Fiction

After months of confusing applications and automated interviews an offer finally came in. They were a small, nonprofit team working off grant funding to study how wildlife adapted to climate change in urban environments. They needed someone to transcribe a year and half worth of field notes the rest of the team was too busy to deal with. The contract was only for six months and not very well paid, but no questions were asked about the twelve year gap on Claudia’s resume or her lack of science background. They only told her not to worry about dressing up when she started on Monday.

Claudia still arrived wearing the only dress slacks she owned that still fit right and old dress shoes that clicked loudly as she walked. She rode the train, something she hadn’t done alone in a number of years. People rushed around her, going this way and that. Elbows of blazers and wafts of strong cologne blended together and she got off with the flow, letting herself be carried up and out of the station into a new stream of strangers. She walked through an old, cement neighborhood filled with old, cement buildings. Inside of one, she clicked her way across an art deco floor made of polished tiles and was greeted enthusiastically by two people who looked somewhat out of place among the lobby chandeliers.

Jewel and Lenard were the lead researchers. The two of them nearly matched in their faded jeans and sneakers, graying ponytails frizzing at the tops. They all traveled upstairs where the elevator wobbled at the top and opened to a dark attic space covered in wooden paneling and steely exposed tubes. The echoing of air being pushed through along with the creaking and clicking of wood and Claudia’s shoes overshadowed the brief tour where Lenard pointed where each shadowed, labyrinthine hallway led to, but she nodded along anyway. They ended at an alcove filled with makeshift computer desks and small windows, flooding the dusty space with a soft light. Her space was set up along a wall with a boxy donor laptop and metal, folding chair piled high with notebooks and accordion folders. They left her to get settled without much fanfare and Claudia shifted the pile to the floor next to her. She grabbed the top notebook and flipped it open.

The drawing that greeted her was done in pen, stains that looked like raindrops blurred the angles of a bird’s wing. A beak bled through the page underneath. Talons, eyes, feathers were all drawn in close detail. The figures were accompanied by smudges of lost observations. She flipped through the book and tried another one. Similar scribbles of messy pen greeted her. Book after book offered only the same, undeniable circumstance. It was all pigeons.

How they nested, traveled, mated, ate, lived among city residents was laid out across notebook after musty notebook and folders of scribbled writings and hand drawn diagrams. Claudia looked around her desk. No one was watching her. If she got up and left right now no one would likely notice, she hadn’t even signed any paperwork yet. Because while Claudia could deal with a dark, attic of an office and waking up at the crack of dawn to pack lunches for her and Ben before an hour and half commute into this dirty, industrial maze, she could not deal with pigeons.

She’d always hated them. Their loud flapping and inability to respect personal space had always elicited the same panicked sprinting as far back as she remembered. The way they sounded, their germs, their pointy little bird faces, all of it horrible. Claudia spared another glance around. She still had no idea what she was supposed to do with all these notes and their smudged, indecipherable handwriting and no one else around seemed to care about that.

The whole team appeared to work out of the same small area. Claudia only caught flaps of arms and backs with names rattled off too fast to catch, she thought maybe there were five of them. She desperately tried to memorize any defining features, but the haze of rumpled, untucked shirts on long-haired men and hiking pants might as well have been copied and pasted across each one of the bodies that flew by. None of them had even spared her a nod.

            “Don’t mind them,” Jewel said. Claudia realized she was at a desk station across the small space from her. “Feathers are just a little ruffled around here with our deadlines looming.”

            Claudia nodded. She half debated excusing herself to the bathroom and running but she didn’t remember where the bathroom was. Claudia turned back to the notebook she’d opened with Jewel still looking on encouragingly, reading the top most notes describing how pigeons appeared to be built well for evading buildings and fast moving vehicles. They were fast themselves and sturdy, apparently keeping them out of more trouble than other urban species, or so the notes highlighted with a hefty underline and a few question marks. Claudia read on with the image of a large pigeon swooping down, wings spread, beak open, and talons poised for attack stuck in her head on a loop. She read assuming she would stop when someone came to tell her what to do and ended up reading until everyone else packed up for home. She followed them, adrift, and marked where the bathroom was on her way out.

            And Claudia returned the next day, only getting a little lost on the way up. She was greeted by Lenard slapping an onboarding form on her desk and giving a quick rundown on the master document she’d be adding research notes to under pre established tabs of different categories. All the software was unfamiliar but Claudia nodded along. He recommended they schedule weekly meetings to check in on her progress and told Claudia to book some time on their digital calendars. After struggling to figure out how to locate his own schedule she saw he was fully booked for weeks out and turned back to the notebook pile instead.

Hesitantly, she opened one and began to type what she saw. Pigeons were small. Pigeon feathers were water resistant. Those could go under physical attributes. Gross and dirty would also suffice. Pigeons were territorial, that could go under behavior. Pigeons were freaky with little beady bird eyes. Claudia typed and drifted. She would need to finish laundry when she got home, Ben’s shorts were stinking up the garage. They were almost out of eggs and sandwich bread too. Pigeons could extract food from narrow spaces by using their feet and beaks; that one came with a little drawing done in smudged pen of a pigeon’s clawed foot gripping a bag of potato chips.

Lenard appeared back beside her desk. “I can’t help but notice some creative interpretation on your end of things.”

“I thought I was meant to summarize?”

            “Only in instances of repetition. Try to keep to the words as they are written. If something is unclear just tag me in the document.”

            “Yes, of course,” she nodded. She wanted to ask him more questions. She’d wrote some down last night at home, alone in bed and unable to sleep. They were things like, Who do you all work for? What is this project for? What exactly is the point of all this? But Claudia couldn’t think of the right way to ask.

            “Do you always type like that?” Lenard pointed down to where her index and middle fingers were still hovering on the keyboard. He shook his head. “Anyways, just think of these field notebooks as a style guide and keep to that.”

            Claudia tried to ask what that meant, but he’d already walked away. She was alone again in her little corner, the window above her offering only a strip of bare gray sky. She began to type again. Pigeons weighed between 220g and 340g from birds lured onto a scale near State and Madison, average 227g. Birds weighed near the Riverwalk trailhead averaged closer to 330g. Did the river yield a more consistent food supply —whoever wrote these didn’t think so. Pigeons were not well suited for fishing but did seem to enjoy a swim. Claudia used to visit the Riverwalk with Ben, they frequented a wine bar one of his college friends owned. She always got nervous sitting outside in the evenings with all the pigeons that would circle the outdoor tables begging for scraps. They were everywhere. Claudia’s trip back to the train last night she had passed a flock of pigeons picking at someone’s abandoned takeout food. She had edged around them and ignored the stomach churning chorus of cooing and scuffling. Claudia had reminded herself they were fast and nimble enough to chase after her if she stepped on one accidentally.

The team invited Claudia out for drinks at the end of her first week. She agreed, bashful and excited as she trailed behind the group of hunched shoulders and crossbody bags. They all walked so quickly, perfectly in step with each other. Claudia was lost in the tailwinds and sped up to reach Jewel who was back a ways talking with Lenard. She reached them in time to see him scratch a hand across Jewel’s lower back, saying something that made her slap his shoulder and laugh. Claudia debated changing course but it was too late. Jewel saw her and swooped, linking their arms together and marching her away from Lenard towards the bar, half prize and half prisoner.

            Jewel did not let Claudia stray far for most of the night, ordering them a flight of fruity beers in little round glasses to share. Claudia had not drank beer in a long time. It had  improved since the days of her sharing a six pack of whatever Ben picked up at the store on his way home from work, back when the two of them lived in a small apartment in the city and were still in school. Jewel placed her hand on Claudia’s arm when she spoke and squeezed it when Claudia replied.

Someone else cracked a joke, Nish she thought, and Claudia laughed along without hearing it. She was slowly observing how to tell her flighty officemates apart. She catalogued who had a handsome nose and who wore the reddish glasses versus the gold, who bit their nails and whose wedding rings gleamed on hairy hands. Jewel wore her nails long, the slightly wrinkled skin on top of her hands dotted with freckles and bare, ringless fingers just like Claudia’s.

*

            When Jewel asked Claudia to step into her office one morning a couple weeks later she thought it was a joke, but then Jewel was leading them both through hallway after twisting hallway back past the out of order bathroom and to a closet that she opened, waving Claudia inside and shutting the door behind them. It was a spacious closet but still a closet, dusty wooden shelves empty aside from a couple boxes. A small window at the back was propped open with a door wedge stuck in it.

            “Lenard is always leaving this open,” Jewel said. She reached into her bag and pulled out a pack of cigarettes, extending one towards Claudia who just stared at it, her head tilted and shoulders stiff. “Not a smoker then,” Jewel laughed and put it away.

            Claudia stayed and watched Jewel light her cigarette, breathing in and exhaling smoke back out towards the window where it escaped in rivulets back into the sunny, stagnant air of downtown. Soft sounds of traffic poured inside and filled the silent, stale air between them. Claudia breathed carefully, afraid to cough or look too disgruntled. She could have left but it seemed like that time had come and passed so she stayed, rocking on her heels in the sneakers she’d swapped her dress shoes for that looked more like the ones Jewel wore. Ben had been a smoker when she first met him and always hated the way the bitter smell clung to his shirts. She wished she had something to do with her hands too.

Making up her mind at last, Claudia moved closer to the window to lean against it and heard soft cooing. Barely visible on the roof, pigeons were lined up under the window. They were basking in the sun, wings fluttering gently. Claudia jumped back.

            “What’s wrong?” Jewel asked.

            “Nothing, just some pigeons out there.”

            “Oh, yeah. They love this spot too. They’re creatures of habit, have you seen that in the notes? The same pigeons will return to their favorite resting spots over and over again regardless of weather or construction or anything.”

            “Hmm.” How many days had Claudia made the same path from bedroom to kitchen and back again or to back yard, to grocery store and back again? Enough to wear the carpet in her hallway down probably if she didn’t steam it regularly. Enough for there to be greasy spots on the handle of her fridge she always forgot to wipe away, and holes in the patio where she’d stand in the afternoon and watch her flower pots struggle to bloom. There was a bit less to do now, with Ben gone there were no longer coffee rings left on the counter. She still wiped it down out of habit.

            When Jewel was done smoking she offered Claudia a spritz of perfume to cover up the smell of smoke. Claudia nodded her thanks and Jewel crept close to spray her own wrist and pressed it to Claudia’s neck, one side and then the other.

            Now that Claudia knew to look she saw Jewel go back to the smoking closet frequently. Sometimes alone, sometimes with Lenard. She never disappeared for long and always came back smelling freshly of perfume.

Claudia started going back there by herself too. It was something to break up the endless scrawl of scratched out notes and marginal asides as she went through notebook after notebook, although she was disappointed when she arrived to find it empty. Two months had passed in a blink without much notice from Lenard or anyone else. Claudia’s days passed evenly. She packed lunch for her and Ben. She rode the train in and back home. She cooked dinner and tidied. She went to bed. Even this new commute soon became another easy, carpeted path.

She passed by more pigeons in a day than she’d ever really realized. The ones drawn over and over again in the field notes were fragmented, a wing here, a nostril cere there. That’s how she tried to see them in real life too. There was nothing scary about a foot. Pigeon’s leg muscles had evolved to be sturdier to keep up with human demand. Their powerful breasts perhaps emerged by preening under human guidance generation after generation for thousands of years. Pigeons today still strutted chest first, two different muscle fibers making up the largest and most important flight muscle. Their chests depressed the wings at the shoulder, where attached to the deltopectoral crest of the proximal humerus. Claudia tried to sit up straight in her desk chair and felt her own chest stretch, odd joints popping and cracking in a way they never did before.

            It was pouring rain and Claudia headed straight to the smoking closet when she saw Lenard leaning against her desk waiting on her. He had an annoying habit of checking on her progress first thing in the morning when he had to know she hadn’t started on anything yet. She clambered inside the closet, dripping from her jacket onto the floor. She pried open the closed window as far as it would go and peered out, balanced up on her toes making her rain boots squeak loudly.

The window led onto the roof, sun bleached concrete dark gray with the downpour. Another gray shape moved into her view. A soaking wet pigeon looked at her with a tilted head and sad bird eyes; a shiver coursed through its little bird body. Pigeons regulate their body temperature by tucking in their heads and feet. They have downy feathers that helped to insulate them, pulviplumes she believed they were called. Claudia thought of the birds she passed outside the train station, the ones huddling next to buildings to avoid the scuffle of feet and how she’d stopped shuddering away when they ruffled their feathers to settle. She thought of Ben in his little puffer coat all weighed down by water, drips pouring off his curly hair. How his cheeks used to get so red and how Claudia used to wrap a scarf around his neck before sending him off with a kiss.

            Claudia pointed at the window, “You want in?”

The bird shivered again.

Claudia reached her arm through the narrow space to try and beckon the bird inside. It backed up and puffed up its chest. Claudia pushed at the window harder and its old wooden latch snapped. She hauled the heavy glass pane up. “Here you go.”

            The pigeon hopped its way inside and Claudia dropped the window closed with a loud slam which must have alerted the bird to its new surroundings because it began flailing, squawking, and pooping all at once. It flew back at the window and banged its body against the glass.

            Claudia sprinted out of the closet, shutting the bird in behind her. She heard it yelling frantic bird calls in her absence. She shakily maneuvered back towards the office area where Jewel was now seated, tiny drops of rain clinging to the ends of her hair.

            “There’s, umm, a bird in the smoking closet,” Claudia said.

            “Really? How’d it get in?”

            Claudia shrugged.

            “Probably Lenard,” Jewel rolled her eyes. “Let’s go.”

            Claudia followed her back to the closet again. At first the bird was nowhere to be found, then Jewel spotted it wedged between a shelf and the wall. She tried to grab it, but the thing flapped its wings rapidly and growled an indignant, pigeony roar the closer she got. Jewel instructed Claudia to close the closet door and she did so, reluctantly.

            Jewel backed up and squatted down while Claudia pressed herself back against the door, hand poised to open it and run if she needed to. Jewel opened her hands, arms half raised off to her sides. She cooed at the bird, softening her voice into a low drone that washed over the closet, barely audible over the rainstorm.

The pigeon stopped fighting, cranking its head and bowing instead.

Jewel returned the gesture, bowing low and popping her shoulders up like wings. Her chest came next as she rolled her body back up, cooing louder. She twisted her head side to side stepping forward.

The pigeon shook itself loose and hopped down onto the floor. The two of them closed in, circling each other as Jewel whispered, “Go open the window,” just before she lunged and grabbed the bird, closing one hand around its head and another around its middle.

Claudia ran over and shoved the window open. As she did, Jewel reached out and thrust the bird out of her grip, pulling Claudia’s hands out of the way as the glass dropped closed again. Back outside, the pigeon squawked indignantly then shook itself off and flew away.

“There, that wasn’t so hard,” Jewel wiped her hands on her pants.

“What was that?”

“Mating signals,” she explained. “Typically a male initiates but more aggressive females can as well. There’s actually a lot of homosexual coupling in feral pigeon populations, I mean, you’ve seen the notes. The dance is all in the neck and chest. They puff up like this,” she rolled her shoulders back again, stretching her neck out to the other side. “And the bowing and shaking comes with a song they sing to each other.”

Jewel dropped down again, shaking her head slowly, her still damp hair flopping about her shoulders. Claudia dropped as well, trying to mimic her movements. She felt stiff and awkward, pulsing out her shoulders in disjointed movements. She braced her hands on her thighs to rise back up and stop, but then Jewel strutted forward, bowing her head down, waiting for Claudia to reply.

She did, stepping forward again and ducking her head down still in her pigeon squat. Claudia’s head was almost in the other woman’s neck, their feet slotted together like a dance. She could smell Jewel’s perfume, felt some of her hair curled from the rain gently brushing her cheek.

Jewel’s lips pursed as she made a soft cooing sound. Claudia leaned closer to copy her, tilting her head and cooing right back against her ear. Jewel placed her arms on Claudia’s shoulders and squeezed gently, her thumbs rubbing over the fabric of her shirt. Claudia bowed her head low one last time in a nod and Jewel turned. She pressed their lips together, soft pigeon sounds getting lost between them.

*

            Jewel and Claudia made cooing noises at each other from their desks when no one else was paying attention. Claudia worked quicker now, her eyes had grown used to the styles of handwriting and the transition from reading to typing. She was only interrupted by frazzled clucking of the others searching in her pile for something they needed or by Lenard swinging by her desk periodically to question why she’d put all the notes about pigeon’s communally grooming each other into the behaviors area when it should clearly have gone with relationships. Claudia always heard him coming before she saw him. The shuffle of his feet and quiet muttering as he squabbled on his bluetooth gave him away.

Claudia knew there was something between Jewel and Lenard. It was the way they dragged each other off sometimes beyond the normal smoke break. They took lunch meetings out together and arrived at the same time almost each morning. Jewel hadn’t asked Claudia back with her to the smoking closet again and they had not been alone since the window incident some weeks ago. Only Lenard, who looked over Claudia’s shoulder, emailed her pages of edits to make and reminded her frequently to refer back to her ‘style guide’, was led off personally by Jewel.

After another morning watching Jewel and Lenard disappeared together, Claudia decided to take her lunch break outside. She circled the block and found a small park. More a smudge of green space and some benches but it was still nice. Pigeons were splashing away in a fountain, more running after each other in the grass clicking and chirping in a way that sounded like laughter. Ben and his friends used to run around in her yard like that. He used to lay on a blanket in the grass and read with her, and share peanut butter sandwiches. Claudia really needed to mow the lawn. She’d been reminding Ben to do it next time he came by but was close to giving up hope on that. A couple of pigeons approached where Claudia sat and stared at her with their beady bird eyes. She cringed back.

Feral pigeons demonstrated the highest intelligence for social cues both within their own familiar units and when interacting with birds of other colonies. Claudia had never realized pigeons had colonies, or families as some of the notebooks called them. Pigeons were tightly knit creatures, returning not just to the same places but the same flocks season after season. They mated for life. They raised their young communally.

Claudia wondered where the birds went when they couldn’t be at home. Did they miss each other when they were away? Did pigeons dream about old friends? Make plans for pigeon family vacations? Did they feel sorry when they’d disappointed one another? Claudia stood and the bird closest staggered back, chest puffing up and wings beating. She almost apologized for startling it.

