Shadow Traffic

by Richard Burgin

  “But I’d feel more comfortable doing it with you since you’ve taken the time to answer all my questions.”

  “Gee, thanks again for the sweet justice.” She began writing in earnest on a scrap of paper. “My cell is probably the better number to try me on,” she said.

  Just as she handed it to him, Mason looked up and saw Archie standing two feet in front of him.

  “Hello, Julia,” he said.

  “Hi, Archie.”

  “Hello, stranger,” Archie said to him, in a voice that made him immediately uncomfortable.

  “Do you think I could borrow Mason for a minute?” Archie said, not looking at Julia as he asked the question while also continuing to stare at him in a way that suggested he’d just learned some incredible secret about him. But he couldn’t know anything about what was happening at his home or, more importantly, what Mason now believed caused it. He hadn’t let anything slip about it when they talked in the bar, had he? At any rate, Mason soon found himself standing up from the table.

  “Of course you can. I think Mason’s gonna be another terrific new member,” she said. Then she looked at him and quickly mouthed the words “call me” before they both said good night.

  With Mason in tow, Archie walked about ten feet from the table and spoke to him in a low, commanding voice. “You seem to be completely charmed by Julia.”

  “She’s very nice.”

  “I hope you think you’ve talked enough with her and might be ready to leave with me now.”

  “Leave, where?” he said, trembling a little, in spite of himself.

  Archie looked closely at him—his eyes had stopped darting. “Am I misunderstanding something here?”

  “Could be,” he said.

  “I thought you were with me tonight?”

  “I walked over here with you. I don’t remember discussing any other plans.”

  “Then obviously I’ve misread the situation.”

  “I didn’t know there was anything to read into.”

  “I guess I owe you an apology, as well,” he said, but his voice was still icy.

  “There’s nothing to be sorry for. It’s just one of those things.”

  Archie continued to look hard at him. “I don’t agree. I think someone should be sorry because it’s a very awkward, unjust situation for me and it didn’t happen by chance. I, myself, have never misread a situation like this before, have you?”

  “Maybe once or twice.”

  “Once or twice,” Archie said softly, but with unmistakable sarcasm, “and tonight makes thrice. So what’s the deal—do you go both ways?”

  For a moment he was stunned. It had been a long time since anyone asked him anything about his sex life.

  “These days I’m not going any ways but when I did, it was only with women.”

  “I see. I see very clearly, but I still think you misled me. At any rate, I’d strongly advise you not to mislead Julia or to try to take advantage of her in any way. In case you don’t know, she’s a candidate for a justice society marriage, and I’m on the committee that will help select her spouse. You’ll find that I’m on a lot of committees, that I’m quite a prominent member of the Philadelphia branch, so stay clear of her, and for that matter I wish you’d stay clear of the society in general.”

  Mason nodded and turned away from him. He’s crazy, he thought. They all are. He had to admit he wasn’t unsympathetic to the idea of a replacement world that finally made its inhabitants feel proud of themselves, just not one in which someone like Archie played an important part. He thought of Julia then and felt his heart beat. She had gone to the other side of the room, but they exchanged a look before he left the building.

  As soon as he shut the door of his apartment he knew for sure what had happened. Again he didn’t see anything specific move on the floor but felt it all around him instead, like the invasion of a new atmosphere. Even in the dark he knew it was different by its persistent, now strongly acrid smell. Then he turned on the living room light and saw it in the filmy look of the air, as if he were living underwater.

  It was all much stronger now—there was no longer any doubt. He didn’t know it would be like this, never thought that hell could be portable and travel to him. It was like the instant recognition of a cruel foreign language—learning its modus operandi. So this is how it looks and smells and feels after it invades you. It waits like a thief till you leave your home and then surrounds you as soon as you open the door. Doesn’t say a word to you but lets you know it’s there. That was how the real hell worked, he thought, not with devils or fires, although he was perspiring and there was a strange feeling of heat in his place—heat, that is, with a kind of cold filling in the middle.

  Will I scream? Should I scream? He thought. Would it even be right to ask for someone to help him, which might mean placing that person in hell, too? His life was not that precious to him. He was just a man alone, worrying about money like everyone else, worrying about death like he used to worry about his father’s death as a child in the bathtub. A man who had sinned many times, he knew, but not spectacular sins, he didn’t think, no more than most people, and yet he had been selected, targeted, and finally captured and all without knowing why, of course, which was the way of the world.

  He wondered if he could trust his thoughts. Did hell already control them? Would he be able to tell?

  He reached in his pocket and withdrew the piece of paper where Julia had written her phone number. Stared at it in the sickeningly watery light of the room as if he expected her number would have been burned off the page or just gone missing. He said it aloud three or four times until he memorized it, then walked toward his phone. It didn’t feel safe to even walk, as if the air was full of a kind of invisible quicksand.

