Y Is for Fidelity

by Logan Ryan Smith

  “That’s good tea!” I say, a little too enthusiastically, and feel my face flush.

  Katharine nods, smirks, pivots, and strides out of the breakroom.

  That’s good tea? God, what’s the matter with me? I’ll have to tell Madelyn about this.

  Before I make the mental note to do that, though, I make a mental note of Katharine’s apparel today: woman’s business suit consisting of black skirt cut two inches above the knee, a slim-fitting black jacket, white blouse with top button undone, skin-toned leggings, and black high heels.

  What did Katharine wear yesterday? Navy blue slacks with cuffed bottoms, eggshell-white blouse with half-length sleeves, and light brown flats. Her shiny black hair was in a ponytail bound by a white elastic band.

  The day before that? Oh, you get the point.

  I take a sip from my can of Lipton Ice Tea.

  It really is pretty good tea.

  At home after work, I pause at my door just as I’m about to put the key in the lock. I place my ear against the door and listen. And listen. Nothing. Entering, I place my keys in a bowl atop a table by the door, drop my shoulder bag by the couch, and head into the kitchen where I grab a twenty-ounce bottle of Lipton Ice Tea from the refrigerator, open it, and take a few swallows, my mind drifting to the lunchtime meeting I missed today, which is why no one was in the breakroom. This fills me with inordinate amounts of anxiety. I decided not to send an apology email to my manager, hoping my absence went unnoticed.

  I guess Katharine didn’t know about the meeting, either. Maybe I can use that as a reason to talk to her. But, Katharine’s never at meetings. Somehow she seems excused from most of them. I’d notice if she was there and she almost never is. Whenever she does grace a meeting with her presence those dull minutes pass by so quickly.

  Maybe I’ll pull someone aside tomorrow and ask them what I missed. Just to make sure I’m caught up if there’s a quiz. Sure, I’ll just pull up to Dennis’s cubicle and ask for a summation. Just like that.

  No I won’t.

  THUMP

  I cock my head and listen. And listen.

  What was that?

  Nothing. Probably came from downstairs.

  I take a few more swallows, twist the cap back on the bottle, and put it back in the refrigerator, then walk to the hallway. Benoit’s door is closed. Daylight peaks from beneath it. It’s not dark enough yet to require the overhead light and I can’t be sure if he’s in there or not. So, I stand there and listen.

  And listen.

  Nothing but the wind outside brushing branches against the front of the building. Nothing but the random car rolling down Pine Grove. Nothing but the scuttle overhead of the little clawed feet of squirrels.

  I put my hand on the doorknob.

  No, it’s not my room. It’s his room now. I even deposited that seven-hundred dollars at my bank downtown before getting on the Red Line for home. I took his money. He paid for the room. It’s his. I must respect his privacy. It’s what Madelyn would expect of me.

  My hand, rebel to my resolution, turns the brass doorknob, and I creak the door open.

  “Benoit?” I ask, as though that’s better than knocking first.

  Silence.

  The door open, the room is as bare and empty as it was yesterday before his jarring arrival. Tree branches scratch at the window and dust floats in the twilight.

  An itch that needs scratching, I walk into the room and there isn’t a sign anyone stayed here last night. Not a discarded sock or quarter-full water glass.

  I open the closet expecting to find that mysterious brown suitcase, but it’s not there.

  For a moment I have to wonder if yesterday actually happened.

  But, no, I’m sure it did. I haven’t gone crazy. And Benoit is not here. He is keeping to himself, and out of my way, just as he said.

  Am I disappointed?

  CHAPTER 4.

  I saw Madelyn today, but no sign of Benoit for the last three days. I have woken to strange grumblings and grunts the last few nights. Very faint. But in my sleep-induced haze, I hadn’t the gumption to get out of bed, though there were moments where the sounds sent my heart racing. I’m used to a quiet apartment and not waking up to the noises of doors being unlocked or toilets being flushed or what sounded like stifled sneezes and dream-whimpers. Last night I nearly got up to investigate, having turned my ears to the weak noises, my attention focused, but I got so nervous I just pulled the covers up over my head and rubbed my feet together until I was calmed enough to fall back to sleep.

