Dark City

by Hodge, Brian

  He fixed her with an exasperated stare. “I never said I liked that, either.”

  She thought she understood the anger. Some people liked to serve. There was nothing demeaning in it. They simply found their purpose in making the lives of others a little better, a little brighter, a little easier, if only a minute at a time. They had kind words when you needed them. Theirs was the one welcoming face you could count on.

  They were the inverse of those who found their purpose in making the lives of others miserable, leaving victims instead of making friends.

  It would offend him, wouldn’t it? All of it. The refusal of life where it was meant to take root. The casual rapacity of the owners. No doubt there were many doormen who would welcome the opportunity to work a building with such low occupancy. The fewer people they had to deal with, the better. But not Barrett. It undermined his reason for being.

  “You’re pushier than I took you for.” Somewhere in this there seemed to be a compliment. “Score one for you. I’m usually so good at those first impressions.”

  “I’m not, really. Pushy,” she said. “I’m not a vandal or a thief, either.”

  “I never would’ve thought otherwise. But I don’t even have the keys myself. The spares are back in the custodial and superintendent’s area.”

  “But you still have access, right? It sounds like getting one is all in a day’s work.”

  Barrett went silent for a few moments. He actually appeared to be giving this some thought. “Why would you want to see them? They’re just empty shells, that’s all they are. That’s all they’ve ever been.”

  “I don’t know, really. I couldn’t explain why,” she lied, then thought she’d better do better than that. “I mean…places are like people. Do they really fully exist if there’s nobody there to notice them?”

  “Let me think about it,” he said, but she knew she’d gotten through, that it was only a matter of time before he found the keys.

  ««—»»

  When a day passed and he said no more about it, she thought Barrett must have decided no, that impossible meant IMPOSSIBLE, and was sticking to it.

  The day after that, though, when she was heading through the lobby for her morning outing, he held up a finger for her to stop. He slid his other hand toward her across the top of his desk, then flipped it over, as if in a street-hustler’s game of cups-and-balls, to reveal a pair of keys. Their square ends were ringed to a plastic card inked with black marker, like something from a car dealership.

  23-C, it read. One key for the knob, one for the deadbolt.

  “For the past four or five years it’s been owned by a corporate trust based in Dubai,” Barrett said. “Even I’ve never seen anyone connected to them come to access it. The only attention it receives is a quarterly visit from a maid service to scrub away the water lines in the toilets and vanquish the dust. And they’re not due for another few weeks.”

  She snatched the keys before he could change his mind. “Thank you, Barrett. Very much.”

  “The do’s and don’ts,” he said. “You will return the key in one hour, maximum. You will not break the chairs. You will not fall asleep in the beds until the bears come home. And I’m sure there’s no porridge, so we’re good there.”

  She laughed. Giggled, actually. She didn’t know she still had the sound in her. “Wrong color hair, anyway.”

  He peered at her as if he wanted to press a rewind button and watch the last few moments again. “Look at you. All of a sudden as giddy as a ten-year-old. Why is that?”

  “Maybe I’m a late bloomer.”

  “Better late than bloomless, then.” His tone firmed up again. “Please understand something. This is a one-time indulgence. It can’t happen again.”

  She nodded agreement, wishing it could. But not if it posed a risk to his job.

  Why risk it even once, then? It wasn’t just Barrett’s annoyance at so many homes going to waste directly over his head. That was secondary, at most.

  Rather, without saying so, he seemed to convey an understanding that this was more than idle curiosity, that it was something she needed; that behind a forbidden door was something she had to find before she could leave this way station.

  She had the keys in hand. Now it was just a matter of an elevator, a hallway, and a door. A few minutes forward in linear time, but on a deeper level, years in reverse.

  Because she remembered a time when she was fearless.

  The apartment seemed to have been waiting for her, for anyone, the way vacant spaces often did. Waiting, but not welcoming. The farther in she went, the more it filled her with a sense of wading through frozen time. High ceilings, pale walls, wide windows, floors of inlaid wood. The furnishings were sparse enough to make the place seem emptier still, like a process interrupted and never resumed. There were just enough fixtures to stake a claim and block the potential for some future resident, and drive home the forlorn message: This is the way it is here. This is the way it always is.

  She hoped there were lots of rooms. If anything, the apartment was larger than her brother’s. The more rooms, the better. The more rooms there were to explore, the greater the chance she might rediscover herself in one of them.

  Because she remembered a time when she was fearless. The one who was always striving to climb higher and ride faster, and who found her way past the fences that told her to keep out, turn around, behave herself and stop poking her nose where it didn’t belong.

  Here, now, today, this moment? This was something that girl would have done.

  And so here she was.

  Here they were. Seeking each other in rooms where no one had ever lived.

  Wendy wished that time could somehow fold in on itself, and place as well. She wished she could walk into one of these empty, lifeless chambers, and see that girl. She would love to catch her in the act of being herself, nothing but herself, bold and wiser than she knew, and then find just the right words to save all that was best about her, and update what had been most naïve.

  Do it right, then go back downstairs to sleep, and there was a chance that when she woke up, it would be very far from here.