  Then he stopped. He couldn’t call her while this was going on, not at night anyway, when hell made its fullest appearance. A minute later he left his apartment heading for a hotel in Center City, where he spent a largely sleepless night.

  He called her the next morning from his hotel room. It was her office, where she was a secretary.

  He apologized for disturbing her at work, mumbled something about wanting to become a member, and invited her either to lunch or an after-work drink. She chose the latter option, which was perhaps encouraging, he supposed. She worked in Center City, so he chose the most expensive place he knew that was near her office, figuring if things worked out he could take her to Le Bec Fin or some other chichi restaurant for dinner.

  He got off the phone with a smile on his face that quickly disappeared once he realized (how could he not always realize?) that he couldn’t do his job because his computer was back in his apartment. He wondered how many of the clothes he’d packed had that acrid smell. It was there in most of them, but he found one uninfected outfit that he quickly put on his bed to wear. He was so relieved by this discovery that he fell asleep on the bed with his clothes on.

  When he got up there were still three or four hours to kill, so he went to a branch of the public library near Rittenhouse Park and read about hell on the Internet, looking for an account similar to his. He found a couple of ambiguously similar reports but nothing exactly like what had happened to him. Perhaps part of hell’s “genius” was to never repeat itself in its dealings with people.

  He left the library earlier than he needed. On the way out he noticed its bulletin board was plastered with notices about the Justice Society’s National Book Award Winners. He felt his heart beat. They may be delusional but they were definitely hellbent on replacing, piece by piece, the world that had excluded them, until they occupied it much the way hell occupied his home. He shook his head as if to expel the thought, then began walking through the park toward the restaurant to meet Julia.

  She was wearing a white dress and he was in black. We look like pieces in a chess game, he thought, a game he was never good at. Yet he couldn’t stop looking at her dress, which seemed to sparkle in the dark restaurant where they sat, and when he tol
d her she looked beautiful he meant it.

  “It has a symbolic significance,” she said.

  “What does?”

  “My dress. The society officially annulled my other marriages for being grossly unjust, and now that they’ve expunged them I can wear white again.”

  “So you’re able to date again, too?” he asked.

  “Sure, as long as they’re approved by my marriage committee. My whole marriage is in their hands.”

  “Is Archie on that committee?”

  “Yes, actually, he is. How did you know?”

  “He mentioned it to me.”

  “Oh. He must think highly of you. Usually you have to be a member to know something like that.”

  She was trying to compliment him but he felt his face fall. So Archie had told him the truth about that and also that he’d never let her go out with him. Of course Julia didn’t think of this as a date anyway, merely a chance to “do a justice” as she called it, by signing up a new member.

  He swallowed his drink quickly. “Am I allowed to buy you a drink?”

  “I shouldn’t really, but I guess one won’t hurt my judgment. I’m going to have to ask you some pretty serious questions before I can pledge you, though.”

  He turned just in time to order drinks from the waitress, who seemed to understand his intent and brought them right away.

  A few minutes later Julia began questioning him in earnest. “You’re going to have to tell me about your injustice. I know it’s very painful, but you have to tell us so we can place you in the right division and help you better.”

  He finished his drink and said, “I don’t think of my life as being particularly unjust.”

  “Nobody likes to.”

  “My personal disasters have happened to a lot of people. I got older, I wound up alone, my career fell far short of what I wanted, and like everyone else I recently lost a lot of money, but I’ve got enough to get by.”

  “Their world is an unjust world. We’re going to replace it … and sooner rather than later.”

  He looked at her, letting her words vibrate in the atmosphere. He was convinced she meant them. “There is one very unusual thing, I think, that has happened to me recently,” he said, figuring he had lost her anyway. “Should I tell you?”

  “Of course, that’s what I’m here for, that’s why the Justice Society exists.”

  “It’s going to sound extremely weird and scary, too.”

  “Just tell me. You can be sure I’ve heard a lot of things.”

  “I don’t doubt that. OK. But first can you tell me what hell means to you?”

  “Hell, the concept?”

  “Hell, the place.”

  “Hell is a ‘place’ the unjust created to punish their victims. It’s just a concept the powerful use against the weak. That’s what hell means to me.”

  “That’s what it used to mean to me, too.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean I used to believe like you did that it was just a concept invented by people in power, that it wasn’t real. But something changed.”

  “What was that?”

  “This isn’t easy to tell you.”

  “Go ahead. You can tell me anything. I have a just heart now,” she said, staring into his eyes.

  “OK. Recently I found out that hell is real and that it travels—it’s portable.”

  Predictably, she looked confused.

  “It came to my home and took it over. It’s living there now, OK?” He looked hard at her, waiting for her to talk. “So now you’re probably plotting how to get away from me as soon as possible.”

  “Not at all. I’m not like that. I won’t leave … until the membership process is finished. You’re safe with me, really, and with the society, too. You have a new home with them. Believe me, the justice society is strong enough to take on hell,” she said, forcing a laugh, which he decided to do as well.

