by Ford Collins
“Hmm.”
“Soooo… Are you avoiding me, Lowell? You know it’s hard enough being a stalker nowadays, what with caller I.D. on every phone and you putting that second deadbolt on your front door. Give a girl a break, would ya? The other stalkers are starting to point and talk.”
“The second deadbolt’s just for show. I wanted you to feel like you’d accomplished something once you got in.”
“Aw, see? Now that’s just sweet. I knew I chose the right guy to haunt.”
Lowell’s rusty smile felt forced, and it retreated quickly.
“So, really then,” she went on. “You okay? You came up a little absent yesterday.”
“I actually had a pretty healthy bag of deliveries to take care of.”
“Uh-huh.” She rocked her weight to one leg and rested a balled fist on the raised hip.
“Don’t push me, lady. You know what I do for a living.”
“You’re one cold-hearted S.O.B., Lowell.”
“I prefer ‘calculating’ actually.”
“You would.”
He tucked his cell phone into a side pocket of the bag and shouldered the strap.
She moved squarely into his path and squinted an eye. “Whatcha doing tonight?”
“Brooding. Writing sad short stories and burning them when I’m done. Drinking vermouth. The usual.”
“You know, I had you pegged as more of a pipe bomb maker in your spare time. Guess you never really know a guy, huh?”
“You’re not much of a stalker, are you?”
“Got a bad feeling they’re going to tear up my card at the next meeting if I keep this up. Anyway, listen, I am going to eat Mediterranean food tonight. And as much as I absolutely looooove sitting alone and crying into a plate of baba ghanoush, I was thinking maybe you’d be up for it too. The eating more than the crying. But crying is good, don’t get me wrong. In fact, my therapist was just saying last session tha…”
“Okay.”
“Okay? Okay. Wait… Okay?”
“Okay.”
“Alright then. Persia’s?”
“Sounds good.”
“Yes it does. Can you be there at six?”
“I can.”
“So can I.”
“Perfect.” Lowell tipped a quick nod and passed Lauren on his way out of the mailroom.
She stepped aside and curtseyed. “Perfect.”
Lowell took the elevator alone to the lobby, plugging his headphones into his ears, and avoiding the main entrance by heading for the building’s back door.
He slid through the exit and turned left to face the alcove, where the garbage bags struggled onto each other’s shoulders for a last view of the free world before the man in the jumpsuit made his weekly visit and dragged them away to be buried or burned.
The flies were out in force, per usual, but were sluggish in flight. The spirals weren’t so frenzied. They almost appeared to be cutting figure-eight patterns in succession, one buzzing speck drawn to the rear of the next, the procession carrying on with funereal solemnity in respect for the mountains of narcotic refuse soon to be spirited away.
Lowell waved a slow goodbye to the lot of them and followed the path of the park down to Main Street.
Between the third and fourth deliveries on his morning route, Lowell swung by a coffee kiosk set up on the landing of a wide stairway connecting two nondescript office buildings. The barista was a woman in her early to mid-twenties. She was nondescript as well, excepting that she was split neatly in two from head to groin.
Her left half hopped from the register to the espresso machine after collecting Lowell’s money. Her movement was graceful considering her condition, Lowell thought. Her right half sat patiently in a plain wooden chair in the corner behind the counter.
An elderly gentleman clad in a long camel hair coat and black wool driver’s cap passed by the kiosk and waved at the woman. “G’mornin’ Ellie.”
Ellie’s right eye spun toward the man, and her left hand waved. “Good morning, Mister McHenry.”
Her enunciation was incredible for someone with each half of her mouth five feet away from the other.
Mr. McHenry yelled over his shoulder, “Be back around ten for my Americano, Ellie.”
“I’ll be here, Mister McHenry!” she yelled back, then turned to Lowell with a steaming cup in her left hand. “Here you go, sir.”
Lowell took the coffee from her and nodded. “Thank you.”
