“Stupid eff-ing emails,” Stan said. “Joyce was on a blast list for Batman toys. They send out a dozen emails a day.” Stan stabbed the Delete key with both index fingers, as if he were playing Asteroids. “They’re all like her. Unemployed.”

“Joyce was into Batman?” Joel said.

Stan leaned back, almost bumping his head on a cubicle wall. “She wasn’t much into working, that’s all I know,” he said. “I been watching her Inbox since she got herself fired, and I haven’t seen a lick of labor in there.”

Joel peeked at Stan’s computer screen. Stan had Joyce’s inbox as part of his Outlook tree. Also in his list were Daniel, Melissa, Jose, Gary, Lucille, Cindy, Bud, Brock … the inboxes of departed coworkers stretched down his screen.

Management had fired Bud nine months ago. He was a drunk, they said. Joel wondered, what would he find if he searched for “vodka” in Bud’s inbox? Lucille had red hair and wore a track suit to work one day. Brock had worked for one week. Maybe less? Brock with the complicated surname, a j, a k, an h, and an i all strung together, and Joel, after practicing its pronunciation all week, never got a chance to say it in public. Brock’s email was probably nothing more than paperwork, health-insurance forms, W-2, dress code. Messages that weren’t supposed to last longer than him.

Stan started a laugh, put his hand over his mouth. “She has an email from this site, imarriedbatman.com. Check out this link.” He waved Joel closer. A window popped up on the screen, with Joyce, her plain face atop a big white dress, standing next to a thick man in a molded Batman outfit. She was holding a bouquet of plastic flowers. Her smile showed her teeth, stained from years of smoking, glowing yellow within the frowsy veil, the browning lace bunched at shoulders. The Batman did not smile. Shadows hid his eyes.

“Crazy girl, huh?” Stan said. “She went to this site a lot.”

When Joel didn’t respond, Stan clicked on the picture. It flipped to another photo, a different bride with black hair and a quiet face. Each click brought up a new picture, another bride, sometimes a groom, holding the same flowers, standing next to the same brooding Batman, in front of the same misty canvas with the yellow Bat Signal shining in the top-left corner.

After clicking through a few pictures, Stan said, “Heck, the guy’s a zillionaire. Huge house. I’d do him, if it would get me in the mansion.”

Joel watched the flipping pictures. They could have been taken on the same day, like school pictures, with dozens of dressed-up betrothed waiting in line to exchange Bat nuptials.

“She wasn’t happy here,” Stan said. “You could tell by her mail. Bosses were right to lose her. Saved time for everyone.”

“How do you know?” Joel said.

“What?”

“That she wasn’t happy. What did she write?”

“Nothing, really,” Stan said. “You start to see patterns, after looking through so much email.” He leaned back, trying to puff up with a professorial air, and this time he did bump his head on his cubicle wall, a painless thud against the thin fabric, but his chest deflated from the surprise impact. “You start by looking at patterns on personal emails. The shorter the time between receive and respond, the less happy they are.” He tapped his temple. “Their head isn’t in the work, you see. Normally you have to switch gears, to get your head from work to personal. If they respond too quick, there’s no switch, you see. Shortest time I ever recorded, 1.18 seconds. Brock. That guy barely had time to write an email between Receive and Send. Then you look at the difference in response times between personal and work emails. If the Response Ratio between work and personal emails is more than two to one, then you got an employee who is not in the game.”

“So Joyce, she didn’t say anything about the office? The people here?”

“Her ratio was 5.879 to 1,” Stan said. He pointed to a company-branded notepad next to his keyboard, where he had written out long lines of numbers. “Her head was not here. I tell ya, I need to write a book about this stuff.”

Joel went back to his desk but avoided his computer. He sorted paper invoices, making several mistakes in alphabetization. He was thinking about Joyce. She had worked for six months, a blond with a pleasant face, not one that stood out in the muted pallor in the office, but she had carried an imperative as she passed his desk, which she did four times each day, on her way to the parking garage for a smoke. Each time, Joel searched for something to say to her, but the current of expectation prickling his forearms also compressed his lungs, and he was left chewing on smoke-stained air as she passed.

Now, too late, he was thinking about Batman. He could have reached out, stopped Joyce on any one of the hundreds of trips past his desk, and asked about her favorite Batman movie, her favorite Bat villain, her favorite Bat gadget. If only he had known.

Joel was a particular expert on the caped crusader because the first Batman movie, the one with Michael Keaton and Jack Nicholson, had opened on his birthday. He was turning nineteen, but he didn’t mention the date to the group, three girls and one other guy who squeezed into his Chevy Cavalier to go to the movie theater. He said nothing at Jack-In-The-Box, where they went to eat after the movie and started a small fire with their greasy taco wrappers. They were quick to stamp it out, giggling like Jokers, but Joel remembered looking back as they sped away, seeing the smoke trapped in that boxy glass building like they had finished a great experiment.

Then they went to a party, and there, standing in the keg line, holding a little plastic cup, Joel mentioned his good fortune, that the universe had gifted the movie Batman for him on his birthday. Soon the whole party, what seemed like the whole world, wanted to know what he thought about the movie. Could you believe Keaton as the Caped Crusader? Was Nicholson awesome as the Joker? They grouped around him, and Joel remembered the first time he wore cologne. He was in junior high, and all the girls, even the cheerleaders, took turns burying their faces in his shirt, as if he were wearing a suit of roses.

Joel had to use his computer to crosscheck an address on an invoice. He rolled over to his monitor, launched the customer database. He glanced back, over both shoulders, then popped open his browser and searched for “Batman Toy Lists.” There were many. He found the same list from Stan’s PC, Batman and the Toy Wonder, and clicked to join.

Membership required you to upload and share your toy list. The system would link it to other members with similar lists, so you could connect with people who had the same toys. Joel’s fate was intertwined with the movie Batman, not the toy Batman. He recounted the toys he’d had as a kid. Building blocks. LEGOs. G.I. Joe. Nothing with Batman. Nothing to connect with Joyce.

It would be better to marry Batman. Go to the next photo session. Get his picture on the site. He tried to imagine Joyce’s surprise. Joel. Former coworker. In a tuxedo. Standing next to Batman, grinning just like her.

After that, she would have to email him. But how long would it take her to see Joel on the site? Would she spot him among all those other Bat wedding pictures?

He went to imarriedbatman.com. There was a schedule in a side column – the next photo session was in two weeks at the triannual Sci-Fi and Toy Expo. In the main matrimonial frame was a tall redheaded bride, taller than Batman, with a proud, round face. She didn’t smile but tilted her head back, as if to impose some austerity on the ceremony. Joel started clicking through the pictures. After twenty-three clicks, he saw the same picture of the redhead. The site shuffled its picture display, pulling at random from its pool of photos. Joel put a paper next to his keyboard and started a count, recording each new face with an f or an m and taking care not to double-count Bat spouses when their pictures repeated. He saw Joyce after ten minutes, capitalized her F on the sheet, and kept clicking. The office closed at six o’clock, and Joel was still clicking, writing. When he had clicked for 30 minutes without seeing a new face, he stopped and counted the letters. 413 total. Only 57 were men. He liked those odds.