“One of the names they used was Cindy.”
“Seems like a man to me.”
“It could be anyone,” Cleo said. “Even you.”
Jill laughed, but when Cleo did not join her, she grew grim. “What reason would I possibly have?”
“I have no idea. I don’t think it is you. I’m just saying, from my perspective, it could technically be anyone.”
Jill dug in her purse and placed a twenty-dollar bill on the table. “Well, this has been delightful, but I better run.”
Cleo reached for her, managed to graze her fingers before she pulled away and stood from the booth. “I didn’t mean it.”
Jill nodded. “See you tomorrow.”
At the exit, she paused with her hands on the door and glanced back at Cleo. She was inspecting her, deciding how to feel about her. Cleo knew the look.
Cleo drove home, parked her car, and walked past the north face of her building. Only one tarp remained, snapping like a flag in the sharp breeze. The rest had become windows, dark eyes reflecting the moon.
As she neared the front entrance, she noticed the sidewalk shucker, his hands dappled in blue and orange paint. He was peeling flyers for a missing corgi off the lamppost, dropping the torn pieces of paper into his frayed and dirty tote.
“You shouldn’t do that,” she said, surprised to hear the words out loud.
He turned, paint scraper in hand, and eyed her as if scanning for data, then grunted before resuming his scraping.
“What if someone is still looking for him?” she asked.
“Did you even notice this flyer before you saw me tear it down?” His face was tanned to stiff leather so that each word was punctuated by the ripple of the wrinkles in his cheeks.
She shook her head. She hadn’t noticed. Now she saw how faded the remnants of the flyer were. The untaped edges had dissolved in the rain. Either the corgi had long since been found, or she was looking at its final picture.
“What do you do with it?” she asked.
“Disassemble and reassemble,” he said, flicking another fragment of flyer into his bag. “One man’s trash and all that shit.” He wiped the sweat off his lip with the back of his forearm. She noticed a faded and blown-out skeleton tattoo. It was dancing. “You don’t smoke, do you?”
She shook her head. “Sorry.”
“I could really use a smoke. And then I’d take that filter and use it too. Make it art.”
His lucidity was unclear. There was something both incisive and scattered about the way he stared at her. Perhaps that was merely the combination of cataracts and a heavy brow.
She retreated to her apartment. By the time she showered and looked out the window, he was gone, but she kept hearing the sound of his knife on the concrete, like the phantom ringing that lingers after tornado sirens.
The rest of the week, Jill maintained tersely polite conversation about necessary work tasks, but she never allowed any extemporaneous chitchat. A couple of times, Cleo felt like Jill was looking at her, but when she glanced back, trying to catch her, Jill’s eyes were locked on her monitor, her hands typing quickly.
On Saturday, Cleo ran into the neighbor as she was checking her mail. Despite the August heat, he still wore his blazer. The veins on his hands protruded more than she’d expected. He was probably closer to forty than thirty, despite the smooth skin of his face. He caught her staring, and she returned to sorting her envelopes.
“I’m Bryan,” he said, extending his veiny hand to her, but she just stared at it.
“Sorry,” she said. “My hands are full.” She held up the enve lopes, awkwardly with both hands even though one could have easily grasped them all.
“And you are?”
“You should know.” She meant to test him. To see if he reacted to the phrase with a spark of recognition, but instead he just looked perplexed.
“I’m sorry, have we already met?”
She nodded to her mailbox, which read her full name: Cleo Darby.
“I see,” he said, turning to close his own mailbox. He didn’t even make eye contact when he left the entranceway. He merely waved a handful of mail in the air in a half-assed gesture of good riddance.
Cleo didn’t care. He only mattered if he was the one sending the messages.
