Everything Solid has a Shadow

by Michael Antman

  “We’re doing everything we laid out for them in the proposal.”

  “And who won’t even sit down with us to explore some out-of-scope proposals, won’t make us feel like we are front and center with them…”

  “So you’re saying I need to go to New York?”

  “Are you being interrogative with me at this moment? I mean, really? Yes, you need to go to New York. In fact, they’re expecting you. Spend the rest of the day today with the social team coming up with some fresh ideas and working off your tan under the fluorescents, and then get on a plane first thing tomorrow.”

  “I’ve got a dozen other projects…”

  “You know what, Charlie? The amount of work expands to fill the available time.”

  There was no point in arguing at that juncture. He’d told me and Bowen and all of our colleagues that the amount of work expands to fill the available time several hundred times over the past few years, whenever we got overloaded or asked for some account help.

  It was hopeless.

  “Alright, I’ll make my reservations.” But knowing what I knew about ClickEver, and its imminent departure, and the manner in which it would queer the deal Gilbert had set up with Glennis, put me in an odd spot. Clearly, Gilbert was panicked that ClickEver would walk away before the deal with Glennis was consummated, and he’d be left holding the bag, and maybe he was even worried that Jason was planning to take the account away as soon as he wriggled out of his noncompete, because he was asking me, and not Jason, to make the New York trip.

  No question, it was a sticky situation for both Gilbert and me. There was no chance that I could impress ClickEver so profoundly that they’d have second thoughts about going with Jason, but I owed it to Gilbert, who after all was still my employer, to serve the ClickEver account as effectively as I could—even though I was likelier to keep my job if the sale didn’t go through, because Glennis didn’t know or care who I was. But I knew the whole thing was pointless and the sale wouldn’t go through regardless of what I did or didn’t do, as Gilbert himself would discover in a couple of weeks.

  He grabbed my left shoulder, just the way he knew I hated it. “March into the breach with head held high, soldier. Run your concepts by me before you leave tonight, and I’ll sign off on them. I have confidence in you, Charlie boy.”

  I had scheduled three days in New York to present our proposals to ClickEver, to meet with a smaller client, and to stop by our small New York office down the street from the Flatiron Building to take care of some routine business and personnel matters. I planned to do the best I could in all of these tasks, I suppose—and that “I suppose” speaks volumes, doesn’t it? I was thinking about Alisa a bit and Willa a lot. And I was thinking about how I knew, and how ClickEver knew—though ClickEver probably didn’t know I knew—that they were going with Jason anyway, and that all I was doing was going through the motions.

  ClickEver’s offices were near the Bloomberg headquarters, and on my first day I had some free time after lunch before my afternoon meetings, so I took a long walk down Fifth Avenue to enjoy the summer weather. I was feeling good about the likelihood that I’d keep my job a bit longer while Gilbert scrambled to replace ClickEver, I had Willa’s cell number and was going to call her later that evening, and I wasn’t especially upset about Alisa and Frank, maybe because I’d suspected it at the very instant that the steak knife in Frank’s hairy paw had hovered a millimeter above the bridge of Alisa’s nose. Her hairs bristled? She felt something vestigial, animal, primitive? No, at that moment, I did.

  And Diane? Did she know about Frank and Alisa when she watched them at dinner that night? I doubted it. Diane probably would have called me. But I knew. And the reason I knew was the same reason I’d had those two walk-in dreams. I was a psychic, I was certain of it, and that made everything easier, even the image of Frank’s cock hovering just a millimeter away from Alisa’s open legs.

  5

  I got out of my last meeting at about 5:45 and joined the throngs of New Yorkers headed to the Port Authority or Grand Central or Soho or the bars on Second Avenue. I was thinking of finding a good ramen spot downtown, so I headed in that direction, feeling a little light-headed from a long day that had started at 5:30 that morning when my taxi had picked me up at the rental house to take me to O’Hare.

  As I walked along in the late afternoon sunshine, the light-headedness started getting more pronounced, but it wasn’t an unpleasant feeling—it was more as if I’d had a couple of shots of Laphroaig before leaving ClickEver. I veered toward a frozen yogurt shop, thinking I needed a shot of sugar in my bloodstream, but instead of entering I veered back into the stream of people, helplessly. I was wandering, but with some sort of purpose I could not discern.

  When you walk down a New York sidewalk, it is impossible to register, much less absorb, every face of every person coming at you from the other direction. But suddenly, in my abstractedness, I began to try. Corollary, somehow, to my experience in the parking lot where I had suddenly seen, or imagined I’d seen, the beauty of the brake lights, I began to absorb as deeply as if they were lovers the visages of everyone who passed, three or four abreast, seven or eight a second, a hundred and fifty a minute, and I let every face pierce me to my core as if I knew them, and then suddenly I slipped into an even more abstracted state and began to imagine that, for each face in each slice of a second that I glimpsed them, that I not only knew them, I was them. I tried on their souls, each for an instant, and saw the world through their eyes and then, horrified or bored, discarded each in turn.

