He tugged on the drawers of Palmer’s desk until he found one that was open. Nothing but a sweater in the top drawer.
Ben sat in Palmer’s chair, careful not to move it by much, while he played with the drawer. It would still be worth going out to Beverly’s, even without the note, even if just to tell her what had really happened. And maybe in exchange, she could tell Ben a little more about Bill Palmer. Ben listened to the rattling of the drawer as he pulled it out and pushed it back in. Leaning forward, Ben extended the drawer out as far as it would go and peered into the shadowed box. He slid his hand inside and felt near the top until he found something other than wood. A latch. He slid it to the side and pulled harder until the drawer was free from its socket. But this desk wasn’t as cheap as Bill Palmer. With his fingers, Ben pried at the panel that protected the bottom drawer. And when it wouldn’t budge, he slid the drawer back in its slot.
Sighing, Ben leaned back in the chair and stared at the flickering screen of the deli cam. Then he stood. The filing cabinet rumbled as Ben pulled open the bottom drawer, and he cursed under his breath as he dug through its contents: books, magazines, old food. But no tapes. Not a one. He hadn’t found Beverly’s address, hadn’t found anything of value. Frustrated, Ben yanked on the middle drawer, but just as when he’d tried after Marty’s accident, the top and middle drawers wouldn’t budge more than an inch. Ben pulled on the chain that connected their handles.
He stepped back for a second, an angry heat burning on the back of his neck. Then he lunged at the metal box, working his hand under the handle of the middle cabinet and pressing his shoulder into the face. He squeezed and pulled and twisted. He clenched his jaw and used the bones in his hand as a fulcrum, grunting and hissing swears, wobbling the whole cabinet. Until something snapped.
Gasping, Ben pulled his hand free and flexed it. Deep red tracks marked his skin. “Fuck,” Ben whispered. He pulled at the handle. It hadn’t snapped. The screw that fixed it to the drawer had. Ben thought for a moment. Fine. It could be replaced. Ben slipped the chain underneath the handle, freeing the drawers from each other.
Ben pulled the middle drawer out and ran his fingers over the employee files. There were dozens of tabs and many names Ben didn’t recognize. He was just about to open the top drawer when he saw Beverly’s name. It was a tome compared with its peers, unwieldy enough that it was held together with what might have been the world’s largest rubber band. Thirty-five years of employment recorded in a stack of papers that Ben could still lift with one hand.
All Ben needed was an address. Delicately, he pried the band off the file. It was so old and dry it didn’t make any noise when it broke.
Ben cursed under his breath as he looked at the limp band. Fine. It could be replaced too. Slowing his breathing, Ben opened the folder, and there it was, right on top: Beverly’s home address, printed in the spry hand of a woman not yet beset with the tremors that would steal her dexterity in the years to come. Ben jotted the address down, checking it more than three times for accuracy. The paper was her job application. Click.
There was a noise, a kind of clatter that made Ben’s lungs seize. He stood and listened, straining to hear something and afraid that he just might. Rubbing his palms with his fingers, Ben first looked into the hall, then filled it. He walked the corridor slowly, quietly, hearing nothing but the sound of his own footsteps. The room below came into view and Ben looked over the railing. There, near the baler: the tube of wires had fallen. Metal threads lay scattered on the floor. Ben stared for a second, then walked back to Palmer’s office.
His fingers picked at the corner of the folder while his other hand riffled through the pages. They seemed to be ordered by date. Ben kept the edge of the cover pinched between his fingers, as if he might close the folder at any moment, but he didn’t.
Ben knew he had a number of files to go through. Marty’s, for one. His own if there was time. But there he sat. There was something captivating about the pages, like drawing life out of a barren well.
Palmer had meticulously collated customer endorsements. “Beautiful cake!” “Always says hello!” “We love Beverly!” and on and on. Things that Beverly would have loved to see but likely never had. Click.