  Today is Saturday, and I’d be surprised if I don’t run into him at some point, seeing as how I will probably stay in and play Halo all day before capping my day off with delivery from Vegetarian Express and a good three hours or more of All Creatures Great and Small.

  I told Madelyn about Benoit—how he came, paid his rent, and disappeared. She said that that was good and that that was fine. She told me getting used to someone coming and going of their own accord, weaving their way in and out of my space and life, was part of learning how to interact with others, and of how others will interact with me. I also told her about Katharine and my inability to talk to her even though we’re coworkers, and she told me not to beat myself up about that, but cautioned me not to become obsessive about women who catch my eye.

  “She has not caught my eye!” I protested.

  “Ian, it’s perfectly alright to develop crushes—”

  “I am not crushing!”

  “on coworkers and—”

  “You’re crazy, Madelyn! Really, you’re the one that’s—”

  “you just need to make sure you keep everything professional—”

  “I am certainly more professional than the likes of you!”

  “or you run the risk of creating a very uncomfortable work environment. And worse, you may even confuse the situation so much that you inadvertently create a case for sexual harassment.”

  “Sexual harassment,” I pshawed her. “Madelyn, tell me why I pay you anything. Please tell me what it is you do that a good bartender or prostitute couldn’t do for me.”

  Madelyn, who is this very slight blonde woman, probably five-one and ninety pounds soaking wet, just sat there in her big chair staring at me through her slim spectacles, legs crossed, bouncing her right foot.

  “Sorry!” I blurted out with a laugh. “Sorry, sorry, sorry.”

  She scribbled something onto the notepad on her lap.

  “I am not obsessing. I don’t have any feelings for Katharine,” I told her, completely calm.

  “Ian, it’s important that, at least in here, you don’t hide your feelings, and that you embrace absolute honesty. We can’t progress unless you do.”

  “We can’t progress,” I scoffed. “We. That’s rich.”

  Madelyn stared at me. I stared at her. Then time was up.

  Now I’m playing Halo with the deluxe edition CD of Phil Collins’s Face Value spinning in the Bose and I’m gulping Lipton Ice Tea and thoroughly enjoying my weekend.

  That’s not entirely true. I’m completely on edge, anticipating the sound of a key thrusting into my front door’s lock and turning at any minute. I keep waiting for Benoit to burst in with his gym buddies and three cases of Old Style in tow, ready to take over my living room, usurp the TV so they can watch the Cubs game or some UFC match, and proceed to get drunker and more raucous until finally they do what all people like that do and storm my bedroom to beat me up or shove my head in the toilet.

  Or something.

  I should probably tell Madelyn about these thoughts.

  As it turns out, I enjoy my West African stew with soy sausage from Vegetarian Express and fall asleep on the couch in front of the TV, uninterrupted, just as James is shoving his black-gloved arm up a pregnant cow’s backside. When his mucousy arm withdraws, he’s clasping a dozen black asps in his hand instead of a baby calf, and those black asps hiss and strike at him, biting his face. He drops them and they slither out into the hills o
f Darrowby, and Siegfried, who owns the veterinary hospital, phones Ireland and asks them to send St. Patrick over to help them with the infestation…

  CHAPTER 5.

  AHHHH!

  AHHHH!

  AHHHH!

  I wake with a start, still on the couch, twisting and throwing the blanket off me and jerking my vision all around to discover the source of the ghastly noise. Someone is screaming. Someone is screaming inside this apartment. But who else is here? Surely I’d have woken if Benoit had come back. The clunk and click of the lock, the clack of the door closing would have lifted my lids as I’m not exactly a heavy sleeper.

  My heart inflates and deflates rapidly. The sound is coming from down the hall, and, more specifically, from Benoit’s room. He—if it is indeed him making that atrocious, guttural howl—screams three more times in short bursts, and then, silence.

