“I miss the posters,” Darius said. “I liked to look at the faces. You wonder about their stories—why people do the things they do.”
The guy seemed to nod. Or maybe he was just stretching his neck.
It was hot in there, the boiler swamping the windows along the street, turning April into August. There was nothing to see outside but the boarded-up courthouse across the street.
“I remember when mine were that small.” Darius nodded at the diaper box, the little white baby blindfolded by a strip of brown packing tape.
The Hispanic guy was already turning back toward the front of the line.
“How old’s yours?” Darius said.
“My what?” the guy said sideways.
“Your baby.”
“I don’t have a baby.”
“The box,” Darius said. “I thought—”
“It’s just a box.”
The line still hadn’t moved. Everyone ahead of them, it was like they’d never been in a post office before, had no idea what one was for. The two clerks looked as though they’d been startled awake from some deep, traumatic dream.
Through the condensation on the glass, the old courthouse across the street was a glistening ruin. Darius and Sylvia had gotten their marriage license there. By the looks of the place, that must have been a century ago. Really sixteen years, Sylvia just pregnant with Nina. But in that time there’d been what the city called a “streamlining of services,” by which they seemed to mean injecting an atmosphere of punishment into every department of the government, the post office included. The old courthouse was beautiful but too expensive to maintain. Or so they said. A vine had climbed halfway up the flagpole.
“I was listening to the radio the other day,” Darius said, drifting a bit closer to the Hispanic guy. “I heard them talking about turning it all into farmland.”
One of the post office clerks had wandered off, leaving a confused old woman at the counter clutching what looked like a sock full of coins. The Hispanic guy dropped his heavy package to the floor.
“All of it,” Darius said. “The whole city. Tear it all down.”
Every couple of months it was something new, some grand plan to bring the city back from the brink. Artists were going to save it, filling empty warehouses with ceramics and easels. Or urban hipsters would come, spawning microbreweries and coffee shops. Or all the empty factories would be converted to make solar panels. Or engines that ran on cow manure. Or the entire city would become a post-apocalyptic film set, permanently on loan to Hollywood. Or maybe a Saudi prince would turn the place into his personal amusement park.
But a farm! Steam-shovel up the courthouse, till the lawn around the flagpole. And plant what, exactly? Acres of corn just off the interstate?
The line shuffled forward. The Hispanic guy toed the diaper box a few inches ahead. “Fuck it,” he said, gesturing toward the courthouse. He’d seen where Darius was looking after all. “Why not?”
From up front came the shriek of a tape gun.
“Are you going to become a farmer?” Darius said.
“It’s just going to waste.”
So what, put the city in a time machine and pretend the whole last century never happened? Even the people on the radio hadn’t been entirely serious, pointing out all of kinds of obstacles. “For one thing,” Darius said, “they’d have to tear everything down first.”
The Hispanic guy raised his paint-splattered boot and rested it on top of the diaper box, using the baby’s head as a footstool. “They tear stuff down every day.”
“Most of what’s left,” Darius said, remembering another piece of what he’d heard, “they don’t know who owns it. They can’t tear down what’s not theirs.”
“People are always burning shit down. They do it for fun.”
He wasn’t wrong. Kids did it, drunks did it. For a gallon of gas, it was cheap entertainment. Scavengers did it, too, trying to get to valuable scrap hidden in walls. The burned-out shells stayed there forever, until the rain and the snow brought them down. But that was criminals. The city couldn’t go around setting things on fire.
“And it’s expensive,” Darius said. They’d mentioned a number on the radio, the price tag a crazy fortune.
At the front of the line, an old man was flipping through the plastic pages of a binder—slowly, as if the stamps between the sheaths were pictures of old friends.
“It doesn’t have to be.” The guy mimed pressing down on a dynamite detonator like Wile E. Coyote.
Darius tried to chuckle. Look, he wanted to say, we’re only joking. But no one else in line was paying attention.
“If they want a farm,” Darius said, “they’d have to get rid of us, too.” And he pressed down on his own imaginary detonator to make his point. “I don’t know about you,” he said, “I’m not going anywhere.”
“You have a family?” the guy said.
Darius nodded.
The guy pointed back to the abandoned courthouse. “Where’s the future in that?”
The old man had finally picked out his stamps. The line edged forward. But the Hispanic guy remained where he was, the diaper box at rest between his feet. He extended his hand.
“Michael Boni.” The man’s fingers were discolored with what looked like cherry stain.
“Darius.”
“The farm,” Michael Boni said. “It’s a pipe dream.”
“I was just talking,” Darius said.
“That’s all anyone ever does.” Michael Boni lifted his diaper box. “But you’re right.”
For a long moment, Darius stared at him, wanting to agree but unsure what he’d be agreeing to.
“A clean slate,” Michael Boni said. “How else are you going to start over?”
Was that what Darius had said? They didn’t sound like his words. But the way Michael Boni spoke them, no hint of doubt, no uncertainty, made Darius proud to claim them as his own.
