We Are Here

by Michael Marshall

  He slipped in through the street door. It was ajar, as often in the mornings, in a vain attempt to clear the stale, secondhand air inside, a stealthy, underhand odor that seeped up from the crumbling building’s foundation. The area beyond was empty, cavernous, and dark, a wide central space with black-painted walls shading off into low-ceilinged, shadowy little corridors and booths where the small hours would find the bar’s racier patrons taking drugs and advantage of one another.

  Golzen walked across this, past the bar along the right-hand wall, and into the office in the back. Reinhart was sitting behind his desk. The space was otherwise empty. No filing cabinets, no computer, no pictures on the wall. No second chair, even. Just a boxy old 1970s-style phone, positioned to line up neatly with the corners of the desk. As always, Reinhart was wearing a coat, as if he’d recently arrived or would be leaving almost immediately. He was watching the door as Golzen entered, as though waiting for him.

  He didn’t wait for Golzen to speak. If you needed that kind of fluff, you did business with someone else—the problem being, so far as Golzen knew (and his contacts were indeed good, and situated far and wide), there was no one else working this game in the entire city. It was Reinhart or nobody.

  “Did you talk to him?”

  “I tried.”

  “The fuck is up with that guy?”

  Golzen considered his response. Idealists who cleave to different ideals seldom mix well. His view was that Maj was unpredictable, full of himself, and basically an asshole. Moreover, a dangerously volatile asshole. He’d expressed this opinion more than once. Reinhart evidently saw something else in the guy, however, and wouldn’t let the matter drop. “He learned at Lonely Clive’s knee.”

  Reinhart grunted, irritable and dismissive combined. Golzen knew the man got what he’d meant—some of it, at least. Reinhart had taken the trouble to understand the world inhabited by the people he now did business with. He knew Golzen meant that when Maj arrived in the city he’d been taken under the wing of a member of the old guard—the ones sometimes called the Gathered, before the term became loosely applied to all of them. Originally it had referred to a cabal of friends who’d started introducing structures and systems into their lives. The Jesuits declared that if you gave them a boy, they’d give you the man. It had been the same with the Gathered, or the few that were left. The Scattered would be a better name now. They’d done good in the way back, for sure, dominating the scene for fifty years or more—but had been fading in authority even before Reinhart arrived. It had happened much faster since, and good riddance to them. They’d never listened to Golzen’s ideas either.

  “Keep on it,” Reinhart said. His hair was cropped short and the single bulb above caught the top of his hard, square head. “Get your buddies to stick to him, too. Like glue. Any sign of an angle, tell them to work it. Hard.”

  “Okay.”

  Reinhart smiled. It was pitch perfect as a coordinated movement of muscles, but once you got to know the guy, his ability to do this only made him even more unnerving. “Don’t worry—you’ll always be my number one. I’d simply prefer to have that guy inside the tent pissing out, instead of the other way around. Get it?”

  Golzen shrugged. Talk of Maj bored him. “Sure.”

  “Good. Because we’re getting close, my friend.”

  No longer remotely bored, Golzen looked up. “For real?”

  “The time for change is upon us.”

  Golzen felt his stomach flip. “How soon?”

  Reinhart closed his eyes, as if listening to something beyond the hearing of normal men, perhaps simply the dark workings of his own mind. “I don’t know. But soon. Maybe even within the week.”

  He opened his eyes. “Put out a broadcast to the chosen. Encourage readiness.”

  “Saying … ?”

  “I’ll leave that to you. Just hold the date. There is no date yet, but … hold it anyway.”

  Golzen grinned. “You got it.”

  “And bring me fresh blood. I’m going to lose some of my best stealers on this. We need replacements in training before I can open the door to Perfect and let us walk the road to our brave new world.”

  “I’m on it.”

  “Not while you’re standing here.”

  Golzen walked quickly out through the bar and onto the street. He already had ideas for friends to turn, clueless wanderers to bring into the fold: people who could learn to do what he and the others had been doing for Reinhart, while the chosen left on a mission Golzen had been preparing (and advocating and prophesying) for years. He had no problem with performing this task for Reinhart. Relished the prospect, in fact. He’d tell his buddies to sniff harder around Maj, too, if that’s what Reinhart wanted. Why not? It wouldn’t be much longer that he had to work with the man.

  Golzen was built to hold impulses in check, most of the time. He’d been very patient, working every opportunity to bind the other eleven of the chosen to him through the treats and advantages he’d gained for them. The relationship between him and Reinhart had been very useful in this, symbiotic.

  But such relationships end.

  Chapter 9

  As he entered Roast Me, David confirmed—with a sinking feeling—that Talia was working the counter. He considered turning around, but not seriously.

  “Hey, Norman,” she hollered, as she cranked through the orders of those ahead of him in line.

  He sighed. Yesterday it had been “Ernest.” Couple days before that, “F. Scott.” The previous week they’d been more contemporary—Richard, Don, and Jonathan (two or three guys she could have been shooting for with that last, the handle of choice for today’s nascent Great American Novelist). She evidently believed she’d found a rich seam of comedy and was determined to mine it out.

