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by Bryan Hurt

  She fled the coop, huh, Anderson said thoughtfully. Wasn’t interested, yeah?

  Griff got into the rhythm. Too good for us, I suppose, he said.

  What was she supposed to be doing again, asked Anderson.

  Griff drained his beer. Oh she was a star man, he said. Triple threat. I can’t say more than that. It’s too heartbreaking. He gestured at his empty glass.

  Anderson took it to the bar and set it down softly. The bartender, who looked strangely content and upbeat for this hour of night and this location in the Manhattan universe, whisked it away. What’s the poison friend, he said, a little knowingly, it seemed to Anderson. Anderson looked at the sea of ten-dollar beers whose names were written in grainy colorful chalk on the board above him. He still couldn’t quite shake the price shock that came from being a freelance copyeditor full time. You got any happy hour specials still, he asked.

  The bartender looked dramatically at his watch, though Anderson well knew it couldn’t be earlier than eight or eight thirty. For you, he said. Why not. Two of whatever it is then, Anderson said. Actually, he said, make one of them a Bud Light. That’s actually more expensive, the bartender said. That’s fine, Anderson said. It seemed to be the way the world was going.

  Don’t I know you from somewhere, the bartender said to Anderson as he passed off the drinks. I don’t think so, Anderson said. Hmmm, the bartender said. He swiped Anderson’s almost brand-new credit card. Well, he said. Open please, said Anderson. He took the drinks back to the table.

  It could have been a worse group of people, Anderson considered. He’d heard of worse things happening to professionals his age, that was for sure. It was a small company still, a true start-up. Nikil and James had the buoyancy of youth and positive thinking about them, backed up by what seemed to be a true intelligence—they were double-edged, perhaps was a good way to think about it, the type of people who at any stage in human history would have been at the top of their pyre or pyramid, however the age went. They might have been shamans, soldiers, explorers, nuclear physicists. Because it was 2014, they were start-up CEOs. And they’d gathered a good group around them, most of whom were clustered around the table. There was their second-in-command, the austere Zoe, who’d streamlined the initial code base enough to cut battery usage by 30 percent. She seemed to have no background but a very bright future, and the short haircut she often sported in addition to her clipped, complete lack of interest in him was an unbearable but low-grade attraction to someone like Anderson. Arrayed to Zoe’s right were Tim, Mike, and Anita, three hardworking programmers who hadn’t gone to fancy schools like Griff or Nikil and James—they’d learned their programming on the side, or had always been good at it, or went to Hacker School after leaving dead-end jobs in reception (that one was the lovely Anita). In a previous age they might have been construction or quality-control engineers, rolling up their sleeves to really get their hands in the business. Anderson had a soft spot for them, for Tim’s and Mike’s matching thick Boston accents, which jibed well with Anita’s New York one—not many people who Anderson interacted with had a New York accent anymore. She lived in Staten Island, and drove to work every day—James and Nikil paid for her parking garage. They had recently promoted her to project manager, and the other two programmers had taken it remarkably well, it seemed to Anderson. They’d bought her a cake in the shape of a blank triptych science board—“Project!” they shouted gleefully when she took the tinfoil off. They seemed happy together. They all made upward of 150K a year, though, which couldn’t hurt.

  Anderson put the Bud Light in front of Griff’s hand, and explained that they had been all out of anything else. He had expected to get a cheap thrill out of the prank, but Griff just slumped down a little, almost imperceptibly. Perhaps he hadn’t drunk much Budweiser in college. Here Griff, Anderson said, just kidding. The Light’s for me—better digestion. Griff lapped up the cold IPA.

  Anita, flanked by the other programmers, was leading the table in conversation. The way I see it, she said, better member of no team than halfway part of this one.

  Hear, hear, Mike and Tim muttered gruffly.

  The new programmer, Griff told Anderson unnecessarily. Anderson raised his eyebrows in acknowledgment.

