The minute I get home, I lie down on the floor and watch the lights on the other side of the curtain. Eventually they blink off, then blink back on a few seconds later and just like that it’s morning. At first I’m not even sure that I went to sleep, or even if the six hours that passes for night down here have actually gone by, but apropos of nothing I remember my feet in a cool stream from my boyhood and smell damp soil and river weeds. I shake the dream from my head and reach for the same clothes I had on yesterday, then realize I never took them off. I tell myself just one more day. It won’t be as bad this time. You won’t have any major episodes and things’ll be fine. I grab my jacket and go to work praying the streets are empty.
The lights are dim on level twenty-six nearly all the time, a perpetual state of pre-dawn blue cast off by the cheap fluorescent lights they put in years ago and never replace. Sometimes when everyone meets their quotas they turn on the yellow lights and man are those some good times. I lock my door and sit out on my balcony with my shirt off and just soak it all up. Everyone makes a day of it, just lounging around, looking up at the bottom of level twenty-five. But we haven’t met quotas in a while, so we come home from work in the same light we had when we left that morning.
On the bus I take up my customary two seats and settle in for the drive by watching the lines on the pavement. I let my eyes go out of focus and for a while it’s just motion. It’s nice and I almost fall asleep again, but the streets start waking up and there are more people on the sidewalk. I think about tossing back another pill, but why bother when they never help anyway? As long as I keep moving and avoid eye-contact I’ll be fine. The bulk of their thoughts stay out there and mine stay in here. I get a lot of facts, but those I can deal with-That kid’s late for school. That bum has a doctorate in biology. That sad sack is hitting the street looking for work. That girl is nervous that her parents will find out-I start to get bored, but suddenly there’s this guy on the street outside and I perk up, instantly knowing that he’s head over heels in love. I know her name is Ann, and she smells like tangerines and sings Irish love songs while she cooks. I know that she believes in things like jinxes and fate and fairy tales. I know that she paints vistas of fields at harvest, even though there are no fields anymore. I know he asks how she can paint them so beautifully, and I know she just smiles and kisses him. By the time I realize that this is one worth looking in the eyes, that this is the only chance I get to I forget who I am and feel a surge of light well up from the bottom of my chest, it’s too late. I get a blur and the world is what it is again: a cracked window with a grease smear from my own head, a street with too much trash, and rows and rows of people that can’t keep their thoughts to themselves. The only thing rising from the bottom of my chest is heartburn.
The bus skids to a stop and I shuffle around back and in the side door. I walk past the boilers, the breaker-boxes, the lunch-room with inspirational posters tacked all over the walls with pictures of the cities at night, a tangled mess of lights that’s a sad mockery of what the sky used to look like under a new moon. I reach my office and shut the door behind me. I file, write memos, file some more, take a 10-minute lunch, then get back to it. I think about locking my door, standing on my chair, disabling the sprinklers, and setting fire to my desk. I think about quitting and spending the rest of my life wandering the streets looking at people’s faces, forgetting who I am. I think about getting up, picking a direction, and just walking until I find a place where it’s just nothing but farmland under my feet and blue sky above me. That gives me a little smile, then I open my eyes and I’m still on level twenty-six in a job that pays the rent, the bus-fare, and nothing else. I sigh and get back to work.
People don’t usually bother me unless they have to or are obligated. Tiffany Hotchkiss is one of the latter and as usual opens my door all the way and stands there, smiling a big Corporate Morale Officer smile in my peripheral vision. “Good morning! How are you feeling this beautiful day!”
“Fine.” I don’t look up. She thinks I’m just shy, but really it’s because when she’s in the room, all I can think of is her hunched over a toilet bowl, punching herself in the stomach to make herself throw up, which is exactly all that she can think of at the moment. She says something I don’t quite catch, then leaves. I feel bad. I’m a horrible person. I know she’s struggling to hold it together. I know she’s as unhappy here as I am, but for her it’s even worse because she’s forced to put on airs. I know all she wants is a little conversation and pleasantry sans superficiality in her day and I refused to give it to her. I know she’s half-running down the hall to the nearest ladies’ room. I know I shouldn’t hold it against her. Sometimes it’s almost too much.
I say a prayer. I say Lord, if it be Your Will, let this thing You’ve given pass from me. The Lord says It’s not all bad, is it? What about that guy on the bus line this morning? I say Lord, that was half a second of happiness in a string of meaningless days. It was good, but can’t these glimmers of beauty show up more than twice a month and longer than a couple of seconds? The Lord says Oh quit your kvetching.
Just then my door bursts open and people start pouring in. Someone yells Happy Birthday! Someone else shoves a cupcake in my face with a candle stuck in the top. Someone else pats me on the back and I wince. I have a terrified look on my face but they take it for stunned and happy surprise. That’s not it. Everyone’s thoughts are rushing at me like a flock of angry birds. I see Jeff Maloy saying goodbye to his kids in a wrecked car on the train tracks. I see Kelly Sandoval sitting in the closet all through college pulling out handfuls of her hair. I see Max Folland taking money from his blind mother’s dresser last weekend. I see Francesca Polito in the bathroom every night spitting at her reflection until her mouth goes dry. I see Rudy Lints cutting open neighborhood cats when he was a kid. I see things in Greg Hodges that I don’t even want to think about.