His morning circuit was nearly unexceptional, filled with routine deliveries and returned receipts, which Lowell dutifully tucked into his bag and moved along. One elevator smelled like burning flesh and clove. Another like formaldehyde. The rest were scentless.
The one thing that stood out to Lowell was an envelope he didn’t recall placing in the bag while loading up.
It didn’t have a delivery receipt, and was smaller than the standard long envelopes used by the firm. It was heavy and dense, as if it was packed with more paper than it had any business holding, and it felt soft, almost rubbery between his fingers.
The name and address on the face didn’t look familiar, and when Lowell tried to locate the recipient in a guidebook given out to all law firm couriers upon hire, he found nothing.
He’d never opened a delivery since becoming a messenger.
It had nothing to do with professional or legal obligations. He simply wasn’t interested in anything attorneys had to say.
Not having to do with their work, anyway. If one happened to stumble to his SUV after an evening of hard drinking, spouting off about the wife he left at home for his weekly hotel rendezvous with a paralegal or another attorney, this was fodder for his research.
Lowell felt a compulsion to open this envelope. He could have returned it to the firm and handed it to his supervisor to deal with. He could have, if the envelope hadn’t asked him not to.
It began mumbling as Lowell spun it in his hands, holding diagonally opposite corners in each middle finger. He stopped spinning it, removed his cap, and held the envelope to his ear to be sure he was hearing what he thought he was hearing.
He was.
The mass shifted to the upper edge, and pushed outward. Lowell peeled back from each corner of the envelope’s flaps, and the contents exhaled heavily.
“Thanks, son. I couldn’t breathe worth a damn in that thing.”
“How did you breathe while you were in my bag for the rest of the morning?”
“I didn’t need to, I was holding my breath.” It was still working hard to stop gasping.
“You should have said something sooner.”
“Don’t be a smart-mouth, kid. No need for that.” The voice suddenly sounded very much like Lowell’s high school gym teacher.
He felt a shot of panic in his back and neck before he collected himself. “No… No, I wasn’t.”
“Hmm. Okay, apology accepted, friend.”
“So, what… What were you doing in my bag?” Lowell leaned on a guardrail at the edge of a municipal parking lot between Broad Street and Main.
He held the envelope down in front of himself, but close to his face so he could hear it speak.
“I was waiting for you to open the damn flap so I could breathe! You gotta conserve energy if you expect to maintain conscience riding around in those things.”
“Consciousness.”
“What?”
“You said ‘conscience’.”
“I know what I said, you damn smart-mouth! What did I say about that?”
“Right.” Lowell bit his tongue to keep from laughing. The thing sounded in a bad enough mood as it was.
“You sass me again and we’ll see whether I have a conscience, young man!”
“Yes, sir.”
“That’s better. How’s that head of yours holding up?”
“Been talking to the mosquito?”
“Now what in the hell is that supposed to mean? Who in their right mind goes around talking to mosquitoes?”
“W
ell, she’s the only…”
“She? Jumpin’ James, son, how in the hell did you know it was a she? I… You know what? Never mind. I don’t want to know.” The envelope shuddered.
“Yes, sir.”
“Listen, Lowell, I need you to do me a big favor, if you would.”
“What can I do for you?”
“Drop me off in the lot behind the little bunch of shops right over by your house there.”
“Anyplace more specific than that? It’s a long parking lot.”
“You’ll know when you see it, son.”
Lowell shrugged and decided he had no good reason to not do it. “Fair enough. Will do.”
“Good man! Now do me another favor and leave those little flaps in the corners folded up so I can get some fresh air, would ya?”
“Sure thing.”
“Much appreciated, son! Wake me when we get to the lot.”
“I will.”
He made sure to leave the corners open as he placed the envelope back in his bag.
Lowell stood from his spot on the rail and walked back toward the office.
He wondered whether Mr. McHenry had been true to his word and returned at ten for a cup of Americano from half of Ellie.