When she was left alone, her work wasn’t all that bad. Four and a half months had flown by. Every day was a repetitive read, type, click click click, brainless work that allowed Claudia to forget about the pigeons as best she could. It was easier than she anticipated to focus instead on words as standalone clumps of letters and waterlogged handwriting. Pigeons have been noted with higher success in adapting their diets. The proventriculus glandular part of their stomach rested around a 4.8 ph level. They were able to eat larger amounts of refined grain and processed food items without getting sick. Pigeons enjoyed a grain and legume based diet which matches up to the urban scraps of human food waste many of them sufficed on. They stored excess food in their crop sac for conserving nutrients or to give to their young, crop milk. Claudia really needed to buy milk. She needed to do laundry again too. Ben had shrunken her nice sweater when she’d asked him to handle it last time. She’d even shown him how all the buttons worked.

Claudia started taking all her lunch breaks in the park. She tossed most of her corn chips away to the fountain pigeons, unsalted of course. She delighted in how they all returned to her for more, longing for her to notice them, nurture them. They cooed at her and bowed their heads. She ducked her own back and hoped they’d reached an understanding.

Claudia couldn’t help but notice it one day as she ascended to the attic with one month left on her contract. She’d come to view the space as her own little roost, up high and plenty of nooks and crannies to cuddle up away from the elements or any predators. And once she put it all together she couldn’t help but laugh, loudly, right at her desk drawing an unimpressed glare from Lenard across their cluttered alcove.

Her coworkers’ gray, mottled heads bobbed in agreement with whatever Lenard was saying. Her coworkers, gray molting pigeons with their receding hairlines, who nested with their stacks of books and overheating computers. Each one of them was an arm-flapping, shoulder-stretching squabbling bird running back and forth all day ignoring any questions she had or emailing her passive aggressive comments about keeping her spreadsheets tidy.

When Lenard prattled on to her later about editing one thing or another, all Claudia saw was a large pigeon, gray remiges all puffed up and little glasses perched on pale ceres. Claudia pressed fingers into her temples and flexed her fingers sore from typing. She listened to the flutter of academics pecking at each other and daydreamed about throwing french fries and watching them scatter.

*

Pigeons came in more colors than Claudia ever realized as she spent a day scanning and archiving a pile of photos, a favor Jewel had asked with a kiss to the top of Claudia’s head when she agreed. Pigeons were not only grime-matted gray but blue, green, and purple. She noted the rainbow of them on her walk back to the train. Jewel too, favored these colors and the scent of her perfume had lingered on Claudia’s sleeve all the way home.

Jewel hadn’t been around as much, their conversations limited to her runs between meetings outside the little alcove. Jewel always left with a lingering hand squeeze, a comforting scratch across the shoulders. Claudia wondered if maybe she was just a very affectionate person, Ben had a cousin like that. She looked over at Jewel’s empty desk.

Claudia noticed how the sun caught on a pigeon’s tailfeathers, the bright green hue of it. Pigeons’ beaks have been getting longer over time and so have their legs. To better rifle through trash or maybe to fight or flee as different accounts had hypothesized. The pigeons Claudia passed outside walked down the streets, heads held high, defiant in their rhythm as they circled ankles and dodged purses.

Pigeons related to each other verbally and physically, each vocalization a signifier to a world of meaning that Claudia could swear she was able to tell apart now that she was listening. A growling rumble when a bird got too close to someone else’s lunch. A soft purr to a friend to check in. Pigeons must have ways of greeting each other, there was nothing to differentiate a friend from a lover in the notes. What was the right caw for, Hello, how was your day? How are you? Claudia cannot remember the last time she had any such conversation with someone. Only Jewel, who hummed at her when she saw Claudia stretching out her shoulders at her desk. She came behind her with warm, perfumed hands and offered to rub them for her, pressed in with strong fingers and clicked her tongue at her. Claudia couldn’t find it in herself to ask if she’d had lunch already, only cooed back in thanks, bowed her head to let her work.

Jewel was the only calm one among the cast of unruly birds. Unflappable, she languished at her desk, occasionally putting in headphones for video meetings where she said nearly nothing but nodded intently. She filed her nails habitually. She ordered the others around in her pigeon-toed orthopedic sneakers, tapping her feet all day under her desk like she’d rather be somewhere else.

Claudia finally invited her out on a walk around the park. She’d packed an extra sandwich so they could eat together by the fountain. She’d practiced at home, tilting her head and popping her shoulders, humming under her breath and twitching her chin. Feral city pigeons copulated on a less strict schedule than wild birds, spring and fall mating seasons mere suggestions of how to pass the time. Pigeon birth rates have only increased through urbanization. There were two pigeons together in the fountain when Claudia and Jewel took their seats, the rest of the birds scattered about, some watching and tittering and others pecking at the ground.

Jewel declined the sandwich, citing a gluten allergy Claudia hadn’t known about. Claudia ate hers quietly, cycling through thoughts of interesting conversation. She’d like to know what Jewel went to school for, what Jewel liked on her pizza. What kind of shoes she wore. If Jewel kissed all her friends, if Jewel had time to see each other outside of work, when this was all over. If Jewel knew how a woman was supposed to make friends now when all of hers were still married or out of state or both.

She tried to think of a way to explain how funny it was that the birds and their coworkers were essentially the same. And that she had been thinking about pigeons nonstop since working here like, that Claudia felt for them and how this job had taught her so much. Humans had abandoned pigeons back to the wild and expected them to figure it all out on their own. Of course they walked with us, acted like us, ate our food. They wanted to be with us.

Claudia wasn’t sure if all that domesticated human DNA baked into pigeons still mattered like the field notebooks debated. She wondered if Jewel thought it was only a pantomime now, a shadow of someone else’s dreams teaching them to chase binned scraps after a taste of something old and comforting. She wondered if Jewel thought of them like children, if she worried after them and wanted them to do well on their own. Or maybe, they looked at us like big, strange birds, bumbling our ways through the scrap-filled nests of the world, fighting our way against the cold.

Instead, Jewel turned to her first. “So, do you have any idea what you’ll do next?”

Claudia’s gaze tracked a pigeon flying overhead. “What do you mean?”

“You only have about a month left with us. Have you been looking at other positions?”

“Oh, yes. Of course.”

She had not been. Claudia’s time at home had been whittled away to making meals and taking out the trash. Sometimes she and Ben watched a show together in the evenings but most of the time they didn’t. She’d ask him about his day and he’d reply in vague gestures and clipped replies, opting to spend most evenings with his friends. Claudia slept alone and woke up alone and rode the train alone and walked to the office alone, only flanked by pigeons and the hundred other people who waddle and chirp and shimmy into their assigned dovecot holes. She tried to find the right words to tell Jewel that she was not meant to fly solo, that she needed this place and the company it gave her, that she was starting to feel like a pigeon too.

“I’m looking for something back in education, maybe,” Claudia said. “I used to work in an elementary school’s office. One time, I had to chaperone a field trip to the zoo and a bird pooped on the third grade teacher.”

Jewel smiled, nodding along to Claudia’s story the same way she responded to floating heads on her screen. “I’ve heard that’s supposed to be good luck.”

*

            At home, Claudia ate dinner with Ben. She drove him to the park and stayed to watch his soccer practice. She sent a picture to Ben. Other Ben, she wanted to call him. Worse Ben. Irritating Ben. Ben Who Probably Didn’t Even Know His Son’s Jersey Number. Claudia’s traitorous mind had considered renaming her son, but that was hard to do when they’d reached a certain age and she thought Ben might have some grievances about it.

Out in the grass the boys ran back and forth, sometimes knocking into each other just for fun. There were pigeons running around too, just yards away chasing a hamburger wrapper across the parking lot flanked by some smaller sparrows. They lived outside of the city too, she’d been noticing more and more the birds stalking grocery store parking lots and sleeping on the post office roof and taking refuge under front yard shrubs. They looked the same out here as they did downtown, sleepy and a little aimless until they were startled by something into high alert.

Baby pigeons are born pink and featherless. They are fed by the crop milk of their parents, tucked safely away from any potential threats. But feral pigeon babies grow up fast, they need to be tough to exist in a world where danger comes for them constantly.

            Did pigeons ever feel jealousy? Did they ever throw other pigeons out of the nest when they got annoying? They hissed, they argued in fits of feathers and clashing beaks, but there was nothing in the field notes about how pigeons made up. When they soothed the other’s ruffled feathers, rubbed out the tension in their hackles, what about that? Did pigeons ever call each other in the middle of the night informing the other pigeon they’d rented an apartment across town? Did they name their pigeon children after themselves and then fly the coop? Claudia wondered what happened to the birds who got left behind. They probably had their pigeon friends, the other members of their colony to help with chores and cooking and helping their pigeon sons apply to high schools and traveling sports teams. Pigeons probably didn’t even notice someone left.

Everyone went out for drinks again at the end of the week to celebrate a successful deadline, a portfolio project or something else crucial to the ‘big picture’ that Claudia still only vaguely understood. They sat at the bar and Jewel leaned against Claudia’s shoulder, whispering jokes in her ear about how Lenard’s drunken pacing reminded her of an owl she saw once that had eaten part of an edible.

A dark haired, handsome man came in and walked over to their table to greet Jewel with a kiss. He introduced himself to Claudia like he already knew her, patted Lenard on the back and waved to the others. She didn’t catch his name, only watched his muscled arm where it draped over Jewel’s shoulder, the one that had just been resting against her shoulder. Jewel left shortly after with him, kissing both Claudia’s and Lenard’s cheeks goodbye.          

            Claudia stumbled up to the train platform an hour or so later, tipsy and off kilter. She was alone on the platform except for the clusters of pigeons. Some were cuddled under benches while others courted each other, strutting across worn wooden boards. Around and around they went, Claudia’s eyes traced over them as her vision spun at the edges.

The birds were all perfectly at ease here. For the feral pigeon, a city was a playground of hiding spots. An endless food buffet. A beautiful, stinky, concrete paradise that wild pigeons could never appreciate. Jewel had said that once. She thought the feral pigeons, the ones descended from abandoned, domesticated ancestors, had gained an advantage when it came to urban living. The ones with memories of lost comforts baked into their DNA now the best survivors.

            A pigeon’s optic nerve was about five centimeters long emerging out from the eye’s posterior hole. They had a nearly full 360 degree view of the world. They could see around themselves entirely. Pigeons bobbed their heads not just to communicate but to gain perspective, shaking their soft nerves to zoom in and out on the world like a camera. But the wulst of their brains that allowed for stereoscopic vision gave them little overlap compared to other birds. They had bad depth perception. Their rock dove ancestors didn’t need it. They only ever had to find a hole along a rocky cliff or mountain edge to call home. These pigeons moved premeditatively, choreography plotted out through generations of knowing this world was not built for them. The cone photoreceptors of their eyes held oil droplets that let pigeons see more color. Pigeons were drawn to bright colors. They liked to fill their nests with shiny plastic wrappers and scraps of fabric. Pigeons recycled. They took what others discarded in evolving claws and carried them into their homes, trusting old instincts to tell them how to shape it into something warm and safe. Their inner ears had electromagnetic cells that allowed them to trace direction, hone in on magnetic fields from the earth. The way home was built into pigeons’ bodies, even now, as they scavenged it from the slate gray holes of a new and strange wilderness. Claudia followed one pigeon as it flew up into the covered platform ceiling. It hopped daintily across a row of bird spikes zip tied to a beam, squawking when they pressed into its legs. It disappeared. Claudia climbed up on the bench, her dress shoe heels wobbling in the cracks, and looked up at the bird spikes, reaching out to prod their surface. They felt springy, softer than she’d imagined. Behind the spikes, more pigeons were crammed into the empty ceiling space nesting in pink insulation and dead leaves. Claudia gripped the beam to get a better look.

One of the birds puffed out their feathers at her, letting out a displeased rumble. Claudia tried to chirp back, twist her head side to side and bow. She cooed to it just like Jewel had cooed at her.

The bird flapped forward and Claudia fell back, crashing to the ground as her weight shifted, pulling the whole row of spikes she’d been holding down with her. She laid on the dirty ground with the wind knocked out of her. Startled pigeons flocked down from the ceiling. Their formless, spinning bodies hitting the ground sounded like applause. She closed her eyes and let the hard press of wood seep into her shoulders, soothed by the sounds of beating wings. The birds settled and when all was quiet again she looked to find them peering at her as if to help her back up.

            On Claudia’s last day Jewel brought her a cupcake and Lenard gave her a gift card for a bookstore she’d never heard of all the way across the city. They both hugged her and wished her luck with whatever came next. There was expectant twinge to the wish, a question buried in the lead. What was she going to do now? She imagined telling them the work here inspired her to go back to school and study ornithology. Or that she was returning to administrative work at another office, one with bigger windows and less confusing style guides. She nodded to her coworkers and accepted a final shoulder squeeze from Jewel. There was no exchanging of numbers, no offers to stay in touch.

Claudia left the office early, completed notebooks left stacked in her seat and the donor computer returned to Lenard’s desk. The sun was out and she headed for the park instead of the train. Pigeons still filled the fountain even though the spouting water had been turned off for the season, leaving only empty basins. Claudia perched herself on the fountain’s concrete edge and toed off her shoes, letting her socket feet touch the cold ground. Around her, pigeons flapped and pecked at old algae, their shining silver and purple crests gleaming in the sun.

Tomorrow, she would drive Ben to school instead of sending him on the bus. Ben would pick him up for their weekend together. She’d finally vacuum under the couch. Change her bedsheets. Do the laundry. Pull weeds in the garden. When Ben came to drop her son off back home, she’d invite him in for a cup of coffee and he’d decline as he always did, and her Ben would run out to the backyard with barely a word. Later they’d eat dinner together and she’d take him back to another soccer practice and Claudia would watch him, send a message to a friend who lived six hours away, and wait a week to hear a reply. Pigeons flocking beside her were unbothered by the cold breeze. The train’s all encompassing rumbling didn’t phase them one bit. Claudia’s own shoulders crept towards her ears with a shiver. When the wind washed over her again Claudia leaned into it, feeling it curl the ends of her hair and creep into her fingertips. She kicked her feet out in the air and flexed her toes like talons to crack them. Her arms opened wide as she could stretch and her mouth followed in a yawn, the air rushing through her as though she was nothing at all. Something inside unfurled. Pigeons huddled in the sun, heads glittering.

“Come here.”

She had a perfect, late-summer cherry between her teeth and when she broke its skin an impossible red ran over her tongue, between the seam of her lips. She spat out the core and the fruit along with it, looking like some boxer on television who’d just been punched in the jaw and worked up a gob of blood and pulp. She kept only her mouthful of juice and stained the ground with the rest.

The air was blue and early over the meadows, the world tucked away, new and untouched. Him and her. Their little secret. The orchard folded over them, encrusted with dew and the spilled guts of devoured fruit, dampening the parched grass and cooling their bare toes. When she pulled him to her, he could taste the sweetness lingering on her lips until she bit him hard enough to draw blood.

He’d met her while the early-May light was still reaching the world in watery beams, while the tulips were disintegrating and teachers were still droning away at their blackboards. She was leaning on the wall three lockers down from him, bruised knees showing under the hem of her dress. He’d watched her before, strawberry hair always in a tangle, gaze never still enough to hold. Until now. When he asked for her name, she reached out a hand with nails bitten raw.

“Cherry,” she said, cutting off his circulation. “Cherry Stritter.”

Summer had come on fast that year, and his pulse had quickened with it. Everything else was long and slow. The sun dragged across the endless days and the two of them disappeared into the meadows, into acres and acres of land once kept as a public park and now left to run wild, to swallow up those who didn’t want to be found.

In the mornings it was cool enough to wander under the fruit trees, to climb for high-up cherries and dance around the early-dropped plums coating the bleached dirt and stubby yellow grass. At midday, the sun left no shade and he watched from the bank of the steadily shrinking pond below the orchard as Cherry waded in. In the afternoon, the light cast wiry shadows from the trees they sprawled under, sweating away the most sweltering hours, the hours that Cherry said turned piss to steam before it could hit the dirt.

The sun was plotting to reach them with its slanting fingers, shimmering on the thicket of high grass surrounding the bald patch beneath their tree. Cherry was on her back, hair dragging in the dust, feet propped on the knobby roots snaking beneath them. She tossed one in the air, let it fall. Her fingers dug up a clot of dirt, the closest thing to a pebble she would ever find out there, and tossed it in his direction without looking.

She got up and wandered off and he followed.

The land was flat and sun-beaten. Cherry moving across it was a rebellion, a refusal to acknowledge the feverish heat pressing down on them, thieving the moisture from their skin and the strength from their bodies.

She wove through the tall grasses ahead of him, the path whispering closed behind her so that he had to repart it at every step. He caught flickers of her between the wispy golden stalks, like a daylight ghost dancing on the dead air. A mirage, always out of reach. Impossible to act on, impossible to hold down.

            The twisting cherry trees solidified first, artificially bright leaves hanging limp under the heat-lamp sky, the shorter plum branches burdened low and heavy beneath bruise-colored fruit. The grass fell to his shoulder, his knee, then to chopped-off stubs poking through the dirt. They pricked the soles of his feet as he wove through the trunks and after Cherry, avoiding sun-baked pulp as he went.

The dropped plums seemed to have doubled since the morning, when their rot was still disguised under a veil of silvery damp. Exposed, they were blackened and bursting with their own insides, bleeding a sweet, necrotic ooze. Greedy, fatted flies bobbed through the air, diving for the fruit before resuming their drunken flight. He watched as one paused, probed, drank deeply, looking like a blood vessel about to burst. He wondered if it could taste what it was taking, if it liked it or was too starved to care.

Cherry was ahead of him, sizing up a tree. She hiked her leg up the trunk and he saw bruises on her shins and knees and stretching up to paint her thighs, set off by the old scratches of thorn tendrils and the newly inflamed cross-hatching where the plum bark scraped at her skin. She looked wild, marked-up, as if the world had taken hold of her and dragged her around a little instead of merely allowing her to trip through it like everybody else.

            She hoisted herself higher and flopped onto a sturdy, half-shaded branch, panting and wetting her cracked lips. Her legs dangled in front of him as he followed her up. She swung one at him and missed. The hem of her dress was stained with pond water; he watched the cotton edge of her underthings beneath it and wanted to run his hand up her skin.

“Maybe I should meet your father,” he said.

She sat up as he reached her, in his face.

“No.”

            She dropped her damp cheek against his shoulder and bit his collarbone. All at once he wanted to shove her. Away. Down. On her back. He didn’t know. He wanted to grab her leg and pull, to send her plummeting through the branches, to watch her hit the ground like the gnawed-on pits they’d thrown that morning. He wanted to bite her calf, her thigh, higher. He wanted to disappear into the tall grasses, to escape her hungry, searching mouth.

