by Evan Dara
Great, Marcus says. Sounds wonderful.
But while we’re here, Mrs. Utsen says, and stops.
Marcus gathers in a few branches from the bottom of the shrub.
It’ll only be for the ski season, Mrs. Utsen says. Maybe a little longer.
OK. Sure.
We’ll get back to you on all of this.
So—
Of course. We’ll continue your salary. That’s a given.
I—
At three-quarters, we thought.
Great. Good. Thank—
But please. Please finish the day. Finish what you’re doing.
Great. Understood. Thank you, Mrs. Utsen.
She looks down to him and smiles. Then starts to say things, confidences, in intimate tones. That it was surprising, nice, to find the house alarm still working – it responded to the shutdown code. That the family is fine. That the Tamaracks look great. That it’s nice and quiet in town. Then she leaves.
When the backdoor clicks, Marcus stands, grabs his mid- size rake and the wheel barrow. He looks around, takes in his day’s good efforts.
At three thirty, Marcus is big-stepping down the hill in street clothes. In his back pockets, he’s carrying the not-inexpensive nitrile gloves that he had bought two weeks previously, and he’s planning his order at C. Ruggles: one cool Coors. Then his subsequent orders: a few Islay single malts, rich in buttressing savors. He crosses Pearl Street, passes on to Elmwood Avenue, starts looking for the neon gleam from the bars front, for its tidewater reflection on the storage doors into the ground.
When he sees bartender Timmy’s cell number, Scotched to the dark glass door, he doesn’t drop a beat, continues walking home.
Past the one milkfatty fingerprint hanging on the suspending tape.
—
At four forty-five, happily, Neil shows. It’s the usual hour, and Neil performs his usual finger-rumba, with nail accents, on the fogged glass beside the front door. Marcus opens up and offers his hand, then walks back towards the living room. Neil follows, easing his satchel over his head, off his shoulder, and onto the couch. Marcus turns on an overhead light.
So, Marcus says. What you got for me, brudder?
Nothing with your name on it, Neil says.
Neil pulls out the day’s stack of coupon booklets. A few come from businesses in nearby towns – St. Albans, Montpelier – but mostly it’s the flyer from Fairley’s, offering color-balloon reductions on yogurt, discounts on cukes, percentages off trashbags, more.
How many you want?, Neil says. I got eighty or so. Maybe a hundred.
Make it forty-one, Marcus says. Neil hands him two.
The men move into the kitchen area. Marcus foot-shifts Neil a stool.
You still drinking water?, Marcus says.
You still reminding me?, Neil says.
Marcus opens the breadbox, pulls out the sandwich-size plasticbag. He’s already rolled.
He lights and takes a shallow puff before handing to Neil. Neil has no such concern for courtesy. He drags deeply; the burning tip starts groundward and ends pointing up, a trumpet player cresting a solo. Neil has always liked Jamaican sensimilla.
Oh yeah, he says, through the fuzzbox of clenched teeth.
Marcus draws, recaptures with nostrils. Missed you yesterday, he says. Where …?
Neil exhales. Wasn’t no yesterday for me, he says.
Wuzzat?, Marcus says, while sucking back breath.
Yeah, Neil says. The latest change. This week, they started us only going out three times. Monday Wednesday Friday.
Fhew, Marcus says.
Yeah, Neil says. No more need. Shit, today, I been waiting two hours in Battery Park before coming to you. Nothing in my bag any more.
Yeah, Marcus says. Internet. Whole deals going online.
Not only, Neil says. Lots is never leaving the plant. Being forwarded.
A break, for long hits. Neil supplements his with a little tweezed stinger before handing back to Marcus.
And obviously nobody – well, almost nobody – who works in A-burg gets any mail here, Marcus says, after he’s finished his toke. And none of those people just walking up and down the streets.
Neil exhales. Where they come from?, he then says. You got any idea where they get ’em?
The shims?, Marcus says. From Middlebury, been assuming. It’s an easy commute. Well, least some of them’s gotta be from there. How else they gonna earn a living, with Specialty Filaments closed.
Yeah, Neil says. Also Capital City Press, over in Berlin. Gone.
