The soldiers are still here. It wasn't Mari or the soldiers. Lily wanted to leave. She just needed a good excuse. An army of soldiers marching around in the apartment building was good enough. The soldiers never sleep. Day and night they march up and down the stairs in a collapsed, winding circle. The building is three stories tall with crosscutting half staircases between floors. There are just enough soldiers that they are always passing one another going in the other direction. All of them are there for the same reason, going in the opposite and same directions all at once. Things at work weren't going well either. My boss, Patrick, launched what he called The Encouragement Program. I was chosen to be the first participant because of what he referred to as my "consistent and impressive performance." My Encouragement was named Sean. We shared my office. He did the same thing I did. The exact same thing. They gave him my clients, or rather, made me share my clients with him. The premise behind the program was that competition would foster higher productivity. Then, once I was outperforming my Encouragement, they would send Sean back and bring in another Encouragement for someone else. We would do this until everyone had been through the program and then start the whole thing over again. In theory, the program would improve overall performance so much that before long we would have to hire more people on a permanent basis. It was supposed to be good for everyone.

For a while, Brian, who lives on the top floor, thought it was his fault the soldiers were there. He never said so, but he's been tiptoeing around this place ever since they got here. He had told me about a time a couple of years ago when he hit his girlfriend. It had never happened before and hadn't happened since. He said it was a cross between a punch and a slap, but closer to a punch. They had been sitting on the couch on a Friday or Saturday night, and his girlfriend, Shannon, kept talking on He said he was as surprised as she was at what he had done, and for the next few minutes they just sat on the couch with blank expressions, Shannon tenderly feeling her face while he gingerly squeezed his outstretched fingers. It left a big dark bruise on her face. They called off work for a week to give the bruise time to fade. When their respective supervisors asked, they each said the other had surprised them with a cruise. He had never told anyone else about that, and for the life of him couldn't figure out what made him tell me. But he did. He didn't ask me not to tell anyone, so I told everyone. Not because I don't like him—I do—but now he makes me a little nervous about myself, and talking about it helps keep my nerves at bay. After a couple of weeks, my encouragement started to get the best of me. I was doing my best, but I was exhausted and this Sean guy was like a machine, a machine wearing a disguise of prosthetics and makeup to look like me. He told me this one night when we were working late. Well, I was working late; he just stayed to tell me how he had managed to do everything faster than me and ask why I wasn't doing it that way. I told him to lay off. I hadn't been getting much sleep lately. Up to that point I had done a good job of keeping what was going on at home a secret, but I was exhausted and that night I slipped and said, "You try and sleep every night with an army marching outside your door." So I had to tell him about the soldiers, and he told me that was no excuse. That he didn't get much sleep either on account of having to wake up two hours earlier than normal to put this whole "get up" on. Neither of us believed the other. I never thought he looked that much like me to begin with. Lisa, from down the hall, thought they were there to take her away. That they were just waiting for the right time when no one would notice. I've tried to calm her down, always over the phone, because she won't come out anymore. I tell her that if they were there for her, she would already be gone. That if they took her, if that's what they were there for, then they would leave once they had her, and even if no one noticed she was gone, we would certainly notice the soldiers were gone, and someone would do something to get her back or at least make sure she was okay. It didn't do any good. She worried about not being missed. She had family, kids that lived a couple miles away, but they hadn't come to visit since she had moved in. That was five years ago.