Vaporware

by Richard Dansky

  My sneakers were by the door. I scratched Marley one last time as I went out, but only once.

  * * *

  Home or work, work or home. Both lay in roughly the same direction from Michelle’s place, which let me put off the decision for a little bit. The clock on the dash on my car read 7:56, which meant that if I delayed a little longer, Sarah would be gone for work before I got back to the house, and I could delay facing her for a while. If I went straight to work, I could maybe steal one of the promotional t-shirts that seemed to breed like mushrooms in the dark corners of the storage closet and hope no one noticed I was wearing the same jeans as yesterday.

  My cell phone buzzed. I checked it and saw that it was just a reminder that I had messages, not a new call. “Might as well listen,” I mumbled to myself and pulled up voicemail.

  “First message. Yesterday. Six. Twenty-two. PM. From,” The voice changed here, to Sarah’s pre-recorded mailbox reading of her name, “Sarah Bogdan.” There was a pause and a click and then Sarah’s voice again. “Hi, honey, it’s me. I know you’re busy. I just wanted to know if you were going to make it home for dinner. Call me if you get this message, okay?” There were a few seconds of dead time, then she hung up. I pressed seven to delete the message, slamming the button down hard, and cued up the next one.

  “Eight. Fourteen. PM. From.” Again, Sarah. They were all Sarah. I knew this already. “Ryan? It’s quarter after eight. When are you coming home?”

  Click. Beep.

  “Nine. Forty-six. PM.” “Ryan, if you haven’t been taken hostage at the office, I’m going to be really upset with you. Come home already.”

  Click. Beep.

  “Eleven. Oh. Nine. PM.” “Ryan, where are you? You don’t have to come back home. I just don’t know where you are, and I’m getting worried. I don’t care if you went back to the office. Just let me know, all right? Please? I love you.”

  Click. Beep. Hearing the strain in her voice rise, hearing it go from amusement to anger to real worry, that was agony. Knowing I’d caused her that kind of worry while I was doing what I’d done with Shelly was torture, self-inflicted and heartily deserved, a fractional penance for what I’d inflicted on Sarah.

  “Today. Twelve. Twenty. AM.” The click of a hang-up was all that was there this time.

  Click. Beep.

  “Two. Oh. Seven. AM.” Sarah’s voice was thick with sleep and worry. “Ryan, I’m going to bed now. Just come home when you hear this, all right? Please.”

  Click. Beep.

  “All messages have been erased. First saved message.”

  I shut the phone and threw it into the passenger foot-well. It bleeped once, then nothing. For another hour, I drove around in circles, listening to clips from the Blue Lightning soundtrack interspersed with random chunks of Coheed and Cambria and Old Crow Medicine Show and Mastodon. With the windows rolled up, I blasted them, one and all, until I could hear the plastic of the molding rattle and feel the glass of the windows shake. The music pushed against my ears, loud enough to be physically painful, almost loud enough to drown out the memory of “Two. Oh. Seven. AM.”

  And when that didn’t work, I shut it all off and avoided Sarah’s route into her office, just in case. Not until the clock hit nine did I feel brave enough to head home, and even then, I drove past the house once to see if Sarah’s car was, by some miracle, in the driveway. The phone buzzed once during that time. I left it where it was.

  * * *

  Sarah had indeed gone into work by the time I got home, something that surprised me slightly. For all my shenanigans to avoid a confrontation, I’d been half-expecting her to be waiting on the front step, red-eyed and equal parts worried and furious. That was romantic fantasy, though, not the reality of Sarah. She’d wait until she had to get to work, and then off she’d go. There would be plenty of time to talk later, or so her thinking would go. I knew it well.

  I ran inside, stripping off my t-shirt as soon as I got in the door. Upstairs I went, heading for the master bathroom, my shirt balled up in my fist. I ran through the bedroom, not bothering to shut the door behind me. If Sarah came home now, a locked bathroom door wasn’t going to make any difference. Besides, the key to my salvation was in the bathroom, hidden away and waiting.