Like Whac-A-Mole, the messages kept arriving in different accounts. She deleted her dating account only to find a Facebook message from Ed Shepherd. She didn’t know Ed Shepherd, and the account only had a few friends, all public restaurant accounts. She looked them up. Restaurants from her hometown and from L.A., but none that she’d ever been to. His profile picture was of Mister Ed, the talking horse, its upper lip curled revealing its big block teeth. He wrote, What’s done is done, but don’t forget to smile.
She reflexively smiled, pressing her hands on her cheeks as if assessing a mold for a sculpture. How stiff and unreal her face felt.
She wrote a response to Mister Ed: Fuck you, you sick fuck. I’m calling the police.
Then she called the police on their nonemergency line and explained the situation, but they couldn’t do anything for her. We can’t just arrest random people, they said. There was no actual threat. There was no crime. Don’t respond to any more messages, they said. Just ignore him, they said, or delete your accounts.
She deleted all of them, even LinkedIn. All that remained was her email, which she needed for work. She wondered about her career. How could she build a network and become a publicist if she had deleted every online iteration of herself ? In a civil case, her damages were all hypothetical. She couldn’t prove that her life was any worse off postdeletion than it would have been if she had kept all her online personas.
Cleo had just finished her first cup of coffee and was rolling calls for her boss, whittling through the phone sheet and the messages they owed clients, when she received the email from Denice Smith. An actual Smith, a real person, who worked on the other side of the office. She invited the office to join her for drinks and maybe even some bowling for her birthday. “RSVP if you want a lane,” she wrote, followed by a string of celebratory emojis. Cleo knew better than to RSVP. This message wasn’t for her.
Cleo packed her purse so that she could leap up when Jill headed to lunch and walk out with her. She even held the door open.
“Thank you,” Jill murmured, avoiding eye contact.
Cleo kept stride with Jill, even though the cafeteria was the opposite direction from the front gate and her usual coffee shop. When Jill quickened her pace, so did Cleo.
Without warning, Jill stopped and turned on Cleo. “Where are you going?”
Cleo forced a smile. “To grab lunch.”
“I wasn’t planning on company.”
“That’s okay. I was just going to grab something to go.”
Jill nodded, then looked uncertain, like she had overreacted. “Sorry. A client’s big interview came out today and it’s a disaster. Not at all what we’d discussed.”
Cleo felt a surge of relief, the happiness of finding herself a confidante, and tried to affect a sympathetic expression. “Sorry to hear that.”
As they neared the cafeteria doors, she added, “Are you going to Action Bowl later?”
“Maybe,” Jill shrugged. “Probably not if I’m stuck doing damage control all afternoon.”
Jill pushed through the door without holding it for Cleo. The glass swung shut on her shoulder, making her feel klutzy and self-conscious. Still, she murmured after Jill, “Good luck.”
Cleo wasn’t an idiot. She knew Jill was going to join all the other assistants at the long table in the far corner of the cafeteria. They were already looking this way, smiling at Jill. But Cleo didn’t want to wait and see, to confirm Jill’s deception. She paid for a turkey and cheese sandwich and a carton of milk and left. She ate at her desk and thought about fixing things with Jill. If they could have another drink together, she could better ex plain what she’d meant about the stalker, about the feeling of not knowing anything about th
e person who was accumulating data and connecting the dots of your life.
The bowling alley was in a historic building with several floors, and each floor was decorated to represent a different decade. Cleo couldn’t recall which decade Denice had chosen. She stood in the tiny art deco lobby checking her email on her phone when she found a new message, now from [email protected].
Don’t disappear on me.
Reflexively, she looked up and scanned the room. No one was there except the elderly elevator operator in his gray suit and white gloves. He raised a bushy eyebrow. “You just going to stand there, or you going up?”
Not wanting to be alone, and not wanting a coworker to stumble upon her in the lobby, she joined the operator in the old-fashioned car with its geometric paneling.
“Where to?” He rested his hand on the manual crank that controlled acceleration.
“The ’50s,” she said. Denice liked knee-length skirts that nipped at the waist. It was worth a shot.