  And that was okay. He’d always liked Talia, a big, cheerful woman in her fifties who cussed freely and had been holding down the Gaggia in the town’s only coffee shop since it opened. Very occasionally they let Dylan have a turn for light relief, but basically if you wanted a latte in Rockbridge, Talia was the go-to gal. She was fiercely resistant to the term “barista” and happy to remain—as she was prone to tell their rare, easily intimidated tourists—just “the fat chick who makes the fucking coffee.”

  When David had been working in an office up the street he’d often passed the time of day with Talia, content that in Rockbridge everyone knew everybody else along with a fair portion of their business. He was aware that Talia lived with nine cats in a trailer on the other side of town near the creek, was long-term single but had once been the lover of a man called Ed who’d died under tragic circumstances, and that she possessed a strong creative urge, manifest in prolific journaling and collage-making and a vast novel of epic fantasy upon which she’d been working for at least five years.

  And therein lay the problem.

  While he’d been holding down a day job David had been happy to shoot the breeze with Talia. They’d been hobbyists, engaged in the same struggle. Since he got his deal, things had changed. Talia seemed to believe David had breached a citadel—like one of the characters in her forever-in-progress novel, perhaps, a book David really, really did not want to read—therein defeating the dragon who had guarded the How To Get Published Spell. Instead of something they could enjoy gossiping about, it had become a matter on which Talia wanted clues. She wanted to be sold the magic potion that put you onto the bestseller lists forever and stopped people from seeing you as just that big, noisy woman who had way too many cats.

  David would have given her the secret if he knew. He was not a selfish man. The problem was he didn’t have a clue what it was, and on mornings like this he almost wished he were back where he had been six months ago.

  “So!” Talia bellowed, hands already in motion toward his customary drink. Her tone was partly due to the coffee machine doing something hectic, but mainly because she habitually addressed people as if across a field and against a heavy wind. “How many of those bastards you caught in
your net today?”

  David shrugged mysteriously. He knew Talia would interpret this as coyness over how many words he’d nonchalantly hammered out that morning, instead of realizing it meant None. No words at all.

  She laughed raucously. “You dog.”

  They chatted, Talia filling him on some “consultant” she’d met on an Internet forum and passing on the advice he’d granted her, which—as far as David could tell—was total nonsense. When she told him, in hushed tones and all seriousness, that the guy had revealed it was best not to sign submission letters on the grounds publishers employed teams of graphologists to divine the worth of your manuscript from tells in your signature, he had to cough to cover a laugh—a desire that quickly faded when it became clear this asshole had gotten Talia to PayPal him a hundred bucks before he handed up this and other pearls of wisdom.

  “You know what, Tal?” he said. “I’m not sure about that. Can’t see them doing that when it’d be simpler to get an intern to flip through the manuscript.”

  Talia looked at him. “Could be.”

  David wasn’t sure she meant it. It seemed to him she might actually be saying, Yeah, and what do you care, big shot? You’ve already got it made.

  But the moment passed, and David realized that envy was something he might have to get used to. In time, that seemed possible. The problem was going to be convincing himself he deserved it.

  He’d been intending to take the drink home to consume virtuously at his desk, but as he turned from the counter he realized he couldn’t face it and headed to a table instead. He’d carried a notebook all the time since he was thirteen years old. He could sit and think and jot bon mots. Be that kind of writer. Live the lifestyle.

  Right. Except it turned out the lifestyle … kind of sucked. He didn’t mind spending every day by himself. He’d always been a solitary person (or, as his father had once put it—to his face and in public—“a total loner geek”). Since giving up his job, however, he’d written fifteen pages all told. When he’d been writing at the end of eight hours of wage slavery that had seemed okay. As the product of fifty full days’ labor, it was not.

  There was another problem, too.

  What he’d written wasn’t any good.

  His first novel had been about someone rather like David. An everyman forging a life in a small town, blessed with big dreams and a bigger heart. The raw material had come easy, but it had taken two years and seven drafts to make it feel like he’d written it. The characters were well drawn and mildly interesting things happened to them and there was a crisis that got semiresolved and some people lived happily ever after while others did not. Nobody was expecting it to storm the bestseller lists when it came out in six months’ time, but it was the kind of book that genteel reading groups might take to and David’s editor was confident it would get good word of mouth. It had a chance, in other words.

  It had also, unfortunately, said just about all David had to say about what it was like to be David.

  The publishers wanted another. David wasn’t sure he had one, and the last month had done nothing to convince him otherwise. He’d started and scrapped three story lines already. It seemed possible that he could keep coming up with ideas and pushing them around the screen before abandoning them … for the rest of his life.

  Which was why he was here, in the coffeehouse, trying to do something else. It wasn’t working. Like their increasingly quiet and desperate attempts to get pregnant, there seemed to be some kind of block. Something invisible but real. Something they couldn’t get past. Something in the way.

  He turned from his notebook—to which he hadn’t added a word—and looked out the window, summoning up the energy to go home.