  I rummaged through the drawers under the double sink until I found what I wanted, tucked in with the unused whitening strips and dental floss: a lint brush. I’d carried the damn thing with me for years, from move to move and apartment to apartment, and this was maybe the third time I’d ever used it. It seemed simple enough, though—lay the shirt out flat, then run the brush over it until all of the incriminating cat hair was gone.

  The shirt took a minute to unravel on the floor, and I knelt on two corners to keep it from rolling up as I brushed it. Mute evidence of Marley’s passage was all over, but slowly and steadily the brush did its magic. Cat hair transferred itself off the shirt, though I had to scrape it from the brush and dump the resultant hairball into the toilet. When one side was done, I flipped the shirt and did the other, then turned it inside out and did that as well.

  At last, satisfied with my work, I tossed the shirt into the hamper. It was maybe a third full, which gave me the better part of a week to bury it under an avalanche of other laundry. Hide the evidence, bury the body, and when the hamper was sufficiently full, do the laundry myself and Sarah would never know.

  Feeling sufficiently confident in that plan, I stripped down and threw my other clothes in after the shirt, then mixed up the stuff in the hamper so as to cover the evidence a little more thoroughly. A fast shower, a quick change, and I could head to work with no one the wiser.

  * * *

  It wasn’t until I was halfway there that I remembered that I’d driven us to Montague’s from work, and to her place from the bar. Her car was still at the office. Michelle was going to need a lift from someone, and that someone was going to ask questions, and the scenario unwound itself merrily from there.

  At the next stop light, I reached down and grabbed the phone from where it had managed to slide under the seat and texted Shelly. sorry forgot your car was at office need a ride?

  She won’t answer, I told myself. She doesn’t want to hear from you, she doesn’t care, she’s mad—

  The answer came back immediately. IN THE OFFICE. LEON PICKED ME UP 45 MINS AGO. Then, a second later, BUT THX FOR ASKING.

  My innards wadded themselves up like a used paper towel and jumped into my throat. Breath wouldn’t move, in or out, up or down. I swallowed, and it was like there was a knife tucked in there, sharp on both sides. Flicking looks back and forth from phone to road, I sent NICE OF HIM.

  There was a pause this time before she answered. DIDNT TELL HIM. YOU WONT EITHER.

  thank you....

  DIDNT DO IT FOR U. DID IT FOR HIM.

  “Ah, hell,” I said. I dropped the phone onto the seat next to me. I’d call Sarah when I got to the office. Calling now would just look suspicious, and with the state I was in, I needed all my concentration for the road.

  The music rattled the windows all the way to work. Somehow, iTunes had gotten stuck on repeat, spitting out the “Level Complete” music from the game soundtrack in an endless loop. I didn’t bother to change it. Instead, I turned up the volume to painful levels and let it batter me over and over, until by the time I got to the office, I was numb to the sound.

  The parking spaces near the office were full when I got there. I cruised around the building twice, looking for something close to the entrance and finding exactly nothing. Eventually, cursing under my breath, I drove over to the next building and parked in one of their numerous empty spaces. The sign over their door said “Houghton Point Industries,” which told me precisely nothing about what they did, but they only had a half-dozen cars parked in the spaces allotted to them. That made the rest fair game, and I took one.

  The walk to the front door of our building took me past Michelle’s car. It was parked where it had been the night before. I r
ead the bumper stickers on it as I walked by, those that weather hadn’t already stripped to illegibility. There were a couple of political ones from long dead campaigns, and few more for bands like the Pietasters and Operation Ivy. On the end was what looked like a fresh one, blue writing on a white background. It read “Stop Continental Drift!”

  “Good luck with that,” I told the empty air and went inside.

  Chapter 22

  There was work waiting for me when I got to my office. Work, and that was all, and for that I was deeply grateful.

  I opened the door cautiously, peeking inside before cracking it wide enough to walk through in case there was a naked blue female figure waiting for me. There wasn’t, so I shoved the door open hard enough for it to bang off the wall and went in.

