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by Bryan Hurt

  Higher, the woman said, in a friendly but impatient way. He pushed it as high as it would go, and the woman ducked her head underneath. He gave her a hand as she hopped down next to his bed.

  Shut that, the woman said, and keep the lights off. Wait, she said, as Anderson opened his mouth to begin with one of various pressing questions. The woman took a cell phone out of her pocket—it looked like an iPhone but a bit heavier-duty. She brought it to life with a few touches of her meaty fingers and a beam extended from it. She swung it 360 degrees around the room. Then she consulted with its glowing screen and, satisfied, returned the phone to her pocket. Okay, she said. Then she froze again. No. Her eyes had lighted on a plastic cup that Anderson had carelessly left on his bedside table, gifted from some takeout place down the street. The woman peered at it, sizing up the angle from it to the window, and in one motion reached it, snatched it from its perch, and crumpled it to a loud nothing of grainy plastic in her hands.

  Jesus, yelped Anderson. Microphone, the woman explained. Or, it could be anyway. All they’d need is a laser pointer and a clear view from across the way. The woman scowled out the window from whence she’d come, as if these laser demons had been right behind her. I have to say I’m a little confused, said Anderson. Don’t you have P2P, the woman said indignantly. The blank look on Anderson’s face would have told her what she needed to know. It’s a security system, sighed the woman. Anonymous peer-to-peer secure communication. I thought everybody knew about that these days. Anderson, however, didn’t.

  Can we turn a light on, Anderson asked. The woman responded by retrieving her cell phone from her pocket and tapping a few times. The ceiling light, and also Anderson’s reading lamp, flickered on. Anderson eased himself back onto his bed. This is all quite a lot to take, Anderson said.

  He closed his eyes for a moment. When he opened them, the woman was still there, indeed, was peering down at him concernedly. It gave him a good chance to take the measure of her. She wasn’t exactly beautiful, which is another way of saying that she matched Anderson. She had thick limbs like he did, a wide, angular face that in some lights could seem strange or intriguing. She seemed to have the beginnings of a paunch around the waist, just like Anderson had begun developing recently. He would say it had been the switch from earning his money hand-to-mouth to FicShare’s custom of leaving Nutri-Grain bars all around the office desks. But really it was his lack of self-control.

  I’m the new hire, the woman said, with an air of explaining the obvious. Or, former, she added. Svetlana, she said, waving her hand in an awkward but pleasant hello. Great bookshelf, she said, I love Malory too. Anderson, Anderson said stiffly, a little behind.

  Let’s get going, she said, gesturing toward the doorway. It’s fine, it’s not bugged after all. Anderson stayed where he was, although she didn’t look back to see if he was following. She didn’t seem to be the type of person who successfully waited for answers or orders. Only at the doorway did she turn around.

  What, she said, do I have to make the whole speech now? Aren’t you even a little bit curious? Look, I promise to have you back in bed in an hour, if that’s what you want to do. Her eyes twinkled a little.

  Anderson considered. If he was in danger he probably would have felt it already. There would be plenty of time later for regrets. It wasn’t like he had to be at work early in the morning. Svetlana, sensing what the small movements that Anderson was committing were pointing toward, opened the door soundlessly. Anderson gathered his keys and wallet—Svetlana wagged a finger when she saw him reaching for his cell phone, which he dropped—and, on a whim, traded the phone for the copy of Dostoevsky lying to the side. Anderson carried the book against his wrist, and the weight of it, the half-fresh paperback pages, felt comforting as he ventured into the unknown.

  OUTSIDE, ON THE corner of the block of Anderson’s apartment, a white car was waiting. This furthered Anderson’s sense that he wasn’t in danger, immediate anyway, and besides, Svetlana was the one driving. She pulled a slim ring of keys out of her pocket as they approached. Anderson opened the back door. I’m not a taxi driver, she said, indignantly. Or a cop. She grinned.