But she didn’t recognize anyone there. Families with small children were crowding the lanes or milling near a soda fountain, clutching milkshakes and sundaes. A father helped his daughter toss an unusually small bowling ball down the lane where unusually small pins toppled.
She tried the ’60s and the ’70s, but she found them in the ’80s. There was a small arcade in the back corner. She drifted to the PAC-MAN machine and pretended to play as she watched Denice and her friends bowl.
Jill wound up and slung her ball so that it skipped the gutter and bounced into her neighbor’s lane before scoring for a clearly peeved middle-aged man in acid-washed jeans. Jill doubled over laughing, each of her coworkers high-fiving her on her way to her seat. Cleo had hoped to join them, but now she felt locked out of a ritual that was already halfway enacted.
She tried to focus on the lanes, to find a moment that would allow her entry, but a preteen boy drifted to her side, eyeing the machine. After several minutes, he said, “You didn’t even put coins in.”
Denice was opening a gift bag from Jill, pulling out bright tissue paper and squealing at whatever she found in there.
Cleo let go of the joystick. “It’s yours, kid.”
She kept her back to the lanes in case anyone would happen to look in her direction. She had almost made it to the elevator when she saw Jill’s boss heading her way. Cleo ducked into the restroom and slid into a stall. She scanned her phone. No new messages.
The door swung open and two women entered, their feet clustering near the mirrors and sinks. Someone popped open a compact and slid open a tube of lipstick. Through the crack in the stall door, Cleo could see a sliver of Jill gently pressing the tip of her lipstick and then dappling it artfully on the apple of her cheek.
“I don’t even know why they hired her,” someone said. “Who wants someone like that in PR?”
“She was good on paper,” Jill said. “And she managed to seem normal in the interview.”
“What if she faked the stalker stuff?”
Jill held her face still as she added mascara to the tips of her lashes, barely moving her lips to speak. “I was there when she got one of the messages. She seemed spooked.”
“Seemed,” the unseen woman scoffed.
“She implied I did it.”
“Why would anyone, never mind you, bother?”
“For sport?” Jill shrugged, then blotted away the creases of foundation beneath her eyes.
The woman stepped to the sink, her back obscuring Cleo’s view.
“She can’t last long. She keeps dropping calls and screwing up the calendar,” Jill said. “I know plenty of people who’d be a better fit.”
Cleo didn’t want to hear anymore, but there was no escaping them, so she let them see her. She opened the door and stood there until they noticed, Jill’s eyes first tracking her reflection in the mirror, Cleo’s face hovering above her shoulder. Denice turned, eyes wide. There was nothing they could say. Jill breathed her name, like she was going to apologize but realized the futility.
Cleo stood beside Jill then and washed her hands. She smiled at Jill in the mirror. Let the normalcy be uncanny, she thought. The weirdness of politeness in an impolite moment. She wanted them to squirm in their ugly, rented bowling shoes.
In the elevator, the operator pretended not to notice the tears that escaped down her cheek.
“The lobby?” he asked, eyes trained straight ahead.
“Yes, please.” Her voice held steady.
When he pulled back the grate on the ground floor, he bowed his head and wished her a good night.
She climbed into her car. The parking lot was half-empty by now. Across the aisle, a small car like hers sat beneath the sole lamppost, its silver paint covered in dust. It was hard to tell, but through the slight tint of the windows and the glare of the light, she thought she could discern the silhouette of a driver seated behind the wheel. She knew it could just be a high-backed seat creating the illusion, but she felt that someone was sitting there, watching.
Her phone vibrated against her hip with a notification. She held her phone low to the seat, so that whoever was in the other car (if there was anyone in the other car) would not see her reading their words. But when she scanned her fingerprint to unlock the screen, there were no words. There was only herself staring back at her, a photo taken just moments earlier. In the image on her screen, she sat behind the wheel of her car, gazing right at the camera, which would mean the photographer was behind the wheel of the other silver car, facing her, as if through a mirror.