  As my office went, it looked normal enough. The piles of paper were stacked where I’d piled them, and there was still an empty coffee mug on one side of the desk. I could see nothing out of the ordinary, nothing that looked like it had been displaced by ghostly hands, no evidence that anyone other than me had been in there. A quick look at the trash can confirmed this—the cleaning crew had given it a pass the night before—but even so, I did a nervous triple-check around before allowing myself to sit down.

  Right, I told myself. Check email. Get to work. Whatever happened in here last night, it was last night.

  She’s gone now.

  I took a deep breath, in and out, and got to work.

  * * *

  At four-thirty, I gave up. The entire day, not including a seven-minute trip to the vending machines in the break room for lunch, consisted of three lines of introduction on the revised multiplayer document and sixteen emails answered in monosyllables. By half past four, I was tired, cranky, and frustrated. No one had been to see me all day, no questions to be answered or fires to put out. The email traffic had been light, the usual mailing-list pissing matches had been the equivalent of light drizzles, and the questions all easily answerable. Any other time, a day like this would have been a godsend.

  Instead, it drove me nuts.

  “The hell with this,” I announced, and killed the power to my system without doing a proper shutdown.

  Hah. Living dangerously, are we?

  I told myself to shut up and grabbed my bag. Eric looked up at me as I stepped out into the hall. “Leaving?”

  My office door slammed shut. I'd barely touched it. “Yeah,” I heard myself saying. “Not getting anything done, and last night was a long night.”

  Eric nodded, and looked sagely down at the papers on his desk. “So I heard,” he said, assuming the look of intense concentration that meant he was ignoring me. I shrugged, turned my back on him, and tried not to ponder what he meant by that as I headed out to the car.

  Shelly was in front smoking a cigarette when I came out. She looked at me once, then down at the ground, and turned her back on me.

  “I thought you stopped smoking,” I said. There was no answer. I stood there a moment and scuffed the sidewalk with my shoe. She stood stock-still, the lazy curl of tobacco smoke winding up into the air giving her the faint look of an incense burner long left to its own devices.

  That, and the hard set of her shoulders.

  I stood there for another moment, mumbled an “Umm, yeah. See you tomorrow,” and walked down the steps toward the parking lot and my car. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Michelle changing her angle in increments, always making sure I got nothing but her back squared to where she thought I might be.

  The office was out of sight in my rearview before I worked up the nerve to kill the music and pick up my phone. It was 4:47, thirteen minutes before official quitting time for Sarah. She'd be on the road by 5:10, home by 5:30, and wondering when the hell I'd be coming home by six. Calling her now wouldn't make any sense. She'd be on her way soon enough, and I'd see her at home before too much longer. Besides, our next conversation wasn't likely to be pretty. That was exactly the sort of distraction I didn't need while driving.

  Only then did I realize that I hadn't called her during the day, either. No email, no phone message...it had just slipped my mind.

  Jesus. She must be worried sick.

  I activated the phone app. “Name-dial, Sarah,” I barked at it. It bleeped once, then announced in Siri’s soothing tones that the request didn't match any names in memory. “For God's sake, name-dial, Sarah. Sah-rah. Sarah!”

  The phone thought to itself for a moment, then told me once again it had no idea who the hell I was talking about. I thought seriously about throwing it out the window, looking up just in time to realize I was barreling toward a red light. Forgetting about the phone for a moment, I stood on the brake and screeched to a halt just short of the intersection. The car shuddered as the brakes grabbed, and the phone tumbled off the seat onto the floor.

  It bounced once and started dialing.

  “Shit shit shit shit shit!” I reached down for it, hand fumbling in the foot-well as it started ringing. Once, twice, a third time, and my hand closed on it.

  Someone answered.

  “Hello?” It was Sarah's voice. “Ryan? Is that you?”

  “Yes!” I shouted, face to face with the air conditioning panel, one hand gripping the wheel and the other squeezing the phone hard enough that I could feel the plastic groaning under my fingers. “Sarah! It's me!”

