Tony went back to the doors. The more he looked at it, the more it struck him that rather than looking like a touring car, designed to ferry the wealthy of yesteryear from national park to fashionable watering hole, it brought to mind some kind of utility vehicle. Like a mini fire-engine or something. Though... maybe that was just the color. Who the hell knew.
It was weird.
Suddenly remembering he had an order of food which would already be cooling on the counter in the taqueria, Tony took a last look and walked away.
He spent the next two days sending out further CVs and tweaking his brag site, which was supposed to showcase his coding skills but had developed an annoying bug -— creating an intermittent rendering fault that had been pointed out (rather smugly) by the only two companies who’d responded to his first tranche of submissions. The problem with code is once it’s been written it’s very hard to see past the way it presents. If it looks okay, and runs by the syntax checker without falling over, then you assume it must work. And in fact, it does work, on one level – but it won’t do what you wanted it to. “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” is a grammatical utterance. It just doesn’t mean anything. Tony’s site was clapping one-handed, and so nobody was hearing it.
Eventually he tracked down an error in a quick-and-dirty function he’d bolted on to massage user experience on IE9 — surprise, surprise — and fixed it. Then waited. His in-box failed to flood with job offers as a result.
In the meantime he fetched coffees from the Windmill on both mornings, and slowed his pace when walking past the building on the other side of East Cliff Drive. Now he knew about the car in the lobby it was relatively easy to spot during the daytime, too. So how come he hadn’t before? On the hundreds of occasions he’d strolled by to get a latte from Mary or Michael, or to head around the corner and down past the lagoon on a longer walk to the harbor (the gift shop there was the nearest place in the neighborhood to buy cigarettes), he’d never noticed it. Sitting at his desk, eyes closed, he’d found he could conjure up very accurate mental pictures of the taqueria, the mercado, the Last Resort Hair Salon, the Southwestern restaurant and the two motels that stood between the corner and the Windmill Cafe — right down to the color and typography of all of their signs.
Yet he’d never noticed the building on the other side, or even glanced at it long enough to clock the fact there was a car inside, for god’s sake.
Tony was well aware this was a trivial matter expanding to fill the mind of someone who wasn’t sufficiently busy in real life, but it still bugged him. Was it just that it was an exceptionally dull-looking building, and that trees and clouds or passing traffic had always proved more of a draw on his attention?
The second time he walked by, he noticed something else. He waited for the traffic to clear, and then jogged across the road to see.
Something had changed about the panel on the side of the steps that the man had been inspecting. It was closed but there was a sticker on it, a six inch long strip of tape. The tape was yellow, about an inch and a half wide, and had the word CAUTION on it in very small letters. It had been placed neatly so as to lay half on the panel and half on the area outside, sealing it.
And yet the word on the tape was really not large. Almost as if the person who’d put it there — the guy in the shorts, presumably — had wanted to recognize that there was a problem within, but in such a way that didn’t broadcast the news to anyone who wasn’t standing close up. Another technician, perhaps.
Abruptly irritated with himself, Tony stepped back. Who cared? Klara would be home in a few hours, expecting a more productive day from him than having sent out a few emails and fixing a brag site that shouldn’t have been broken in the first place.
He crossed over and walked up 14th, firmly putting the building out of his mind.
Klara got back home later than she said she would. He fixed a pasta meal, they watched a little television, and went to bed. She fell asleep quickly. She was busy at work - hence the lateness. He lay awake for a while, eyes closed, then gave up and opened them. Lying in the dark staring at the ceiling didn’t help, nor periods lying on both sides, and his stomach. Mind not tired enough, he supposed. After years of working too hard, coasting for day after day wasn’t getting him to where he was ready to check out. He assumed that’s what it was, anyway.
He gave it another half hour and then quietly got out of bed. He wandered along the corridor to the kitchen, gently closed the door to avoid making any noise, and made himself a cup of tea. He took this into the sitting room. It had always been his favorite room, partly because of the big, U-shaped sofa that went around one end. The house had been built in the 1940s by someone who looked like he’d learned his trade on boats. There was a lot of wood, many strange angles, and storage nooks and crannies everywhere. The entire ground floor was given over to a double garage and storage space, all under the control of their landlord. Everything else was on the second floor, including an expansive deck, the corner of which pointed off toward the junction between East Cliff and 14th and further reinforced the sensation of being on some kind of land-locked ship. Tony liked the elevation of the living space, which was rare in Live Oak. It conferred the feeling of being raised above the neighborhood, and not just in literal ways.
Now, standing with his drink in front of the long window, he realized it did something else. He opened the sliding door and stepped out onto the deck.
Yes.
You could see the top of the building from here.
How had he never noticed that before? The house was the fourth up from East Cliff Drive. The two houses in between were single story, and the motel on the corner only two story on the right-hand side. This meant that, above the trees, you could see the upper story of the SYSTEM SERVICES building.