  ««—»»

  When does losing your mind become the preferable alternative?

  They never answer questions like that in therapy. It’s like, to admit this possibility exists is an admission of failure, and they can’t have that. Sorry, Dr. B, but I see through you. You don’t just have a reputation to uphold, but an entire paradigm.

  They know how to treat for crazy. Maybe not very effectively, but they have their starting points. But the possibility that the choppy videos in your sleepytime head might actually be a travelogue? The starting point here is to declare crazy and proceed accordingly. Simple. Shrinks must be the original guys with a hammer who think everything looks like a nail.

  Are they still dreams if they come from somewhere else? What’s the distinction between a dream and an incoming transmission? I would say these are the things that keep me up at night, but if they did, there wouldn’t be a problem.

  I can’t shake the feeling that this place, this wonderful wet warm watery squishy soggy place I keep seeing and feeling and tasting is genuinely factual, with its own objective reality. It’s somewhere out there. Or maybe sometime back when.

  You can’t tell me it’s all in my head. You know why? Because I really wish it was that easy, that with the right pill or the right voltage on the electrodes, or maybe if you keep talking me to death, I could get rid of it.

  Instead, there I am. Me, not me, dream me, whichever me. Wandering the empty halls of these strange and beautiful buildings that look like they’ve grown out of the sea, or washed up on shore, intact. Only they’re not hallways the way I think of them here. They’re not straight, room A to room B, the shortest distance between two points. They’re curved, as if the journey matters as much as the destination. The walls are even curved vertically, with no distinct lines where they end and the floors and ceilings begin. They’re
smooth and lustrous and I think I never want to leave.

  But where is everybody?

  There’s a feeling you get when you walk into an empty room that everybody else left a minute before. It’s not as empty as it seems. There’s a lingering energy. I pick up on it, anyway.

  That’s what this place is like. This city, or world, whatever it is, it’s like I’m ten minutes behind everything else. They’re just around the next corner in time and I need to catch up.

  I can feel myself now, can feel my face. No wonder I couldn’t find my hands earlier. I don’t have any. I just have these appendages. Really? Really? It had to be this, huh?

  But then, they all go together, don’t they? I can’t tell, because it’s not a human face, either.

  As faces go, it’s either beautiful or hideous. There’s no middle ground here.

  It’s a shock to the system, but it’s true, you really can get used to anything.

  It’s like finding myself on the other side of the world. I am her and she is me and I am there and we are all together.

  ««—»»

  It took a few days, but responses began to come in to the queries she’d sent out to the friends and colleagues of Maisie Danziger that she’d found online. Whether through professional profiles, company portals, or social media, few of them were hard to reach out to, once she’d started following the trails linking one person to another. The hardest part was waiting for them to reply.

  According to one of her co-workers, Maisie had never tendered her resignation at Condé Nast. She’d simply stopped coming in to work.

  Another confided that, once she’d had enough wine, Maisie would start spinning fantasies about chucking it all and going to the west coast, where there were no such things as winter and Upper East Side assholes. I just assumed she finally made good on that.

  There were those who missed her, those who’d nearly forgotten about her, those who didn’t even realize she was missing. A neighbor claimed to have seen her Queens apartment being emptied by movers.

  She sent a text to Blake: Was there ever a police investigation re Maisie? Don’t take this wrong, but when a woman goes missing, the husband or boyfriend is the first one they look at.

  Hours later: Investigation? Not much of one. I got a visit a few weeks after I did my own due diligence with them. I assume by then more people were noticing she was gone. Possibly it originated with her family. Although she wasn’t close with them. I concluded she might have been trying to put them behind her, too. Also, don’t take this wrong yourself, but correction: The husband or boyfriend is the first one they look at when a woman turns up dead. With no body and no crime, they don’t seem to take it all that seriously. It’s low priority and very routine.

  The most intriguing reply came from a friend named Devandra, claiming she’d last seen Maisie when they met for an impromptu Sunday brunch after her boyfriend had backed out on her. Which weekend? Devandra wasn’t sure. It had been two years.

  Another text to Blake: How many Sunday breakfasts did you cancel on?

  Minutes later: Just the one.

  In other words, this Devandra may have been the last person in Maisie’s life to see her, even after Blake had, and didn’t seem to realize it. She followed up.

  Wendy: Did Maisie say anything about where she was going or what she would be doing after your brunch? I know it’s been 2 years, but…anything?

  Devandra: Actually, yes. She said she felt like swimming. She’d gotten most of her pissedness (her word) out of her system, and a swim should wash out the rest. You know why I remember? She was joking about having to wait an hour first, like our moms would tell us when we were kids.

  Wendy: Where did she like to go swimming? Did she belong to a club?

  Devandra: Yes. But she didn’t like swimming there. Too many creeps with 20/10 vision is how she put it. She did her swimming right there in your brother’s building. You didn’t know?

  No. She didn’t. She hadn’t even known the building had a pool.

  ««—»»

  She texted Blake once more to ask if she was correct in assuming that Maisie kept a swimsuit there. And she had. A one-piece, leopard print. Yes, really. Leopard print.

