I once worked in a small state agency that, among other things, analyzed legislation. At one point the agency’s head hired three new analysts. One of them was a woman in her early thirties—call her Leena. Her job was to brief other staffers on budget-related bills. When she first took the job, she seemed knowledgeable and reliable. She knew the names and general attitudes of lawmakers (a great advantage in that position), and she seemed to know a lot about the state budget. She was a tad abrasive, to be sure. At the first staff meeting Leena attended, she talked a great deal and at one point loudly used the word “tit.” But apart from the loudness and occasional impropriety (“Do these loafers make me look like a lesbian?”), she was friendly and seemed capable.

Then the disappearances began. She would come in two hours late and say her power had gone out as a result of a storm no one else had been aware of (and anyhow, we wondered, why should a power outage make you that late?). There were endless excuses to leave work early. Once, she said she and her boyfriend had ridden on an amusement park ride and her tailbone was too sore to sit at her desk. One morning around 10 she said her cat had vomited and she needed to attend it; she didn’t return that day. And then there were the funerals​—​for friends she’d known at school, for her parents’ friends, for family members. You wondered how she could endure so much death.