There was a light on.
Tony knew there was something different about the building before realizing what it was. By the time his brain had processed the information, the light had gone out. Just like that. It was as if... it was almost as though someone had been watching, seen him notice the light, and extinguished it. Immediately.
But that made no sense. From this distance — it had to be eighty yards — he would have been nothing more than a blurry shape on the deck. His face might have been visible as a pale spot, but if someone had been indoors with the light on, they’d never have been able to make that out through the glass. Why would they do it, anyhow?
Though, while he was asking questions, why would someone be in the building at gone midnight anyway?
A cleaner? Maybe.
Seized by a sudden impulse, Tony hurried back indoors. He slipped his feet into the beach shoes by the door and pulled on his zip-up fleece. His pjs were dark blue. From a distance, no-one was going to know the difference, or care. In Live Oak people walked around looking more casual than this in the mid-afternoon.
He grabbed his keys and hurried down the stairs to the front door.
He stood at the corner for ten minutes, starting to feel both cold and foolish. The taqueria and mercado were long-closed, all the lights in the motel extinguished too. A few cars drifted by, but otherwise the corner was dead. Nobody came out of the building. No light went on. Nothing, basically, happened. At all.
He gave it a few more minutes and admitted to himself it was a bust. He was about to turn for home when he stopped, and thought what the heck.
Instead he walked down the block to the end of the ocean-side stretch of 14th. He’d discovered a half-empty pack of forgotten cigarettes and a book of matches in the side pocket of the fleece. He could sit on one of the benches on the low cliff that overlooked the cove. He’d done that any number of times in the mornings, but never in the middle of the night.
It was something different, and he still didn’t feel remotely like going to sleep.
He ambled down the block. All the lights in the houses he passed were off. It was like he was the only person awake in the whole town. At the end of the street he went thr
ough the gate that marked the back off as state park land, and walked down over the slope.
The beach below was deserted, of course. Because of parking restrictions it was locals-only most of the time, and this was, of course, the middle of the night. Tony headed to the nearer of the two benches, and sat. He looked right, toward the lighthouse at the harbor, the boardwalk, and the few lights that lined West Cliff a mile or two away. It was very quiet.
When he’d finished his cigarette he stayed a few minutes longer, finally starting to feel a little tired. He walked home, barely glancing at the building on the corner as he passed. There was nothing to see.
As he walked up the driveway toward the house, he was startled to see a figure up on the deck.
‘Hey,’ he said, quietly, not wanting to disturb the neighbors. He raised his hand. Klara didn’t wave back, but turned and disappeared from view.
Not very friendly, Tony thought.
He let himself into the house and went upstairs, half-expecting to find her in the kitchen. She wasn’t. He headed into the sitting room, but that was empty too. He took a mouthful of the tea he’d left, but it was cold.
He went through into the bedroom. The lights were off. Slightly irritated by now — so he’d got up in the night and gone for a walk, that wasn’t a crime, and shouldn’t she maybe have some kind of considerate inquiry to make about how her husband was? — he wasn’t very subtle about climbing back into bed.
Klara made a noise. It was a distinctive noise. The sound of a person who’d been fast asleep, disturbed, and gone straight back to the depths again.
Tony went still. ‘Klara?’
She grunted, barely, and turned on her side away from him. As she did to the counterpane moved enough to release a little waft of warm air, the kind of air that accretes around a sleeping body and holds it comfortable.
She was asleep. Genuinely asleep.
It could not have been her.
Tony was out on the deck when Klara left for work the next morning. He hadn’t asked about what happened. He hadn’t needed to. Over breakfast she’d said what a great night’s sleep she’d had, and how refreshed she felt. You don’t say that — at least, not without heavy irony, which hadn’t seemed present — if you’ve got up in the night to check where your husband is and then waited for him out in the cold, before huffily going back to bed.
Klara saw him up on the deck and waved as she climbed into her car. Tony watched her turn out onto the street and went back to his real reason for being there.
He had fallen asleep, eventually — but it took a long time. Certainly longer than it took to work out it was hard to imagine how someone could have got out of the house without Tony seeing them. He – Tony assumed it had to be a “he” — hadn’t vaulted down off the deck. The only other way out of the house, raised as it was, would be via the stairs Tony had entered by. Maybe, maybe, the person could have hidden in one of the other rooms, waited until Tony had gone through to the bedroom, and then slipped out. Hell of a high risk strategy, however. If he hadn’t been so convinced it was Klara out on the deck, he could have gone rampaging through the house, checking everywhere.
There was no way of knowing how he’d done it. There was no way of telling why the other thing was beating in Tony’s mind, either: a strange, dark certainty that the figure had something do to with the building he could see from the deck. The building on the corner.