  “Oh my God, are you OK? Is everything all right? You sound like you're underwater. What's going on?” Two parts panic to three parts relief, all hidden unless you knew her—that's what Sarah sounded like. I took a minute, took a deep breath, then hauled myself and the phone up. The light flicked to green, and I nudged the car forward as I brought the headset to my ear.

  “Hey,” I said, and let about two years' worth of tension out with that one syllable. “It's me. I'm OK. I…went back to the office last night, and got caught up, and ended up sleeping....”

  The words “at the office” caught in my throat. On top of what I'd done, a lie was just a small betrayal, a molehill on top of a mountain. But it was a lie, a deliberate hunk of falsehood tossed into the still waters of the relationship. Last night couldn't be excused, but it could maybe be explained in the sense that it had, well, just happened. That one thing had led to another, and another, and there I was in Shelly's bed in the morning.

  Lying, on the other hand, felt premeditated, like a deliberate backstab of whatever Sarah and I had. It was an intentional devaluation of the relationship, of whatever open and honest communication we might have left. It—

  “Ryan? Are you there?” The relief was fading, the anger growing. Now that she knew I was all right, she could unload on me for all the worry I'd caused her. In a way, it was a relief.

  “I'm here,” I said, and swallowed, trying to moisten my traitorously dry throat. “The phone just cut out for a minute there.” My voice cracked a little on the last word, but I pushed through it and got the traitorous syllable out.

  There. A little lie. That wasn't so hard. I could do it.

  “Where are you?” I could hear papers rustling in the background, computer keys clicking loudly. Those were the sounds of Sarah shutting down for the day. She'd be on the road soon.

  Up ahead, the traffic light flashed yellow. I thought about gunning it and trying to beat the red but thought better of it and coasted to a stop. “Briarwood and Francis, I think,” I told her. “I should be home in a couple of minutes.”

  “Home?” There was frank disbelief in her voice? “At five o'clock? What happened? Did you get fired?” Somewhere, a pinging noise announced that Windows was shutting itself down.

  “No, nothing like that. I just got caught up at work, like I said, and—”

  I paused, swallowed, stared into the red light like I wished it were the eye of an angry god who could strike me down before I could speak falsehood. “I ended up crashing at the office.”

  The words were tumbling out now, the lies and explanations all tripping over one another. “I came home when I woke up, but you
were already gone, so I just did a quick shower and change, but I really wasn't getting anything done at work, so I decided to just come home a little early for a change because God knows they got enough time out of me last night.” I stopped and felt myself squeezing the phone so hard the plastic bent under my fingers. “And I missed you.”

  Behind me, someone honked. I blinked. The light had gone green. Foot on gas, hands on wheel, I rolled forward. It was six blocks to home, three turns included. A faint beep told me someone had felt the need for last licks on their traffic dissatisfaction. I flipped a genial behind-the-head bird in their rough direction and shoved the incident out of my mind.

  From Sarah's end of the line, there was silence. Then, “Ryan? Are you feeling all right?”

  I licked my lips nervously. “Yeah, sure, why?”

  There was another pause. “You're coming home early. You sound, I don't know, feverish. Is something wrong?”

  “Just tired, honey,” I said. “Just tired. And I can’t wait to see you.”

  “That’s sweet,” she said. “I’ll be home soon.”

  * * *

  Dinner was takeout Mexican from the new place on Maynard, which Sarah picked up on the way home. We ate it sitting on the couch, catching up on back episodes of The Following and not talking except when she occasionally would say things like “Eww” and “Why do we watch this while we’re eating?” whenever various bodily fluids appeared on screen. Once in a while, she sneezed, putting it down to an oncoming cold. I cleared away the plates when we finished, and then we both just sat there for a minute until the episode wound itself down.

  “So,” she said finally, resting her head fractionally on my shoulder.

  “So?”

  “So I think we need to talk.” I stiffened. She put her hand on my arm to keep me from pulling away. “Not like that. Just…talk.”