So, yeah, they’ll be begging to do this, Marcus says. Anatomical props. Greasing the gearbox. Maybe convince some of the people who happen to pass through that this is still a town. Façade ’em long enough for the itch to rise for that good MasterCard.
Marcus leans against his refrigerator. Still can’t figure how the shims make any kind of economic sense, he says. What are there, hundreds of them? Who’s paying their salary …?
Marcus places his palms together, raises them high, looks up and beyond. Glory be to God for City Hall, he says.
And for you, my man, Neil says. Mean it. Nice you’re still around.
Well …
Really. I’m, like, surprised. After all the truncate, truncate …
No surprise at all, Marcus says. It’s like this: the sun still rises and we up for another doobie?
—
That evening, after washing suppers plate, fork, and spoon, Marcus decides to revive a practice that, for several years postcollege, had held him well. He puts on his waist-length parka, his New Balance shoes, and goes out for a constitutional.
He recalls Bertrand Russell: if a man walks two kilometers a day, all of philosophy becomes superfluous. Marcus has nothing strapped to his ankle, but he estimates that two sweeps through his neighborhood, up as far as Lakeview Terrace then over to the bike path towards North Beach, will keep him from night classes. He acknowledges the pause before he cracks open the door, but then the eight-ten air is face-wakening and silvery, and the sidewalks and streetflanks rush up with promises. He goes forth, silent on the outside. The night quiet turns his steps into statements. He understands why it’s called a constitutional.
He walks past homes and bus stops, apartment complexes and curves. Dark, low-decibel, moderately chilly are the words that operate within him. Lamps on poles educate in shadows, making his split and fade or drain into his shoes. The breeze surprises with its lack of fealty to direction. The jaunt is both energizing and calming.
When confident he’s made the Russell minimum, he heads home. But then stops at the corner of Loomis and Weston, right near his place. It’s a residential intersection, and the density of houses is high: in the three directions – it’s a T junction – there must be two dozen freestanding single-family homes, plus fragments of planked domesticity visible down on Henry Street. Everywhere he looks, swaddled in dark, he sees eaves, wall-parts, windowsheens, steps up to front doors, roof angles, gutters, shrubbery …
And more. The houses are alive. They breathe. Almost every one of them – not all, but nearly – has lights that go on and off. In windows in upstairs bedrooms, in windows in downstairs living rooms and halls, by front doors, out back, bulbs are blazing, then not. Or voids flare into orange-white. Richly distributed among the many houses, edgeless patches of illumination change. Room parts and outside-segments, neuroned over by branch silhouettes, present themselves or withdraw. None of the bulbs blip rapidly, but the large congress of lights visible from the Loomis/Weston corner makes the scene teem with activity. Marcus needs but wait a second to see an abrupt reordering of the housely constellation.
They’re security lights, used to confound would-be burglars. Through electricity and timers, they let people be at home when they aren’t. Off and On creating Go Away. Marcus can not know if they scare off malefactors. But he finds them ravishing. This unplanned, self-regulating light-ballet. This collective PET-scan of his living environs. Struts and deaths in
deeply rewarding esthetic disorganization. Festively enlivening his windy intersection.
—
Then it’s morning, the next one. He wakes to outdoors dark, indoors cold, but his bathrobe, lain atop his comforter all the night, has absorbed his heat and now hands it back to him, arms first. The warmth, enwrapping, feels to be at precisely his frequency. Nothing more luscious. It is a new day.
In the bathroom, he pings on the light, pisses, turns to the mirror, uncrusts, brushes, shaves. Then stays reflected to put aloe vera on his uppity dermatitis, today more present just above the eyelids. As always, he counts to three as he rubs the gel over and in, sees it, and the foam beneath, disappear. Then the comb, and the classic transaction: introductory down-raking and aligning of the hair, then whisking it once, twice, three times to the left, unnaturally, against the grain, until his fringe finally hangs in place. Where he wants it, above the larger notch of naked skin.