“There’s something to be said for keeping promises,” Lowell said to no one.
[Twenty-Eight]
The remainder of Lowell’s workday slipped by rapidly.
Lowell kept the envelope tucked away in a side pocket of his messenger bag to allow the thing inside to breathe while staying out of sight.
He saw Lauren a couple more times, passing by her in the hallways and showing a labored grin, with no substantive conversation taking place.
He saw Eva standing by her desk, looking out over the office with a vacant expression and her hands hanging limply by her sides. Lowell wondered if she’d lost her mind, or just forgotten what she’d gotten up from her desk for, but he knew it meant nothing to him either way, and he continued on to his destination.
The other office messenger, Kevin Greer, bumped into Lowell in the mailroom as he was clearing out his delivery bin to sort and pack the envelopes for his run.
Kevin was large, maybe six-foot-four and pushing two hundred and seventy pounds, in his late twenties, and hopelessly addicted to caffeine and nicotine. Lowell had never seen him without a cup of coffee or extra large can of carbonated energy drink in his hand. He spoke quickly, sweat constantly, and jittered uncontrollably.
Within five seconds of stepping through the Central One Plaza doors for each messenger run, Kevin lit up and filled himself to the eyeballs with a massive tug of cigarette smoke. His teeth, eyes, and fingers were yellow. His hair was dyed black and pulled back into a pony tail, and he wore a chinstrap beard.
Lowell had never asked him about it, but he’d heard that Kevin lived in an apartment over his parents’ garage. He’d also heard that other than work and his apartment, Kevin only ever existed in a convenience shop around the corner from his home, or the video game store he passed on the way back to his suburban paradise.
“Oh, sorry dude.” Kevin jumped after realizing he’d stepped on a foot while backing up, and spun to see Lowell trying his best to keep from being flattened.
“It’s okay. Sorry for sneaking up on you.”
“No worries, dude. I gotta get my fat ass out of here. Huge run for some reason…” Kevin trailed off while looking at Lowell, shrugging his shoulders, and rolling his eyes.
Lowell got the sense that Kevin was leaving a door open for Lowell to walk through and ask if he could help him out by taking some of his deliveries off his hands.
“Yes. It’s been a busy day for me too.” Lowell stepped around Kevin and made a final scan of the bank of mailboxes to be sure he wasn’t leaving anything behind. He had no interest in making an end-of-day run and winding up late to Persia’s.
“Yeah. Alright, dude. See ya.” Kevin huffed and slung his bag over his head and onto his shoulder, snagged a cell phone from a charger by the door, and rumbled out to the elevators.
Lowell heard Kevin say “dick” as he was stepping through an open car door.
He roughly calculated Kevin’s life expectancy at somewhere in his mid-thirties. “Only a few more years of misery, ‘dude’.” He spoke to himself, just above a whisper.
“Then you can rot in the ground rather than above it.”
Minutes after Kevin left the office, Lowell exited the building’s front door for his second foray into the business district, took an immediate left, and headed onto the bridge crossing the Genesee.
He rested his forearms on the bridge’s iron railing, and looked down to find and lose dozens of white spirals on the leaden body’s surface below him.
The river was swollen, though the precipitation had been negligible over the previous week or so. It was as if it was rising up in anticipation of its engorgement with the coming snow.
Instead of its usual static shush, the river sounded to Lowell like a person gagging. He bent as far as he could over the railing to listen more closely. As he did, he noticed a length of black nylon strap looped over the upper curve of a decorative metal blade that jutted above the railing across the rest of the side wall.
Beyond that, the top of someone’s head bobbed and twisted, the scalp a bright red where exposed by the parting of greasy black sheets of hair. Plump hands the same red as the scalp clawed at the jutted chin, where it looked as if the strap from a bag much like Lowell’s was wrapped around the person’s neck.
It was Kevin. He must have fallen from the side of the bridge somehow and caught the strap around the railing and his head. It was choking him to death.