  Where’s a better place to work, is all I’m saying, Anita said. There was an upturn to the end of her sentence, but it was a statement as opposed to a question. Zoe expressed her agreement, in the reserved, quiet way she had. Anderson wouldn’t have been able to say how she did it. The tilt of her chin?

  Truth, she added.

  You know, Griff chimed in, bigger’s not always better. Less cuts of the same pies.

  Fewer, said Mike and Tim, almost simultaneously.

  Huh, asked Griff.

  Fewer cuts, explained Mike kindly. Right Anderson?

  Anderson pulled down a gulp of his beer. He’s got you there Griffin, he said.

  All I’m saying is, Anita continued, I don’t understand why Nikil and James were so torn up about this chick. Anita had strong, shapely forearms, which nestled confidently on the table while she made her point. Zoe bristled a little.

  Know what I mean? Anita said, directing herself toward Zoe. It looked like Zoe, as usual, knew more than she was letting on.

  She was an exceptionally good candidate, Zoe said evenly, by way of explanation. Anderson waited, but like a minimalist short story, it seemed like that was all she was going to give them.

  She came highly recommended, Zoe added, when it seemed like it hadn’t been enough. The table waited.

  Nikil and James had been pursuing her for a long time, Zoe finished, in a concluding kind of way. She shrugged and raised her glass, some kind of brackish wine. To the future, she said. And to FicShare.

  To FicShare, the rest of the company chimed. Anderson felt himself going along with it, the way he went along with the river waves he watched, every lunchtime, leaning over the railing without jumping in.

  EVEN THE STRANGE bartender could no longer pretend that it was happy hour. At a certain point in the evening Zoe had been a mensch about it and thrown down her own credit card—was it a company card? Did the company have those? Nobody quite knew—and bought the last few rounds for the cohorts. Anita, Mike, and Tim were the heaviest drinkers, quietly getting to the bottoms of their glasses as if they were adventure novellas. Zoe carefully drank the same brackish wine without any discernible exterior difference. Griff got sloppy, like the college kid he had been. Anderson was embarrassed to realize that he himself was getting a little sloppy, but there was nothing to be done about it at that point. He’d get home, heat up some old pasta, try to read a little more of Crime and Punishment, which had been bookending his bed stand for the past several months, before he’d inevitably give up and watch television. Sometimes he had dreams, on particularly warm nights, of a FicShare fairy creeping into his studio apartment and wrenching the unread Dostoevsky from his care. Others need it better, the FicShare fairy would say in a singsong way.

  The chair did not squeak as Anderson pushed it away from the table, letting himself up. The bottoms must be covered with something, or else the floor was more forgiving than he’d thought it was, when last he’d stood up on it. A good lifehack for the bar, getting rid of all that excess noise, Anderson considered. Lifehack was a new word he’d picked up from Mike and Tim, which he struggled to use correctly. Room, Griff pronounced grandly as Anderson got up. This time he and Anderson were on the same page. Bathroom. He nodded. They pushed themselves away from the table silently and ventured to the men’s.

  Anderson and Griff stood at adjacent urinals. In the middle of his piss Anderson felt himself drawn to check his cell phone, but he resisted the urge (it was a recipe for further sloppiness), and instead happened to glance toward Griff. When he did he noticed the pained expression on his colleague’s face.

  What’s the matter, Anderson said, almost horrified. He couldn’t believe that he was about to have a urinal conversation wit
h the guy. Griff continued shaking his head and staring into the blank monitor screen of the urinal.

  She was supposed to be beautiful man, he said. The new hire. Talk about one who got away. For a moment only the sound of their quiet piss streams interrupted Anderson’s silence. This always happens to me, Griff said, and for an awful moment Anderson thought that Griff might be about to cry. They washed their hands together at the sink, the water cascading around and getting the fronts of their shirts wet. The bathroom was dark and smelled strongly of ginger beer. Griff didn’t meet Anderson’s eyes.