Still in his terry robe, Marcus breaks open his back door and pulls the day’s delivery from the drop-box. He looks through the bag: bread, apples, beans, all the provisions, plus the Thursday snack. He has never liked Fairley’s lime-spice potato chips, but this, alas, is what they have. Still, the shop’s dry-cleaning is reasonably good, he thinks, as he lifts out the thin metal hangers, necks twist-tied together, and drags away the long, streaming, shiny-plastic sheaths that harbor four of his best cotton shirts.
—
The toaster oven is clean. His car keys are found, and back on the peg. Now this is what is meant by exhilaration. By exaltation. This is what they talk about when they talk about flow. Energy generated by its expenditure. Experience providing the fuel for further experience. A roar in the heart that sounds so loudly it can never be rendered in the sounds of speech.
He has never known such freedom. Never known such opportunity, one following directly from the other. Marcus paces, in wide strides, across his living room, from woven couch to settee to hutch. He looks at his bookcases, his 90mm Maksutov telescope, his album rack. His grounds-design notepads and his internet rig. Richnesses just waiting for delving.
That afternoon he walks the streets, seeking to feel in the great world a correlate to the vastness now drumming inside him. He percolates with ideas. He will get back to studying Joseph Paxton, how his thrall to early industrial-age technology fed the gigantism of his late work. He will dive into Nicolaides and, picking up well before he left off, fifteen years ago, refine his drawing skills. He will build and he will grow.
The field has been wiped clean. He is parasailing in vertiginous possibility, the gifted chance for open-source self-renovation. Freed from the darts of eyes, he will, at long last, be able to nurture himself. To realize himself. Finally, he will be able to tend his own garden. It is deliverance.
Time is dignity, he sees, its sole conveyor. Not one without the other. He crosses Clarke Street, then Elmwood Avenue, for the first instant in his adult life autonomous. He is the keymaster of his hours, he holds the code to those vaults, and so can experience time as treasure.
He approaches downtown, steps springing, and starts swerving. Involuntarily, he veers away from his planned route and heads elsewhere – into alleys, along gutters, across roads not marked for crossing. Then he stops. And, after a moment, looks.
Shims. Everywhere. In every line of sight, every subtended angle. Coating the streets. Carrying totebags, lolling with prams, stopped and, heads bent, speaking on cells. Idly chattering at shuttle stops, idly ambling on spot-clean, busy, gradeless pavements, wholly given over to primping and unconcern. Blankly, blindly filling their economic function, following what their employer has told them to do. By advertising self-worth, arguing against it. Marcus looks to the ground. Tells himself not to take it too much to heart. Understands that the thought means it’s already too late.
After a minute, Marcus makes his way to C. Ruggle’s, rifting through back passageways and commercial sluices. He slows, though, before arriving, stops entirely when he again finds the pub closed. Lightless, silent, unviewable to the back, even the old-style juke box now shut down. Timmy’s slip of paper still taped to the door, unmistakably untouched.
Marcus pulls back from peering inside, scans the Street left and right. Puts his index finger through the aluminum-strip door handle. It now holds winter cold. He tugs it once.
An honor – a privilege, he thinks, while walking home. Something to be proud of. Marcus, take a bow. The last one left. The one just person who’s keeping this town from being destroyed. Shit: the others didn’t deserve to have this town.
—
The faintly caramel-y smell of squash roasting. The quiet decorousness of the night, lived in tents of amber-warm light. He sits down to supper. Places the paper napkin, unfolded, on his lap. Gnaws around his full plate of squash, peas, mung beans, and more, along with the second, smaller plate’s slices of rye-cornmeal bread. Of course without butter.
It is all very good. He wipes his face, stands, moves to the sink, notices something. Through his side window, he sees a light. A light in his neighbor’s house. In his neighbor Mr. Baker’s house, right across the driveway. The neighbor whom he has not seen for must be six years. Since that one time, right after Marcus moved in, when he walked out and found the man sitting at roadside, painting his house’s number on the curb, black against a yellow background. Thinking nothing of it, Marcus went over, said hello, and introduced himself, and the two swapped unfussied words about whatever – mostly, if Marcus recalls correctly, about a good local plumber and, alas, about the weather. Baker was stout, small-eyed, maybe sixty, with dark hair hovering atop a high forehead horizon. And, again if Marcus recalls correctly, Baker had a narrow moustache, cut rectangular, separated by visible skin-space from both his nose and his upper lip. Since then: no data. Not a trace of life. No follow-up about the plumber.