Ben didn’t read every sheet. Not at first. He skipped around, skating through Beverly’s life capriciously, thumbing away huge chunks of time, until he saw that the tone shifted somewhere in the pages. “Messed order up.” “Snapped at customer.” The folder read like it contained the histories of two different employees.
At first, Ben assumed he was seeing the grasping paranoia of an unkind man. But partway through the list of grievances, Ben began to doubt. There was a rhythm to things, a structure, a line. Any page toward the beginning glowed with the happy words that had set Ben to reading in the first place. It was only later in the file that things soured. Somewhere along the way, there was a split, and Ben wanted to find it.
So Ben stopped skipping and just read.
It became hard to track, since many of the papers were benign or otherwise hard to categorize, but eventually Ben found the schism. It wasn’t clean or sharp, but it was there. A gray period when the file spoiled. Over the course of several months almost a decade ago.
There was nothing in the pages themselves that explained it, but the change was there. Ben could touch it, pinch it between his fingers. The file told a story. So Ben kept reading.
With no music overhead, the only sounds in the room were the squeaking joints of the chair and the soft shuffling of old paper, like the chittering of insects in the dead leaves of winter. As Ben read, he found himself humming. The song seemed to creep into his mind rather than emerge from it: a tune he could not place, one that he’d learned from the mother of these pages.
It was hard to say how long he’d pored over the file. His eyes were dry and tired. He stood with his legs still bent and craned his neck so that he might see the sleeping store below. A feeling of restlessness had crawled into his bones. He sat, shuffled more papers, and tried to ignore the fact that that restlessness was really something else entirely.
It had been coming since he’d opened the folder. Of course it had. He had been gaining on it with every page he’d turned, as sure as the sum of his entire life had been gaining on it all those years before. And just like the first time, he hadn’t seen it barreling toward him until it was too late, until it was staring him straight in the face with the unblinking and unfeeling eyes of Time that said only, “What took you so long? I’ve been waiting.”
Perhaps he hadn’t expected to see the date. Not every day had made it into the file, so why should this one? But it had. And there it was. The date Eric had gone missing, scribbled at the top of the page like it was just any other day. There was a fuzzy feeling at the back of Ben’s skull, and the small room was beginning to feel smaller still, like it might actually crush him with his hand still caught in this paper snare.
The text itself was without substance. Beverly had been late that day. A customer filed a complaint about the fact that his cake wasn’t ready on time, when he’d needed to pick it up before work. It went on at some length, droning trivialities that Ben slogged through only because of the date in the header. His mind kept trying to help him skim through the inanity with such insistence that he almost missed it, almost breezed right past that final line, those final words stuck to the end of the paragraph like they belonged there. Like there was nothing wrong with them at all.
HI BEN
38
It felt unreal in the most literal sense, like a thing that was not happening because it could not happen. Like he’d found the world playing games with itself. A mistake in the very tissue of life.
And there it was, waiting patiently for him. All in capital letters. A different-colored pen stroke maybe? A darker shade? Or was that just an artifact of Ben’s eyes? Or even his brain?
It wouldn’t go awa
y. No matter how long he looked, or how many times he turned the page as if it were a Magic Slate that might simply erase itself, it was there. It was a part of the world.
HI BEN
He was going to cry. Not for any reason he had access to. He hadn’t even considered the meaning yet, the why of it all. That it was was more than he could weather, more than he knew what to do with. It was there, and it had been there, sitting in a file, one page out of hundreds, locked away inside a cabinet. A secret waiting to be told.
And Ben could feel it. He was being watched. Ben could feel a gaze scraping across his skin, burning welts into his flesh. The room had no cameras. Ben had checked before, just as he was checking now, searching for an unblinking eye that shined from a corner, its electric veins spiraling somewhere deep within the moldy walls.
Ben sat paralyzed in Palmer’s chair, afraid to move so much as an inch for fear of tugging on the invisible strings that surrounded him: tripwires woven from the air itself. Connecting everything. Reporting everything.