  The car bounced along the recently unpaved streets of Brooklyn—Anderson’s neighborhood (not Anderson exactly, but his immediate peers) had been pressuring the city government to re-level their relatively bucolic street, as if there weren’t enough problems elsewhere. Someone with a sense of humor in City Hall must have given the okay to get started, but not permission to finish. The hot exposed street was sticky and vaguely sewage-smelling in the summer days. But soon they reached the Manhattan Bridge, by the good offices of wide Flatbush Avenue. As they crossed the great river, Svetlana began to fill Anderson in.

  FicShare is a dangerous entity, Svetlana started. It’s not alone in its danger, but that doesn’t make it innocent either. She had a stirring, sugary voice. Maybe it began in an innocent, positive way, she said—maybe the idea really did come from a library. That was partially why I went through the interview process, Svetlana said, gunning the gas to get through a red light off the bridge, to hear Nikil and James in their own words. She looked over at Anderson. It’s seductive, as I’m sure you know. I can see them thinking about it while sitting on some leafy steps outside an actual library, wherever they went to college. Anderson knew it was Stanford (he’d seen their resumes too), but he didn’t mention this to his confident driver.

  I don’t think I need to play out the numbers for you, Svetlana said. Sure, maybe this gives a relatively underprivileged kid the opportunity to read a few more books—that’s assuming they’ve gotten their hands on an e-reader in the first place, and haven’t heard of a public library system, which does this for free anyway. And maybe it spreads awareness of an author, and someone, somewhere, actually buys the book, physical or digital, that supports their bottom line. But you know the real drill. The only people who will actually use FicShare are people like us, people like Griff. It sounds sexy and hip and like a new way forward, in lots of ways. But people will start feeling good about thinking about all the reading they can do and they won’t actually do any of it. And all there’ll be will be VC funding and some nice offices, Svetlana said. Another reason to be glued to our device. Anderson was pleased, among all this, that Griff’s proclivities traveled before him. And so it’ll be one more trap, snaring us in the digital space, Svetlana said.

  They coasted through the streets of Chinatown. The people I work for, Svetlana said, don’t want this to continue. It doesn’t matter who they are, or how many of us it takes. There is a silent majority of us. A person wakes up in the morning and discovers—well, nothing particularly earth-shattering, just that they can’t continue with it any longer. Not with life, although that’s a part of it, but everything—the constant connection. Pinterest, Facebook. The fact that the first thing this person reaches for every morning is their cell phone because it has become their alarm clock, and then, because they’ve reached for it, they start checking things, before their bleary eyes have even adjusted to another morning—email, work email, various sites, Snapchats. In this way this person or persons feels that they are missing the advent of sunlight, the nape of their lover’s neck; the puffy-cheeked entry into daily existence. They sometimes forget to go to the bathroom first thing, as they had usually done, sometime in the distant past. They can hardly remember their old daily routines. Anderson did, in fact, know what the woman was talking about. He agreed, in a sort of begrudging way.

  I’m bringing you to meet some people, Svetlana said. They’ll have some requests to make of you. They’re fellow souls, you’ll see. You’ll feel right at home with them—she nodded at the paperback Anderson was carrying, like a talisman or spirit pole. We’ve taught ourselves to survive in this world, Svetlana said, but we want to change it. We want to pause it, is a way of thinking about it, she said. Suddenly there were the lights of Broadway, the empty but half-lit stores of the street’s southern section, mannequins gesticulating
in the moonlight, and before Anderson had much more time to process anything they had arrived, back at Bar Kaminuk where he’d started his then-uneventful night.

  Svetlana parked in a bus stop and they left the car. Don’t worry, she said, there won’t be any cops coming by. She moved confidently and methodically, Anderson noted, like a former athlete, or someone who had cottoned to manual labor late in life but well. The lights were off in the bar except for one, all the way in the back, and Svetlana and Anderson eased their way through the quiet door. Inside, the bartender was sitting more or less where Anderson had left him, still reading something or other, and next to the bartender stood Zoe.

  Hello Anderson, the bartender said with a smirk. Zoe! said Anderson. Are you involved in this, he said, and she gave a small nod without changing her expression. Svetlana reached over the bar to shake the bartender’s hand, and nodded at Zoe. Svetlana took her heavy-duty cell phone out of her pocket and waved it around once more—it beeped when she got to the bartender, and the bartender pulled his own phone out of his pocket and apologized. He got up and Anderson watched him go to the refrigerator behind the bar, where he tossed his phone in and closed it. Svetlana took a seat on the stool next to Zoe, and Anderson remained standing, as if at an interview.