And now a glow from Baker’s side window is dividing the night. A lone bulb haloing a closed shade. Never before has Marcus seen such a thing. He wonders: Has someone bought the place? Is someone else living there? It doesn’t seem likely: Marcus has seen neither lawn signs nor traces of new maintenance. Absolutely not a car or a caller. Does Baker have a daughter who, after years in Seattle, has moved back home? Could someone have broken in, tied Baker to a slat-back chair, and started to ransack?
The thoughts replay when Marcus takes his evening constitutional. Favoring side-streets this turn, he walks past the area’s smaller houses and thinks of Mr. Baker for minutes, then for minutes more. Then taps into the sweet night air, wet paint on his nasal membranes, and the possibility of migrant starlings flying just that instant over his head.
Back home, he says hello to his two-bottle reserve of Ardbeg single malt, cues up Carmen McRae, then Betty Carter, then Billie Holiday. Wonderful singers, every one of them.
—
No doubt about it: morning is charmed time. Marcus separates from his bed, dresses, preps, cajoles his hair into place, stares down the mirror for ten seconds then springs away, officially launching the day. He steps up to his breakfast, chews his bread, acclaims his coffee, cinches the plastic neck of the filled garbage bag, and puts it in the drop-box. He is energy; he is élan. Now fully arrived, he understands the unhidden truth of earliness: I am in the a.m.
At four fifty he jumps into his car, heads to the post office.
With the streets empty, he nods at stop signs, pares red lights, arrives in under six minutes. The PO’s large beige building is quiet, deserted. Not a car in the slotted lot out front, until his. The front door is locked; Marcus pulls its ridged metal handles twice. But it is still four fifty-eight. He tramps around to the back, sees, through the squadron of large dead trucks, a few bodies up in the loading area. One of them is Neil.
Marcus uses both arms to hoist himself onto the dock, into its light. He lands on his ass, stands, flattens the front of his pants. Neil walks over.
Hey, Neil says.
Hey, says Marcus, now pulling down his parka. How you—
>
You wanna come over here?, Neil says.
He leads Marcus deeper into the loading zone, to a corner that, behind dollies and bins, holds two metal stools. They sit, angled towards the seam of rear walls.
So, Marcus says. It’s Friday.
Tell me about it, says Neil.
As in Monday Wednesday Friday, Marcus says. As in when you’re still supposed to go out …?
Yeah, Neil says. Shit. That didn’t last long.
Neil rubs his arms, looks around, back. We’re closed, he says. The whole thing. And not just no more deliveries. No more nothin’.
Woo, Marcus says.
Yeah, Neil says. Edict came down yesterday. Just told us to pack our bags.
Well, Neil continues, least we get to put something in our bags …
Neil looks at his fingernails. It a surprise?, he says. You were the only one left on the whole route.
Marcus nods. Hm, he says. So, what—
Just go pick it up at Fairley’s.
Marcus shakes his head. Hm, he says. Hey: wonder if I can get ’em to leave it in the drop-box.
Marcus stands, puts his hand on Neil’s shoulder. Looks at the modest residual movement on the loading dock. You wanna?, he says.
Nah, Neil says. Can’t. Not here.
Neil looks up, scans. Come on, he says.
Neil leads Marcus off the dock and to the side of the building. They tuck themselves behind a boxy air-conditioning unit, outfitted with fans, info-labels, and grilles. A security lamp, halogen, shoots one-point light from atop a high, nearby pole. Under its brilliance, shadows etch and cut.
Marcus lights up, puffs, quickly passes. Neil wheezes, holds, looks overhead, emits a Thanks, man, before letting the long smoke go. Within a minute, the joint is down to a nub. The night is quiet.
So, what?, Marcus says, after an exhale. You know. Now. For you.
Radical unsureness, Neil says.
But it’s cool, Neil continues. I got some ideas. ’Ll start working on working on ’em tomorrow.