Darius had to wait another twenty minutes before a washer freed up at the Laundromat. And then, of course, the bus was running late. With all the stops, it took three-quarters of an hour to get across town; the only decent grocery store was miles away. Darius knew he was gambling with the sheets. The woman in the fuchsia stretch pants had said she’d watch them, but who knew if they’d still be in the dryer when he got back? He had only enough time to race from aisle to aisle, filling the cart almost without looking. He grabbed whatever seemed familiar, whatever he remembered having gotten last time.
Half an hour later Darius was stumbling down the narrow aisle of the bus, hoisting the plastic shopping bags as high as he could. But they were heavy, and he couldn’t seem to keep them from banging against the backs of the seats. Sorry, he said, sorry. Sorry sorry. The passengers sitting by the aisle bent toward the windows as he passed. He flopped down, groaning like an old man, into the second-to-last seat. Around himself he built a fortress of groceries, which he spent the next forty-five minutes struggling to keep from falling to the floor.
“You’re late,” Michael Boni said.
Darius slumped down beside him on the marble bench. It was twenty minutes after six, and he felt as if he’d been sitting all day, somehow without a single moment’s rest. He tossed back his head, taking in the columns of mirrored windows hovering above him.
“And you look like a tourist,” Michael Boni said.
They sat in the evening shadow of the HSI Building, the sun setting at their backs. No matter how many times Darius looked at the tower, he couldn’t understand how anything could be so big and yet stand so effortlessly.
“It’s what a city should look like,” he said. The whole city, not just a few square blocks, what passed here for a business district. The plaza was immaculate. In the flower bed beside the bench, even the dirt was tidy, the soil so deeply and evenly black, it appeared to have been painted. The chrysanthemums were all the exact same height. From down here it was impossible to tell that nearly a third of the building’s floors were vacant.
At this hour, everything was shutting down. The parking ramps and streets were choked with cars waiting to get on the interstate, out toward the suburbs.
“They can’t get out of here fast enough,” Michael Boni said.
Darius reached out to pick up a straw wrapper from the flower bed.
“What are we?” Michael Boni said. “The ladies’ auxiliary?”
The sawdust in Michael Boni’s hair seemed to sparkle in the day’s remaining light. He leaned in closer to Darius. “We can’t meet here any more.”
Since that day at the post office two weeks ago, Darius and Michael Boni had met here five times, always just before the start of Darius’s shift.
Michael Boni pointed at three men in suits who’d just pushed through the revolving door. “We’re like foxes in a henhouse.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’ve been looking through those books,” Michael Boni said. “I’ve made a list of what we need. But we can’t talk about it here.”
“Why?”
“It’s too dangerous.”
Michael Boni gestured over Darius’s shoulder. Over there was a second tower, with a second plaza, virtually identical to their own. An old man was rising from one of the benches.
“Watch,” Michael Boni said.
As the old man moved toward them, Darius saw he was wearing dark glasses and a brown straw hat, carrying a blind person’s cane. At the crosswalk, the old man stopped, standing with four others, men and women in business suits. The old man was saying something, talking into the air. A businessman in a gray flannel suit reached out and let the old man take his arm. The light changed, and the five of them started across.
“Watch carefully,” Michael Boni said.
Darius felt he must be missing something. It took just a minute for the men to reach the other side. When they did, the old blind guy offered thanks, bowing and waving goodbye. On his own again, the blind guy navigated his way to a bench not far from where Michael Boni and Darius were sitting.
“Did you see it?” Michael Boni said.
“See what?”
“The way he pocketed the guy’s wallet. The blind guy.”
Darius glanced at Michael Boni, expecting to see he was joking.
“I watched him do the same thing twenty minutes ago,” Michael Boni said. “I was the only one who noticed it.”
Darius saw no point in arguing over something he hadn’t seen.
“That’s what I’m talking about.” Michael Boni leaned in, lowering his voice. “There might be someone here saying the same thing about us, watching us every day.”
“But we haven’t done anything,” Darius said. And he was sure no one had ever noticed them. Darius was hardly the only black man in a uniform. And Michael Boni wasn’t the only Hispanic guy in stained jeans.
“What do you think we’re doing?” Michael Boni said. “Just shooting the shit?”
“I’m just saying, we haven’t done anything. Not yet.”
“Don’t think I’m not keeping an eye on you, too,” Michael Boni said.
Darius pushed the straw wrapper deeper down into his pocket. “Fine,” he said. “We’ll be more careful.”
Michael Boni turned away, his eyes falling once again upon the old man with the cane. He seemed serious about the dangers the blind man represented. But more than that, Michael Boni seemed pleased by what the blind man had done.
§
In the five months since he’d been assigned the night shift at HSI, Darius had never faced a security breach more serious than a drunk setting up camp in the doorway. After six o’clock, there was never more than a handful of people left. Every night, from the booth in the lobby, he watched the stragglers trickle out, a few each hour until, by eight or nine—ten at the latest—the last of them had gone. It was always the same people.
That night, like almost every night, the last to leave was Mrs. Freeman, from the third floor. Even before he knew her title, Darius could tell she was someone important. She was in her late sixties, and she had a leisurely way of crossing the lobby from the bank of elevators, as if she had nothing to prove, no reason to hurry. Maybe no one was waiting for her at home. It made him sad to think so.