Lowell looked down at Crossroads Park and found no one. Likewise, nothing moved in the exit lane along the wall of a hotel on the river’s opposite side.
From what he could tell, only he had witnessed Kevin dangling and struggling.
He wondered, annoyed, if he would be stuck delivering Kevin’s run after they found his bag along with the body.
Chances were pretty slim, however, that they would find it early enough to contact Lowell and saddle him with the added work before he left for the day.
He pulled his cap down to keep the chill out of his ears and continued up Main Street to his first afternoon delivery.
[Twenty-Nine]
Lowell dropped off his phone and bag, and removed the envelope from the bag’s side pocket. The thing inside hadn’t moved or made any noise that Lowell had noticed since their initial conversation.
Lowell didn’t see Lauren again before leaving the office, but there were no notes on his desk or messages on his phone indicating plans had changed, so he would drop off the envelope wherever it was to go, and then swing by his apartment to clean up before walking the two blocks to Persia’s.
He walked up Main toward Clinton. Shortly before reaching the courtyard where he would turn south, he caught a glimpse of a darkness sliding quickly down the sidewalk in the opposite direction across Main.
Lowell turned to see Kevin running at top speed, which for him meant clocking in at a tick above walking lest he risk his heart exploding in his chest. He held his office phone in one hand and his personal phone in the other, and looked to be talking into both, or rather wheezing and coughing into both. He may have even been crying, Lowell couldn’t tell for sure.
Regardless, Lowell couldn’t have cared less.
Clinton eventually hit Court Street, which Lowell used to cut over to Chestnut. Chestnut turned into Monroe.
All along the way, he thought about his brother. He didn’t frame his consideration as positive or negative. He tried to remember the dream, the first contact he made with the boy, or rather the first contact the boy made with him. After all, it was his brother who had anticipated Lowell’s failure, either to reach the external solution on time or to find a significant solution within himself. It was his brother who had found him, face down in the mud and melting snow.
He struck Lowell as a hap
py child. The boy wanted nothing more than to protect Lowell, to comfort him. Lowell had given him nothing in return. He wasn’t sure the boy wanted or needed anything in return.
The envelope jerked violently in his hand, almost breaking free from his grip. He lifted it up to examine the torn corners of the flaps to be sure there were still breathing holes for the feisty contents. It calmed as it neared Lowell’s face.
“Son, you shouldn’t be talking about such things. It’s not healthy.”
“I wasn’t talking about anything. I wasn’t talking at all.”
“Son, just… Just listen to me, will ya? You seem like a pretty sharp guy. The kind of fella who doesn’t take anything on blind faith. But right now, you’ve gotta take me on my word when I tell you that you can’t be talking about things like that. It can only bring you pain, son.”
Lowell cocked his head clockwise slightly and held the envelope more firmly. “All faith is blind. That’s what makes it faith. And I have no use for it. I live in a world saturated with data to be collected and processed with every sensory function. Keep your faith for the blind and deaf.”
The envelope contents sighed, then vibrated with a guttural moan. “Suit yourself, son. I’m just trying to help.”
They were nearing the parking lot where the thing had asked to be taken. Nothing jumped out at Lowell at first glance. A handful of cars were scattered around. A garbage truck idled near the Oxford Street entrance where Lowell stood. A teenager was locking her bicycle up to a sign post behind the truck.
But then he saw a small, handwritten cardboard sign that read “Those who haven’t blind faith will stand witness to the downfall of man.” The envelope tugged in the direction of a coffee can on the pavement next to the sign.
Lowell held the envelope up and ripped open the flap, revealing a small fleshy lump with two flat, paddle-like protrusions that approximated an arm on either of the lump’s sides, and a fully formed face short eyes.
“I hoped you’d know it when you saw it, ’cause I sure as hell can’t see a thing! Now don’t you feel like a fool for telling me to keep my faith for the blind? What else have I got if I haven’t got faith, son?”