Someone knew that Ben would look in this file—would look at this piece of paper—before Ben himself did. He was exposed, so profoundly and so completely exposed, that even his thoughts might not be free from the grasping gray hand that now waved to him.
It had to be Palmer. It could only be Palmer.
And yet that didn’t feel quite right. Because Palmer was just a man. And this felt like something else, like this paper had arrived with Eric’s tape, seeping through a membrane between worlds.
The sound of Palmer’s phone tore through the quiet room.
Ring-ring-ring. Ring-ring-ring.
Ben flung himself away from the desk as if it were on fire. “Fuck!”
The panic had washed out his vision; everything was as bright and featureless as if he were waking in a hospital. His heart tripped over itself, and his breathing came and went at its own volition.
Ring-ring-ring. Ring-ring-ring.
Ben stood and looked out the window, certain that he would see Palmer standing behind the Customer Service counter, smiling and waving. Who else would call? Nobody called this late.
Leaning over the table, Ben reached toward the phone as if it were a coiled snake. “Fuck!” he snapped again.
Ring-ring-ring. Ring-ring-ring.
Someone had called before, though. That late-night conversation while Ben stood in the deli, talking to a caller who said that he’d been tricked. What the fuck was going on? Ben rubbed his unsteady fingers against his soaked palm, then placed them against the cold plastic of the receiver. It rattled against the base in Ben’s shaking hand. Very quickly, Ben raised the phone to his ear and spoke into it.
“Hello?”
Static swirled in Ben’s ear as a voice crawled through it. “…et…n.”
“Hello?” Ben repeated.
“Let me in,” said the faraway voice.
Ben nearly dropped the phone. He leaned his elbows against the desk and pressed the receiver hard against his ear to keep it in place.
“Ben?” The voice was lost in static. Then, “Ben?” it said again, clearer this time.
“Marty?”
“Can you hear me?” Marty asked.
Ben sighed and nearly collapsed back in Palmer’s chair. “Yeah, I can hear you. Jesus, dude. You almost killed me just now. What’re you callin me for?”
“I’ll take near death by phone over near death by baler any day, man. I been knocking on the front door for like half an hour. Where the hell’ve you been? You get her address?”
“Yeah. Yeah, I got it. I been up in Palmer’s office.”
“Come let me in; it’s fuckin cold out here, and I ain’t even got my money to keep me warm because I spent it all callin you from this goddamn phone.”
Fishing the key out of his pocket, Ben hustled toward the door. He could see Marty hugging himself and shivering with enough exaggeration that he looked like a cartoon character. Ben slid the key into the lock and started to turn it. When Marty grabbed the bolt on the other side and found that the door wouldn’t budge, he cussed Ben and slapped his palm against the glass.
Ben hesitated, his fingers still pinching the key. This wasn’t the plan. This wasn’t even close to the plan.
HI BEN
“Dude, c’mon!” Marty slapped the glass again. Ben turned his wrist and freed the doors.
“What’re you lockin the doors for?” Marty snapped.
“I always lock ’em.”
“You got it then? You know the street?”
“Huh?” Ben muttered. “Yeah. Yeah, I got it.”
“Let me see it then.” Marty glanced at the scrap of paper for a while and chewed his lip. “Think this is way out in the sticks. What about the note? The fake confession note or whatever.”
Ben shook his head.
“You get into the filing cabinet? He probably locked it up.”
Ben felt his heart tremble. “What…what’re you doing here?”
“I got excited, man. This is like some KGB shit. You want help? I can help you look. Read through stuff double-time.”
Ben glanced at the wide windows of Palmer’s office. “Listen, I got a lot to do up there. Lemme go finish, and I’ll meet you where we said.”
“You alright, man? I spook you or something?”
“No. Yeah. I’m okay. Just gotta wrap it up and finish the store.”
“I know you’re the last man standing here and all, but you ain’t that good, dude. Store opens in like an hour and a half.”