  Hesitant, I sit up and place my feet on the wood floor. The floor is cold and the dark apartment, lit only by street-glow coming through the windows, is quiet. Eerie calm. There’s only the slight murmur of the lake a few blocks east, and the electric hum of the darkened TV.

  I’m shaking, but I stand on wobbly knees and proceed to the hallway where I wait before Benoit’s door for a moment just listening. I strain my ears and can hear nothing coming from there.

  I place my ear on the door, and… nearly fall into the room as the door swings inward. Benoit stands there wearing a white tanktop and black tracksuit pants.

  “Benoit? Are you…”

  He rubs sleep from his eyes, looks at me, confused, as if he doesn’t know who I am, then walks past me and toward the kitchen. I hear the faucet turn on.

  He’s gulping water down from a glass and stopping only to stare out the window where street-light and moonlight mix.

  “Sorry,” he says, his eyes crystal blue, no longer dark. “I probably should have warned you. I get these… night terrors.”

  “Night terrors?”

  “Yeah. They’re like nightmares, but much worse. Sometimes I wake up screaming.” His slight, unknowable accent seems to have thickened a bit through his sleep haze.

  “Why do you get… night terrors?”

  “Don’t know. But I’ve had them for maybe six years now.”

  “What are the night terrors about?” I ask, still freaked out, but intrigued and maybe even concerned.

  “Don’t know. I usually can’t remember anything.”

  “You don’t remember a thing?”

  “I remember… red. I remember lots of red, and lots of darkness. And cold.”

  “Hmm…” I say, crossing my arms, not sure where to take this conversation.

  “Yeah.”

  “Maybe you should talk to a therapist?” I suggest, like a question.

  “Don’t really have the scratch for a shrink, and I don’t get health insurance from the… gym,” he tells me, as if he forgot for a second where he works.

  “Maybe I can ask my therapist about your night terrors.”

  “You see a shrink?” He smirks.

  “A therapist. Yeah.”

  “Are you crazy or something?”

  “I’m… I see a therapist because…”

  He strides past me, pats me on the shoulder, and says, “Just kidding. I’m going back to sleep. I’ll see you around.”

  “Wait,” I tell him and he turns back to face me, slowly, his shoulders tensing.

  “What?” he asks, maybe annoyed.

  “When did you get home… I mean, here?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, well… I just didn’t hear you come in. I feel like I would have woken up when you came in.”

  “I’ve been here all day.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Just… in your room?”

  “Where else would I be?”

  “But I’ve been home all day and…”

  “Look, Ian, I’m tired. Exhausted. I’m going back to bed,” he says, turns, and walks back into his room, shutting the door before I can get a glimpse inside.

  “Oh. OK,” I say to no one at all, remaining in the living room for a long while before grabbing my blanket off the couch and going to my room where sleep won’t find me no matter how long I hide under the covers and rub my feet together.

  I didn’t sleep until the sun came up, and then I was awakened a few short hours later by the sound of the front door slamming shut, the lock turning into place.

  Slipping from bed now, I tiptoe down the short hallway and into the living room to make sure he isn’t out there. Then I listen at his bedroom door: Nothing. As he had little regard for waking me in the middle of the night with his screaming, I decide to be bold and knock on his door

  “Benoit?” I ask. “You in there?”

  No answer, so I call out his name once more and wait. Nothing.

  With conviction, I stride into the room as if it’s my own, and find it empty, but changed from the last time I found myself in here. There’s now some blankets on the floor in the corner, off to the side of the window, which is open and letting in morning light. A cardinal perches on the tree branches out the window and I step closer to study it. It eyes me, its head turned sideways, when I notice a man in the window across the street staring at me. He just keeps staring. He’s a fat old bastard wearing a white, stretched out tanktop—just like Benoit—and he’s staring at me. He has coffee in one hand, and a book in the other. He puts both down on the windowsill of his third story apartment and picks up a small pair of binoculars, and points them directly at me! I wait to see what he does next, but he just stares and stares and stares.

