by Xavier Mayne
“There’s a space at the top there,” she suggested, seeming perfectly confident that hefting a heavy bucket over his head were something Drew was easily capable of.
Luckily for Drew, he’d been procrastinating on his seminar paper for several weeks, taking refuge from his word processor by spending long hours in the gym. He lifted the white bucket into place, completing the Tetris game Mrs. Schwartzmann was playing in her hall closet.
“What is all this?” he asked as they stood before the wall of white plastic.
“It is for emergency,” she said, sliding the closet door closed. “If they come again, I will be ready.”
“Who’s coming, Mrs. Schwartzmann?”
She gave a shrug that was both resigned and conspiratorial. As if she knew precisely who would be coming for her—maybe for both of them. “I like to know I have enough to live.”
“Those buckets are full of… food?” He had visions of bucket after bucket full of moldering groceries. He could almost smell it.
“Yes. There’s a nice man on the television who sells them. Each bucket lasts two months, and all you do is add water.”
“If the apocalypse comes, where will you get water?”
She smiled proudly. “The water buckets are down in my garage. I have no car, so instead I have water.”
Though Mrs. Schwartzmann had lived in the building since it was brand-new, Drew realized he’d never seen the inside of her double-padlocked garage.
“You have this many buckets full of water?”
“Oh no,” she replied. “That would be silly. There are many more buckets of water. So much water.”
Drew blinked, trying to imagine how she had managed to fill her garage to the rafters with water. But when dealing with Mrs. Schwartzmann, he had learned that it was usually best to simply pretend that what she said made sense. “It sounds like you are well prepared.”
She nodded sagely.
“Do you mind if I ask what, exactly, you’re preparing for? Earthquakes, perhaps?”
“Ach, no. I have lived so long there is nothing God can do that would hurt me. Earthquakes, volcanoes, typhoon, who cares?”
“I don’t think we’re likely to have a typhoon, Mrs. Schwartzmann. And there aren’t any active volcanoes within several hundred miles.”
“See? I told you I’m not worried about such things. No, I am prepared for when they come back.”
“Who are ‘they,’ exactly?” he asked again.
“You know who they are,” she replied, her voice thick with conspiracy. “One time they are called Nazis, and another time they are called Bolsheviks, and sometimes they style themselves terrorists or patriots or revolutionaries. Whoever it is, it is always the same. It doesn’t matter what they call themselves, or what color their shirts are. They take up a cause of some kind, but only to hide what they really want: power. Power to tell people what to do, and power to kill people like me. Well, this time I’m ready for them. They can do their worst, but I will outlast them.”
He smiled inwardly at her dogged insistence on meeting her vaguely defined foe on the battlefield of starvation warfare. And given that she weighed approximately eighty-five pounds, she could probably survive for years on her buckets of freeze-dried rations.
“I don’t think anyone’s coming to kill you, Mrs. Schwartzmann.”
She shrugged. “They do not announce. There are no calling cards to tell you they are coming with dogs and guns and steel boots to cart you off to the camps.”
“I think you’re pretty safe here. If someone came to cart you off, I would stop them.”
Mrs. Schwartzmann grabbed Drew’s hand and clutched it to her chest. “Oh, you darling man,” she whispered.
“So you can stop worrying, okay?”
She shook her head gently. “After what I have seen in my life, worry is the price I pay for waking up at all. I cannot be anything other than what I am.” She released his hand and smiled peacefully.
He returned her smile. “I would never want you to be anything other than who you are.”
“Thank you. You are so good to me.”
“Next time you need to move any of those buckets, you let me know, okay?”
“So kind. Of course,” she murmured.
“Good.” He stepped toward the door. “Good night, Mrs. Schwartzmann.”
“Good night, Mr. Drew.”
He walked out her door, and as he descended the stairs, he heard the many locks click into place.
Back in his apartment, he found himself once again alone with his thoughts, his bourbon, and his laptop with its insistently blinking cursor at the head of a blank page.
“Fuck,” he groaned. He shut the word processor window with an angry click of the red icon at the top.
Drew picked up his laptop and his bourbon, then headed into his bedroom, where he set the bourbon on the nightstand next to his bed and tossed his laptop onto his pillow. Shucking out of his clothes took him no more than a couple of seconds—he wasted no time at all on putting his clothes away, since tomorrow was laundry day anyway—and then dove naked under the covers.
This was, in some ways, Drew’s favorite part of the day. As a graduate student, the work he had ahead of him was measured in years, not hours. There was no end-of-the-day satisfaction coming from a job well done—he was never done, never would be until he turned in his dissertation. And that was years away. He loved the work and looked forward to whatever form of the profession would come after—research, teaching, or fieldwork—but the never-ending nature of it meant that rarely did he go to bed sighing the exhausted breaths of a man who had faced a challenge and seen it through. He had a different way to find peace at the end of the day.
Binge-watching British crime dramas.
He popped open one of the several streaming services that his parents subscribed to and chose the next episode of a particularly grisly series he’d been enjoying lately.
