by Unknown
A sliver of grayish light slipped through the open bathroom door. He glanced down the hallway at the living room; where the television was off now. There was a plate sitting on the end table next to the La-Z-Boy. Even from here, he could see it was empty, except for a fork and a crumpled napkin. The chicken burrito was gone. He had finished it, he supposed, though he couldn’t recall having done so.
What happened here, Raymond, my friend?
“I don’t know.”
He looked again at his reflection in the mirror, at the puzzled expression staring back at him, then brought the toothbrush mechanically to his mouth. What had happened, he decided, was simple: he hadn’t been paying attention. He had finished the burrito, turned off the television, and changed into his pajamas without paying attention to what he was doing. It had been like driving on automatic. Entering the on-ramp, thinking about how you’re going to get everything done by tomorrow’s production meeting, then suddenly finding yourself a block away from home with no recollection of the miles in between.
Either that … or he had misplaced a little piece of himself tonight. Stashed it away in the same hollow place where he kept the bitterness of his separation from Sherrie and his every-other-weekend visitations with Robin. Somewhere out of mind, where the memories were kept dull and painless.
One of those, Ray decided as he climbed into bed. He pulled the bedsheets up under his chin and covered his eyes with his left arm.
It would be another twenty minutes before the Sand Man would accompany him down a long, spiral stairway into the pure black peacefulness of slumber. In the morning, he would struggle to pull himself out of that dark, safe sleep, and by the time he was fully awake, the episode of the night before would be long forgotten.
3.
“I’m going to miss it,” Bev told him late the next night.
Ray switched his briefcase to his other hand, and checked his Rolex. It was five to midnight. A light rain had fallen sometime after dinner, and the streets mirrored the soft shimmer of the surrounding city lights, it seemed later than it was, in fact. Ray told himself, it seemed almost as if the night had settled in to stay. “No you won’t. We’ve got five minutes before the last train leaves.”
He took her by the arm, and together they hurried across Fourth Street and started down the tunnel entrance to the Midtown Station, If there had been someone else on the street, they might have been mistaken for a young married couple heading home after a late-night dinner with friends (a late super, as they liked to say on the Hollywood side of the business). But that would have been a mistaken assumption. Bev had hired on with Baylor & Baylor Advertising a little less than a month ago, after a national ad campaign at another agency had won her a Clio, and CEO Chet Baylor had lured her away with an offer of bigger bucks and more creative freedom. She had been lured right into Ray’s office, to work on a campaign for a small independent film called Timescape. A get-your-toes-wet project while she learned her way around the agency.
At the bottom of the steps, Bev switched her purse from one shoulder to the other, and brushed a wisp of hair back from her forehead. “I still don’t understand why they’re front-loading this movie. It’s not that bad.”
“Ours is not to reason why.”
“God, you’re cynical.”
“Not a cynic, a realist,” Ray said easily. “It’s a horror flick, not Gone with the Wind. Two weeks after it opens, it’ll close. And two months after that it’ll be in every video store across the country. Doesn’t matter how good we do our job, we aren’t going to make Timescape into a box office hit. They know that. As long as we can max the theater gross they’ll he happy. Video sales’lI take care of the
“Seems like a waste. I’ve seen Oscar winners that were worse.”
As they arrived at the platform, Ray checked his watch again. Midnight, straight up. It had been ten or fifteen minutes since the last train had come through, though it felt as if it might have been days. A cool breeze carried out of the tunnels, howling softly and faraway. The train was running late, and they were the only two people waiting. He couldn’t recall that having ever happened before, being alone in the station.
“Why is it so quiet?” Bev asked. “We miss something?”
“Maybe the system’s down.”
Overhead, the information monitor ran through a blurb for the symphony: The Skylight Center. Saturday night at 8:00 P.M. General admission $15.00. Ray watched until it went into the Arrival/Departure Schedule. “Nope. Looks like it’s just a few minutes late.”
“Where is everyone?”
He placed his briefcase on the floor between them, and glanced about the empty station. Someone had spray-painted a symbol in day-glow orange across the face of a billboard of a local FM station. It looked a little like an hourglass on its side, with a man buried in the sand to his knees. A sleeve of newspaper swirled out of one of the tunnels. Ray cleared his throat. “It’s midnight,” he said with a shrug. “There’s never much of a crowd this time of night.”
She seemed to relax a bit. “You have your daughter this weekend?”
“Supposed to, but Sherrie took her down to Florida on some sort of business trip. They’re doing Disney World and Epcot while they’re down there.”
“So what’s your weekend look like?”
“I don’t know.” He watched the sleeve of newspaper drop back to the tracks. “Maybe I’ll spend some time at the office tomorrow.”
“Another look at Timescape?”
“Yeah, if you don’t mind?”
“No, of course not,” she said, and he could see she really was comfortable with the idea. “I suppose I should have brought this up earlier, though …”
“What’s that?”
“I was wondering what you thought of the IPMs.”
“For Timescape?”
She nodded, a little less comfortably now.