  You didn’t get rid of it, did you? She had to ask, but knew the answer already. A man who couldn’t toss out a bottle of sleeping pills he was never going to use, because they’d belonged to a woman he’d lost, was never going to throw away her swimsuit.

  Keep thinking. If Maisie stashed the one-piece here, then she probably would’ve kept flip-flops, as well. And a robe to wear to and from the pool. A woman who kept her swimming private to avoid ogling would’ve covered up in the hallways.

  Yet no matter how thoroughly Wendy searched the closets and cabinets and drawers, nothing of the sort turned up. Maisie had either taken them away with her, or…well, one step at a time.

  Keep thinking, keep thinking.

  Which led her down to the lobby, to ask Barrett if the building had a lost-and-found receptacle. He disappeared through the doorway behind the doorman’s station, into the office they used for safekeeping packages and dry cleaning deliveries, then brought out a trio of long boxes, stout cardboard with lids, like portable filing drawers.

  “What are we looking for?” he asked.

  “Accessories.”

  One box rattled with an assortment of smaller items, keyrings and gadgets and books and water bottles and more. Not the box she wanted.

  The next was lighter but fuller, crammed with castoff items of clothing arranged in layers. She picked her way past neckties and gloves to the larger items beneath, lined up in neat rolls. She found a flannel robe, but when unfurled, it looked oversized even for Barrett. The terrycloth robe, seafoam blue and spattered with daisies…that was a woman’s. She held it in front of her; it came down to her knees.

  The third box was footwear. Not a lot of people here lost shoes, so the flip-flops immediately stood out, four of them, two singles and a matched pair.

  “Who gathers all this up?” she asked.

  “The custodial staff finds most of it. A few things I find here in the lobby, coming on first thing in the morning.”

  “Do they keep records on when things were found?”

  “Afraid not.”

  She draped the terrycloth robe over the top of Barrett’s desk and set the flip-flops in the middle, then snapped a photo of them with her phone. A moment later she sent it to Blake: Are these hers?

  While folding the robe to return it to the box, she noticed a flap pocket on the inside, just below belt level and barely big enough to slip her hand into. She pulled out the only thing in it, a keyring looped onto a plastic seahorse.

  “Is the pool room locked, normally?” she asked Barrett.

  “Always.”

  She held out her palm. “Does the key look like this?”

  ««—»»

  My thinking is that if you’re going to break a rule, you might as well go all in. Trying to analyze what my own dreams may mean? Leaving it there is for half-assed slackers. I say it’s time to get a second opinion.

  Today I met with Stephen Wu at Blue Spoon over coffee and crackpot theories. What good is being an editor if you can’t meet with one of your science writers, get him good and caffeinated, wind him up, and let him go?

  Here’s my feminine stealth and subterfuge: I didn’t run anything past him as having come out of a dream. I was presenting it as hypotheticals, thought experiments. Maybe there’s an article in this and maybe there isn’t. Let’s just have fun, shall we, and in the short term maybe there’s a pumpkin muffin in it for you, too.

  The thing I was ultimately getting at was this: How feasible would it be for a civilization to develop among intelligent, sentient beings that didn’t have hands, but had tentacles instead?

  Stephen didn’t bat an eye or miss a beat: “It probably has, somewhere, even in our own galaxy. Countless times.”

  Just like that, everything changed. I knew nothing was
wrong with me, not directly. This does not originate in me. Which isn’t to imply I take much comfort in that. Whether the implications are better or worse, ain’t got the foggiest, now have I?

  If I’m summarizing correctly from these wretched scrawls and pictographs I call notes, here’s Stephen’s overview:

  • Maybe we Homo sapiens can afford to be cocky now, but there’s no reason to be so primate-centric about the whole civilization concept. It would take just four major traits to get a species moving that direction. They’re up for grabs. We don’t own ’em.

  1) Advanced intelligence capable of language and abstract thought.

  2) Some type of higher communication skill capable of storing information so it could be passed down through multiple generations.

  3) Forward-oriented sensory organs, which would be an inevitable hand-me-down from badass, focused predators rather than pathetic, scurrying prey.

  4) Some sort of extremity with enough dexterity to manipulate the environment and create tools and weapons, and maybe later their version of pens and paintbrushes.

  • Such a civilization would’ve risen out of an aquatic world (sound familiar?!), with shallow seas thriving with life that had a long time to evolve under cycles of survival pressure but no major extinction events while they were developmentally vulnerable. Using this planet as an example, he thought maybe the seas would exchange extremes of depth for greater coverage, so more of the overall land mass would look like islands and archipelagos and wetlands.

  • Hands and opposable thumbs are all well and good on land, especially for critters that need to get around in trees, but the evolutionary pressures that created hands aren’t necessarily going to happen in water.

  • They would have a completely different approach to technology, probably based on biology and other soft, pliable materials.

  • There could still be a lot of common traits between us, because, what do you know, they just make sense, or sooner or later they’re advantageous: bilateral symmetry, binocular vision, upright posture, and fuck it I can’t read my own writing on this other thing.