  Zoe has been very helpful to us, Svetlana said, in monitoring FicShare. But soon she will be moving on. It’s all it takes, one woman or one man, some serious conviction—Anderson could tell that Svetlana was just starting to get warmed up. She seemed to have a nervous tic of continually rolling her sleeves up, even as they kept falling down. Anderson had noticed her doing it about four times already. And now the burden has come to you, she continued. It’s time to shake off your lethargy. Time for you to step out of your quotidian existence. You are old world but you are also new. You are a guardian but an innovator too. Time to decide to make something of yourself, for this and all ages. Very soon—

  But at that very moment the door of the bar slammed open. There was no high-end creaklessness now—it slammed and banged. Inside ran four hooded figures, dressed all in black—were they armed? Anderson couldn’t say. The lights had suddenly shut off again, and the room was plunged into darkness and delirium. Anderson felt a hand on the back of his neck, urging him down, coolly, softly, almost pleasantly, though urgently. As he crouched, heart banging away somewhere around his throat, he turned and saw that it was Zoe, and she had her usual grim expression on her face. He realized that, whatever else, he trusted her. He didn’t know why, but he realized now that he always had. The little grimace she made, unconsciously, while she was typing, in the office; the way she bit her bottom lip while she read something, almost whispering it out loud. They crouched together, and Anderson closed his eyes. He clutched the Dostoevsky to his chest.

  When he opened his eyes again, the lights had come back on. The sounds had stopped, and Svetlana and the bartender were leaned up against the bar, plastic zip cuffs around their wrists, dark material blindfolding their eyes. Zoe, Svetlana called. Anderson? Do they have you too? Zoe looked at Anderson and slowly shook her head. Anderson didn’t say anything. Two of the hooded figures took charge of the captives, and began to perp-walk them out the employee exit of the bar. As she went by, Anderson could smell a whiff of something off Svetlana’s body—sweat? Fear? But she went toward her fate stoically, her sleeves hanging loosely around her cuffed wrists.

  When the captives and the first two figures were gone, and the door shut softly behind them, the remaining figures removed their hoods, and Zoe stood Anderson up. Well done J, the first figure said. Anderson watched him carefully, as the shadow of the hood fell away from his face. It was Nikil.

  Good work, Zoe, Nikil said quietly. She never suspected. Zoe nodded almost imperceptibly. We’ve been very successful here tonight, said Nikil.

  As if on cue, the three leading members of FicShare looked to Anderson. Zoe’s bracing arm left Anderson’s back. Once again he had the feeling of being at an interview, or else a firing squad.

  This is bad business Anderson, James said. We wouldn’t want an employee who’s dissatisfied at the company. You know what I mean. He looked to Nikil, who agreed.

  Of course, continued James, we haven’t been entirely honest with you either. With many of our employees. We have certain connections with a larger start-up, one which doesn’t have a public name yet, but which very soon will be changing the way we think about lots of the regular aspects of our lives. James looked quite earnest, the way promotional material does.

  One vast connection, he continued. One large multiplier. One—

  All right J, Nikil said sharply. This is all quite beta.

  James came down to earth. We’d like for you to be a part of it. We value you at FicShare, we really do. The books, the stories—you keep us grounded. Will you stick with us a while longer? He, Nikil, and Zoe stared out at Anderson. Zoe held her hands motionless behind her back.

  Anderson considered. Should he answer truthfully? What he wanted was a steady job, a decent apartment. Room for his books, nicely constructed bookshelves, and most of all, time to read from them. He realized, deep down, that he didn’t mind office work, much as he complained about it. It was a routine for him, like life. It kept him connected to some larger role, the possibility for some great advancement. And, he figured, everyone else was doing it. Once, when he was just out of college, there’d been an opportunity for him to go to an island off the Finnish coast and work in a bookstore for eight months, room and board included, but he’d decided against it. His life was like that. He shrugged off the unusual, and the strange. These thoughts flashed through his mind, like end-of-life, like a montage, like the flip-book public art installment that the B train passed on the Brooklyn side of the river when going over the Manhattan Bridge. It was a painting, lit from behind, covered with strips of black metal, so that when the train sped past it, it jumped and buzzed almost like a movie. He knew it well—he could see it before him. Anderson closed his eyes. He felt like Griff, nearly weeping in the clean SoHo bar bathroom.