“What about ‘em?” He looked past her, down the tunnel beyond the long line of tracks leading off into the darkness, and was struck by the myriad of images they had put together for the ad, each one flashing on, then off again, as if its afterimage were burned permanently into his retinas.
“I’m feeling a little uneasy with the pacing.”
“Too slow?”
“No, too fast.”
He looked at her now, surprised. “We’ve got to quick-cut it. There isn’t a fifteen-second run in the whole damn film we can bring up. What else are we supposed to do with it?”
“No, I understand that. It’s just that we’ve got …what?—better than forty cuts in the thirty-second lead?”
“Forty-seven.”
“It’s too fast, Ray.”
“Not if you’re targeting the MTV crowd. The world’s a faster place than when we were kids. People don’t have the patience anymore to sit back and wait for us to make our point. They want everything to be a roller coaster ride.”
“You know that’s not true”
“Truer than think.” He checked his watch again. 12:06 a.m. Except for their conversation, the platform area had fallen into an even deeper hush. But now, approach by the way of the South Tunnel, the sound of the next train came clicking along at a reassuring rhythm. “About time,” Bev said with a smile.
Ray looked at her, thinking how lovely she looked, even under the weak fluorescent lights of a late Friday night. Her outfit was all business: the gray jacket, single-breasted with padded shoulders and dropped-notch lapels; the skirt pleated in the front with angled pockets and a wide waist band. All business at a glance. But you couldn’t look at her without seeing the woman. She was thin, elegant lines and small breasts. She could smile at you, reflect serious, or throw a tantrum without ever making you feel uneasy about her. And her eyes—they could stare mysteriously in your direction with never a hint of …
(CUT TO)
… what was going on behind them. “Don’t work too hard this weekend,” she was saying.
Ray closed his eyes, then looked again. The train had a
rrived. He had closed his eyes and opened them, and the train had arrived out of the black midnight of the tunnel. Bev was standing just inside the doorway now, holding on to a stainless steel rail with one hand, looking tired from the long day’s work but hiding most of the exhaustion behind a polite smile.
“See you Monday Ray.” She brushed the hair back from her eyes, waved, and the doors closed, like a wall coming down between them.
The subway train began to roll forward, lurching a time or two before it finally found its stride. It skimmed down the short span of rails, making a sound something like the wind swirling around the tops of the skyscrapers, then sailed off into the mouth of the North Tunnel.
Mystified, Ray watched it disappear. Something strange had just happened. He wasn’t sure exactly what it was, but for a moment it had felt as if time had somehow skipped a beat. He checked his watch again. 12:08 A.M. A full two minutes had passed. The train had pulled into the station, the doors had opened, Bev had climbed aboard. All that had somehow happened without him.
He stood there a moment or two longer, feeling strangely out of place, and finally, after the platform had fallen back into its uneasy silence, he climbed the stairs again. On the street, there was a chill in the late-night air. The rain had stopped. The sky had opened to a spattering of dim stars. He tucked his briefcase under one arm, and walked with both hands jammed into his pants pockets to keep them warm. It seemed unusually peaceful beneath the sparse patches of night sky. He crossed Washington against a red light, only distantly aware of what he was doing.
By the time he arrived at his apartment on Sixty-Second Street, his thoughts—which had never been far from that picture of Bev standing inside the subway train—had drifted hack to the night before, when he had suddenly found himself in the bathroom, confused and feeling as if he had just come out of anesthesia.
The lock clicked into place, and he leaned heavily against the inside of the apartment door. The cast of a streetlight seeped through the living room curtains and cut a path across the floor toward the end table next to the La-Z-Boy. The plate was still sitting there, with its fork and its crumpled napkin. The chicken burrito was missing, though.
Because you ate it, don’t you remember?
No, he didn’t.
And that was the problem, wasn’t it?
It seemed lately he had began to forget a number of things.
4.
Bev beat him to the office Monday morning. After checking his messages—there was only one, a panic call from the B.M. Myers folks who were having second thoughts about their new dog food campaign—Ray wandered into the editing room and found her sitting in the dark, running through the Timescape ad.
“Morning.”
She waved, back-handed, without looking up from the projector. “Just a sec.”
No hurry. He closed the door, and as the room settled instantly back into its comfortable darkness, he was taken back to Friday night again. It was something he had nearly put out of his mind over the weekend, but suddenly he was there again, on the platform, looking down the long, dark tunnel, wondering when the train would come in. He had been haunted all that night by a strange, unexplainable sense of detachment, and finally on the edge of sleep, had decided that something precious had begun to slip through his fingers. He had wondered—quite legitimately at the time, he thought—if maybe he hadn’t begun to lose a little piece of his mind.
Which piece would that be, Ray old boy? A couple million neurons, perhaps?
Perhaps, he thought now, solemnly.
Someone had left a conference chair next to the door. Ray pulled it away from the wall and sat down. He stared vacantly at the soft green light emitted by the projector. He found it, along with the rhythmic clicking of the sprockets and the Monday morning chill that had collected in the room over the weekend, momentarily meditative, and allowed his mind to wander off again.