She was always biting. Grazing his ear, teasing his finger. Sometimes, he hated her.

Once, they’d been lying by the pond, limbs splayed over the cracked mud, crushing a flat, boy-and-girl-shaped patch among the tall grass, when without warning, she’d rolled up on her side and sunk her teeth into his bicep, keeping them fixed there as he yelped and she stared up at him with a trance in her eyes. Usually, she bit him while they were stuck together with their own salt, when she would nuzzle under his chin or find the tender flesh beneath his ear, as if she was trying to bury herself in the layers of his skin. He’d feel her sweet breath, a prick of canines; finding her mark, burrowing in.

“He wouldn’t want to meet you,” she said, unfastening her teeth.

There was a fresh mark on her knee. He watched as the joint bent and stretched beneath pinkish skin.

“Hey.”

“Really.”

“I’m not so bad.”

“Exactly.” She kept her cheek against his shoulder and wove her fingers through his, like grasses tangled together in the sweeping, lifeless wind.

Cherry was late, the sun nearly at its summit by the time she emerged through the field, fresh scratches on her knees from the greedy, groping thorn thickets above the orchard. She held a battered milk jug filled with some dark liquid, runnels of dried-up purple cutting lines down the plastic. She grinned, holding the jug aloft, and her eyeteeth seemed to wink at him.

“What is it?”

“Plum wine,” she said, squatting and unscrewing the cap.

“Your father’s?”

“Not anymore.”

She looked away, and he wondered if she was afraid. He watched her throat bob as she pulled a long swallow from the grimy plastic and then passed it to him.

He abandoned his usual noontime post on the bank and they waded through the pond for hours, tossing the jug back and forth and throwing mucky water in each other’s shrieking faces until Cherry’s shoulders and cheeks grew bright with sunburn and she left him for the shade of a pond-side tree. He lingered, standing thigh-deep in the stirred-up water, watching mud swirl from its bed to stain his fingertips. He thought of Cherry’s spattered dress, of her bruised thighs, of her bare, blistered shoulders.

He staggered from the pond and cut a crooked path toward her.

“You’re drunk as a skunk.” Her grin was lazy, her eyes unfocused.

He nodded, standing over her, knowing something she didn’t: he had already been drunk. On the hot air and endless skies, on the middle of nowhereness, on the whispering grasses and the maw of the depleted pond bed. He was drunk on the girl in front of him.

His skin was trapping heat, pooling it. He was too full of her, too full of ideas, bloated and stupid with them. He felt nauseous, as if he would be sick if he didn’t touch her, and it was only ever going to get worse.

Cherry slouched low against the bark in front of him, her hair caught up in the rough seams above her head, forming a mangled, gingery halo. He lowered himself unsteadily into her lap, resting heavy in the junction of her broken-doll legs. He let his chin fall against her navel. Stared up at her. Said nothing. Felt like he was begging. Fermented plum stained her lips. A rivulet of wine trailed over her jaw. He licked it. She giggled and licked him back, leaving a sour film over his mouth. She took another gulp from the jug and fell back against the tree.

He was dreaming, hallucinating. She was right in front of him—beneath him—but somehow distant and untouchable, slippery and blush-bright and full of teeth. When she bit him, at least, he knew she was real, that they existed on the same corporeal plane. But she wasn’t biting him now, only sitting quietly, watching some faraway wisp of grass or bit of dust as she let her fingers fall absently through his matted hair.

“D’you ever just want…” Her words slurred and she trailed off. A minute passed before she picked up again, as if she’d rediscovered the thought while rifling through some attic of her mind, dusted it off, and stuck it back in her mouth. “D’you ever want a soft sort of world?”

“What?” He was watching her lips, feeling her heat. His brain felt like the steam of breath on glass, fuzzy and barely there.

“Dunno.” She stretched a hand up in front of them. There was a shadowy stripe over her knuckles. “Just sit with me, I guess. Please.”

He felt like there was a current leaping beneath his skin. He didn’t want to sit. He wanted to roll her over in the dust, to squeeze her hard enough that he could keep himself from bursting, from cracking open and spilling out.

He tried to pull himself up, to reach for her, but she drew back and slid from beneath him and disappeared into the fizzing, static-filled hum of the grass. He stared up at the sky, his entire body heated and aching and too heavy to find her. The abandoned jug lay beside him, caked with pond scum and holding the last of their sun-spoiled wine.

It was days before he saw her again. He waited, watching the mornings disappear under the plum trees. She was not there to wade through the pond at noon and so he stayed in the orchards to watch the flies wade instead, through sour nectar and decaying fruit flesh. He stayed even when his head began to ache with thirst, even when the flies landed on him and lapped at his sweat. Only in the evenings did he rise and go to the water, sitting defeated along its edge, filling the stolen jug and soothing his throbbing skull.

Nearly a week had passed when she appeared in the night, across the water, like a will-o’-the-wisp come to lead him astray. Instead she crossed to him, circling the bank to his perch on the cooling mud. The moon was full and high and its light gave the pond the sharp shine of a knife’s edge, the water somehow alive as it never was during the long, flat days.

“Hey there,” she whispered, unsteady.

He rose to meet her and she slipped her hand into his. He pulled back. She moved forward, trapping him in the cage of her arms, and she must have felt his stiffness but she hid her face in his neck anyways and softly bit the skin there.

The blow came like a crack of summer lightning, the impact snapping her head back and radiating up his hand. He had never been sure before if her father hit her, but he was now. He could see it in the way she was quiet, in the way her eyes met his with an unexpectant dullness, even though he was still humming with the shock of the strike. It was in the way her lips formed around his name, even as her cheek bloomed dark as rotted, bloody plums. He turned to leave and she reached for him. Sealed them together like hot wax over a note, like a pact of sliced and oozing palms, like the saccharine, sticky death of an insect on honey. Her lips were coppery with blood; something inside her mouth was broken open and it flowed over his tongue. He sunk her low in the high, spindling grasses. The ground was cool against her back, against his palms as he leaned over her. Her hand was knotted in his hair. There was a cut over the height of her cheekbone, fresh shades of red and purple flowing out from it like the rings of the drying pond. She twisted her fist painfully against the nape of his neck and kissed him as if she were drinking from him, as if he was the one belly-up in the dirt.

Beneath the night, beneath the grass, beneath him, she solidified. She could be touched, she could be hurt. She could be had.

Her eyes were wide, wild, staring up at him. Afraid. Something barbed and weedy unfurled in his chest, something hateful. He forced her head back to bite the soft, sweet flesh of her throat, and she yelped.

The moon was sinking, carving a line down the night. Cherry’s dress was ripped and lying in the dirt somewhere above their heads. Her wrists were bruised, her throat littered with the imprint of his teeth. Her hands curled against his chest, fragile and transient as droplets tipping early-morning grass before they were scorched away. Instead of a soft love-blush, her cheek showed a deepening bruise. Dark patches marred the pale skin over her ribs and her left hip-bone, marks that he had not put there.

He held her tight, but thought about letting go, about tossing her into the mud and making her crawl back to him. But he would keep her, he thought, in the end. He would keep her where he wanted her, because she needed it, because he wanted it, because he could hurt what had been taught to hurt.

The moon abandoned them. As he watched, silver fingers tore open the sky, flooding the meadows, the orchards, the high grasses and the pond, pouring over the mass of their spilled and tangled bodies, all of it razor-bright and bristling with dew.

Welcome back. Kind blue light flushed the grey rags of morning. Strong, purposive light. Not a marketing tip, no service message. A customer reach, wedded to the a.m.

He examined his legs, slantways on the dull sheet. Essential to business, their definition assuring. He gripped the phone, terse in the stretch of his spine. He should fix that. Exercise. Warm-ups. It would take work.

A man wanted his windows clean. Fresh, to start the day. There was a chance of sun. Nothing said care, when the sun shone, like clean windows. The ladderman cooked bacon for breakfast. Folded in greased bread. He brewed coffee for now and enough for his jar. Store coffee dented the take. He wasn’t first or only at this. A hundred profiles drove a ladder. His username got recognition, his reviews – when people remembered – in the high points. But store coffee was slippage.

The vinyls on his truck promoted the app without suggesting a flesh connection. Task seekers were freelance. They owed the app. The app wasn’t liable. Their decals and materials should promote the app. But the app didn’t supervise nor guarantee. A self-regulating community. Reviews laid the pitch. His truck needed work. A rind of rust at the arches. A softness on the brake. A full overhaul cost more than pre-owned replacement. But then he’d need new vinyls. They stuck one time only. They couldn’t be lifted. A new truck meant a new plate, which went to verification. He might lose an hour’s work while it all went through. He idled each intersection, so drivers could scan the code. Sign ups from his code went to status. Medals stitched to his name.

Across four lanes they aimed their trucks at business. Plumbers, electricians, cleaners, helpers, surveyors, decorators, morticians. Hands to assemble flat-pack. Signatories for deliveries. Sitters for dogs and kids. Witnesses to occasions. Joined on the app. This work the factory joes and diner waitresses dreamed of. No more the same crew with the same complaints. No more one place the day through. No more that boss. This freewheeling future. A task here, a job there. Unpredictable routes. Unlimited distance. The choice to take or not take. Work as personal mission. Supple, not routine. Not coasting. No moments of slump. No backseat lawyering on corporate finagles. These were days of fulfilment.

Streets of okay, petty houses. This house a little worn in the boards, a little long in the lawn. The ladderman unhitched from the truck, the ladder’s stern, assuring weight at his shoulder. A good ladder. Flip to arch or clip to stretch. Aluminum grips and treads of black plastic. Still with its safety labels: stickman diagrams of right and wrong ways with a ladder. Green check marks and red kisses. Do and not do. A ladder’s not all fun, those labels said. Give ladders respect.

He showed his credentials to the door and waited. The ladderman was punctual; he liked when customers reciprocated. Some didn’t understand the time they bought was sliced from larger time. He had to assess task time, drive time, admin; he preferred not to wait. A slow start could infect the whole day.

The man at the door seemed unnaturally old. Older than decent. He stooped as though searching. His hair was smoke. One earlobe hung ragged from some life event the ladderman didn’t wish to share.

“Mr. Stevins?”

“Thank you for being prompt.” Stevins tried to make space and got in the way. “It’s a family matter.”

Fragile shelves of mementoes made fodder for a large ladder. The ladderman guided it in knee high, steering with his legs. He had to pay breakage. That was the deal. The app insisted task givers were always victims. A house so cluttered he couldn’t distinguish clothes from quilts from heaped today-only purchases, deals too hot to miss. That worked with old people. They wanted something to leave behind. Caught between walls, the ladderman waited for Stevins to navigate the hallway. “You booked a window clean, Mr. Stevins. Polish and shine.”

“Polish and shine.”

“How many windows?”

“All of ’em. They all need the treatment.”

“Maybe I start in here.” He rested the ladder’s feet.

“Not upstairs?” The old man’s screwy, pleated face held shock.

“Well, I’m in here.” The clock was ticking. The app beat time in his pocket.

“Don’t you clean a house head to heel?” Stevins’ tone suggested a lifetime habit upended.

Task givers held the cards. Tasks had to be done their way. Unable to turn in the heaped-up room, he reversed the ladder through the house, nearly back to the street. Then angled its nose for the heavy haul upstairs. Stairs narrowed by clumsy installation of a glider, its railed seat obstructive at the base of the climb. As he teased and twisted and tentatively crept by, its motor hummed to life, Stevins moving up like molasses at his ankles. Task givers had to be satisfied. Some liked to watch.

He began in the bedroom. The old man tried to make things okay. Pill boxes and brushes and junk on the shelves had been straightened. Knocked-about dust lay thickly curled at the rims. The smell of age clung against linens turned inside over, he guessed to hide stains. A pair of old suits slumped off a rail, wilted with disuse. He lined up the ladder and climbed to the top of the window. Here was the issue. These houses, built for light to counteract smallness, their windows touched the ceiling, out of reach for a regular guy. No job for a full-height ladder, but kick steps wouldn’t do it. In the bucket his cloths, his wiper and spray. No need for water. Water and windows was best avoided.

Stevins disentangled from the hoist. He clung at the door, expecting turbulence. “You do outside?”

“I’ll see what I manage from here. These flip right out.”

“It’s different from outside. Those corners are tricky.” Stevins walked to the bed – a flicker book, limbs jerked to move. He sat with earnest sadness that irked the ladderman. You didn’t show anger with task givers. The app was insistent.

“Fine little place you have.” It might be, with less junk.

“Does for me. Does well.” Stevins rummaged his phone, holding it close to his eyes though everything scaled. “It’s a family matter. Why I needed you early.”

The street was regular. Nothing to see. Old people. Young sharers. Little families: couples with their treasured addition. People with tenured jobs, corporate credentials. They could take a day sick and get paid. The ladderman didn’t care for family matters. “Nothing cheers a place like bright windows.”

“I want them to see that.” Slow fingers chumped the phone screen. “They’re here in two hours.”

In people’s homes, attending their tasks brought degrees of involvement. The ladderman liked practical chores. Paint a ceiling. Flush a roof. Any blend of altitude and attention. He didn’t need reasons. “This won’t be two hours.”

“I should tidy.” Stevins poked a bale of towels. They rose and settled. “Meant to, last night. I get tired.”

Tired people called the ladderman. Weary with everyday life, they wanted to buy what their bodies declined to manage. They said they were tired while they watched TV, eating candy. When infomercials for productivity aired, they remained, tossing sugar between slack lips. Their skin too coarse to feel the approaching hand. “You did your share.” That was the trick, with old people. Assure them no one expected more. “You can enjoy it.”

Stevins coughed untidily, spit across his chin. “They want this place. They think I don’t know their talk of helping me out means just that.”

The app provided resource against this risk. Tutorials and explainers, to mitigate and avoid. For tasks in domestic space, oversharing was heightened. A spill of personal information he wasn’t bonded to process. Step one was distract. “All clean here. I’ll do the bathroom, then downstairs. You don’t have another room up here?”

“For my wife’s things. She loved the sunlight.”

A second bedroom, fallow and undisturbed. A second bedroom those fertile couples might yearn for. No horror show. No shrine of splintered lace. Everything boxed and labelled. Stacked and ordered – clothes and accessories, make up and souvenirs. Objects that carried meaning to Stevins’ imaginings. The room’s residual furniture cowed with bygones. Slow and delicate to weave the ladder through. “This needs attention.” The window matted and filthy.

“That’s why I called you,” Stevins wheezed. “I want them to know I can manage.”

It would take more than clean windows. Stagnation filled the house. But prestige was no more than accumulated reviews, so he cut to it, scraping the glass to a mild vista of backyards. Bleaching the frames. Bringing the hinge its shine. And so with each window in that little house. When he took the ladder to the dusty backyard, to lay up against that dormant bedroom, Stevins was at the boxes, reading labels, smoothing packing tape, a gesture of cautious curation.

Credits transferred. The old man didn’t tip.

“Now the sun can get in.”

“I’ll show them.” Stevins shuffled aimlessly on the rug. “I can keep my windows clean. They don’t need to take me away.”

“No they don’t.”

“They’re grabby. But I’ll fix them.”

“You do.”

“They can’t take my home. Can they, huh? They can’t make me.”

Those neat stacked boxes. The guy who got that removal would need a spine.

Not late, not yet. He should hustle. Each day got late. An hour, could be, by time he was done. Status was a reward of punctuality. But that wasn’t always possible, not knowing the tasks. Even with an intelligent vehicle, the quickest route wasn’t always the slickest. Parking wasn’t assured. Especially at blocks like this: a foursquare concrete divot over retail. Cameras watched him cruise. More than twice around was suspect.

“Not there.” The super was a little guy with the tremendous delts of unquestioned authority. His stocky outrage from the lobby suggested pleasure no kindness could equal. “You can’t street park. You got to pay in the tower.”

The motor purred compliantly. “One of your residents booked a task.”

“They should have comped you a permit. No permit, pay in the tower.”

The elevators in these stack lots were often too short for the ladder. An elevator was non-earning space. The shafts were minimized. He found a spot on second and sledged the ladder down the fire stairs, feeling it run on the concrete treads, embroiled in its momentum. He clung tight. Better a sprained wrist than a busted ladder.

When the ladderman got there, the super had strength for fresh fun. “You don’t take that in the elevator.”

The ladderman ate a hard breath. “I not told you where I’m going.”

“I’m in charge.” The super gave a slow nod. “You don’t take that in the elevator unless you got sacks for the mirrors. You know the cost to fill a scratch? No sacks, you take the stairs.”

“I’m here for Ms. Kinsey.”

“Take the stairs.”

The hallways were plain and neat. It took a ladder to paint the ceiling, maintain the lights, check the integrity of cable trunking pinned above doors. Humans couldn’t live without climbing higher than they could reach. Some of these buildings were fancy. Some, basic but homey. All needed a ladder.

He was sorry Ms. Kinsey had a problem walking. Her ankle was bust. It slowed her. She might have said when she booked. It took her three minutes to reach the door. “I would offer coffee. I haven’t made a food order today.” Ms. Kinsey was around his age. Deceptively tall. Robust-looking. But her walk, down on one side, showed the extent of her collapse. She mountaineered around the apartment, lunging at any support. He rarely considered prospects, delivering tasks to women. The app beat time and, anyway, too much could be misunderstood. The app provided resource against this risk. Customer service was customer-friendly. Friendly had bounds.

“You booked home rearrangement.”

“I didn’t know how else to describe it.” She stood on one foot to relieve the weight, an oddly coy stance. “I need my suitcases down.”

More conscious of damage here than in the old man’s cluttered pit, he contrived a gentle, sailing gesture to persuade the ladder between shiny paint. He never thought, at any rich level, about being in someone’s bedroom. What a bedroom invitation might otherwise weigh. He worked till he stopped. He slept without effort. He welcomed each busy day. His truck purring around the city was credit earned. He didn’t question the task givers. The clock was ticking.

This bedroom was a light space. High enough for primary sun. Sympathetic reflections cut shapes in white paint. In white linen, corners tucked, edges smooth. The table glass shot light across grey carpet. Its cleanness astounding.

Ms. Kinsey, awkward at the dressing table, its sparse and sensible product all hygiene. She reached to rub her ankle, a creased look of annoyance. “I appreciate it’s not much of a job. I can’t trust myself on steps.” One wall of the room, floor to ceiling, side to side, was the closet. Glass-fronted below attic cupboards. The ladderman’s reflection held the ladder keenly, its feet truffled the carpet, its body tight to his side. Ms. Kinsey’s reflection was solemn as she picked around under her slippers, testing her feet, massaging persistent pain.