I try to look sick as I push my way to the open door and it isn’t much of a stretch. I practically sprint to the janitor’s closet, the one island of solace I can think of now that everyone’s in my office. Once I’m alone, I leave the light off and sit on an overturned bucket gasping for breath, the floor twisting up like my gut and my pulse through the roof. I sit there for the rest of the shift. My breathing eventually slows and I can remember only myself, but I stay in there until the buzzer sounds and it’s time to go home. Enough excitement for one day, I plead. Just let me get home.
- * *
The bus starts pulling away while I’m too far away to make any difference, but I give it all I’ve got. The bus driver sees me, but he hits the gas anyway, leaving me standing in last wisps of exhaust with sweat pouring down my face, wheezing like a bellows. Then I see why he cut out of there.
The woman is doubled over and the thugs are standing over her, just giving it all they’ve got. I take a breath to yell and maybe scare them off like a flock of small birds, but nothing comes out. I pick up a brick and wonder if I can throw it so it will bounce off each one of their skulls, but I let it drop. I ball my fists and summon up every bit of courage and holy anger I have within me, but the reality is that I’m just a paunchy middle-aged dope standing in the street, watching like an idiot.
It goes on for I don’t know how long. Eventually she stops groaning and she gives up on shielding her face. The thugs drift away from her and look around for more, and out of my periphery I see one of them spot me and signal his buddies over. I think about running or just getting out my wallet, but settle on squeezing my eyes shut and shuddering in fear. I drop to my knees and stare up at the lattice of rusted steel that makes up the bottom of level twenty-five and I think this is it. I hear one of them say that it’s not worth it, and besides, he looks like he’s having a heart attack anyway. I think You’re right, I probably am having a heart attack. My chest feels like it’s going to explode from my mad dash across the parking lot, but why take the risk? Do it anyway. If you don’t kill me, my grief will.
They cold cock me in the back of the head and leave it at that.
- * *
I come to hearing the ocean. I almost drift all the way back into sleep but then I remember what happened. Suddenly the ocean is gone and I’m lying in the street in a second-hand uniform with little bits of asphalt pressed into my face, listening to the traffic on level twenty-seven. Then I remember the woman and I hope beyond all hope that I had imagined her too. I turn my head over and boy am I wrong.
I get to my feet and stumble over to her. She’s alive, but in bad form, her legs bending at odd angles, her hair wet with dirty water and blood. I can feel her pain seep out of her skin where I’m holding her and it makes my head hurt. It makes my bones ache. There is so much sadness inside her that it just runs out of her like water. Sadness at the thought of how everything in her life has gone wrong, sadness at thirty-nine years of disappointments, sadness at the thought of never getting to see her freckle-faced kid again, sadness at the childhood memory of the sun on softly moving grasses lost forever.
That’s when I get it.
I shush her gently as I stroke her hair back from her face and tell her to look into my eyes. “Angela,” I say, “it’s going to be okay. You’re going to be alright. Just look into my eyes and every thing’s going to be alright.” She cracks her eyelids and I’m hit with the shocking green of her irises. She struggles to open her swollen eyes as wide as she can and looks deep into my eyes.
I dive in. The black rushes up and I’m diving into a lake at midnight rimmed with evergreens. I hit the surface and down I go, deeper and deeper. When I touch bottom, the lights come on. Everything’s lined up on a table. Everything separated in shoe boxes with dates on them. Every moment of her life a labeled Polaroid. I grab a spare box and get to it. I start with her eleventh birthday when her Dad broke her arm for interrupting the news and I go from there. I move through the insults in grade school, the drug-abuse in college, the many abusive boyfriends, the miscarriage, the depression, the handfuls of pills. Every mistake, every wrong-place-wrong-time, every unkind word, every black eye, everything that shouldn’t’ve happened to her. I look at all of it and toss the worst into my box. The box keeps getting heavier and my heart keeps on breaking.
By the end, I’m sobbing like a baby and she’s kneeling next to me, sobbing with me. She showers kisses on my head and thanks me over and over. She moves her newly healed limbs to embrace me. She wipes her eyes with the back of her unbroken hands and fingers back her beautifully tangled hair. Tears roll down her perfect face. Her un-split lips are pulled back in a beautiful smile over pearl-white teeth. She pulls my sobbing face toward her and looks deep into my eyes again. I hurt like hell, but those eyes—I could look into those eyes forever. There’s no regret, no pain, no sadness. She remembers everything, but for her it’s like a story she heard once about a person a lot like her; It doesn’t weigh her down at all. She’s free and clear.
I ask her to help me to my feet and she does. She’s worried I’ll break, but I tell her it’s alright. “Your eyes are so beautiful,” I say and she smiles and cups my cheek. Her hands are so warm. I pick her up with one quick move before she can stop me. She clings to my neck and holds tight. She’s light as a bird.