Sherrie had called from Florida Sunday night. They were having a good time, she said, though Robin was a little cranky from a long day at Epcot. Everything else was doing fine, even the business part of the trip. They still intended to be back the afternoon of the twenty-fifth as planned, she said. Then she had put Robin on the line. “Hi, Daddy! We’re on the other side of the country. We went to Epcot today and on Tuesday we’re spending the whole day at Disney World, and there’s a swimming pool where we’re staying!”
“Sounds like you’re having a pretty good time.”
“Yeah. It’d be better if you were here, though,” she said matter-of-factly. “But I understand. Most of the time, you and Mommy don’t like it when you’re around each other.”
That’s not true, he thought. At least not entirely. Sometimes we just forget what it was like a long, long time ago.
Now, as he was sitting in the chair, silently watching Bev run through the thirty-second tape, four, maybe five times altogether, he realized he had forgotten most of the bad times. The happiest times--when they had first met and started dating, and in the early years of their marriage—those were the times he recalled most clearly now. How had he ever lost sight of those?
The rat-tat-tat of the sprockets ended abruptly and the silence brought Ray back from his thoughts. He looked across the room at Bev as she swung her chair around. In the faint green light her face was half-hidden in shadow, but it appeared as if she were lost in thoughts of her own.
“Okay, no secrets between co-workers,” Ray said. “What’s eating you about this thing?”
“It’s too fast,” she said evenly. She sounded every bit the woman who had won a Clio, though the degree of concern in her voice surprised him somewhat.
“That’s still bothering you?”
“It’s still bothering me.”
“You’re worrying needlessly,” he said. He leaned back on the legs of his chair and flipped on the light switch next to the door. The room brightened immediately, and for a reason he could not explain, it seemed as if something nearby had suddenly stopped moving. “I don’t think so. This one is going to crater on use if we’re not careful.”
“If it craters, it won’t be because of the IPMS,” he said. He had come across a black-and-white, quick cut Nike spot during a Bears/49ers game over the weekend and that ad had convinced him that they had made the right decision for the Timescape campaign. It was a gritty, emotional series of shots that had left him feeling pumped up and powerful, the same kinds of feelings they had set out to convey for Timescape.
She turned back to the projector, staring silently at the white screen. “I’m not so sure, Ray.”
“It’s the perfect vehicle for this movie. We take the thrills and al the action, splice them together in a thirty-second run … and as long as we leave viewers feeling excited, it doesn’t matter how much of it they absorb. It’s the feeling we’re trying to convey here. That’s what’ll get them in the theater on Friday night.”
“I suppose.” she said with a degree of resignation. “But?”
“But … don’t you ever feel it?”
“Feel what?
“How fast everything seems to be moving?”
He leaned forward, staring at her, thinking: You feel it, too? That sense that a tight sprint has suddenly let loose and everything’s becoming unraveled? You feel that? But that wasn’t what she was talking about. She was talking about the rat race and how fast the days sometimes go and how confusing the world can be with all its changes. And he was talking about something much more personal than that. He was talking about closing your eyes while watching Nightline and opening them again and ending yourself somewhere else, doing something else.
“I guess I do,” he said.
“Doesn’t it ever scare you?”
“I don’t think about it much.”
She turned back to the projector again, and Ray felt the muscles in his neck relax, as if the air had been let out of them. She seemed momentarily occupied by the screen, then …
(CUT TO)
… placed the menu down on th
e table and looked up at him. “Sorry I was late,” Bev said.
He heard a clinking sound and followed it across the room to a middle-aged man who was touching wineglasses with a much younger, and appreciably more attractive woman. They were sitting at a small table in the corner, with a flowered trellis behind them. The woman giggled.
“Chet dropped by. He said you were busy on the phone but he wanted us to know that the company got the Timex account. It’s ours for the asking, Ray.”
A waiter brushed past him like a breeze, kicking up a swirl-of hair on the back of his head. He combed it back, and looked up at the man, who was carrying a silver tray on the palm of one hand. There were three or four other tables in the area, covered in white-lace cloths, centered with candles and fresh bouquets of flowers. Through a latticed divider, he could see the soft glow of sunlight slipping in past a curtained window. It was still daylight out.
“Ray?”
He looked down at the menu in his hands, feeling as if he had just opened his eyes after an accident and was still shaking the cobwebs out of his mind. They were at Fitzgerald’s. It said so across the top of the menu. And they were having lunch, he supposed. They often lunched at Fitzgerald’s.
“Are you okay?”
“Huh?”
“You look pale.”
“No, I’m fine,” he lied. Across the room, another waiter appeared from behind a pair of swinging doors. He weaved his way through the maze of tables, half of which were empty, and disappeared through an archway into another room of the restaurant. “What time is it?”
“One-fifteen,” Bev said. “We’ve still got forty-five minutes.
One-fifteen.
My God.
Ray closed his menu, and stared across the table at her. She was wearing a pearl gray, loose-fitting blazer over an attractive silk crepe de chine blouse and a slim, elegant skirt. It was the same day as it had been this morning, he realized. Those were the same clothes she had been wearing in the projection room. Only now …
“Are you sure you’re all right?”