“In the top cupboards?”

“You move to a place. You unpack. What do you do?” She straightened, for the mirror. “You’re optimistic. You think you won’t need your cases a long time.”

The carpet by the closet spiked with heel points, between uncrushed fiber sprung like rye. “The ladder might draw some ruts. They should ease out.”

“It’s a rental. The last tenant had a dresser. See the archeology.”

Four cupped dents guarded an untrodden oblong.

“Suitcases up top?” He set the ladder’s feet, regretting how it humbled soft material.

“I’ll give a hand. I’m not wholly done.”

He waited halfway up while she got to her feet and a minute went, in sideways gait, crossing the room. No doubt she was in pain. No doubt it galled her. But she should have booked a longer slot. It was just stealing time.

The cupboard doors gave readily, against weight piled inside them. Spare pillows. Old umbrellas. Small linens – napkins and such. He passed down these objects. She stacked them around her.

“It’s a pity that super didn’t help.” Because he could have. The super had ladders no charge.

“I don’t want to involve him.” She spoke quiet. “He knows everyone.”

The ladderman stepped higher. Her luggage, crammed to the back of the cupboard, a respectable matching three. “You want them all?”

“I need them all.” She took to one foot, wobbling primly.

Customer service was customer-friendly. “You have vacation?”

“If you just fetch them down I’m obliged.”

The cases resisted a while. Lapped over each other, wedged to the corners, he had to gain height, reach deep. They came loose with a suck of pleather. “They need just a shine to revive them. I have spray.”

She stroked the cases like something overdue at the veterinarian. “Thought I’d dig roots. Much as one can. My contract here has two years.”

Conversation, that salaried privilege. The app had his next task. Three on the bounce earned a swill of coffee. “It’s good luggage. May as well use it. You want these other things back up top?” She didn’t seem ready to answer, so he moved the items cautiously, lofting them two-handed, where performance was all. He closed the cupboard doors, wiped his fingermarks, unwilling, as sometimes he was, to descend. To meet life at ground level.

Ms. Kinsey opened the cases. She flattened their sides, coaxing them to optimum capacity.

“Thank you for prompt payment.”

“It’s physical business, this, you do. I suppose you have a truck?”

He folded clever aluminum limbs. “These marks in the carpet. Really, they’ll fade.”

“You never take the subway?”

Some guys did. Some lofted all kinds of equipment. “Not with the ladder.”

“Not other times?”

“There’s no need. Really.” Did she want him to engrave it? Seekers were specialists. Part-substitutable. Reviews made status, not small talk. “Have a good vacation.”

“I always took the subway. To the job. No thought about it. Down underground each morning. Back to the surface at night. A job is a good thing. Gives the day purpose.”

They never grasped the time they bought was cut from bigger time. Non-earning time, moving the ladder place to place. Attending the ladder. Keeping it lucrative. He had the next task. He should be gone. “Be careful. With the ankle.” It wasn’t transgression. She told him.

“In your truck I guess it’s you. And devices. What you see is always far side of some material. But the subway is up close. Bodies. Looking to exit.”

“I hear it’s busy.” The ladder a friendly, authoritative weight. Nosing its way to the door.

“You know the moving stairs.” Her hands made a rising, step on step. Her wrists all rigidity. “Everyone jostles a little. I don’t mean I’m discourteous.” She quailed at this notion. “You don’t always see. There’s people, their luggage. And equipment. People with equipment.”

He set down the ladder to open the door. Its sudden absence like ice. “Yeah, I hear.”

“I got close of someone. We collided, I guess. The stairs, all the movement. I couldn’t stop.” Her voice the bright edge of grass. “I was moving. Those moving stairs don’t stop. I didn’t mean to offend her. My ankle collapsed. I nearly fell. They took me to hospital. She cursed me.”

He had the door open. He held the ladder. “I’ve a task. I must go.”

“Now I can’t walk. Nor climb. My ankle is gone. She cursed me.” Her eyes were all. “I must move from here. From her.”

He maneuvered to the hallway. “Enjoy your vacation.”

This third task brought a less familiar district. A commercial zone at the highway ribbon. He didn’t get commercial jobs. There were specialists. Big trucks. Expansive equipment. A short notice commercial job meant an error to correct. Some embarrassment that couldn’t be charged to the project. And what was a ladder for but getting out from holes.

A little chilly around his kidneys. An empty building. Buildings changed hands. Grew and, sometimes, receded. Retooling didn’t indicate a problem. But there was no scaffold, no tent wrap, no banners enticing with what would come next. No trucks. No guys in headgear. The wrong type of empty. Coarsened, wind blown, behind gates too bent to shut. No one challenged his arrival. No security dusted his device. No one gave him the site procedures, the safety talk. Barren, caged from big box neighbors, the building could scarce exist in such disrepair.

He left his truck in view of the road – he could activate its hazard strip if needed. There were always patrols by the big stores.

The door stayed shut. It didn’t slide back. Its sensors fuzzed with dirt. He messaged the giver. A statement of presence. The ladder caught air. It tilted against his shoulder. He was confident with the ladder.

The man at the door had old skin, though his hair was dark and shapeless. Dressed for business, too formal for construction. But that need not make a misgiving. The task was present. The task was paid.

The door creaked against its runners, unlocked at some grip in the wall. That was okay. Security guys might need that. In case of a glitch. The man seemed surprised at air on his skin. His lips took a second to form. “The ladder.”

“You are Mr. Luck?”

His limbs fetched around in his clothes. “You arrive at the opportune moment. The time as booked.”

“The task wasn’t explicit.” The device in his pocket. “You said ‘ceiling work’?”

“I did say that. Come forward. That thing must be heavy.”

“It’s light for its size.”

Mr. Luck’s eyes took a slow journey. “Ingenious.”

The ladderman worked in people’s homes. Nothing was certain with people. Despite apps and therapeutics, they might still be inattentive. Over-focused. Less than specific. But a home at least had other homes, with better citizens, round it. The big stores weren’t so far out but this building felt noxiously lonely. Buildings shouldn’t be left to decay. Ordinances precluded negligence. And no signs of construction. Just this man overdressed.

“We’ll take the stairs,” said Mr. Luck. “There are elevators, but I am abundantly cautious. I’ll help with your burden.”

Mr. Luck walked backward upstairs, gripping the head of the ladder. He addressed himself to it awkwardly – squared shoulders, canted chest – his muscles unenthused by manual labor. The ladderman, lofting the feet, felt improper hurry. In reverse Mr. Luck moved quickly – the ladderman’s arms drawn up, his charge dragged from his care. The ladder dipped and bobbed and threatened the walls at each mezzanine. The stairs crumbed with grit. The lights filthy. He squinted along the ladder. He counted its bolts. He had to, or meet Mr. Luck’s eyes. The man subsumed his distaste for this work in exceptional effort. His eyes bulged. His cheeks darkened. Faint, cellulose moisture lit his brow. Each knuckle set, as though hands could do nothing but grip the ladder. Meld the ladder to his clumsy structure. The ladderman pulled back, even as he climbed forward. One shove and Mr. Luck would fall.

Likely this floor was a piece with the rest. A torn out tip of cracked pasteboard and split tiles. Wires hung from gaping runs where sockets had been salvaged. Broken-armed brackets drooped from ceilings shedding glass fiber. Daylight reluctant to pass dust-iced windows. Lights on backup supply barely there.

Breath captured by exertion, Mr. Luck indicated to set the ladder beside a metal case, clear of debris. The clock was ticking. Time only stretched so far. “You said ‘ceiling work’?”

“I did.” Mr. Luck coughed himself straight. “I said that. Excuse me. The dust.”

“What is this place?”

“We work the same platform. I’m a surveyor.”

The place was due work. First call the surveyor.

“My assistant brings the equipment. The ladder.”

“Are they expected?” He didn’t like to task share. The app encouraged collabs but the cut was thin.

“They had an accident. Not serious. But I’m left with no elevation.”

“Unfortunate.”

“It is unfortunate. I’m glad you could attend at short notice.” Mr. Luck tried a brogue at the lowest rung.

The ladderman flinched. “If you don’t mind I’ll see to the height work. Liability.”

With arch impatience Mr. Luck moved his foot from the ladder to the metal case, toeing open its latch. He stooped to pick a plastic box, creases sparking his business attire. “Remember these? No. You wouldn’t.”

A plastic box, caved and bent. The clock was ticking. There was barely ever time.

“It’s a video cassette case. Old technology. I store articles in it.”

The ladderman gripped the ladder. It must be his hand on the ladder. “I need to deliver the task, Mr. Luck. I have other givers.”

“You have your equipment. Your ladder. I’m a surveyor. I have my equipment.” He held the box two-handed. A jagged card bulged from its plastic clips. A man with a look of surprise and satisfaction. A building on fire. Unreadable monochrome text. Red-block words: Die Hard. It looked like nothing. It had no reference to anything known.

To abandon a task, to abscond, raised a penalty on the app. A downrating. To climb back from a downrating might take a year. In his history. His feed. He had to see every task through.

Mr. Luck gained outsize pleasure from opening the box. He squeezed each plastic catch with a delicate finger. He drew the hinged lid with steady pressure, shielding its splintered spine. “Of course I don’t have the video cassette,” he murmured. “That would be absurd.”

The box hummed with ticking, circular forms. Metal discs with beveled sides, each inlaid on its upper face with a round black screen, fading red as it captured light. The discs agitated, drawn, apparently, to Mr. Luck’s hands.

“That’s your equipment?” The ladderman didn’t know why he said it. He had only general ideas of surveying.

“If you’d be so good as to activate the safety features of your ladder, I need to deliver my task.”

“The ladder?”

A sadness to Mr. Luck’s mouth. “You see the void? Where the ceiling is disassembled. I have to set these devices along that concrete channel. It is,” he nodded, “a surveyor’s task.”

“I have no liability for people on the ladder.”

“I have liability.” That hardened voice from tightened skin. “My work involves height ordinarily. I’m familiar.”

Not right. An imposition. This man on the ladder. His brogues on the rungs. His soft, office fingers at its grips. And the clock was ticking. No task. Not yet. But another might come. “We’re nearly at time.”

“Then we should get on.” Mr. Luck’s shoulders probed beyond the fractured ceiling. The animation of his torso emphatic through his arms. Each few seconds, his hand would descend to select from the box. Each device, as he chose it, moved smoothly through his fingers, stretching brief red light across his skin.

“You should keep hold, at least with one hand.”

The headless spine paused in its mechanics. “Your concern is admirable. I’ll mention it in my review.”

“Thank you.” He couldn’t dismiss it. There were others who did this. Bigger trucks. Longer ladders. “Is your task completing?”

Again, that freeze, like talk through nitrogen. “Precise completion is hard to determine.” Mr. Luck moved down. Enough to show wary eyes. “Full deployment may not be sufficient.”

“I’m concerned for my next task.”

“You have a next task?”

“I may soon.”

Mr. Luck descended the ladder, a little flighty with the last steps.

The ladderman winced to hear metal sing out.

“Why don’t you complete for me?” Mr. Luck offered the box. “If you’re concerned to do something.”

“It’s my ladder.”

“It is your ladder.”

He knew the void above the tiles was dirty. Buildings were cleaned. But this building looked untouched since, perhaps, the last business moved out. Even closed space drew dust. Tied wires and silent conduits, their informational codes unscannable, hung bleakly from silted bolts, awaiting disposal. A pipe had ruptured, its long body panting wide. And these tight orbits of metal and glass spun keen red light across inert channels. Chained in lines, they seemed to call to each other. The ladderman picked one and gave a cry, the device hot and slippy against his palm.

“Alright up there?”

“What are these, Mr. Luck?”

“They measure. They interrogate.”

“There’s heat.”

“No more than an orthodontic scan.” Unforgivably, Mr. Luck nudged the ladder. Perhaps in excitement, he jogged its frame. Pressure echoed through the ladderman’s spine. “Set loose the rest. I know you’re busy.”

It wasn’t that simple. He wanted to tell the voice below it wasn’t the cakewalk as planned. Of course Mr. Luck began at the length of his arm, to play his devices outward. And they slipped and slalomed. They moved away. When the ladderman tried to place one between others a polarity force resisted. When he tried to extend the line, it moved beyond his reach. “Do they have a sequence?”

“What you say?”

“Mr. Luck, do they follow some order?”

“There is an order.” The careful voice. “They acknowledge each other. Function adapts to position.”

“So I can put them anywhere?”

“Set them loose, as I told you.” The ladder trembled again. “A busy man is best methodical.”

The ladderman completed what he could. He encouraged the little discs along the channel, hesitant of their sanguine light, sensing their communication in his fingers. From this small box, it seemed a great many devices. Or perhaps their oscillation multiplied them. Shifting back to daylight, he thumbed the wounded card clipped to the box lid. Its grainy give, nothing to signify what it meant. No connection with anything served to his off-work moments. Perhaps it was a joke, of a kind. No building caught fire.

Mr. Luck displayed needless caution, taking hold of the box. The box was empty. The little machines doing no doubt valuable labor. “You wouldn’t remember.” With conviction. “You never saw a video cassette.”

No task in the app. Its vibration absent. “I have to go.” It seemed insufficient. “I’m sure you have tasks.”

“In what world would that concern you?” Mr. Luck watched the ladder fold down. “Do you think of the future?”

That wasn’t a question. “I like to help people. I’m grateful to the app.”

“Yes, they need help.” Mr. Luck looked to the broken ceiling, as though called by his machines.

A ring of sour flesh burned the ladderman’s neck. The task had run long. Off the clock. “Have a successful day.”

“I shall.”

The ladder clinked and shivered against his shoulder. Strong, with ready muscles, its weight should be easy. His chest shouldn’t sting. He shouldn’t watch his feet, for fear of falling.

The ladder stowed, the truck seat closed around him. The app stayed quiet. Perhaps he should eat. The ladderman let the truck take decisions. Each touch of the wheel brought heat. The feel of slippy, agitated metal.

The truck stopped for patrols. It was mandatory.

The young officer walked from his vehicle with smooth, perceptible pressure. Embodied rules, no need to lay out where his authority came from. He noted the ladderman’s license. His app credentials.

“I appreciate the truck’s a little old. I’m working to make a trade.”

“Got rust on the rims. It stopped a little sluggish. That’s not why we pulled you.”

Cops were always plural. “I hope there’s nothing wrong.” He wanted to go earnest. He sounded scared. Cops didn’t move from their vehicles without reason.

“You just came from this address.” The data he skimmed from the app.

“I had a task. Height work.”

The cop’s face lost mobility. “Says that on the truck. We got the feed. You drive in, drive out. What height work?”

Deep in monochrome text, terms and conditions said tasks were subject to conventional analytics. To gauge patterns of use. To improve the app. Anyhow, this task was commercial. “With a fellow specialist. A surveyor. Exploratory work. You saw me drive out.”

“We saw.”

However the cop might play it next got lost in a devastation of concrete. A blast so energetic it filled the street.

Instant, the cop acquired rapid, precise instructions. These rare events were prepped. Sirens swarmed the corner. Black tubes filled fireproof gloves, wrapped on hard hands.

The ladderman went five steps when the first blow took him. Sour-tasting blacktop scorched his face. Obedient, he let the kick come in, knowing soon they’d hoist him away. The truck burst open. The ladder broke on the ground. All the while, the cops said the same thing. The same thing.

​            Alice felt brackish being back in the city. She was seasick from the stinking, lumbering bus from Boston and standing in the throat of Port Authority. That and everything: the three hundred level philosophy and psychology classes; 2 a.m. wake-ups in the library; summiting 25-page papers; the long dirty winter of ramen noodles, and rounds of sweltering and freezing, inside, outside, all the time, took her down to the studs. Spring didn’t feel like release or renewal. It felt like a dated rerun. All she could think about was lying on the twin bed her mother surely put in her new bedroom in the latest apartment—Better views! Higher ceilings! More light!—two blocks from the last one. She drifted toward the usual meeting point, the ghostly sculpture installation of “The Commuters,” forever frozen while somberly waiting to board a bus. Supposedly a tribute to the commuting masses, Alice saw herself in the dull monotony of their slumped bodies and blank faces. People swerved around her, clicking their tongues. A man smacked into her. “Idiot,” he hissed, “this whole thing is about keeping moving.” Alice glared at the back of his head. “Idiot yourself,” she muttered, looking for a clock. This could not be the first time in eight years the meet up failed. She came through the heavy doors, flipping her dark, glossy hair back and mirrored Ray Bans up. Alice exhaled. No one felt more like home to her. Elena, solid ground and bright sky.
            Their hug was long and hard. “To make up for the fact that you’re leaving for the summer again,” Elena pulled back and stared into Alice’s eyes, “we will jump into having fun.” She sighed. “Once we get you fixed up, of course.” She took a bulging bag from Alice’s shoulders. As they walked out onto the sidewalk, Elena chirped about people and things. It was a frizzy day, warm for early May. The city, too, was winter-worn, gray. As they walked, Elena’s warm, familiar warbling picked Alice up and carried her the rest of the way off the front lines and onto the life raft that was her best friend since kindergarten, driving her crazy, and loving her madly, since circa 1973.

            “Obviously we’ll go to Joan’s new place first…” Since middle school, they’d been referring to Alice’s mother by her first name. “…then we’ll grab a bite, a nap and a shower, in that order,” Elena said. “Good plan?”

Alice nodded. “Thanks for coming to get me,” she said. “I’m fried.”

“No shit! You’re like one of those hot dogs we used to eat on Coney Island!” Elena laughed. “What are they called again?”

“Coneys, I think,” Alice said, prickling, while Elena shouted, “rippers!”

Had it been so long that Elena didn’t catch herself anymore, didn’t give Alice an apologetic glance, bringing up Coney Island?

After a class she took on spirituality in the modern world, Alice had been secretly working on “saying yes” to life. In her wallet, she kept a Rumi poem, “The Guest House,” about welcoming thoughts and feelings like visitors entering a guest house. She was a work in progress.

            That night, after each of the promised steps and Q & A with Joan, her real estate broker mother, Elena insisted on going out for just a drink. “We are twenty-one,” she said.

Waving and smiling at strangers as they walked through the dark bar, Elena pulled Alice up a set of sticky stairs to a balcony with stools lined up at a counter on the banister, facing the stage. Through shafts of spotlight, they had a clear view of the blue-lit stage below.

“I see you’ve been here before,” Alice shouted to Elena over the house music, watching a group of fake ID holders with glowing white teeth spool out of one of the back corners, fiddling with each other’s miniskirts and poufy bangs.  