  When they exited the bathroom, Zoe was the only one waiting for them, sitting at the table and tapping on her phone. The guys went home, she said. I don’t think they’re gonna let Anita drive. She smiled in her thin way. Anderson wondered if he’d ever have a chance dating her. He wasn’t sure how much they had in common—her favorite author on Facebook and the FicShare landing page was Ayn Rand, favorite book was The Right Stuff (one for two, at least)—but he admired her quiet competence, the elegant way she sat at her computer desk. Anderson spent a lot of time looking through the interior glass walls of the office. Anderson tried to project all his possibility into a smile. Griff broke the moment with a burp.

  I should take off, Zoe said, and went to the bar to close out her tab. She did so quickly, while Griff and Anderson watched—it was almost as if the bartender had had her card ready, a pen prepared for her to sign. After she did so she looked back, and gave them a small wave. Her small tote bag bounced softly against her back as she left.

  Well, Anderson said, another night in suck city. Griff laughed uproariously. That’s really funny man, Griff said. Where you come up with these things? Anderson accepted the praise. Here’s to tomorrow, Anderson said. Tell me about it hombre, Griff said. They were walking to the door when Anderson remembered that he’d left his tab open, his shiny new credit card in the bartender’s clutches. He’d finally responded to one of those countless spam ads after he’d gotten the job—he felt like a member of capitalism once again. I’ve gotta close out, he told Griff, and he backslapped him. See you tomorrow. Griff nodded a little and kept walking. Anderson felt strangely buoyed—it was, he realized, that he’d both remembered about his credit card and also had succeeded in not taking the train the few stops to Brooklyn with Griff. Although surely Griff would have taken an Uber. Hell, he might have too.

  Anderson made the universal symbol for check-please at the bar, and the bartender came to him immediately. The check was right there for him, and an uncapped pen, all ready to go, but before Anderson could reach for it the bartender bent toward him and whispered in his ear. You’re going to get an email tonight, the bartender said, portentously. She will contact you.

  Anderson backed away, his fingers still curled around the pen. Now he really felt like a Maugham story; maybe Ashenden. What are you talking about, he said, a little thickly. The bartender backed away, and smiled as if he hadn’t heard him. He made the check-please sign back at Anderson, and walked away to the other side of the bar.

  Anderson waited for a moment and watched the bartender. He signed the bill, and made sure to pocket the new credit card. He looked toward the bartender one last time to see if he might divine any special provenance or helpful assistance but the bartender refused to meet his eyes. There had been no customer at the other end of the bar—the bartender was leafing through the pages of a book. Anderson wanted to ask him what he was reading—it was a habit that Anderson found hard to drop. He’d always considered that he could judge a person by their paperback choices. This had changed in recent years with e-readers. There was only so much consumer difference between iPad and Kindle. But just as Anderson was opening his mouth the bartender shook his head warningly. Anderson, a little disconcerted, took his leave from the SoHo bar.

  AS IT WAS wont to be on summer evenings when the night air is cool and welcoming and the subway itself is fetid and warm like the day that has already died aboveground, the Broadway-Lafayette station was dark and crowded, and Anderson waited twenty-five minutes for the next train. He had forgotten his book at the office, and though he tried to read a couple more pages of the always-waiting Crime and Punishment on his iPhone, through software Anita had introduced him to, which allowed you to read the same book on all your devices, he soon gave up. He wasn’t sure if it was the translation, the device, or just him. Also, he couldn’t get the bartender and his strange warning out of his head. When the F finally came, it was empty; not as in loosely populated but almost entirely empty, only its ghost lights on, like the garbage trains of 3:00 a.m. The crowd at Broadway-Lafayette surged on anyway, and Anderson followed. The train paused a little in the station but the air-conditioning worked and eventually it closed its doors and continued on.