  I’ll see you all in the morning, Anderson said, pointedly. I don’t suppose I’ll recall much of what you might call a very dreamlike night. Nikil nodded swiftly, James pressed Anderson’s hand into a quick handshake. It’s for the best, Nikil said. Undoubtedly, answered Anderson.

  He was almost to the door when Zoe called out to him. Wait, she said. You forgot this. He turned around. It was the Dostoevsky. He took it from her grasp. Her face was impassive, grave. Without saying anything, he left the bar. Outside, he hailed a cab—the subway would have been a nightmare at this hour, whatever hour it was. He didn’t know, because he didn’t wear a watch anymore. He didn’t have his cell phone, so he couldn’t tell the time—nor could he call an Uber. But the taxis were out in full force on the vacant streets of lower Manhattan, even at that hour, shuttling from the hotspots of northern Brooklyn and the centers of commerce, industry, and culture on Wall Street, Midtown, Murray Hill. The taxi that picked Anderson up stank inside of old cigarettes and bad bread, and old, mildewed leather jackets. By the streetlights of the city that never sleeps around them Anderson opened his copy of Crime and Punishment, and began reading. St. Petersburg. Islands and canals. A policeman and a public park. Fallen women. He forgot to tell the driver to avoid the unpaved street just before his building. They bounced to the end. He paid the driver, walked the quick stairs to his apportioned room, closed the window that he’d left a little open, and settled into the armchair next to his bed to continue reading. By the time morning came, stark and resolute, Anderson had finished the book.

  Making Book

  by Dale Peck

  The sun beat down so hard it almost had a rhythm to it. I mean, the sun’s rays pounded against the top of my head like the bass track on a gangsta rap single, boom-boom, boom-boom, boom-boom, boom-boom, and I could almost believe that the angelic visions in front of my eyes were being forced out of my brain by the relentless heat: acres and acres of barely c
overed baking flesh, virtually motionless in the foreground but undulating in the distance, where thousands upon thousands of swimmers rolled in the surf like potatoes floating to the surface of a pot of boiling water; and it was just as I hit freeze frame that Ace Ferucci stuck his naked white ass in front of the camera, and, at the same time, my mom called my name. And I mean Ace’s ass in freeze frame was bad enough, but then my mom too.

  “Fuck off!” I yelled at the TV in general and at Ace’s ass in particular, but with the video paused and the television suddenly silent—there had been a bass track, courtesy of these two like totally obnoxious dudes who’d been next to us on the beach, but it disappeared when I paused the video and I could almost see my words carry past the television to my door, and then push on through to my mom on the top of the stairs.

  “Boo?” she called again, a funny, half-worried, half-peeved sort of undertone to her voice, and then she knocked on my door. It must’ve been about five, I guess, sometime after school but before their bridge game, and thank God—I mean thank God!—I hadn’t really had a chance to get into the video yet. “Boo, I wondered if I might . . .”

  She eased the door open, but by then I’d composed myself and was staring at the TV and trying to make my face look like, Ah, summer—which “summer” was a shot of Ace’s ass I barely had time to fast-forward past before my mom’s head appeared in the doorway. She held the doorknob in one hand and a drink in the other, and for a long time she just looked at the TV. Ace was gone, but in his place was this like totally stacked brunette, or, really, just her chest, which in context was even more incriminating than Ace’s ass. My mom looked at the TV, and then she looked at me on the bed with the pillow on my lap, and when I followed her eyes down I saw that I was holding the remote so hard my knuckles were white, and I dropped it like it’d burned me. “Boo,” my mom said. “Boo, could you come downstairs for a moment? Your father and I have something we’d like to discuss with you.”