Elena waved a peace-sign at a guy behind the long bar on the main floor. “The band is really hot. I mean the music. I wanted it to be a surprise!”

“Wanted what to be a surprise?” Alice said, but Elena’s attention pinballed. Her usual buoyant energy had been consistently escalating. By the time they walked into the Greenwich Village bar wedged between a window featuring a giant plastic pepperoni slice and another crammed with grimy bongs, she was babbling about the drummer and the bassist like they were her brothers.

Two glasses of electric blue liquid appeared on the table in front of them. Elena bent back, twirling the mini paper umbrella at the scruffy man whose bandana showcased a broad, shiny forehead.

“You’re always the best, Marty!” Elena cooed.

Marty winked. Alice sipped the fruity florescent drink. Elena leaned over the table, scooting Alice’s elbows into her palms. Her dark eyes sparkled with mischief.

“You love it, right? Marty calls it Sex on the Driveway, an urban twist on the usual Sex on the Beach,” she laughed, raising her cup. “Let’s toast! May we jam the whole summer into the next three weeks!”

Alice tilted her cup to Elena’s. “No one has a driveway in the city,” she said. Elena rolled her eyes and sipped through the tiny plastic straw.

Two hours, two drinks, and multiple assurances from Elena later, the house lights went down and a band appeared. Elena shot up, whistling through her fingers. During the first songs, top 40 covers, Alice watched her friend unfurl like a flag in the wind, arms waving, hips swaying. She herself still felt underwater, or maybe just dispassionate and detached, like an anthropologist or a surgeon. But no, something watery rinsed through her.

The fake IDs tossed their hips and projected their chests at the bassist, guitarist and singer, who played into their groping by toeing and backing away from the edge of the stage. The music was crisp and accurate, but the scene, including Elena, was teeny bopper.

“You Shook Me All Night Long” was a favorite. Alice closed her eyes and was suddenly watching herself run Smoots along the Charles River, Walkman cranked. When a crooning ballad rolled in, she opened her eyes to see if it was the same singer. It was. The guys romped around the stage like idiots, but their rawness morphed from dirty to glamorous, loose and easy to strutting and defiant. She felt the live music wanting to hook her, to pull her in, and was not about to be tied up and thrown over a shoulder. Not her, not here, not tonight.

She studied the guys with steely distrust. The drummer’s mouth contorted to the beat, his gaze a lightning bolt of concentration. The bassist’s long, sickle-shaped trunk curled over his instrument. The guitarist’s high cheekbones and spiky bleached hair. Were they ridiculous? Or so in thrall to the music that restraint and self-consciousness disappeared?

The front man’s chameleonic voice was Clapton, Jagger, Springsteen, Bono—a mixed tape in a boom box. What was that bit in the spirituality class? Something about “no equilibrium without facing the music.” She parsed his details: thin, blond hair; compact legs in tattered, acid-wash jeans; a long, hairless torso beneath a rumpled, mis-buttoned black shirt. Piece by piece, nothing remarkable. And yet, as he twirled toward the guitarist and lurched back to the microphone to belt out lyrics, her breath caught. When his fist shot up, she almost followed. He marched and leapt and skipped and dipped and shimmied and bent over the microphone like it was a child, or a lover. Loping across the stage, left to right, from the front edge to the back shadows, winking at the bassist, throwing a peace sign to the drummer, squatting and jumping up to taunt the fake IDs. She watched Elena responding effortlessly, gracefully to the band’s amplified, hyperbolic performance. But Alice only felt overheated and exposed, with something like Pop Rocks exploding in her chest.

Finally, the stage went dark and the band disappeared into the back. “That was fun!” Alice shouted in Elena’s ear, more volume than enthusiasm.

“Come meet them!” Elena squealed.

Alice stood up, light-headed, her legs as unsteady as a knock-kneed fawn. “What the hell is in that drink?”

 “Alcohol!” Elena hooted.

According to Joan, this was the last real summer, meaning the only kind of summer Alice knew. After she graduates, there would be no more three month summer vacations or days off for “everything under the sun.” Her mother called herself a realist. Elena’s phrase was mano dura—a firm hand, which she said was in line with, but more respectful than, Type A or battle axe. Alice believed Joan’s screws tightened when she became the only parent. If her mother managed the family’s basic needs, her father was free to show Alice the firehouse where he was captain, the Tenement Museum, the Transit Museum, Ellis Island, Governors Island. He wanted to show her how culture, history, thought all pendulumed through time. Once Alice overheard her mother crap on the head of her father’s mission. “If you really want to support our daughter’s education, you would teach her a musical instrument, a second language or a practical skill.” Mano dura, indeed.

Maybe this dissatisfaction was why Joan decided they’d go Coney Island that Memorial Day weekend. Alice was eleven and unenthused. Her dad’s understanding smile persuaded her not to complain. That morning, a real estate deal blew up and her mother stayed home. Once out of the apartment, her father promised fried Oreos for lunch after riding the Cyclone as many times as they wanted. Five, it turned out. Alice would have gone again, but her father had a headache so they ate funnel cakes while he drew a roller coaster in the dust at their feet, explaining the effects of gravity, momentum, centripetal force, and friction. She asked her dad if he was sad that her mother didn’t come, but he laughed and said, “Your mother is a marvel.” Alice remembered little else until she found herself at the Rangeley Lake Camp for Girls the day after fifth grade ended, except that her father’s headache was caused by a fractured vertebrae in his neck, and two days later, he was “gone.”

Alice became a ward of her mother’s efficient, methodical planning. Watching the blurry river whirr by from the backseat of a rental car, she feebly tried to imagine herself as a camper. Her mother promised she’d start to feel better after a few days of fresh air. Being outside all day and evenings around the bonfire did help her sleep. But the counselors—younger, cooler, more attentive parents, especially the Director, Ben Waterman—made the real difference.

Alice had a twice weekly appointment in Mr. Waterman’s office. “It is very difficult for a girl to lose her father at a young age,” he told her. “It will take time to feel normal again.” Those first weeks, Alice clung to the soft, muffling shroud that had wrapped itself around her weeks before. When she complained that her mother was too busy to visit, Mr. Waterman said she was also grieving.

Thankfully, the band was in the mysterious off-limits “back” by the time Elena and Alice got down the stairs and up to the stage. The fake IDs, who had turned into a pack of jackals during the set, had returned to more docile pack activities.

Alice faked cramps to go home. But Elena heard none of it. The crowd started chanting for the band to return. “Free Bird!” they shouted. “Stairway to Heaven!” The band returned to the stage playing the first notes of “Livin’ on a Prayer.” The crowd roared. If it was pleasure that Alice felt, it had a thread of restless agony. She opened and closed her eyes, stood up and sat down, put her attention on the things nailed to the wall—a blue bucket, two fishing poles, a net of dozens of yellow rubber ducks. The house lights came on. Elena was drenched, pink cheeked, and grinning unbearably. Alice could not stand another second of near-rapture. It was time to go.

As they picked their way out, Elena gushed at Marty, back-slapped roadies, and nodded to the fake IDs. Finally, Alice pulled her the rest of the way out to the sidewalk.

“I told you, didn’t I?” Elena’s wide eyes were an inch away.

“Yeah,” Alice swallowed, unable to pour out her confusing feelings. “I’m starving.”

“Pizza!” Elena shouted.

            They plopped down at a greasy table in the buzzing blue fluorescence of the giant pepperoni slice place. A waitress dropped the slices down between them. With pink grease dripping down her forearms, Elena cooed at her slice, praising the gods of cheese and bread and sauce. Alice, too, felt somewhat better. Her twin bed was howling for her. Holding open the door for Elena, Alice clucked, and the band walked in.

At Foxleigh, the boarding high school that was the next great idea after summer camp, Alice attended Hot Pot mac & cheese parties with so-called friends, but only on the hall phone with Elena did she share her actual life. She felt bad complaining about boarding school, and later about Northeastern, but Elena always swore she was thrilled to be getting an inexpensive associates degree before matriculating—with a full scholarship, mind you—to Barnard. Even if that was just a dream. “I’m a first generation college student,” she loved to say. “I’m already a colossal success!”

Joan shook her head about Elena—such a bright girl, if only her parents prioritized her education—which Alice learned from her college social worker was a subtle way to pat herself on the back. Psychology courses gave her terms to privately name the world she lived in since then: dyadic, merged identity, conflicted, enmeshed, disruptive attachment, trauma-bonded.

The singer was twinkly, shinier, up close. Elena joked and giggled with them, then with a yelp, remembered to introduce Alice to Joey, the drummer; Colton, the guitarist; Rex, the bassist; Billy, the singer. Billy with brilliant blues; Billy with blond hair under a backwards Mets hat; Billy with the soaked half-unbuttoned black shirt. He was shorter on the ground than on stage.

He said, “bring your friends to Kenny’s on Thursday. You might get to be there the night history is made!” The guys grabbed their slices, nodded and walked out. Elena and Alice followed less than a minute later, but the sidewalk had already swallowed them.

On Thursday afternoon, Alice picked out the slate blue sundress with spaghetti straps that left her shoulders and back exposed, put on mascara, tiny gold hoop earrings, and drew dark brown eyeliner into the lash line of her top lids. Her mother raised an eyebrow when she came out of her room, but only mentioned that Ben had called from Maine. Alice said she’d call him back tomorrow. She played it cool.

At the West 4^th Street Station, Elena smiled in approval. In her jean miniskirt, pink ribbed tank top and shimmery pink lips, she got away with sweetness because she was witty and smart. She didn’t need Alice’s approval. Like gum-snapping agents, they walked south on Sixth Ave., cut in on West 3^rd, right on Sullivan and left on Bleecker, passing tables of used books, leather wallets and silver rings. The bouncer nodded them in. In the dim, malodorous bar, a half block from the first, Alice let out a two-day-old breath. They were early, properly timed to get a table and start on their two-drink minimum. Elena gestured to the bartender, and two milky drinks arrived at the tiny wooden table. She had already laid tracks here, too.

Tomorrow, Alice promised herself, she’d focus on Maine. Ben Waterman called to confirm she was coming because at the end of last summer, she told him she wasn’t.

As the band warmed up, Billy pointed at people and palmed his heart, occasionally blowing kisses. The songs unspooled. Though this new universe was light, spongy, more effervescent than Alice enjoyed, she didn’t want to be anywhere else.

They started “Every Breath You Take.” An electrical storm flew into her chest, crackling and sparking. Billy locked eyes with a woman in front of the stage who held her tattooed forearms out, swaying and smiling like an idiot, belting out lyrics. “Oh, can’t you seeeee… you belong to meeeee?” It was like she was feasting on Billy from an arm’s length and five feet below him. Alice laughed. As if he belongs to you! As if!

Something clicked. She laughed again, at herself this time, realizing she was acting jealous! She glanced at Elena, who beamed back, oblivious to the exposing neon light of what Alice felt. On stage, the woman was gone, and Billy, singing, locked onto her for a little eternity. The electric light orchestra inside her body swelled to a juddering, breathless, suspended crescendo.

The house lights came on. Alice ran to the bathroom. Her pulse was racing. Her heart exploding, her head pounding. She splashed water on her face just like in the movies. This was all absurd. She went to find Elena. It took a second to register that Elena and Billy were talking, leaning close to each other’s ears. Elena arched an eyebrow at her. “After party?”

In what seemed like a few minutes, they were in a paneled basement studio three avenues east. Some of the fake IDs, Marty the bartender, and two bouncer-types came in. Billy handed out beers, Rex ordered pizza, and Joey went for beer. More people came, but not the tattooed arms woman. Alice settled herself on a sinking couch, next to a giggling Elena, as the parade of pheromones flowed inside her. She did not want to appear to be looking for Billy.

“Hey,” a gravelly voice whispered behind her ear. “Wanna see something? You’re gonna love this.”

He was so close. Close enough that if she turned her head, her lips would graze his cheek. He aimed a remote at the TV set on the wall. “Pizza!” yelled Joey from the hallway, and people got up. Elena pinched Alice’s thigh, hard, before leaving the room. Bouncy orchestral music and concentric red circles appeared on the screen, centered around a bullseye tunnel.

“Bugs Bunny is a genius,” Billy said.

They watched Elmer Fudd tiptoe through the woods with his shotgun, and Daffy Duck warn Bugs, only to get out-pranked. “Isn’t he great?”

Alice tried to watch with fresh, new, guest house eyes. After the first episode, when no one changed, no one succeeded, and no one died from the many bullets fired at close range, she turned to Billy.

 “I loved cartoons when I was a kid.”

He laughed. “Bugs is just a regular dude trying to stay out of the way. He just does his own thing, then all of a sudden, someone throws an anvil at him.”

“Then he’s probably not innocent,” Alice said.

“Maybe.” Billy chuckled. “But he always comes out on top.”

He slid over the back of the couch, sinking down beside her where Elena had been. They were alone.

“I’ve been watching you,” Billy whispered. With the tip of his index finger, he slowly traced her lips, eyebrows, cheekbones. Her skin sparked where he touched. “This okay?”

Ribbons of color pulsed behind her eyelids. Vague, passing considerations sank into the quicksand of her eagerness. It was more than okay. It was astonishing. Why didn’t Rumi just come out with it straight? Say yes when opening the door because who would ever want to miss this? Her whole being subtly shifted, right there under his gentle touch, from aquatic to terrestrial. Her lungs filled with phosphorescence. She was becoming something new. In the complete dark of the basement, she was like a bird or a flower; weightless, oxygenated, bursting with life. 

Alice woke in the gray dark and shot her legs over the side of the lumpy pull-out couch. She felt around for her clothes, a thread of panic coiling in her throat. What time was it? She gazed at him, soft, gentle boy. Their legs were entangled when she woke. His cheek on her chest.

Billy’s arm snaked out from under the afghan. “Don’tch,” he mumbled.

She kissed the side of his face. “See you tonight,” she whispered, the wheel of fortune and misfortune spinning in her chest: the hour, her mother, Elena, her vibrating body, his hands, her legs, his salty tongue, the lyrics of “Heaven,” he crooned after they finished making love.

Later that day, having successfully avoided her mother, taken a morning-long nap and a long shower, Alice played with the bowl of fake seashells on the eat-in-kitchen table. Her mother’s summery heels clicked up to the door, opened the locks, and clacked inside. Alice braced herself for her professional mother’s taut, poised, pre-closing energy. She wasn’t wrong. In a trim, taupe linen skirt and fitted white blouse, her mother stood on the other side of the table.

“Ah ha,” she said, “here’s the mystery party girl. Ben left another message. Haven’t you sent in your forms?”

“I meant to,” Alice said. 

Her mother sighed. “It’s probably your last summer there,” she said, draining the last of the coffee pot into a lidded mug. “It was right for you back then, and I’m forever grateful to Ben Waterman for taking such good care of you, but you do have an adult life to get on with.” 

“I’ll sort it out,” Alice said.

Her mother’s head tipped a little to the side. “You’re okay?”

“Just tired,” Alice said. And baby…so gently he sang last night, this morning… you’re all that I want / When you’re lying here in my arms / I’m finding it hard to believe / We’re in heaven. Elena would think it too high school prom, so that bit of ecstasy she would keep to herself.

“The re-do is nice,” Alice added, a little ego petting to steer away from questions about last night.

“I rushed to get it done for you,” her mother said. “You like the palette, then?”

“Sure.” Moving and redecorating, when she was making good money, was a way her mother showed love. Elena thought it sweet. Alice thought it a slightly softer more mano dura.

“But?”

“A little bland.”

Her mother smiled. “Pale Earth. That’s the scheme. Homier than all white, still good for resale.”

“Can we mix it up for my room? Something like aquamarine?”

Joan screwed up her mouth. “Predictable.”

Her mother’s gaze stretched out. “Let me see you,”she used to say, taking her in before they parted.

“Well, I’m off to meet with the Maiden Lane buyers,” she said, grabbing a striped purse on the way to the door.

“Dumb street name for one of the world’s major metropolises,” Alice called after her.

“But not a dumb paycheck!”

Night after night after night, the music sizzled. Alice, weightless and sure, slid in before dawn and out again after dark, crammed with adrenaline. Every night there was more energy, bigger audiences, more anticipation. Elena remarked on Alice’s enthusiasm, her stamina for the night life, and something about her new attachment. Alice smiled and laughed and clinked her beer against Elena’s. Maybe a touch of jealousy, maybe nothing at all.

The string of late nights loosened Alice’s grip on time and day. Life felt like a revelation—no structure, no responsibility, only anticipation and the dawning present. She and Elena had dinner with the band before gigs, hours in full and empty bars, and afterhours in the basement studio, his grandparents’ rent-controlled apartment he had for a year while trying to “make it.” Something was up with Elena, but Alice figure she would find out when it was time.

Maine was hanging over her. It would be bizarre to be a no-show after so long, even when, last August, she’d said she would not be returning. Ben had accepted her statement without question, and in the spring, longing for tiny wild blueberries and the private, salty refuge she found nowhere else, Alice called to change her mind. “Wonderful,” Ben said, and laughed his big hearted, welcoming laugh.

Next to the To Do list on the dresser, a note from her mother: IF YOU DO NOT CALL BEN WATERMAN TODAY, I WILL. Alice dialed.

“I did tell you I was coming up,” she said a tiny bit curtly.

“Yes,” he said.

“I had finals,” she said, remembering the messages he left on her machine at school. “And I’ve been busy since I got home.”

“Here too,” he said. “We just finished rebuilding the big dock.”

He had a way of changing her mood. “With a diving board, finally?”

“You’ll have to see for yourself. We look forward to seeing you, Alice.”

“Okay,” she sighed, and hung up.

Sprawled on her bed with the top half of the pineapple phone to her ear, Elena twirled a lock of light brown hair around a pencil. Alice gazed at the photo triptych museum of their growing up: in oversized mortar boards for kindergarten graduation, as a pair of dice for 5^th grade Halloween, knobby kneed in white lace for 8^th grade dance, as dates in matching chartreuse georgette for junior prom. With a gift certificate that Elena won at the science fair in 7^th grade, they re-decorated her room in island paradise. Curling around a coconut pillow on the palm tree comforter, Alice whispered, “I’m considering not going to Maine this year.”

Elena’s eyes widened. She whispered into the pineapple and clapped down the phone. “Seriously?” 

“Debating,” Alice spluttered.

Elena stared at her longer than necessary. “Tell!” she finally squealed.

“I just realized I’ve been stuffing myself into the kiddie swing for way too long.”

“Would it have anything to do with a guy who’s addicted to Bugs Bunny cartoons?”