Ben checked his watch. “Fuck.” He still had to fix Palmer’s filing cabinet and had half the truck to throw. Before Ben could say anything else, Marty was walking toward the aisles. Ben sighed and locked the door, then hustled to the store’s modest hardware section.
Back in Palmer’s office, he set the superglue on top of the filing cabinet, then got to work. Wedging his hand between the folders and the inside face of the door, Ben fished the screw fragment out of its hole. Then he dug a handful of screws out of his pocket. With the broken bit resting in the trench between his middle and ring fingers, Ben pushed and flicked the other screws around in his palm until he found one that was the same size.
He bent the filing cabinet handle just enough to test the screw against the hole. Four screws later and he’d found the one he needed. After he put Beverly’s file back, Ben would have to feed a screw that was just a little smaller than it should be through the hole in the cabinet’s face. Then he could close the drawer, reset the chain, and glue the handle back onto the screw. Ben glanced out the window to check on Marty’s progress but couldn’t see him.
Closing Beverly’s file, Ben couldn’t help but wonder about the pages he hadn’t read, about the possibility of other special things waiting for him. But there wasn’t any more time. The papers hadn’t been stacked or arranged nicely. As he worked to re-create their jagged appearance, Ben saw the torn rubber band.
He sighed in frustration. With hurried steps, he left the office and descended the metal stairs, making his way across the store toward the school supplies.
“Where you at, dude?” Ben called for Marty. But there was no answer. Glancing down each aisle, there was no sign of him at all. “Dude!” Ben shouted again.
Ben lifted a multipack of rubber bands from its hook.
“Who’re you talking to, dude?” Palmer asked.
39
Ben felt his body jolt. He turned. “I was talkin to you,” Ben said. Oh, fuck. “I…seen you come in, but then you just weren’t there.” Oh, fuck fuck fuck.
“Store looks bad.”
“Yessir.”
“C’mon,” Palmer said.
As Ben stepped toward the man, he pointed to the bag of rubber bands in Ben’s hand. Ben put them back on the hook.
As they walked the store, Ben again glanced nervou
sly down each aisle. Palmer was saying something about the Christmas trucks. Where the hell was Marty?
The superglue wouldn’t take long to dry. Ben had left everything in order, right? He just had to put the folder back. He should have made some kind of excuse to keep the rubber bands. Fuck. Put the folder back, fix the lock. Put the door back where it was. The camera. Ben had to grab the camera. What was Palmer doing here so early? Goddamnit.
“Okay,” Palmer said. “Get to it then.”
Ben felt like he was going to faint. He had to stall, but he couldn’t think of anything—not a goddamn thing. Ben tried to rub the tingling in his hands off onto his jeans as he watched Palmer walk away. For a split second, he could only think to throw something at the man, to hit him with a can. They’d yell, maybe fight. That would stall him. Was there any chance that Marty had gone upstairs and fixed things? And if he did, would it even matter? He didn’t know where everything went. Just do it. Hit him with something. Ben wished that the ceiling would collapse.
Faintly, in the air somewhere behind him, there was a sound, a nasally repetition.
“Mr. Palmer?” Ben said the words before he thought of what he’d say next, before he even understood what he was hearing. But then Ben turned and saw the blinking lights through the wide glass of the storefront. He almost cheered when he asked, “Is that your car?”
The man craned his head as if to better hear the noise. Then he hustled past Ben, back toward the front of the store.
Ben followed, unsure of what was happening and desperately hoping that whatever it was would buy him enough time to do what he needed to do. Palmer grabbed the lock cylinder and slid the doors apart. There, in the middle of the parking lot, was a solitary BMW. Its headlights pulsed in time with the horn. And between the blinding blinks, Ben saw something he never knew he wanted to see.
“Shit!” Palmer shouted, walking briskly toward his car. The driver’s side mirror dangled impotently from its base. Even in the poor light, Ben could see the dent in the hood—like someone had used it as a trampoline.
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