After about fifteen minutes of painstaking investigation into the decapitation of a vicar, though, he was fighting to keep his eyes open. The little green light at the top of his screen regarded him reproachfully. Though he suspected that his predilection for brainy television would be a plus in terms of his dating profile, falling asleep while watching it would probably outweigh any benefit.
He clicked the viewing window shut, and the green light extinguished. Clearly, Q*pid didn’t care about the facial expressions he made while staring at a computer desktop littered with half-finished reading notes and PDFs of obscure journal articles. Shutting his laptop left him completely in the dark. He sat for a long moment, listening to the nothing around him, wishing he were the kind of person who could fall asleep simply because it was late and dark and quiet.
He knew what would do it.
A little electrical tape over the camera would give him a chance to do it. Then he could sleep.
In the back of his mind, though, something tickled. It had to have been several decades since anyone had thought of Mrs. Schwartzmann while in bed. But entirely without warning, Drew heard her voice in his head. “I cannot be anything other than what I am.”
Maybe that was his problem.
Drew considered himself a truthful person, an honest person. And yet he had never once mentioned in his online profile that he occasionally watched porn. He didn’t do it every night, but there were certainly nights when it helped soothe a need that no decapitated vicar could. And yet, while his guy friends all understood the proper role of porn in a well-adjusted life, he had never once so much as hinted to a woman—any woman—that he was not entirely averse to watching attractive people have attractive sex with each other.
Maybe it was time to be himself.
A shiver of terrifying possibility ran through him. He’d never sent anyone a dick pic—he hadn’t, to his knowledge, ever taken a photo of himself that showed anything below his belly button. And while he certainly had no intention of waving his cock in front of the camera now, he realized he was actually con
sidering letting Q*pid watch him while he watched porn.
He had, perhaps, had a little too much bourbon.
Shaking his head, he pushed his laptop aside, sure that sharing his porn viewing habits with potential mates—or the computer that was supposed to find those mates for him—was a terrible idea.
His erection, however, begged to differ.
It was, in fact, presenting a lengthy counterargument.
He tried to quiet it by rolling over on top of it, but it jutted out from him like a kickstand, keeping him from turning all the way over. It throbbed against him, unbending in its demand for his attention.
It clearly could not be anything other than what it was, either.
“Fuck.” He was not in the habit of talking to himself, but he did on occasion lecture his penis on the appropriate times and places for tumescence. He knew that such talk would be fruitless, so aggravatingly erect was the thing that now jutted and drooled before him. He pulled back the covers and glared down at it, which somehow inspired it to throb and spit out an extra drop of clear fluid onto the dark spot that spread before it.
“Fine,” he huffed, rolling onto his back and heaving himself into a sitting position against the headboard. “We’ll do it your way.”
Though he knew himself to be only about a dozen strokes from an easy orgasm, he figured since he was having trouble getting to sleep, he might as well take his time. He picked up his laptop, opened it next to him, and executed a quick succession of clicks to access his private bookmarks. A mortifying experience last year when he’d let a friend look up something on his web browser had taught him to hide his porn links a few folders deep. Muscle memory brought him quickly to a set of browser tabs that ranged from the most vanilla soft-core on through to things that he would never admit to in the light of day.
The green light next to his camera switched on.
A chill ran through him, a vertiginous jolt that stopped his breath. He froze. Though he was visible to the camera only from the chest up, he had never felt more exposed in his life. His hand was actually in motion to slam the laptop closed before he was aware of it.
“No,” he said to whatever shameful impulse was impelling it. “It’s time to be what I am.”
He opened the first tab with one hand while he reached down with the other.
Chapter THREE
“SO, WAIT,” Chad said, his tumbler of whiskey suspended before him halfway to his next drink, a look of puzzled shock on his face. “You gave these people access to everything?” They sat, as they sometimes did when their Friday afternoon schedules were coincidentally clear, in a bar they chose due primarily to its location equidistant from both their offices.
“Not people,” Fox replied. “It’s an artificial intelligence system—no people will ever see my data.”
“Why can’t they scrape your public profile stuff? Why do they need your passwords?”
“Because they’re building a deeper profile. And it’s not like I gave them access to my bank accounts or something. Only my social media stuff.”
Chad, who’d finally taken a sip of his drink, very nearly failed to swallow it. “Only social media?” He made a noise that was somewhere between a sympathetic laugh and a skeptical cough. “Only every pic, every direct message, every comment you’ve ever made. That’s all. What could go wrong?” He shook his head to convey how very many things he thought could go wrong.
“Like I said, they have a great track record with data security, and the results speak for themselves.” With a couple of taps on his phone, he pulled up last week’s dating spreadsheet, which he then held across the table for Chad to see. “As you can see, my average is in record territory—up nearly ten points week over week. The past week I’ve averaged in the mideighties and even had a ninety-two for brunch on Sunday.”
Chad squinted hard to see the cells packed with romance to the third decimal point. “That’s amazing, Foxy.”
“You should see the chart,” Fox added, swiping to the next sheet.
“Holy shit, that’s beautiful.”
“If that trend line holds, I’m going to end up proposing in—” He pulled back the phone and tapped twice to bring up his analytics sheet. “—twelve weeks.”