“That, too.” Alice blushed.

“You know,” Elena said, “There’s something I wish I told you already.”

“Okay…” Alice tensed, hoping to hear why she left that first night at Billy’s with a big pinch and without a good bye, or what has been bothering her in general.

“The scene, the guys, the band, the music, the whole thing—it’s not exactly a gentle environment.” She took a deep breath and blew it out. “Maybe it’s too late, because you’re already in with Billy. I should have warned you. The scene can be kind of brutal.”

“Oh,” Alice said. “Well, I’m not that sad little girl anymore. I can take care of myself.”

“Okay then,” Elena said, smiling falsely. “I just worry. But if you’re good, then I’m good. So, what are we wearing?”

The cocktails tasted metallic. The music blasted through Alice, not filling her with bright color, but clawing and scratching. She sat in the back where Billy couldn’t see her and was not looking. In fact, he seemed drunk before the first song. They hadn’t done dinner before the gig, something about Billy seeing his grandmother.

An hour later, tiny knives pricked her throat. Alice told Elena she didn’t feel well and had to go home. Elena didn’t try to get her to stay, or insist she go too.

Twisted in the sheets, she dreamed: lying on the bottom bunk in the cool, humid cabin, Mr. Waterman’s face bent under the top bunk, turning a damp washcloth over on her forehead. He lifted her head to give her sips of water from a metal cup. He touched his cheek to her forehead. He smelled briny, like seaweed. Mr. Waterman stayed a long while. She might have been twelve.

Alice slept and woke, slept and woke. She was in swimming Maine and eating pizza in New York and having sex on a beach and on a driveway and in Billy’s basement, through tides of heaviness and lightness, until Elena jumped onto her bed, startling her awake.  

“Joey said an agent is coming tonight! Can you imagine? They could get signed!”

Alice tried to swallow around the pebbly jumble in her throat, to make sense of the details. “Cover bands get signed?”

“I’m sure there’s a progression, but ultimately, they’d get paid, quit their day jobs and work on their own stuff.”

“They have day jobs?”

“You know what I mean,” Elena said. She held up a bottle of Tylenol Flu. “Take this and get better immediately!”

Alice sighed, dropping back on the pillows. “I’m stuck at the bottom of the deep end. Pressure,” she waved her arms, “everywhere.”

“Promise me you’ll try,” Elena sighed. “Joey said we need you there. Billy said you’re the Courtney to his Kurt.” Her face darkened. “But in a good way.”

“I’ll try. If not, tell him break a leg.” She tried to imagine the scene, but he was only a faraway spec in her mind. “In a good way.”

When she woke again, she’d dreamed of sitting on a barstool on stage in front of thousands, smiling at Billy as he crooned a soft, sweet ballad. Johnny and June. John and Yoko. She got up. Her body was weak, but her head was clear and vigorous, like the shaft of sun bolting through the window and splashing on the floor.

The kitchen phone rang. In between blasts of the blow dryer, Elena shouted about how the agent loved the band, promised them an opening gig for a big act at a big venue, and told Joey he saw a real future for them if their originals were half as authentic. “He’s coming again tonight,” she said excitedly. “But listen—Billy was MIA after last night. Joey just found him and said he’d be okay as long as you come and bring his stuff tonight.”

“MIA? What day is it?”

“Well, not missing, but you know, out of the loop. And, it’s tomorrow. I saw you yesterday and now it’s the next day. Joey said they’ll be at the bar in a couple of hours. And the agent is coming. And you’ll get his stuff, right?”

“I’m getting in the shower,” Alice said. She felt fresh and new and triumphant. Billy needed her. The refrigerator hummed. On it there was a magnet she gave her mother years ago, a watercolor Maine shoreline of pines and craggy rocks with tiny rope words: I ❤ MY MOM

She picked the beige phone receiver off the wall, steeled herself, and dialed.

“Mr. Waterman,” she said. “I am not coming. I know it’s late notice, and I’m sorry.”

“Alice? Are you okay?” his voice flowed softly over her.

She took a deep breath, then pushed words out around the spiky remnants in her throat. “Yes. I can’t … I’m not… I just …” Her throat closed around the rest.

“Okay,” he crooned. His inexhaustible calm irritated her.

“It’s not okay, Ben. I don’t know exactly why, but I do know it’s not.” Words sloshed around her head.

He was silent.

“Goodbye,” she said, conflicted, upset, and relieved.

At the bar, Elena jumped up to bear hug her, then pulled her down to sit at the table, where she and Joey filled her in on the agent.

“As long as Billy’s in decent shape,” Joey said. “We’re golden.”

In two bounding strides, Billy dropped into a chair next to Alice and planted a lippy kiss on her open mouth. He was showered. Shaved. Smiling.

“Cretin,” Elena whispered.

 Joey looked at Alice: “He’ll be ready in fifteen?”

Alice nodded, confused by the tone, and by Elena and Joey slipping off.

Billy’s wide black pupils bored into her. “What happened?”

“I was sick. What about you? They said you were MIA?”

“Everything got screwed up,” he said. “I missed you like crazy.” He nuzzled in her neck. “You’re all better now?”

“All better,” Alice said, pulling back to look at him. He looked bright and clean, but there was something else. Leaning in to smell him, she imagined the worst—girly shampoo, flowered soap, fake ID stuff—but just smelled cigarettes. “You don’t look like you’ve been face-down in a ditch.”

“I’m good now,” Billy said. She hadn’t told him about Maine. “Did you stop by my place?”

She held out a cotton bag. “I brought you clothes, and,” she held up a paper sack, “coffee and a sandwich.”

“Alice my Palace,” Billy said. “Look at me.” She looked at him, his shining eyes. He smiled, held her gaze, stayed with her. “Thank you.”

As the night went on, the crowd grew and pressed in on the stage. Heat hung in the air. Elena kept a fretful eye on the young, smack-cheeked agent in tight black jeans and a rumpled black t-shirt. The songs were tight, the set list was tight, and for the first forty minutes, everything was seamless.

Between sets, the agent fed Billy shots. In the second set, he moonwalked across the stage. In trying to swivel the mic stand while jumping over it, he caught a foot, lurched, tucked, and rolled off the stage. The fake IDs pawed at him, stupidly excited by his sprawl, trying to help him gain control of his limbs and whereabouts. He was graceful in his fumbling, got back on stage, and carried on.

Elena looked at Alice, slightly accusatory. The band kept the music circling while Billy dropped back to all fours, crawled to the edge of the stage, stuck out his hand, and grabbed one of the fake IDs. While shouting garbled lyrics without a mic, Billy bent the girl backward, slipped, and dropped her on her mini-skirted ass.

Alice dropped her head into her hands. Elena shouted in her ear: “Billy’s fucking everybody over.”

A thin silence accompanied the two of them back to his basement. Billy was smashed. Alice pulled his arm to keep him from knocking people, but he kept tugging away. She was pissed.

He was snoring before Elmer Fudd tip toed across screen with a rifle. Alice wiggled out of the couch bed and went home. The note on the counter, held down by the Maine magnet, in caps: MUST SPEAK TO YOU BEFORE MY 9 A.M.

It felt like two minutes later that her mother knocked, entered and stood by her bed.

“I spoke to Ben Waterman.”

“I said I would handle it.”

Her mother scoffed. “Oh, sure. You waited until the last minute and then you flaked.”
            “I did not flake,” Alice huffed. “And anyway, you yourself said it was time for me to get on with my life.”

“That’s misrepresentation. You were unprofessional, ill-mannered, inappropriate, and self-centered.”

A red rage tore into Alice’s tender throat. “Are you serious? It’s a summer camp, not a real-estate-agent-of-the-year contest.

“Incorrect. It’s Ben Waterman, who has been nothing but good to you. You ditched your commitment at the last minute for an…infatuation?”

“First, I’m not a child anymore. Furthermore, you are the ill-mannered, inappropriate and self-centered one who has no idea about enjoying life!” Alice had never talked to her mother like that.

“Oh, is that right? Since you’re such an adult, you should get your own place,” her mother snarled, stopping the door just short of a slam.

“If only I knew a good realtor!” Alice shouted. Fuming and throwing clothes in a bag, she waited until she heard her the front door close, and left.

Elena was in an electric mood. She had managed to talk the guys into an Italian dinner near Irving Plaza. Billy, holding the set list on his lap in the window seat while they waited for a table, looked like a little boy. Alice sat down, intending to be soft. Infatuation my ass.

“When are you going back to school?” Billy mumbled, looking at his hands. 

“That’s what you’re thinking about right now?”

His stunning blue eyes flicked to her. “Something’s not right,” he said.

It could be drugs, Alice thought, or alcohol. She looked for something less serious to say.

“You’re under a lot of pressure,” she whispered. “But you have a gift, and it might just be that more people are going to have a chance to appreciate it.”

“You should be a therapist.”

“It’s just common sense.” Ben Waterman was why she had anything to say. Alice took the set list, and pulled his face toward her. “You got this,” she whispered in his ear after. “Trust me.”

Billy smiled and sighed. She knew so little about his life, family, and childhood. Bugs Bunny, he’d said, was the best thing about it. Their party was called. His face was lighter. “I’m starving,” he said.

At twelve-thirty, after six other acts—two great, two horrible, two meh—the spotlights went up again in the massive empty ballroom. Alice and Elena stood on the dance floor, their anticipation long drained. The band came out. Billy shaded his eyes and scanned the scene, found Alice, and pressed his palm to his lips blew her an exaggerated kiss. His vulnerability worried her.

In tightly wound unison, they rolled into the first songs of the set. Onlookers migrated to the stage. A groove began to take shape. Whether the audience was 200 or 500, by the third song, they were smashed up close to the stage as Billy paced back and forth, jabbing his fist into the smoky air. He moved seamlessly, jumping the mic-stand, crouching on the floor and bursting up to belt out the falsetto of “Sympathy for the Devil.” During a solo, the bassist played the strings with his teeth. The crowd went crazy. Alice followed Elena, letting her hips and torsos loose. The electric current left no one still, no one untouched.

When the set was over, they collapsed into each other, sweaty and elated. The band was going somewhere! With crisp clarity, the nights in skuzzy bars became the preamble for a bunch of early twenty-somethings who believed in a dream that was actually coming true.

            House music came on as the ballroom went dark. Elena grabbed Alice’s hand. “I have to tell you something!” she shouted.

“I have to tell you something too!” Alice returned.

 “Me first!” Elena insisted. Alice leaned into her friend, her solid, physical, present friend whose usual vanilla rose smell was cut with musky sweat and cigarette smoke. She draped her arms around Elena’s neck, feeling woozy.

“You know I love you, right?” Elena chuckled nervously. She spun Alice around and backed her to the side of the stage. “Can you just promise that you’ll forgive me eventually? Please?”

The spotlights popped up. The band was back on stage.

“Just tell me!” Alice shouted, her head full of scenarios and apprehensions.

“We were asked to run a few originals,” Billy rasped into the mic.

“Oh my God!” Elena screamed.

The crowd erupted. Billy was gleaming, smiling, no sign of the sad little boy she helped to his seat in the restaurant hours ago. Alice needed him to find her, to connect with her in that sweet space that filled and emptied and stabilized her all at once. But he did not.

Elena led her back to the dance floor. “After this,” she said. “I promise.”

The first was a jaunty, almost poppy song, less flush with texture and complexity, but a catchy chorus the crowd seized. By the second song, a rock/punk mix with a raw edge, Alice and Elena were dancing at the front of the stage, arms overhead. Alice didn’t care what she looked like. This is me letting go!  

The next thing she saw was Ben Waterman’s face, lowered close to hers. What was this? She turned away but could not shake him, his rough thumb tracing her nose… no! she thought, no, no, no! Was this Rumi’s crowd of mutilated dark thoughts? She was dizzy, suddenly, the room spinning, like when her father took her upper arms and spun her in circles. Then she was at the campfire eating, shoving funnel cake and cotton candy in her mouth, then fried pickles, blueberries, and Cracker Jacks, everything falling back out of her mouth. She ate a carrot, shrieked on a roller coaster, jumped off a cliff into a freezing river. She gulped, coughed, choked, spat, vomited, shat her pants, squeezed the hand in hers, screamed and fell.

Though she seemed like a cartoon version, it was her mother at the eat-in-kitchen table, drinking a very full glass of red wine. “The Maiden Lane buyers pulled out,” she said. Elena mumbled condolences. Joan looked long at Alice, who had no fight, no words, and no way to hide the cracks in her universe. “We’re turning in,” she heard Elena say turning to steer her down the pale earth hall.

On her back in the dim yellow spray of nightlight, Alice searched for meaning, motive, understanding; something to make sense of why she had a big black smear where the last hours had been. Elena’s cheek pressed into the watermelon slice pillow as she slept. She’d said Alice had fainted. Alice had no memory of fainting, but also no memory of leaving the ballroom, taking a cab, sitting a long time in the lobby, or riding the elevator up to the 11^th floor. She did remember Elena twisting the skin on her forearm in two directions as they stood in front of the apartment door and Alice jerking her arm away. “Be normal,” she whispered. “Joan.”

“Elena,” she said, nudging her. “Wake up.”

Elena sat up.

“You were going to tell me something,” Alice said.

“Oh,” Elena said softly. “Okay. Yeah. Are you ok though?”

“Ok enough,” Alice said.

“In the winter, when I first met the guys and saw the band play… there was one night, just one… when I made a mistake. I knew it immediately, or as soon as the alcohol wore off…”

“You slept with Billy,” Alice said.

Elena’s face fell. “You knew?”

“No, but you’re making such a big deal. What else could it be?”

“It is a big deal! And you’re really mad, aren’t you, I mean, I would probably be, I think, at least for a while—” Elena sucked in a breath.

“Is that why you pinched my leg instead of saying good bye and didn’t make sure I had a way home that first night at Billy’s? Is that what’s been bothering you all this time?”

“No,” Elena said, sighing.

“Well?”

“Alice, you’re my best friend forever. I love you just the way you are, but then you passed out tonight, and I got really scared…”

“Get to it,” Alice said.

“It’s about us.”

“Please be concise. I could have a concussion…”

“Stop it!”

Alice threw her arm around Elena. “Joking. Go on.”

“In a way, you have always been the center of our friendship. Like, my job is to make sure you are alright. Not only after your dad, but before.” She paused. “Do you know what I mean?”

“Maybe,” Alice said.

“After I saw the band, all I could think about was bringing you to see them. I was determined to have fun before you left. I didn’t anticipate that you would get so wrapped up in it all.”

Alice sighed. “I know what you’re saying. And I agree. So let me tell you this while we’re putting it all on the table. I think Ben Waterman might have been inappropriate with me.”

“What? Why do you think that?”

“This whole thing with Billy has given me a new idea of myself as someone who is free to enjoy and feel and be irresponsible and have desires and do things that aren’t about getting somewhere else. I can’t explain it exactly. I don’t know if I’m a breaching whale or a diving dolphin or a soaring bird, but I feel a ton, way more than before, all kinds of things like sadness and anger and even, I know how this sounds, ecstasy.”

“Either Billy slipped you some of his performance-enhancing drugs or you’re finally ready for that cracker jack therapist Joan has been threatening all these years!” Elena shouted.

“What drugs?”

“Yeah, that was the other thing I needed to tell you. Billy disappeared when you were sick because he was on a bender. Uppers and downers both, Joey thinks. He’s gets manic, and then he sleeps for 12 hours.”

“I see,” Alice said. “Thank you, now I’m clear. And now, it’s set.”

“What’s set?”

“Coney Island.”

Elena raised her eyebrows. “Huh?”

“It’s time for me to start facing the music. I’ve skipped over a lot. I think I’m ready to start, though. And if you are not tired of me, and I would absolutely respect your decision either way, I’d love for you to make sure I’m alright one more time, starting where my dad ended, and I began again.”

“Of course,” Elena said. “On one condition.”

Alice looked at her bestie in the dim yellow light.

“For our first, last summer, we find new fun.”

“On one condition,” Alice said. “You also come with me to the doctor. You know I hate doctors.”

“You don’t want Joan to go with you?” Elena offered.

“She can come too,” Alice said. “For Memorial Day.”

After I’d organized the container drawer, a mess of orphaned tops and bottoms, I recommended that Tammy toss all the plastic and replace it with glass. I researched where to buy it and sent her the link. She loved the initiative. That was the problem with their old housekeeper, she’d said. “She did the bare minimum, and even then, it was half-hearted.” I laughed because that’s what my mother had said about me. My modus operandi, as she’d called it, my whole view of the world, my dad jabbed, was a cross between half-assed and half-hearted.

Every week, I cleaned out something that wasn’t on the original checklist. I reorganized the linen closet, the basement shelves full of Christmas decorations and old paint cans, the kids’ closets full of broken hangers and candy wrappers. Until I found the note pinned to the fridge, asking me to remove all the food from the freezer and please prepare meals with anything that appeared “ready to die” and then another note the following week, “Can you check the ceiling fans in the kids’ rooms?” Who did she think she was?

They’d been paying me generously and I liked impressing them, but when she started listing things, the extra favours that once garnered surprise and gratitude, and the occasional twenty-dollar bill, had become part of the job.

I was watching YouTube videos sitting on their daughter Chelsey’s unmade bed when the idea came to me.

Unscrew the mounting bracket behind the bookshelves in Chelsey’s bedroom. Move books from the bottom to the top shelf.

Fifteen minutes before Tammy returns from Yoga, pull down shelf and crawl beneath the rubble of snow globes and books.

Scream for help when the front door opens.

Limp down the stairs and rest on the sofa for an hour until Joe gets home from work.

Refuse to visit the doctor, refuse to call the cleaning service, refuse to initiate any sort of paper trail because Tammy and Joe may not find another housekeeper willing to work in such an unsafe environment. The bookshelf hadn’t been installed properly. Call the contractor. No. Don’t call anyone, I’m fine, totally fine. I’ll be fine. Just let me rest.

It worked. I couldn’t believe it.

I texted Tammy during my first shift after the accident.

• I hope it’s okay that I didn’t finish the laundry.

I hate laundry.

• Don’t even worry about it.
• Would you mind if I work a half day next Tuesday?
• Of course.
• You won’t need to pay me, if that’s an issue.
• Not at all. We’ll pay you. Take all the time you need.
• I’m sure I’ll be right as rain by summer.
• Summer? Do you think it will be that long?
• Massage therapist said I tore my rotator cuff.
• Torn? Oh no. Poor Marina.
• I’ll be okay. I appreciate the support.