  Outside, people wandered up and down. Some seemed like they had pressing goals, others like leaves being blown nowhere in particular. It seemed for a moment like there was someone on the opposite side of the street, looking at the coffeehouse, but then he or she was gone.

  “How’s it going? Really?”

  Talia had appeared on the other side of his table. She seemed diminished when not behind the counter.

  “Not great.”

  She sat, plunking her big elbows down and supporting her chubby face in her hands. “Must be tough, huh?”

  David couldn’t tell how much irony this carried. “What do you mean?”

  “Dreaming dreams is easy. Living them, not so much. That’s why they’re called ‘dreams’ instead of ‘lives.’ ”

  “Nice. I may write that down.”

  “Check the copyright position. Think I heard it in a country-and-western song, which is how the eternal truths are most often revealed.” She smiled. “You’ll get there, David. You done it once, you can do it again.”

  “Got proof?”

  “I feel it in my bones. And I got heavy bones.”

  There was a loud clattering, and they turned to see the door to the coffee shop had swung open by itself. They stared at it together, and laughed.

  “Huh,” David said, getting up to close the door. “Doesn’t even look that windy out there.”

  Talia looked enthused. “That reminds me! You know George Lofland, right?”

  “Works at Bedloe’s? Not really. By sight.”

  “Well, he was in here at the crack of dawn, like always—that guy actually drinks too much coffee—but he looked a little whacked, so I asked if he was okay.”

  “And?”

  “And so early yesterday evening he’s driving back from his mother’s on the other side of Libertyville—she’s rocking Alzheimer’s big-time—and he’s coming home through the woods and he sees this guy by the road. It’s cold and windy with a pissy little drizzle on top and George decides to take pity on the asshole. He pulls over, asks where he’s going. The guy says Rockbridge and George tells him to hop in, but the passenger seat is full of work files so he should get in the back if he doesn’t mind. George drives on and they talk about this and that, though not much—George ain’t no great talker when he’s not selling something, never has been—but then he pulls over on the street here to let the guy out … and guess what?”

  “I have no idea.”

  Talia leaned forward. “He wasn’t there.”

  David laughed. “What?”

  “For real, and like, O-M-fucking-G. George says, ‘Okay, here we are’—there’s no reply. He looks around and … dum dum DUM: the backseat’s empty, dude. He jumps out of the car and goes around to check. But there’s no one there.” She sat back and folded her arms. “Freaky, no?”

  “But … you realize that’s a classic FOAF story, right?”

  “FOAF? WTF?”

  “Stands for ‘friend of a friend.’ As in ‘This weird thing happened to me, well, not to me, actually, but to a friend … In fact, it wasn’t even a friend. It happened to the friend of a friend of mine. But it’s totally true and …’ and so on. It’s a way of making a story seem real without taking responsibility for it.”

  “Gotcha,” Talia said. “Though, like I said, this actually happened to George, or so he says.”

  “But I don’t know George,” David said, “so … he’s a friend of a friend, to me.”

  Talia worked this through in her head, and smiled—a dazzler that took off thirty years. “I see what you done there, smart boy. Guess that’s why you get paid the big bucks.”

  David spread his hands in mock self-appreciation. “When genius strikes.”

  “Uh-huh. So why don’t you take those smarts and go home and do some actual work?”

  David laughed. “Good advice, as always.”

  “Right. It’s on account of me being so fucking wise. Now push off. It’s easier for me to steal cake if there’s only Dylan around.”

  Just before he opened the door, David turned back. “Talia,” he said. He hesitated. “Your novel?”

  “You want to help me set fire to it? I got matches.”

  “It’s not like I know much, but if you wanted me to take a look … I’d be glad t
o. For what it’s worth.”

  Talia blinked. Never mind losing thirty years; suddenly she looked about fifteen. “Oh, David, that would be so cool. I’ll e-mail it to you tonight, soon as I get home. I know there’s a lot of work to do on it, but … It would mean a lot to me, really.”

  “Can’t guarantee how quickly I can get back to you, is the only thing.”

  “Oh, I understand, totally. And I won’t bug you about it. I promise. David, that’s so kind. Thank you.”

  He nodded, feeling shy. “What are friends for?”

  He walked home knowing he was going to regret the gesture but telling himself you had to pay it forward or sideways or whatever the hell it was. He owed Talia for picking up his mood, not least because the old chestnut of the phantom hitchhiker was working at him, becoming an itch in the hard-to-define area in the back of his brain from which the ideas came (when and if they did).

  He went straight up to the bedroom that had been designated his study. As he settled at his desk, the phone rang. He grabbed the handset while reaching for the keyboard. Once something started working at him he had to start typing it right now, or it would fly away.

  “Yes?”

  Nobody said anything. “Miller house,” David said irritably. There was silence; then he heard a noise down the line. It was quiet, as if coming from a long way away. “Can you hear me?”

  Silence, then a distant, muttered sound that might have been words, but was impossible to make out. There was something about the tone that did not sound friendly.

  David put the phone down. If it was important they’d call back or try his cell, and either way he didn’t care.

  He started typing, slowly at first, and then faster, and the next few hours disappeared to wherever they go when the page opens up like a six-lane highway, for once.