Prickling unease swept through her, like the cold sweat induced by a virus. Her hands shook as she turned the key, igniting the engine. With the car in park, she idled. Something needed to happen. She flashed her brights and blared the horn. The other car’s headlights turned on and echoed her, on and off, again and again, matching her rhythm, mocking her.
She should drive away. She should ignore it all, go home and pull up the covers and play dead. You do not look at the thing.
But she had to know. She pulled out the key to kill the engine and held the cool metal in her palm. If she approached the driver’s side, if she peered into that window, who would she find looking back at her?
MODERN RELICS
Ahuman checked them in. Marian wasn’t too surprised. She’d read the reports. Automated entities were less effective at coercing people into spending money. The man was a natural pusher, rapidly listing the various services they should consider adding to their hotel stay. Eighty-dollar brunch. Thousand-dollar cabanas on the beach. A couple’s massage. After suggesting an excursion in a submarine pod, the pusher looked pointedly at Gerald and said, “This is your honeymoon, yes?”
Gerald smiled stiffly as he fiddled with the loose thread of his denim pocket, unraveling it further. Marian knew Gerald was actively weighing his warring desires: to succumb to opulence and appease the pusher or to decline the offerings of the luxury resort and thereby avoid deepening their crushing credit card debt. He often would acquiesce to unnecessary transactions and add-ons if asked in a public space by a stranger with a moderately imperious tone. Why settle for a synthetic steak if you could get a cut from a cow that had experienced deeptissue massage each day of its life? Why take the lake view if you could get the ocean view? When Marian had suggested that they’d save money with half pours of champagne for their wedding guests, the venue coordinator had pursed her lips slightly and said, “You only get married once.” Gerald had wilted like a double agent under interrogation. Suddenly, he needed a respectable pour of bubbly. He’d insisted.
Now, Marian chimed in before Gerald could fold, “We’ll discuss our options and call down from the room.”
“Certainly,” the pusher said, sliding an activity menu across the counter. “Please be aware that appointments and cabanas often sell out before noon on the preceding day. Sometimes sooner.” He nodded toward the large brass clock behind him, which read eleven forty.
Gerald picked up the menu and said, “Oh,
look, kayaking!”
The pusher brightened. “Shall I — ”
“We’ll discuss.” Marian shot her husband a stern look.
Gerald’s mother had given them a generous portion of her rewards points to book the hotel, a luxury chain that was far beyond the couple’s means. Gerald taught high school, and Marian, the librarian for an entire school district, had recently been demoted to part-time hours. Gamified teaching software and algorithms were used to curate books for the students. One of their corporate sponsors would present Marian with a dozen titles that had sentence patterns and vocabularies that allegedly optimized students’ verbal scores, and from that scant selection, she would choose her favorites. She no longer taught students how to find books or articles in the library. Instead, it was now her responsibility to fetch the students’ selections from the stacks whenever they submitted a request online. Still, she knew this too was a fading purpose. The richer suburbs already had automated retrieval systems with metal bins on miniature train tracks weaving up and down and through the stacks. Occasionally, she would reply to a student’s request with a helpful suggestion — a book or an article with more credible research or a more engaging style than the one they had asked for — but the students rarely responded. Fewer and fewer came to collect their books in person. Instead, she placed them on a cart whose inner gears and fans whirred rhythmically as it wheeled the selections to each student’s locker. Most students, she suspected, did not realize that she was even a part of the process.
“Mr. and Mrs. Gerald Moore, here are your room keys,” the pusher said. “The luggage will be up shortly.”
Gerald turned, already slipping the keys into his pocket, but Marian lingered to correct the pusher. “Marian Grace.”
“Excuse me?”
“My name is Marian Grace. Do you not have my full name on the reservation?” She turned to Gerald. “Didn’t you give my name as well?”
What Makes You Think You're Awake? Page 18