“It’s all yours, Darius,” she said, pausing at the booth, tossing him an imaginary set of keys.
He caught them midair, as always. “We’ll get it spic ’n’ span,” he said. “A fresh coat of wax.”
She raised her eyes toward the high ceiling. “I don’t know how you can stand all this quiet.”
“The girls get here,” Darius said, “and I drive them crazy, talking their ears off.”
“You’re a bad influence.”
He smiled.
“Well,” Mrs. Freeman said, giving him a wave. “Goodnight.”
Outside in the plaza, she opened her umbrella. Darius hadn’t realized it had started to rain.
At eight, his partner, Carl, arrived, toting sixty-four ounces of radioactive pop. Darius poured himself a cup of lukewarm coffee. Carl flipped through a magazine, page after glossy page of sports cars, posed like centerfolds.
“Did I ever tell you my uncle used to build Vettes?” Carl said, holding up the magazine for Darius to see.
The thing in the photo looked more like a flying saucer than a car.
“Ever drive one?” Darius said.
“So fast, bugs vaporize on the windshield.”
“Is that something you need?”
“What’s need got to do with it?” Carl turned the page and did a double take at a little red convertible. “Get your boy one of these,” he said. “Zero to pussy in three point one seconds.”
Darius’s coffee had grown cold. “Carjacked in three point two.”
At nine, Darius had his first break. He walked to the far side of the lobby, where he could have some privacy. He called Sylvia. She was already in bed.
“Thanks for doing the shopping,” she said. “Did you wash the sheets, too?”
“I spilled coffee,” he said. “Sorry.”
“They feel nice.”
Darius asked about the kids, about her day at work, about everything that crossed his mind, but none of it helped to distract him from what he’d done that morning, what he’d promised himself he’d never do again.
His voice nearly failed him when it was time to say goodbye. “I love you.”
She said, “I love you, too.”
Why wasn’t that enough?
By the time his break was over, the cleaning women had settled in on their floors and commenced their work. Darius began his rounds. It was exercise of sorts, and talking to the women while they cleaned made the time go a little faster. But then at midnight, when it was time for Carl’s break, Darius had to return to the booth and the quiet tedium of the security monitors.
By midnight, Darius knew, Sylvia was long asleep. Shawn and Nina, too. And then there was Michael Boni. What would he be doing? He probably never slept. Darius didn’t know where he lived, but he imagined him in a narrow room, on a bare mattress, a pile of books on an unsteady side table. There’d be no carpet or rugs. The paint would be yellowed and peeling. Windows? Maybe a small one. Michael Boni would be sitting on the bed with his back to the wall. No television. No radio. He’d be smoking. Did he smoke? Darius had never seen him smoke, but it seemed likely. Michael Boni would be staring at the peeling walls and plotting.
Some of the facts of Michael Boni’s life might still have been hazy, but what Darius knew for sure was that his new partner was a man of absolutes. Their chance meeting in the post office, their rendezvous downtown, their trip to the bookstore to see what they could learn—all of it confirmed his first impression, that once Michael Boni made up his mind, there was no going back. For Darius, there was something irresistible in Michael Boni’s clarity, and it pleased him that it had been his own idea that Michael Boni had latched on to. A clean slate. They could start over, fresh.
It was midnight, and Violet would be getting into be
d. She slept in the nude, he imagined. Darius had no way of knowing for sure. They’d never spent a night together. Was there a good reason for sleeping with a girl just three years older than his daughter? There was not, though there were plenty of bad ones. Did Sylvia deserve better? She did. So who was he to be sitting here supervising the cleaning women, dusting and vacuuming and polishing, making sure they didn’t try to sneak home with a roll of stolen toilet paper?
He’d made a mess of things. With Sylvia, with Violet. He’d known this for months, since the first time he’d let Violet into his bed. And yet still the affair continued, because he’d been too weak to make it stop. But now he had Michael Boni to show him how to follow through.
No more weakness.
A clean slate.
Start over.
Four
In his dream, gray slippery smoke in the shape of a lamprey slid under the door of the bookstore. There were five people in the basement. The smoke asphyxiated them in their sleep. After its work was done, the smoke came home and curled up at Dobbs’s feet.
He awoke on the floor, bathed in sweat. He got up and went outside. The street was a well of darkness. To the north and east, there was more of the same. But to the west and south, the trees wore faint halos of light. He buttoned up his coat and bolted the door behind him.
After a couple of blocks, Dobbs had left the residential streets behind. The road led to a small bridge crossing over a grassy canal. Down the center of the canal ran parallel depressions that must once have held train tracks. On the other side of the bridge loomed a pair of water towers dipped in rust, held up by spider legs. The factory underneath looked as though it were being consumed from within by some sort of cancer.
He reached an intersection. There was no traffic, but across the street he saw a faintly illuminated shadow, tinted as the signal flashed from green to yellow to red. An elderly woman, slightly stooped. In her arms she held a small wooden crate she seemed to be struggling to keep from tipping over. In a moment, she reached the curb, stepping down into the crosswalk.
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