I haven’t folded a pair of Joe’s boxers in two years. Haven’t cleaned out a drawer. Now I work the half-hearted bare minimum and still get paid $40 more than they’d originally agreed for a six-hour day.

On Wednesdays, I clean Chuck and Bob’s condo. They pay me $200 for four hours of cleaning. Last year, a finishing nail mysteriously appeared out of the freshly installed hardwood floors. I sat in the emergency for eight hours to get a tetanus shot because I’d forgotten to consider the real implications of putting a nail through my foot.

On Fridays, I work for Nancy and Geoffrey, and I have no plans for a workplace injury. They never expect anything from me. I walk around their house every week for five hours with a dust cloth and a half-filled bucket of tepid soapy water, and they pay me $150.

I’d been trying to fill my Thursdays for a few months, but none of the clients worked out. When my boss Tatyana recommended Hugh, I worried that another divorced man who works from home, whose kids visited on the weekends, meant that I’d have to wash his dishes and pick up dirty clothes from the floor. I do not like touching dirty underwear. I’d rather sweep them into a bin. Cleaning up before I get down to cleaning up takes up a lot of time. I told Tatyana that I’d do a three-clean test-run.

Turns out Hugh is not your average divorced dad. Hugh spends an hour on the stationary bicycle in the morning and when he finishes eating his lunch, he cleans his own dishes. Hugh dresses in a suit and tie every day. Hugh has a place for everything. Every shelf is built-in, the hardwood floors pristine, the cleaning supplies environmentally friendly, which means I could drink them and still not be able to claim exposure to toxins. It means he’d know if anything had been moved or modified, if anything went missing. It was the easiest job ever, but without an opportunity to make it even easier, it started to feel like hard work.

After a few cleans, I called my boss.

• Tat, I can’t work for this guy. Can I get another family in Rosedale?
• You’re all I’ve got. Nobody wants to work for him.
• Why? This place is the easiest job I’ve ever had.
• I don’t know, but nobody lasts more than three months before they leave, as in they quit the company. Isa moved back to Chile for fuck sakes.
• He doesn’t need a cleaner. The guy cleans the house before I get here. This morning the hardwood floors were still wet.
• Are you calling me from his house?
• He’s on a call. He can’t hear me.
• You shouldn’t be using your phone on a job.
• Sure, Tat.
• I mean it. Tammy and Joe sent in a complaint last week. Said you stopped cleaning their daughter’s bedroom.
• They did what?

I told Joe a couple of months ago that it was triggering to go into Chelsey’s room and clean the same shelf they’d re-secured to the wall. Now, they’re complaining about me?

“Good morning. Sorry.” I tuck the phone into my back pocket after ending the call with Tatyana.

“That’s okay. I’m not one of those employers who cares about that. You can talk on the phone all day, if you want.” Hugh sips his smoothie, rubbing the back of his neck and stretching his shoulder muscles.

“I’m almost done here.” I roll the last pair of socks and toss it into the laundry basket. “Do you want me to put this away?”

“No that’s fine. I was wondering if you could do two days next week?”
“Two days?”

“I’d like the refrigerator cleaned out, and the stove. Is that too much?”

Here we go. I knew this was too good to be true. It’s been two months. I guess this is where it starts. All the cleaners probably quit when his nit-pickiness jumped into high gear. He doesn’t know I’m wily. I’ll find a way of getting out of things like cleaning the stove. I hate cleaning the stove more than I hate folding his fifty-dollar-boxers.

“Sure. No problem,” I say, “My hourly goes up a bit for jobs like that, but don’t tell Tatyana. She’ll take a cut and it’s not like she’s doing the work.”

“I completely understand.”

“If you want me to clean the basement, let me know.”

The basement might be where I’ll find my workplace injury.

“I hire a special cleaner for that.” Weird. He appears nervous and embarrassed about the basement.

“I can always add it to my regular day. Tatyana doesn’t need to know.”

“Thanks for the offer.” He tugs at the tie and unbuttons the top of his shirt. He’s got the body of a marathon runner, lean and a bit gaunt. Not my type, as if he’d ever consider a woman like me. I’m a solid size 14 but occasionally squeeze myself into a size 12 and this guy wears small boxer briefs under a 38 Tall suit.

“I noticed the kids’ rooms haven’t been slept in.”

He stares at me for a few minutes because of course it’s none of my business but I’d rather not wash and change clean sheets on two twin beds pushed against the walls.

“Their mother moved to Montreal,” he says, “They’ll come live with me in the summer.”

If there’s going to be two teenagers here all summer, I will not be doing their laundry. I’ve got a few months to figure out how to get out of this.

“Tatyana mentioned your family lives in, Florida, is it?” I don’t usually care about family history, but it’s always weird to think about an American moving here, to a bungalow in Etobicoke.

“Cleveland, actually.”

“Cool. Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.”

“Never been.” He untucks his shirt and removes his belt. For a second I think he’s going to undress in front of me.

“Parents still alive?”

“Both still working.” His abdomen is a topographical map of manly perfection.

My parents still live in our seven-bedroom house in Rothesay, New Brunswick. When I stopped going to school, they threatened to board me at Netherwood for high school, I forged another one of my mother’s cheques and moved to Toronto with ten grand. I called them from Montreal. They said that I’d never see a penny from the trust until I paid them back.

“What about you, Marina? Parents? siblings?”

“Why do you ask?” What the hell business is it of his what my brothers are doing right now. Would it help him to know they blocked me on Instagram?

“I just like to know what ties people to the world, you know,” Hugh says.

“What does that mean?” I ask. He steps into the laundry room and exits wearing running shorts and a t-shirt. It’s the middle of March, probably 5 degrees outside.

“Family is everything, right? Without family, even if they’re friends who are like family, what do we have to keep us here?”

“You mean, alive? Like family is what keeps us from leaping off a bridge.”

“I guess so. Existentially, we’re here to matter to other people, to make other people feel like they matter.” His earnest smile as he slowly says, matter.

I am not in the mood for a conversation about why I don’t matter to anyone. I’ve already missed my streetcar. “I thought I was here to clean your house.” I smile right back.

He reaches inside his shorts to adjust himself before he pulls his ankle up to his butt to stretch his quads. “I just mean, why are we here?” He reaches for the smoothie on the kitchen counter.

“On the planet?” I pucker my lips while he drinks the liquified grass.

“Human beings? Why are we here? You should know, I’m an atheist,” he says, “Sorry if you believe in God.”

“I don’t believe in God.”

I don’t believe in anything, I want to say, but this guy clearly believes in something, and I don’t want to hear what it is.

“God is a waste of time, and real unhappiness exists with or without him.” He swallows the last of the grass.

“I don’t know. Tat believes in God, goes to church and everything, and I’ve never known anyone happier than her.”

“I bet that’s not true.” He swings his leg down, shaking his foot around before pulling up the other ankle.

“I’m not close with my family.” I don’t know why I say it, but it’s like he’s a priest or something. The words fall out of me.

“I didn’t think so. You’ve only got an Instagram account, where you have six followers and

you’re following nobody. You might be the only 26-year-old without social media.”

How does he know all this? “I just watch YouTube and TikTok.”

“I couldn’t find, Marina, DelRay is it? Not on TikTok.” he says.

My TikTok links back to my real name. Why is this guy looking me up?

“I’m on there,” I say.

“What’s your name?”

“Pardon?”

“On TikTok. What’s your handle?” He tosses out the words like he doesn’t care about the answer.

“I don’t really want the people I work with to see, my personal life.” I carry the laundry basket to his bedroom, and he follows me.

“I can put that away.” He stretches his neck by pulling his face into his armpit.

“I’ve gotta go. See you next week.”

“Can you come on Monday?” he asks.

Does he know that’s my day off? That I never work Mondays?

“Can I let you know?”

“I’d rather know now. Otherwise, I have to hire somebody else.”

Somebody else? Is this why people quit because he tells them they have to work two days or be replaced? Because he starts stalking them on social media like some kind of psycho?

“Sure. See you Monday.”

“Great.” He leaves before me, and I watch him out the living room window as he jogs across the street.

I immediately go through his drawers looking for something to steal. If I can’t figure out a plausible workplace injury, I’m going to leave here today with something. The remote control to the television! Brilliant. He’ll come home after his run and want to turn on the news or sports or whatever he watches, and he won’t be able to. I go out to the living room and open the skinny drawers in the wall-to-wall cabinet searching for the clicker. I get down on my hands and knees and reach under the sectional, waving back and forth like a windshield wiper. Finally, I check behind the wall-mounted screen and there it is, attached to the back of the television with Velcro. Of course, he’d have it in a spot where he’d never lose it.

Instead of that, I take the Miyabi chef’s knife. It fits diagonally in my fanny pack.

Before I have my shoes tied, the front door opens.

“You still here?”

“Ya, sorry. I forgot to vacuum the carpets in the kids’ rooms.” A believable excuse given I’m sweating from searching for the remote and those rooms never get dirty.

He knows I’m lying. It’s the same face my dad had any time I came home drunk or high.

“Can I show you something?” He removes his t-shirt and opens the door to the basement.

“I honestly have to run. I’ve got a date with a friend.”

“I know that’s not true. Corinna.”

“Corinna?” I swallow my birth name like it’s an entire supermarket dinner roll. Maybe he didn’t say it.

“I know you have no friends. I know you go home every day and watch pirated television shows on your laptop. I know your other clients, Tammy and Joe, have been trying to figure out a way to fire you and that Nancy and Geoff feel sorry for you. What did Geoff say? He said watching you walk around their house like an idiot toddler is their way of paying it forward. Charity. They have another cleaner who comes on Saturdays to clean what you didn’t clean. Charles and Robert are afraid of you.”

“Afraid of me?” I turn the fanny pack around and rest my hand on the zipper.

“Yes. Robert thinks you might be a bit.” Hugh circles the side of his head with his index finger.

“They think I’m crazy?”

“You don’t leave a good impression on people.” Hugh removes his shorts. As he turns toward the bedroom, I lunge for the front door.

I’m fiddling with the lock when he comes up behind me.

“I can’t open the door.”

“It’s locked from the inside,” he says, “Come with me.” He grips my hands and drags me to the top of the basement stairs.

I open my fanny pack, but I know there’s no way I can get a good swing from this angle, and I know psychopaths, if you hurt them, they just get mad, and all this, whatever he has planned for me, will be worse.

“I’m just like you,” I say. Like if he knows that I’m a bad person, a schemer, a fucking liar, as my mother once called me, maybe Hugh will let me go. What pleasure will he get from murdering me? I have nobody who’ll care I’m dead.

Hugh doesn’t hear me.

“It’s not about how you live or how you die, but how you will be remembered.”

Is he suggesting that my life will only have meaning now as a murder victim?

“Ho-leee, shit.” An entire wall in the basement is covered in photos of me, drone shots of me walking on my street, paparazzi style photos of me drinking coffee on the bench across from the park. I’d started watching the nannies with the kids, keeping them on their toes with a few photos here and there. There are screenshots of the stupid TikTok videos I made cleaning everything with baking soda and vinegar. I thought I could make some money, pay back my parents, go home for Christmas.

“How does this make you feel?” Hugh asks.

“Like you’re a psycho who’s going to kill me, but for some weird reason wants me to see how big a loser I am first.”

“That’s not what’s happening here.” He places me in a rolling office chair and pushes me to a big screen. He lifts a remote control, and it comes to life. I see my birth certificate, a picture of my mom crying with a bloody-freshly-birthed version of me on her chest, a photo of my dad crying, staring down at a swaddled baby. Me. The images that come across the screen are all of me at various stages of my life.

“Do you see this girl?” An image of me at thirteen. Mr. Paterson, the vice-principal thought it was a good idea to create a board of shame and any student who acted out – or who accidentally tripped the most popular girl in school throwing her into the open door of a school bus causing her to lose two of the front teeth that her parents had paid thousands to straighten – had their photo taken in front of a height indicator he’d painted on the wall in his office. That mugshot had been pinned to the corkboard in the front foyer of the school for two years.

“She looks cool,” I say. I doubt my sarcasm is going to get me anywhere today. I laugh because maybe Mr. Paterson was right. One of these days, young lady, that smart mouth of yours is going land you in a heap of trouble. 

“What’s so funny, CoCo?” Hugh says it like he knows the truth, like he knows what’ll happen when I hear it.

“Don’t call me that.”

“I just need your attention.”

“I’m Marina. Not CoCo.”

Hugh sits in another rolling office chair and pulls himself close to me. My hands are shaking because this is it, this is my only chance. I feel it. I push my chair back and reach inside the fanny pack.

He doesn’t see it coming because he’s now focused on a yellow file folder. More photos, more proof of the half-assed, half-hearted life I lived before coming to Toronto. Do I tell Hugh I’m a worthless piece of shit who won’t be missed by anybody? Does that matter? He’ll probably send Tatyana a text message from my phone saying that I quit and he’ll have added another body to his count.

He grips his neck. The blood comes out like the fountain at the park, and I can’t believe I actually got him in the good spot. The jugular.

“Holy shit.” I run up the stairs. He’s gargling words and stumbling after me.

I lock the basement door. At the sink, I clean the knife. I spray it with bleach cleaner.

“I have to take this with me, what am I doing?” I should call the cops. I know I should call the cops. But I’m freaking out. I put the knife back in my fanny pack. At least it’s clean. They won’t find evidence of it. I remove the Swiffer mop from the front hall closet and spray and wipe the floors around the basement door.

I finally stop running at the park. On the bench, catching my breath, which I think is probably still in that basement because it takes so long, I worry I might pass out and one of the nannies will find me here, the knife in my pack. I need to throw it in the creek. He was going to kill me.

I open my phone, press 9-1-1, and look at the clean knife on my lap. I breathe in and out through my nose. I’m afraid if I open my mouth, I might scream. I drop my phone and pick it up. I need to call Tatyana. I can’t get my fingers on the right icons.

Finally.

“Tat. What the actual fuck?”

“Marina. What’s wrong? Is it Hugh?”

“Oh. My Gawd.”

Why did I call Tatyana? I can’t tell her I just killed a client. I can’t be the one to tell her that there might be more bodies buried in his bungalow basement.

“What’s going on?”

“Who else worked for Hugh?”

“What do you mean?”

“Who worked and then quit?”

“Shannell, Halina, and Isa. Why?”

I have their numbers. I hang up and call Shannell. The number has been disconnected. I call Halina. It rings. I’m about to hang up when someone answers. They don’t say hello. Does Hugh have Halina’s phone? Is he still alive in that basement? I hang up.

In my apartment, I pack up my clothes. I wrap my Beatrix Potter cup and a musical Peter Rabbit. There are shelves of these figurines at home in New Brunswick. These were the only two pieces I packed ten years ago. I want to go home.

My phone rings. It’s Halina’s phone number, but I know it’s not her. I ignore it.

At Union Station, I have my backpack, the fanny pack with the knife still inside, and my mother’s rolling suitcase. My phone pings. Why do I still have my phone?

A text message:

• You trying to call me?
• Who is this?
• You called me 2 hours ago.
• Halina?
• Yes!!!!
• You’re alive?
• WTF are you talking about?
• Where r u? Have you heard from Shannell? Isa?
• We don’t talk, but I think Shannell moved to the States and Isa’s in Chile with her sister.
• You know that for sure?
• Pretty sure.

Damn.

• How’d you like working for Hugh?

How does she know that? I attach a thumbs up to her comment. Is this Hugh? Is he still alive?

• Get you to the basement yet?
• No. Why?
• I won’t spoil the surprise. If you’re still there after three months, he’s going to change your life.
• How?
• From what I heard, he paid for Isa to fly to Chile. Gave her enough money to open a bookstore.

The train pulls into the station. I call her phone.

“What do you mean he paid for Isa to fly home?”

“He’s a philanthropist. Like a billionaire,” she says.

“Why does he live in a bungalow in Long Branch?”

“He sold some tech business, Shannell said he became a certified life coach, a spiritual guru or something. He researched the hell out of me. Knew my middle name and the name of my elementary school teachers. Freaked me out a bit.”

“For sure. That would freak me out, too. Psycho killer stuff.”

“Right. Anyway. He told me I should be a lawyer, and guess what? I hired a tutor to write my LCATS and I passed. I’m applying to law schools. And the kicker? He’s going to pay for it. I don’t even have to pay him back.”

“He’s going to pay for it?”

“Ya.”

“He didn’t give you the money yet?”

I cling to the hope that he’s still a psycho killer.

“No. I didn’t want the money up front like Isa. He gave me a choice. Get paid monthly, and have my tuition covered, or take a hundred grand.”

“Shit.”

“Shit what?”

“Halina, I have to go. My train’s here.”

Instead of getting on the train to Montreal, I walk downstairs and head over to the Lakeshore West platform.

A woman wearing a chef’s jacket stands on Hugh’s lawn screaming into the phone, “He’s dead.”

The front door is open, and the woman walks along the sidewalk like if she moves farther away from the house, Hugh won’t be dead. She’ll be looking for her knife. I leave my stuff behind a tree and walk up to the front door and straight through like I’m supposed to be there. I disappear downstairs and just as I get to the bottom step, I hear someone say, “Corinna?” The chef knows about me?

I step over Hugh’s body and lift the file folder. I just need to find out what he had planned. What future had he chosen for me? The chef grips my shoulder.

Who am I? Who am I supposed to be? What did he see that might be worth anything?

– end –

I still have hands and feet and eyes – this will serve me well. I am somewhere in a winery. The vines hang and hands work to pick the grapes: frantic, moving, cloth-like hands. I am looking out at the expanse of the Western Cape. I can see the lights of Stellenbosch in the distance where the students are. Where, possibly, my son is studying – it would be helpful to still know these things.

I don’t know exactly where my feet are heading. Those scampy stumps have a mind of their own, one I can never control. What drove me from the Atlantic seaboard to here was the pure instinct of these two feet. They brought me to this strange country in the first place. 

Herbert would be at work. He wouldn’t know for hours that I was gone. So run. Feel the magic, the heat dripping. Think of summer holidays running through the sand dunes in Gullane, the North Sea ice still clinging to your body, draining the Scottish soul before it had the chance even to be half-filled. Here, the wind blows but the earth is silent. Nothing moves but working hands, whistles in the distance, the occasional rumbling of a jeep engine. It could mean war, or it could mean nothing. 

I am not here to interpret anymore. I never was. I was here for love – something like that. That word felt awfully heavy but, then again, Herbert was a destiny laid out. When I met him in that dusty bar in Chelsea – was it 1970? – I knew in a second that he was a man I wanted. Oh, the way he talked to the staff: controlling, barbed but polite. The deference of the others there. The opulent wealth that he was never obtuse about. To a young model making her way through London, Herbert seemed like the perfect conduit to the inner circle. Back then my accent was mocked – it was the only part of me that appeared unconventional. Herbert liked that, back then. He bought me a drink before anybody else in the room had even sat down. 