  Back at his apartment, Anderson heated up the days-old pasta he’d been not much looking forward to. He wasn’t much of a cook, and in his freelance days he’d been forced to enjoy his own cooking more than he would have liked to. The pasta was left over from a restaurant that Anderson had been to one night the week before, after work. He’d left the office, gone to the restaurant, thought about nothing, sat with no one, and before he knew it it was ten o’clock and he brought the rest of the meal home to his quiet apartment, where he had immediately fallen asleep.

  Pasta devoured, Anderson checked the locks on his door and changed into a sleeping T-shirt and clean boxers. He settled himself into the armchair beside his bed, and rather than cracking the desperate old copy of Dostoevsky that had been darkening his bedside, he reached for a copy of The New Yorker that he’d picked up on a whim one subway ride. It was neither new nor old. This was the perfect age for a New Yorker, he considered. He had always felt an aspirational tug to read The New Yorker, to sit somewhere and read the magazine from beginning to end. Including the dance reviews that he might not have paid any attention to otherwise. He could envision himself doing this someday, some weekend when he was married to a Zoe-like figure and he was the editorial director of a fresh new imprint, maybe e-only at that stage in the game. He would page through the magazine, knowing all the writers, many personally. Anderson opened the magazine, and made it all the way through the Talk of the Town, skipping the economics column (naturally), and starting the short story. But it was a light first-person piece that had the problem that many first-person pieces had in recent years, in Anderson’s opinion, that they mattered only to the first-person in the story and their creators themselves. They didn’t have the elegance, the everyman quality, of third-person narration. In the middle of the story Anderson lost interest for good, and closed the magazine.

  Usually Anderson tried to go to sleep without checking email. He’d come to understand that it messes with your natural sleep patterns, that it opens some pathways that healthy sleep depends on having closed. But tonight Anderson pulled his laptop off the shelf where he kept it next to his bed, and signed into his Gmail account. There were the usual promotions from Amazon and BookBub, and news alerts from a local news website he’d signed up for long, long ago. Nothing of interest. Perturbed, Anderson pulled up a new tab to get into his office email system, which was something he very much tried to avoid on a regular basis. He gave them enough hours of the day. He typed in his ironic password—DownAndOutInNYC—and the colorful green design of the FicShare page appeared before him. There was an all-staff email from Griff about some new e-reading app he’d seen on the train that night. Nikil had responded, “Interesting.” Zoe had sent out the daily schedule for the upcoming day. But nothing particularly intriguing. Anderson even checked his spam folder.

  There’s no other way to put it: Anderson felt a little down. As usual, there was nothing special in his life. This was nothing new. He found his surprises in literature, not real life. Even his reading choices confirmed it—he looked, dilettante-like, for amusement, rather than deep vertical mastery of any particular author or period. It was why he’d drifted out of graduate school to New York City in the first place. Anders
on looked at the clock on the upper right-hand corner of the screen—it was 1:00 a.m. Easy to get down on yourself at a time like that.

  Anderson closed down the laptop, slid it back on its shelf, took a lingering look at the forlorn-looking Dostoevsky, and shut off the lights.

  HE WAS AWOKEN with a rap on his window. He had been in the middle of a dream in which he and Anita were staring at a computer monitor, forearms bumping, and Zoe had her hands on their shoulders, staring disapprovingly. This was all par for the course for Anderson. Anita reached for the computer screen and tapped it with her fingernails. Again and again. Finally Zoe reached forward and did the same, but harder this time, so that in his dreamworld the screen Anderson was looking at shivered and broke. He woke up. There was someone tapping on his fire escape.

  He got out of bed. With the lights off, he had a pretty good view of the outside, once he pulled the curtains apart. Leaning against the fire-escape railing, hand poised to knock once again, there was a woman. She was dressed in slacks and a button-down shirt, which seemed to Anderson improbable for a cat burglar or nighttime strangler. Her posture prefigured not danger or anxiety but almost normality, even out there on the fire escape. The woman nodded at him, gesturing the window up. He unlocked it and lifted.