  A middle-aged man with a long upper lip and soft brown eyes like a hound dog? Melancholia and ahedonia. Gone. The woman with a nostril ring and glossy lips? A doomed sensualist, and gone. And her friend who also had a nostril ring and tight thin lips? A narrow mind, and gone. A very handsome young fellow in leggings? Laboring under a severe misconception about what life was likely to give him and, hence, gone. A grumpy bohunk whose jaw was grinding sideways? Gone. A man with a horrifying beard and mustache that joined in the middle and sprouted into his mouth? Gone, just as I recognized that his beard was ordinary and he was gripping a black cell phone for some reason between his teeth. A little toddler, holding his father’s hand? I could hear him say, “In da morning I put on my shoes and den I put on my pants.” And then, he too, and his father as well, were gone along with all the rest, just as endless others took their place.

  And what did I mean by gone? Not that I wished any of them ill, it was nothing like that. Rather, it was that they passed by me within a second or two, and thus were gone from my consideration, dismissed, even as there was always another someone behind them ready to take their place. I didn’t hate myself, and never had, but ever since I’d remembered I’d had a fascination with the notion of being another person, or more to the point, with the impossibility of being anyone other than myself, and suddenly I found myself, on this narrow concrete chute in the middle of midtown Manhattan, vested with the power of being anyone I wanted for a split second. I could try each one on, toss away the shell, and then try on the next. The elderly woman with an old-fashioned wooden cane and a coat despite the heat? I was her, and then gone, and then I was a pretty woman with pineapple-colored hair and a cross expression on her face, worried about work but looking forward to a weekend of smoking pot and shopping and then she too was gone, and then an imperious, patrician-looking woman, and I suddenly felt her sadness and disappointment in life and her brittle attempts to maintain her dignity in the face of disdain and age and then she too disappeared down the concrete chute.

  I sustained this mood for a good fifteen minutes, and, at the end—by the time I’d reached a restaurant—I was feeling less light-headed and even less upset about my job and Alisa and everything, because I had for this little stretch of time not only not been myself but been, instead, countless interesting others.

  And only then, after
all of this, did I remember Frank’s story about the embittered flight attendant and how she’d instantly communicated her essence to him, and I realized that I had wanted to make the same thing happen to me. While I was awake and conscious, and not dreaming, I wanted to be as powerful as Frank was, and as insightful, and as hypnotic.

  After dinner, I called Willa, but she didn’t pick up, so I tried Bowen, but he didn’t pick up either, and he’d changed his outgoing phone message, which worried me for some indefinable reason. So then I just lay on my hotel bed and flipped through the channels, and as I did so, it suddenly struck me that what I’d just been doing on the street was a form of channel surfing with human souls, and in the end, the program I’d been left with was the one I’d been watching from the day I was born. As in the moments after my vision in the parking lot, I couldn’t help but feel deflated and defeated. Just like the taillights on the cars, the faces had all bleared and run together, because there were too many to keep track of, much less inhabit. And I was just one of those too many people myself and I, to an insightful other that I passed, was equally evaluated and equally dismissed. Gone.

  Some fucking psychic…that’s what I was thinking.

  I finally found a rerun of The Sopranos that I didn’t mind watching, but I kept the volume low and placed my cell on the bed next to me in case Willa called me. About twenty minutes later, she did. I mouthed the words, “I love you” to the phone, though I wasn’t sure if I was addressing these words to the phone or to Willa, and I answered.

  “Hey, Willa, how are you?”

  “Good! It was nice to hear from you!”

  “Yeah, me too. I had a nice time in Hawaii. It was so cool reconnecting with you. Actually, I’m in New York now.”

  “I’ve never been to New York.”

  “I love it. A lot of job issues, I mean, it’s work, you know. And I’m still kind of processing breaking up with Alisa. Kind of tough right now, but I’m definitely glad it happened, and anyway it’s a beautiful day here.”

  “I’m sorry about your girlfriend. I mean, you know, if you want me to be sorry.”

  “It’s okay. It was coming sooner or later. Anyway, reconnecting, right? How cool is this? And speaking of that, I was walking downtown to find a ramen place and New York is so crowded, you know, and I’m looking at everyone’s faces, and I fell into this strange mood like I could actually fall into everyone’s soul, one at a time, and try it on like a mask, and see the world from their perspective…”

  “So you mean, you saw you?”

  “Me?”

  “Yeah, you’re saying you were imagining you were every person who was passing in the opposite direction, the moment you saw them. So that would have been the same moment they saw you, and since you were them, you were seeing you.”

  “That’s true, hadn’t thought of that.”

  “So what did you see in them?”

  “I don’t know, every person, without exception, I thought I could feel what it was like to actually be them, to inhabit their souls, and I kept on rejecting each one, every single one, because…”

  “Because they weren’t you?”

  “I guess you could say that. But I don’t mean it in the sense that I thought I was better than all of them, just that…”

  “Yeah, I understand. Just that they weren’t you. But what was the common denominator? Everyone you saw was seen by you. And everyone you saw, saw you. So maybe because of what you were doing, trying to read their minds or whatever, they could tell you were doing that by looking at you, I mean, you were probably staring at them, and they didn’t like it and looked a little sour, and that’s why they all looked unappealing to you like you wouldn’t want to be them, just like they wouldn’t want to be you!” She laughed.