  Then she turned as the waitress passed by and ordered another drink.

  “So you want to tell me how this all began?” she said. He told her about the distinct sense of something moving over his floor, about the change in air, the smell, his night sweats. She listened to him closely, looking very serious, not trying to dismiss it all at any point. Why did it take him so long to meet a woman like this? Why did he only meet her now, when it was too late?

  When he was done talking he was afraid to look at her. “I notice you aren’t saying anything, now that I’ve finished my story. So, I’m sure you think I’m just crazy.”

  “Not at all. I was wondering if you’re a religious person?”

  “No, no way.”

  “Were you raised as one?”

  “No, my father considered the question of God beyond the comprehension of man, which is the truth of course. So I guess he’d be labeled an agnostic.”

  “Forget the labels. The other world likes to label you to death. What about your mother?”

  “She was a far more conventional person. She made me go to Sunday school for a while when I was a kid before she gave up. But she wasn’t as big an influence on me as my father was, anyway.”

  “Still, she probably made you aware of sin and of hell, too.”

  The new drinks came and she swallowed hers quickly.

  “So this must be a new one for you to listen to?” he said. “Kind of hard to know what to say, isn’t it, hearing something like this.”

  She looked down at the table when she spoke, for the first time not making eye contact with him. “Actually, something like this happened to a friend of mine not too long ago. A woman who had suffered a lot …”

  “What? Here in Philadelphia?”

  “Yes.”

  “What happened? Could you help her?”

  “I did help her. The society helped her.”

  “What about me? Can you help me?”

  “You have to become a member first. You have to believe in it before it can help you.”

  “Lack of belief is one of my sins, but sure, OK.”

  “Here,” she said, withdrawing some papers from her pocket-book and unfolding them while she spoke. “Sign these,” she said, handing him a pen. “And then you’ll also need to pay your membership dues for the first year, which is only two hundred dollars, though you’ll probably end up wanting to donate a whole lot more than that—everyone does.”

  He signed the documents then wrote a check in the half dark of the restaurant. She had a big smile when he gave them to her.

  “Congratulations, you’ve just left the other world.”

  “I’ve always wanted to, so now I finally have,” he said, with a little laugh.

  “But seriously, to help you, you need to tell the society about the injustice in your life. You need to tell me now.”

  “You don’t think having hell take over my apartment is unjust enough?”

  “Tell me what happened before that.”

  “You think my behavior caused it to happen?”

  “Of course not. That’s what the other world wants you to think. You’ve left that world now and you’re taking your first steps in the new one, but you still need to face what happened to you before. For instance, in your work, did you do want you wanted to?”

  “Does anyone?”

  “Did you achieve what you deserved?”

  “I was a painter once. I had some talent, I thought, but I didn’t know the politics, didn’t know how to succeed.”

  “The art division can help you there. What about in your love life?”

  “I didn’t know how to treat women.”

  “Nobody in the other world does.”

  “I ruined every chance I had.”

  “Your life isn’t over there either. The marriage division will find you a partner, I know that firsthand.”

  He looked at her longingly.

  “Do you have any children?” she said.

  “No. I was the child I tried to take care of,” he said, remembering himself as a seven-year-old th
en, alone in his bathtub.

  “It isn’t too late for children either. The Founder will soon have some exciting news about getting children into our lives, or into the lives of those people who want them.”

  “OK. All of that sounds great, but none of it’s gonna happen as long as I’m literally living in hell, right?” he said, more angrily than he wanted. He felt the veins might even be sticking out near his forehead, veins his hair was no longer there to cover.

  “You’re not in hell anymore,” she said, looking at him calmly.

  “How can you know that? Is that what happened to the other woman you helped?”

  She nodded. “She was given justice, and hell can’t survive in a just environment.”

  “So can you really help me?”

  “What would you like me to do?”

  “No, it wouldn’t be right. It could …”

  “Do you want me to go to your apartment and face down your hell? Is that it? I’m not afraid to. Is that what you want?” she said.

  It was almost preternaturally easy to get a taxi, as if the two of them were never really in the restaurant at all.

  Mason sat with a kind of rigid attention, as if he were a soldier assigned to guard himself, while Julia kept assuring him about their trip to his apartment. But when they got out of the cab he started muttering, “I shouldn’t be doing this. It’s a sin, don’t you see? It’s a sin.”

  “The only sin was your enduring the injustice in your life and now you’ve finally done something about that.”

  “No, no, I’ve sinned against others, always putting myself first and now I’m doing it again.”

  “Hush, Mason,” she said, putting her hand to her mouth as they approached the door to his building. “I’ve done this before even though I shouldn’t be doing it now. I mean I’m breaking the rules a bit ’cause it’s work outside my division, but I think they’ll understand. Is this your building?”

  “Yes, I’m on the ground floor.” Then he told her to turn back even as she was turning the key in the lock. “I was often disappointed to find out the world was real,” he said, “that things stayed in their place after we left them.”