  The red bird scuttles along the branch a few inches and the man’s binoculars follow it.

  He’s looking at the bird.

  Of course.

  Still, I pull the plastic venetian blinds down and close them.

  Besides the blankets, there are plastic wrappers for microwaveable breakfast sandwiches, burritos, and hamburgers, all purchased from the 7-Eleven around the corner on Broadway. A few plastic shooter bottles of whiskey and vodka also clutter the floor next to crushed cans of Steel Reserve malt liquor. Two forty-ounce Budweiser bottles are filled with a foamy yellow liquid. He really has been camping out in here.

  I’m fighting every urge to grab a couple paper bags and sort the recyclables from the garbage, and to take those bags down the back stairs and into the alley where they can be properly deposited into their receptacles, but I know I can’t do that. Benoit can’t know I’ve been snooping. So, I leave the mess and turn my attention to the closet.

  I slide one of the faux wood doors aside. In the closet he has hung up all his clothes—there are seven black tracksuits, seven white tanktops, and one tweed suit, the kind with leather elbow pads. His collection of boxer shorts, socks, jeans, and t-shirts are piled on the floor of the closet, half-covering the brown suitcase there.

  He didn’t take it with him today.

  Eagerly, I crouch and, with forefinger and thumb, pinch a few of the undergarments away, not wanting to touch them. Then I snatch the handle of the suitcase and yank it out of the closet and lay it on the floor.

  THUMP

  My chin juts out, my ear to the wind. I listen. I await the click-clunk of the lock, the opening of the front door, and Benoit’s not-so-quiet rage.

  But there’s nothing. Just early morning Sunday traffic on the streets, a few playful barks from doggies being walked, and the hoots and hollers of those already drunk, pregaming for today’s noontime Cubs home game.

  I flip open the suitcase and, much to my horror, papers go flying all over the room. I watch them flutter down like snowflakes, terrified whatever order they had been in within the suitcase will be impossible for me to re-sort. In Benoit’s suitcase, next to more paper, is a typewriter. It’s not ancient, but not very new, either. Maybe from the 80s? It has a pale blue shell that’s textured with many tiny bumps. It’s in remarkable condition but the keys do look well-struck.
<
br />   Is Benoit a writer?

  A writer that wears tracksuits?

  Nah, it couldn’t be.

  I scurry on hands and knees to the loose sheets of paper and gather them into a pile, attempting to reconstruct their order from the position they landed on the floor. There are about fifty sheets here, and a stack of hundreds of sheets of paper in the suitcase next to the typewriter. In fact, the suitcase could only fit the typewriter and sheets of paper. So what did he bring his clothes in? He only arrived with one suitcase.

  Rifling through the loose sheets, I see, much to my relief, that the pages are dated, making it possible for me to get them back in order and cover my tracks.

  However, the first page I pick up appears to be dated the furthest back: Thursday, February 18, 2010. Benoit must be keeping a journal, but that seems just as unlikely as him writing the Great American Novel or play or poetic opus or what-have-you.

  The first line reads: They found me. They found me in a dumpster, unconscious, half froze to death.

  I lick my lips and my face and the back of my neck grows warm.

  I get to work organizing the papers when my guts drop so quickly I think they might have fallen into my ball-sack.

  The lock. It’s being turned.

  CLICK-CLUNK

  The noise happens as if in slow-motion.

  I feel a bit dizzy, having not inhaled in the last few moments, so I suck in a fresh breath and shuffle the papers together, mostly convinced I have them in order, and shove those atop the stack in the suitcase next to the pale blue typewriter.

  CLICK-CLACK

  The front door is opening. I clasp the suitcase together and shove it toward the open closet. It slides across the wood floor and hits home against the pile of underwear and socks.

  CLACK-CLICK

  The door closes and I can hear him now turning the deadbolt from inside. I scramble to the closet, yank the door closed, careful not to slam it, then leap the five to seven feet out of the room into the hallway, my right arm flailing behind me, my hand finding purchase on the doorknob.