Now, we must keep moving. If the jeep is the war, tanks coming in, if the townships are burning, then we must keep moving. I have time, but the Cape is not a safe place to linger too long past nightfall. Herbert’s goons will soon be swarming, needle-eyes looking for white amongst the black – a woman amongst the men. In this country of division and classifications, to be invisible was impossible. But I will try; God, I will try. Maybe I will cross a border. Maybe I will reach Durban or East London and pay a man to take me across in his boat to a new reality. 

Among the vines I think, Soon these words, this language, will mean nothing to me, I’m sure. Soon it will be a memory, lost to me. Me and June, my old English-speaking companion, mocked it in the tearooms, for it was an ugly way to speak, we thought. English is much more serene, we thought, but since independence it is now the second language in a country which has over thirty. Herbert would laugh and say, “Afrikaans is our heritage.” And later, while watching the news: “Look at how the Africans speak with all their clicks – so far away from anything a dictionary could document.” It was foreign to his ears, but it just made me think of something in the wind blowing through the veld: ringing, ringing, ringing. The voices of ancestors ringing, ringing, ringing. The voice of the country ringing, ringing, ringing. I was hearing it more and more often now. Even the maids would speak it to their children in their quarters, where they used to speak only broken English for their education. 

A long time ago, when you were out shooting in the country, I heard the same whispers of the language these wine workers are speaking now. It is different from the ones I usually hear. I don’t know the names but I have heard it only once before, spoken by the boy in the corner, huddled under the bushes – a long way from the Cape Flats or wherever he had come from, out in the wilderness.

Can you remember the voice that haunted these valleys? They had shot an eland, Herbert and his friends. The black boy watched the bullet so intensely and analyzed the death of the animal as though it were a human experiment. I think I was the only one who saw him. He had on a ragged Manchester United strip, a pair of shorts, and a tatty leather jacket. I let him stay hidden. I thought he may be with the terrorists, but still, this seemed like something to do.

The boy whispered to a figure who was obscured to me. He spoke in this language, this strange tongue. He seemed to be looking for something. I thought it may be a militia, and I thought it was a deep irony that the police commissioner might die being hunted like sport. I could imagine the blood leaving his body and saw him dying on a hilltop like a Voortrekker. He was born in the city and knew nothing of the farms, but to die like a farmer protecting his land like the Boers of old seemed to be every white man’s dream. We will die here as folk heroes and be remembered as villains. 

He didn’t die and the boy disappeared soon after. Later that day, it was discovered, some wiring had gone missing from an animal’s cage.

I must stop looking at this woman now, in the vineyard, for she looks scared. I always hated that look of fear. It’s why I don’t look at Black people very often; even my maid must turn away when I enter. Herbert likes to stare right into their eyes. 

First, before I move, I will go into the farm and ask the owner for some water. I will then ask him for directions to a shop where I will buy what I need. It is early enough in my escape that this holds little risk, but I need to get plenty of supplies while I still can – as many supplies as I can carry. To deal with the man at the farm, I would need my wits about me. Indeed, he would think I was trouble out here all alone; then he would see me and think I was in trouble, then lastly he would hear the surname ‘du Plessis’ and think he was in trouble. 

I have to work out how to get to the farm from his wineries without immediately being labeled a thief, or worse, a worker leaving before they were permitted. I can see the white facade of his house, the well-maintained green garden patch outside, a pond like a moat, a fence, guard dogs. The vineyard’s centerpiece surrounded by those cloth-like hands: picking, picking, picking. You can’t stay here, though, lying amongst the vineyards. The man will find you eventually. Maybe the police will know by then, maybe your picture will be on the TV.

Better to go now while I’m still invisible. So stand up, look at the workers and ask for their silence. They will listen to me, for I look official, like the wife of the vineyard owner. Hell, they probably can’t tell the difference. I probably am her, just as the voices here probably sound like the little boy in the football strip to me. When I make the ‘ssshhh’ gesture towards them, they say nothing. I creep around the bushes, around the back of the house to the front. I start to imagine the landscape as a chess board and me as a piece, with the liberty to move in any way I want. I approach the house, ring the bell, and watch a young man in his checkered shirt come down. 

“Tannie, what is it? Are you okay?” 

Checkmate. 

“Come in for a tea, Auntie,” he says to me. “Come in and we will be safe.” For outside, the hands are still moving and the workday is not yet over. The curfew had not yet been imposed, the military jeep was not yet an enforcer, just an observer. But wait until night falls. Maybe I will see the flames and hear the sirens we read so much about. This would make me happy. I would like to see a little bit of destruction. I don’t hate this country, nor do I love it, but to watch something burn is exhilarating – even an inanimate object such as a piece of paper, lit alight by a schoolboy until it is cindered ash. That’s how I feel about dear old Suid-Afrika: a piece of paper slowly smoldering. Now I was a jumping ember.

Scotland burned for me a long time ago. Now, it is a place of memories as opposed to a country, but maybe that’s all a country is. And if the memories are different for everyone, then everyone has a different country. That means there are six billion countries; that means this place doesn’t exist. This is why, Herbert, your memories are useless, your heritage a sham, because this land is a land is a land is a land, just like Scotland is a land is a land is a land is a land; and feet walk and different faces smile and cry, bodies buried underneath rot and time’s needle moves. Stay stagnant, for the land doesn’t.

Oh, I used to talk about these things in cafes in London. That seems like a long time ago, when the world had no passport and no tramlines; when there was no signs to say, “You can’t step here”. Ot if there was, I barely noticed them. Now, I tend to stick to home and to cooking. Herbert doesn’t mind what I do as long as I cook for him and let him have sex with me twice a week. These are the two constants of our marriage; they keep the wheels of his life spinning, his business booming. 

But now I have gone. Now that I have slipped, I can’t recover that reality. And the reality of the passion I had in the past with different men, young men, is a bygone one. It is not a question of returning to London, it is that the 60s are a time I can never have back – they were freedom, music, hash; I don’t know if they existed in the same way here. I had an image which could be captured irrespective of whose arm was around my waist. My disgraces were all still ahead of me, and to be disgraced seemed then like the greatest thing ever. Now it just seems like a headache. Could you imagine your figure in a bikini now, or a tight-fitting Dolce & Gabbana piece? It would make you laugh.

I’m accepting the young man’s offer. He called me “Auntie”. I’ve never learned to love that particular Afrikaner deference to age; it just makes me feel old. The house is large but ramshackle. And who is the boy? He looks to be in his early twenties; he has an unkempt beard and a tired look. It is clear he is not the owner as he takes me through to the kitchen. 

“You want tea?” he says.

“Tea would be lovely,” I smile politely.

“Sit down on the sofa; make yourself comfortable. My dad will be back soon and you can tell him what’s going on.” 

He is heating up water in the stove; the back door is open and the dogs roam, patrolling up the edge of the barbed-wire fence. I don’t know what to tell the owner when he comes. I need to think of a good reason for pitching up at the door of a random vineyard that doesn’t make me seem dangerous. The boy pours the hot water onto the teabag but doesn’t let it settle; for two seconds he swirls it around and then quickly takes it out and puts it in the bin. The tea tastes ghastly when he brings it to me. He offers his hand.

“Johan.” 

“Pleased to meet you, Johan.” 

“You too. What brings you here? Are you okay?” He looks me over with a sense of politeness, respect, and concern – the holy trinity.

“I’m fine, just lost.”

“Oh well, we are just outside Stellenbosch. Where is your accent from?” 

“Scotland.” 

“A Brit. Oh, my dad won’t like that,” he chuckles. “What brings you here?” 

“I’ve lived here for 18 years. I’m married to a South African in Cape Town.” 

“My dad will give you a lift back to the city if you’d like,” he says kindly, smiling. “It’s not safe to make the journey alone, with the current situation. My dad knows the route; it’s a little longer than usual but –” 

“I don’t want to go back to Cape Town. I’m heading to Durban.” 

He looks at me inquisitively. “You’ve got a long way to go, tannie, a long way. Do you not have a car?” 

“No, but I need to find a friend of mine. It’s important.” 

“Well, okay. What’s your name again?” 

I pause. “Linda. Linda Clark.” Don’t tell him you are Sarah du Plessis and he will trust you more… 

“Well, Linda – my dad will be back soon. Until then, please make yourself comfortable.”

But all I could see was the mess, the heat shining through the windows illuminating the stub of a rifle. 

*

When the owner returns, he turns out to be a man whose stature does not match that of his farm. He is much smaller than his son and he wears a white shirt and brown trousers. Still, he commands the kind of respect I only hold for Herbert, and even that is now fading. He talks to the boy outside and then introduces himself. He says very little.

“Hello, Linda. You should stay with us tonight.” 

“Oh, no, it’s okay. I’m just looking for directions to the shop –” 

“Curfew is coming soon; you shouldn’t be out.” 

“But I need to –” 

“No, lady, I won’t take no for an answer. We can’t have the good women of this country out alone when the place is burning. You will sleep, and tomorrow we phone your husband, ja?” 

I don’t want to stay, but I know resistance is futile. I know he won’t listen to those words; and I know what he said is right. He continues, taking my silence as a yes: “We have a spare room, please take it; Johan will show you.” That is all he says, and then he disappears again. Before he does, he picks up the rifle – this is the main thing I notice. 

When Johan shows me the room, I see that it is a farmer’s room. I haven’t slept somewhere so small since the 60s – since London squats and, before those, Govan tenements. I was poor then, poor as can be, but now I hardly remember it. Now for one night again I will sleep like a member of staff; a high-ranking one with her own room, but still staff. I guess it will have to do. I guess I will need some food.

Johan says, “Is this okay for the night? I know it’s not perfect, but it is safe. Pa makes sure.” I’m sure he does. I’m sure the fence keeps you safe. I’m sure the expanse of the Cape, though, harbours many shadows, and some shadows are smarter than others. Smarter even than the blunt instruments used by your father. His gun and his fences can’t hold out forever – or maybe they can, I don’t know. As long as they work for the night, nothing else matters. I will leave early in the morning before the phone call can be made, before I can provide him with a number I don’t have.

“I’ll leave you to get comfortable. I’ll be here if you need anything.”

“I’m terribly sorry, Johan, but I am quite hungry.”

“Ja, ja, of course you are,” he grins. “I can make some chicken? Or I might have some boerewors?”

“Chicken is good.”

“Of course, give me half an hour.”

I sat there for forty minutes, watching the walls. There were three books and only one in English: an Agatha Christie murder mystery. I read it with intrigue until he called me, knocking on my door.

“Let’s have some chicken then, eh?” He smiled. I was starting to like this boy – polite, well turned out, and funny; kind of like my son. They were both army skippers as well; they must be.

“So, Johan, why aren’t you out there with the SADF?”

He looked at me, worried. “I’m just back.” 

“So, you have already served your conscription? You don’t look old enough.” 

“Ja, ja, well, I have a youthful face, but I was out in Angola.” 

“Okay, enough said.” 

“Yes, better not to talk about it. I might go back out if I can’t stay here.” 

“What, to the townships?” 

He shrugged. “You know this is the last chance for us in Africa. I have to fight. What happened to Rhodesia can’t happen here, you know. Anyway, let’s not get started on politics. An English and an Afrikaner, eh? Never ends well.” He laughed. “But we must be united. Tell me about your life in Cape Town.” His eyes lit up. “What does such a beautiful woman do with herself in the city, huh? I bet you have such an exciting life.”

“Not really, Johan. I’m a housewife.” 

“Ah, the domesticated woman! How many kids? Who is your husband? What does he do?” 

“You ask a lot of questions.” 

“Who doesn’t? You just turned up here like a ghost.” 

I couldn’t help but laugh and smile at his youthful arrogance. Oh, the boy was sweet; he had fight and candor and passion – all misdirected, of course, but when had that ever not been the case? “I don’t have any children, and my husband is a businessman.” 

“Oh, a housewife with no kids? How come? What do you do all day?” 

“It’s quite rude, Johan, to ask a lady why she doesn’t have any children.” 

“And it’s quite rude to turn up unannounced and make me cook you a meal, yet here we are.” His grinning, contemptuous face – I realized he had stopped referring to me as tannie or auntie.

“Well, I never wanted any. And I cook and clean and keep my house for my husband.” 

“Oh yeah? And why aren’t you there now? What’s your business in Durban?” 

“Well, it’s part of a business deal.” 

“Oh, okay.” He winked. “A business deal. What are you really running from?” 

“None of your business.” 

“Oh ja?” He smiled.

I scraped the rest of the chicken around my plate. “Do you have any coffee?” 

He grinned. “No, but we can have a cigarette.” He lit one and passed me the packet. 

“Sure.” I took it and smoked. I don’t smoke often now; I used to back in the day. Who didn’t in Glasgow in the 60s? And who didn’t in London in the 60s? Indeed, who didn’t smoke anywhere, at any time, in any place, in the 60s? 

“So, Linda, I don’t care what or who you are running from.” He sighed and exhaled the smoke in an almost erotic manner which surprised me, as he leaned back against the chair, eyes measuring my body inch by inch. “It’s good to have some company here. Since the barracks, I’ve just been here.” 

“You don’t have any friends? Girlfriends?” 

“No,” he grinned. “Nothing like that. I’m alone on the farm. All alone.” 

“Well, you should come to Cape Town. You know, study and –” 

He laughed. “Study what? Eh, I don’t have any qualifications, and I’m good on the farm. I have my staff. I’m a good manager.” 

“I’m sure you are a good manager.” I roll my eyes. Yes, I’m sure you are, with no education and no qualifications. 

“Ja, I am. They respect me and I respect them; it’s simple.” He scratched his chin. “In the city, though, I would love to hear the music.” 

“Not much chance of that anymore.” 

“Well, it must still be more exciting than here. Tell me, how is England?” 

“England is England. I am from Scotland.” 

“Ja, but the only difference is the rugby teams.” 

“You may think that.” 

“I do. So, how is Scotland then?” 

“It’s okay. Different from here.” 

“Everywhere is different from here.” 

“Most places are more like it than you think.” 

“You travelled a lot then?” 

“No, I’m just saying –” 

“Just saying what?” His grin was starting to annoy me no end. 

“I just mean … Oh, it doesn’t matter. Let’s stop the heavy stuff for tonight. I’m tired; I might go to bed.” I try to sound resigned to bed. 

“There is still more wine,” he says. 

“Well, you can finish it.” 

He pours me a glass then says, “I’ve already poured you a glass.” 

Ah youth – terrifying, backbreaking youth. “Fine, I’ll finish the glass.” 

Johan talks about music and then cricket and then he talks about Dallas. I tell him, “I don’t watch TV.” He tells me I’m old and that I really must. I don’t have the heart to tell him that the SABC would never show anything that interests me. I know he would then, no doubt, ask what does interest me, and I don’t want to answer that because I don’t know – and even if I did know, I think the answers would worry him.

As we are sitting there, getting drunk, and the wind shakes the house gently, we are slowly moving closer. First he touches my hand and then my leg. I haven’t felt the touch of another man in a long time, and he is so much younger than me.

“I could be your mother, Johan.”

He chuckles, “But you’re not,” and leans in to kiss. I feel his unshaven skin bristle against my chin. At first, I pull away and keep my mouth firmly shut, but then I open and allow him to push me towards him, submitting to the vineyard, submitting to the Cape, falling down into the boy’s hands. I wonder how often he gets visitors. 

“Do you want to go to your room?” he whispers, now gently moving his hands up my top, feeling my breasts. I don’t know, but I nod and follow him. It is over in 10 minutes. Johan is still laughing, as if something about sex amuses him, while we sit beneath the covers of my bed. We are not touching. After he cums, we do not kiss. He just puts a cigarette to his lips.

“Hey, tannie, that was nice, wasn’t it? I wish more ladies got lost out here.” He chuckled. “Wow, I haven’t felt that way since Angola.”

“What does that mean, Johan?”

“Ah nothing, nothing. I wish I could sleep next to you, but my dad will be back soon. I’m going to have a bath and let you sleep.” He doesn’t kiss me again before he leaves. He turns off the light as if commanding me to sleep. 

I wake up at 4 a.m. and think of how to leave. The first step is simple: I climb out of the window. But then how do I get over the fence? That is the big lingering question. I can’t scale it. So instead, I decide to wake Johan. I stand in his room, shaking his sleeping body. “Johan, Johan,” I whisper. I look at him at this moment and see a child. Earlier seems a long time ago now; a different person almost. He wakes up.

“L-Linda, what is it? Are you okay?”

“How do I get out the gate?”

He switches on the light. “Are you leaving?”

“Yes, yes, please – I need to, you don’t understand.” 

“Well, make me understand and then I’ll help.” 

“Well, I just can’t go home.” 

“Where will you go? Durban is too ambitious; you’ll never make it.” 

“I don’t care where I go.” 

“Well, I’m coming with you.”

He stands up stridently, suddenly putting his stuff together: four pairs of pants, two shirts, and a book in an army rucksack slung over his shoulder. 

“No, you’re not.” 

“Yes, yes I am. Come on, I need the excitement.” 

I think I could let him believe I could be with him just so he can get me out of here. “Okay, okay, fine.” 

“Really?” He grins. 

“Yes. Now, how do we get out?” 

“Oh, easy, I have the key.” He takes it from his bedroom drawer. “I can open it.” 

We are out in the fields. It is dark. We do not have torches. I can barely make out anything but the guiding lights and sounds from the townships; the armored cars in the distance that endlessly move towards it. What lies in front of me, though, is empty.

I take Johan’s hand and let him guide me through the winery. It feels quiet without those voices, with only Johan whispering about where we can go next. I’m not listening. I let the words wash over me, but I am used to humoring men and know what to say so he believes my sincerity. It’s very easy with men; they tend to believe what they want to believe.

When we are through the gate, Johan says, “Where should we sleep?” I point out those glittering lights and walk towards the motorway, in the direction of the township. Johan looks at me as though I am insane. “We can’t go down there.” 

“Are you coming or not?” 

Johan just freezes. He doesn’t come. He sits and watches me walk down, confused. I can hear the ringing of something. I sense my life could very soon be over. I wonder where my son is; I wonder what is happening in Scotland right now; I think of Herbert’s goons out looking for me; I think of blood and Manchester United.

I look back at Johan as he gets smaller and smaller, and then toward those lights – the shacks, the fires that glisten ever bright.