There was no reason to think this except that he’d seen the figure right after going out in the night, after witnessing a light in one of the building’s upstairs rooms. That wasn’t a tight connection, he knew, but he had no other explanation for it. If one thing happens and then another thing happens... you draw lines. The question is whether the second thing was intended.
He stood on the deck another ten minutes, watching. From this angle he couldn’t see as far down as the portico or entrance, so had no way of knowing if anyone went in or out. The sun was up, too, so he couldn’t tell if any of the lights on the first story were on.
No way of knowing or telling anything.
He eventually went indoors and opened the laptop on the kitchen table. No replies to his CVs of yesterday, or the days before. He opened up another blank email and prepared to send a fifth or seventh tranche... he’d lost count.
But then he closed the machine instead, snatched up his keys, and left the house.
The owner of the Windmill Café was surprised to see him at half past nine in the morning. You’re early today, she said. Tony explained he was tiring of his schedule and mixing it up a little. Mary nodded sagely, and made his coffee. Mary knew it was not the place of a coffee shop proprietor to make judgments about how much free time some of her customers seemed to have on their hands.
Tony took his drink out onto the small terrace area by the road. This was screened from traffic, more or less, by a row of bushes. From a standing position you could look over them, however, and across to the building on the corner. You couldn’t see much from this angle, though. Along the front and both sides ran a neat and very well-tended strip of earth holding little plants and succulents and shrubs, not to mention a number of fairly large and recently-trimmed cypress trees. Needless to say, he had never seen anyone tending or trimming any of them. He hadn’t even noticed they were there.
He decided he was done looking from afar. He left the terrace, crossed the road, and headed quickly along to the building. Walked up the steps without hesitating and up to the glass doors. Realizing he felt short of breath, he took a deep one, and then entered.
The lobby was very cool, almost chill. The car/mini-truck/whatever was right there, looking even larger at close quarters. Tony knew they built such things bigger back then, when the technology was new and standard stylings and dimensions had yet to be determined, but still: it was massive. Intimidatingly so. The combination of colors and materials and contours should have been striking, and attractive, and theoretically they were... but it also looked like the kind of vehicle that, many decades ago, might have been used to come up slowly behind someone in the night. Or to chase them down.
There was a man behind the reception desk. He was wearing a charcoal-colored suit and tie, with a white shirt. His hair was dark and curly.
‘We’re aware of the problem,’ he said.
Tony blinked at him. ‘Huh?’
The man nodded. ‘We’re aware. Thank you.’ He looked back down at a piece of paper on his desk.
‘What do you... do here?’
The man did not answer. Tony felt uneasy, but not to the point of being incapacitated. He took a couple of steps away from the desk and toward a door halfway along the wall. It had a glass panel in its upper half. Presumably this led to the wing on that side. Perhaps he’d get a glimpse of what it was like through there, some sense of what people might be working at. He got just far enough to see a fluorescent-lit corridor, with a standard office-style cubicle off it.
The man at reception coughed.
When Tony looked around at him the man shook his head, barely. A tiny movement, to one side and then back. Tony realized the man was wearing dark glasses. Had he been wearing them before? He wasn’t sure.
How could he not be sure?
‘The repairman will be back this evening,’ the man said. ‘He has the part now.’
‘What... are you talking about?’
‘Thank you,’ the man said.
Tony just stood there.
‘Goodbye.’
Tony found himself back out on the sidewalk. He remembered getting there well enough — reaching out to the door, opening it, walking under the portico and down the steps. He just didn’t recall choosing to. He supposed it made sense, though. The man behind the desk clearly didn’t have anything else to say. Tony had no more questions to ask.
As he started up the sidewalk toward the corner he glanced at the panel on the side of the stairs.
The strip of tape was still there.
CAUTION
He tried to
work, in the sense of dispatching yet more emails. He even re-sent his CV to one of the companies who’d commented on the error on his site, pointing out that it was now fixed. The only reply he received that entire morning came from this person, saying yes, he could see that, but had such an error been committed on a site for one of their clients it could have cost tens of thousands of dollars in lost revenue. The email did not go on to say that they would keep Tony’s details on file.
At mid-day he went to the fridge and looked inside. There was food, but nothing that he wanted. He kept looking, convinced there must be something he couldn’t see: he’d bought most of the stuff, for god’s sake.
In the end he got so frustrated that he decided to get methodical on it. He wedged the fridge door open with a quart of milk and took every single thing out of the fridge and lay or stood it in rows. Bacon. Cheese, three types. Beer. Coconut water. Lettuce. Ranch dressing. Some kind of dumb low-fat sausage – that was Klara’s. Beets. Chard. Blah. Celery. Carrots. Blah. Onion. Garlic. Mayo. Cream cheese. Strawberries. Pine nuts.
It made sense. It was all stuff he ate, every day and all the time. So why didn’t it work? Why didn’t it do what it was supposed to? Why didn’t he want to eat it?
Everything You Need: Short Stories Page 8