  “You have a succinct way of putting things, Willa.”

  “I really understand what you were trying to do. As I got a little older, I would sometimes imagine what it would have been like for Elizabeth, I mean just before we found her, but it always comes right back to how I would feel if it were me, and it’s unimaginable because I’ve never been in a situation like that, and it’s also unimaginable because I can’t be her. No one can be anyone but who they are, forever.”

  “Willa, not to change the subject, but something has been troubling me ever since—well, I was going to say ever since we talked on the beach, but really, ever since it all happened.”

  “Okay.”

  “I mean, I was too scared and too young to say anything to your mother at the time, or even to my own parents when we moved to Argentina, but what the hell were a couple of eight-year olds like us doing watching an infant baby? I mean, what was your mother thinking?”

  “I can’t testify to what she was thinking.”

  “I mean, couldn’t she get a babysitter, is all I’m saying?”

  “I guess, but I think it was just one of those having to run out for a few minutes situations. She was working two jobs, remember, and my parents’ marriage was constantly on the rocks. And besides, we really didn’t have babysitters. Usually it was just Bea who watched us.”

  “B?”

  “Bea. As in Beatrice. My other sister.”

  “Wait a minute. What other sister are you talking about?”

  “You knew I had an older sister, right? Oh, shit, I forgot. You completely lost track of me, didn’t you? I mean, once you got back from Argentina. Elizabeth and I had an older sister. She would have been, let’s see, twelve years old when it all happened.”

  “So why wasn’t she sitting for Elizabeth, or for Elizabeth and us, that day?”

  “I guess she would’ve in theory, but she’d left for summer camp the previous day. So that was another reason my mom was going crazy. She didn’t have anyone to help.”

  “It’s so funny that I don’t even remember your sister. Beatrice? Is that what you said?”

  “Yeah, Beatrice Baer. That’s her married name. She lives in St. Louis so I hardly ever see her, and we kind of drifted apart pretty bad. Last time I talked to her was maybe two years ago.”

  “Because of Elizabeth?”

  “Huh? Why because of Elizabeth? Just because. Sister stuff. Family stuff, is all. Listen, Charlie, I really meant what I said. Elizabeth, the past, whatever…we can talk about it or not talk about it, whatever we choose. But come see me in Seattle.”

  6

  Though the two events were not, in my mind, directly connected, I drove over to Alisa’s condo the Saturday after my conversation with Willa to pick up some of my things. As I was getting out of my car, Gilbert called.

  “Catch you at a bad time?”

  “No, I’m just at Alisa’s. What’s up?”

  “It’s never an easy thing to say, and it’s never a good time to say it.”

  “What? What are you telling me, Gilbert?”

  “You understand I have a business to run.”

  “Are you telling me I’m fired?”

  “Children to feed. Two in college. You know that, Charlie.”

  “So, yeah, I understand, I know all about your kids, but what I’m asking you is, am I fired?”

  “I don’t think that’s entirely accurate. That characterization. I would say that we are mutually and reasonably reaching a point where we’re going to have make a decision about your future with the firm, fair enough?”

  “I guess. So I’m fired?”

  “Look, we can parse this seventeen ways to Sunday. We can do this all day if you’d like. You’ll have two weeks, okay? You can come in, use your office, look for your next job, you can tell everyone that this was a mutually agreed upon decision, which has the added advantage of being the truth. You’ll be locked out of our files, of course, but you can make phone calls, work on your résumé, whatever you would like.”

  “And after the
two weeks?”

  “You go with my blessings.”

  “But I mean, severance? I’ve been with the firm for seven years.”

  “Contractually, you understand that I’m not obligated to provide you with anything in that area. But I would be happy to set you up with a woman I know who runs an outplacement business.”

  “So you’re telling me no severance?”

  “Charlie, what I’m telling you is that I’m opening up your future for you. If you were wise, you would just take it and run with it.”

  “Is this because of ClickEver? Did we lose ClickEver?”

  “I’m not at liberty to discuss that, Charlie.” But at that moment, Gilbert sounded almost jubilant, as if, somehow, the sale had gone through. In some fashion, evidently, he’d managed to keep Jason from walking away with the business, and neither the new agency nor, apparently, Gilbert, had any further need of me.

  “Okay, thanks.” I mashed the little red button with the miniature red telephone on it to end the call and stepped into Alisa’s place.

  The front door was open; Alisa was lying on her side in front of the television, crying.

  “What’s the matter, baby?”

  “Nothing. What are you doing here?”

  “Well, it would appear that I’ve just gotten myself fired.”

  “I’m so sorry.” She was still crying and sniffling from whatever other thing had been troubling her when I first walked in.

  “So what’s going on with you? I walk in, it’s the middle of the day, you’re lying on your couch crying, is it me?”

  She looked surprised. “No, it’s nothing. They’re just back and I got upset, that’s all.”

  “They’re back? Who?”

  Alisa motioned over to the corner of the living room, where the heating grate was. I suddenly became aware, for the first time, that under Alisa’s crying there had been another sound, a rustling sound punctuated by a faint squeak.