“Congratulations,” Chad cheered, holding his glass high. “I trust you’ll be very happy together.”
Fox touched his glass to Chad’s. “Thank you, sir. I am sure we shall be.”
They tossed back their whiskeys.
“Now, I just have to meet her.”
“SO, SHE was nice girl?”
Mrs. Schwartzmann poured Drew another cup of tea. He had already described the date he’d had last night—the charming, slightly dive-y restaurant where they’d discovered their shared passion for a well-made sweet potato fry, and the Little Library, where they’d each found a book they’d been wanting to read, which also happened to be the other’s favorite book of the past year. It had been a very nice date.
“Yes, she was a very nice person,” Drew replied.
Across the table, Mrs. Schwartzmann squinted at him. “Nice, but no…?” Without warning her features burst into antic rapture while she clutched her hands tightly to her chest. She looked like a starving person who’d just won a contest at a sausage factory. He couldn’t help but laugh at her pantomime of passion.
“Yes, that’s exactly it,” he replied. “She seemed perfect in every way I can think of, but there was no… spark, I guess?”
She regarded him skeptically. “We prefer a girl who breaks our coffee table?”
“No,” he objected. “I really liked that coffee table.” The coffee table had been third-hand, and it had aggravated him constantly with the way it rocked and tipped no matter how he tried to make it sit level. In fact, he kind of hated that coffee table.
She smoothed, for the hundredth time, the already glass-smooth plastic tablecloth. It was her tell, the thing that let him know she wasn’t buying whatever line he was selling. She always did it just before asking one of her awkward, straight-to-the-heart-of-the-matter questions. “So maybe we like a girl who is a little… wild?”
He took a breath to launch into an objection, but realized mid-inspiration that he simply didn’t have the heart to take his own side in this argument. He let his argumentative half breath escape slowly as he slumped in his chair. “She was exactly what I thought I wanted, and yet she turned out to be not at all what I wanted.”
Mrs. Schwartzmann smiled slyly. “I think I know your problem,” she said. “I think you are in love with Magda Schwartzmann, is what you are.”
She always knew how to lift his spirits.
“You’ve found out my secret,” he said wistfully. “It’s true. You are the love of my life.”
“This is not your fault, dear boy,” she replied with a solicitous cluck in her throat. “I have unwittingly ensnared a good few men in my day. Have I told you about the KGB agent who abandoned his fat wife to spend a weekend with me in Vladivostok?”
“Please, do tell,” he said, leaning forward. He hadn’t heard this one before.
She tucked a ringlet of silver hair behind her ear. “Well, it was something of an international incident. Khrushchev himself ordered the poor man to be shot afterward.” She glanced up at him, as if confirming that her bold opening was believed.
Drew nodded solemnly. This was going to be good.
FOX HATED the sound of doors being slammed. When one of his neighbors did it, he always muttered under his breath about the lack of self-control evidenced both by allowing emotions to control one’s actions and by imposing those emotions on fellow humans. A door slamming anywhere in his condo building would be met with a searing lecture that no one but Fox himself would ever hear. A slammed door was an admission of human irrationality, and if there was one thing he hated more than a door being slammed, it was human irrationality.
Fox slammed his door.
As soon as he did it, his scolding faculty swung into action, and by the time he r
ealized he was scolding himself, he was already three sentences in.
“Fucking fuck,” he grunted, then turned and opened his door and closed it again gently. Much to his disappointment, this remedial action did not restore order to his world.
The date had started with great promise. Q*pid was delivering better and better matches every day, and Fox had found his scores rising reliably along the trend line he had shown to Chad the week before. Tonight’s date was predicted to be in the ninety-two to ninety-four range, if the pattern held. And as soon as he entered the restaurant, he decided she had the potential to hit ninety-five, a number he hadn’t seen in more than two years. She was tall and elegant, and yet her smile was warm and genuine. All signs pointed to a brilliant success.
Until they started to get to know each other.
On the surface, they were eminently compatible. They agreed on everything that Fox held most important, and any moments of difference turned out to be fascinating fodder for discussion. Fox got the feeling that she already knew him, and had in fact already decided that she liked him, before they were fifteen minutes into predinner cocktails. He didn’t really even need to work through his checklist of things he liked to mention during the opening moments of a first date—his job, his prospects for promotion, his good health and dedication to fitness, his investing strategy, his favorite sports—because as soon as he introduced any topic, she was immediately engaged and suitably impressed with his accomplishments. He had the odd feeling that she’d been created in a lab somewhere just for him.
He didn’t like this feeling at all.
She was too… perfect. Not in the abstract sense, like she would win any pageant she entered, or could be a successful lawyer and a Victoria’s Secret model and mother of two darling prodigies (one mathematical, one musical). No, she was too perfect for him.
This made no sense at all. His outrage at her perfection made no sense at all. And yet there it was, clouding his vision, ringing in his ears—the inescapable impression that she did not need to be wooed and won but rather claimed. Finding the right person should be like finding a winning lottery ticket in the cushions of his couch, not finding his car keys on the peg where he’d hung them the night before. What was missing was exultation in a race well run and duly won.