Angels of Detroit

by Christopher Hebert

  “I miss you,” she said. “I wish you were here.”

  “Me too,” he said without sincerity. She couldn’t blame him.

  She told him about lunch, how she’d embarrassed Mrs. Freeman in front of her friends.

  “Who cares?” he said, interrupting. “These people are animals. You should never have taken the job. I mean, it’s repulsive. They’re vile. A fucking military contractor. Spewing toxic waste all over the place. They’re a scourge.”

  “A scourge?”

  “It’s immoral,” he said. “Working there, you’re part of the problem.”

  In the background his stereo was blasting his favorite band, the Chicken Tongues, and she just wanted to close her eyes and listen.

  “We need the money.”

  “Which is more important?”

  It was his way, when he didn’t want to talk about something, often simply because talk bored him, to reduce it to the most simplistic of terms. Yes or no. Either or. The fewer the choices, the shorter the conversation. But what sort of job could she have taken that he wouldn’t find objectionable? Just about everybody sold something, and nearly all of it was garbage in one way or another. Yes, the company made weapons and drones. But it also built toasters and fetal heart monitors and solar-powered water filtration systems. She’d applied for the job in the first place for the same reason she’d applied for everything else: because it was there. She’d gone to the interview without even the faintest sense of optimism, not so much assuming she wouldn’t get the job as almost hoping she wouldn’t. She’d had a brief office internship in college, and the thought of spending her life doing something like that had filled her with something even more debilitating than dread.

  And so it had come as a surprise to Tiphany that during the fifteen minutes the interview for the job had taken, Mrs. Freeman had voluntarily, without any provocation on Tiphany’s part, acknowledged each and every one of her fears. She had said the position Tiphany had applied for was tedious and unglamorous, that the people she’d work with would often be tiresome, that the company itself could be exasperating. But she’d added that she herself had fought her way up from the bottom, a woman in a man’s world, and that she’d come to HSI because she’d seen great potential, potential she saw still.

  “We do good things,” she’d said, “but sometimes we do them badly.” And as far as Mrs. Freeman was concerned, there was no point getting up in the morning if there wasn’t something—and for her the company was that something—in one’s life worth struggling to make better.

  “We get to be the conscience,” Mrs. Freeman had said that day, seeming to enjoy the idea of the two of them conspiring in her office. “These men need us, even if they don’t know it.”

  And Tiphany had admired not just her honesty but the confidence with which Mrs. Freeman had voiced her convictions and her condemnations. Even before the fifteen minutes were up, Tiphany had decided that, if she was lucky enough to be offered the job, she would take it.

  But she knew if she’d told Sasha any of this, he would’ve said she was a sellout. So she kept it to herself.

  §

  All throughout the next day, Tiphany found it impossible to concentrate. She couldn’t get out of her head the thought that tomorrow she and Mrs. Freeman would return to Detroit and she’d find herself out of a job. Then she’d have to start all over again.

  Toward the end of the afternoon, she gave up on her work altogether. Desperately needing to get out of the hotel, she changed into her grungiest clothes, a pair of jeans and the T-shirt she’d been sleeping in. For the first time since her encounter with the mime, she returned to the square. Standing beneath a café awning, she scanned the kids on the long steps of the courthouse. She was looking for the girl with red-veined eyes. But what would she have done if she’d found her?

  Neither did Tiphany see any sign of the landscape painter. His peers were in their usual spots, with their displays hanging from the wrought-iron fence. But his space was empty.

  Coming upon the park entrance, Tiphany thought she spotted the mime, but it was a different one, tall and lean. She guessed the odds weren’t good that he’d be a talker, too.

  As she walked away from the square, she found herself wondering what Mrs. Freeman would have made of all this. The old woman had seemed so determined for Tiphany to get out of the hotel and experience it. Was it possible her boss would’ve found it fun, enjoying the place for the spectacle it was?

  Back at the hotel, the desk clerk was holding a note for her.

  Dinner at 8, it said. Well, Tiphany thought, death row inmates get a final meal—why not me?

  The waiter who greeted them wore a black T-shirt and black jeans and a yellow pencil behind his ear. The interior of the restaurant was almost as dark as his clothes. The place was decorated with dead, brittle flowers. Tiphany recognized almost nothing on the menu.

  “I come here whenever I’m in town,” Mrs. Freeman said. “It’s the one place I know I won’t run into anyone.”

  Tiphany made it to the last page of the menu and then started over. Perhaps she’d simply order whatever Mrs. Freeman was having.

  “Are there interesting sessions tomorrow?” she said.

  Mrs. Freeman barely glanced at the wine list, and then she was done, ready to order. “Every year I promise myself I’ll skip the last day,” she said. “Of course, I never do. I don’t know what it is—some weakness of character, I suppose. Everyone else plays golf.”

  “Do you play?”

  “If I were Supreme Dictator,” Mrs. Freeman said, taking up her martini, “I’d outlaw that hideous addiction. My husband’s a fanatic. Does your boyfriend play?”

  “He doesn’t really play sports.”

  Mrs. Freeman seemed relieved. “Personally, I don’t consider golf a sport,” she said, “but that’s another matter. What does he do? I don’t believe you’ve ever mentioned.”

  Tiphany chose that moment to take a long, slow sip of water. It wasn’t that she was exactly ashamed—she just wanted to avoid any more uncomfortable conversations. “Plumbing. He’s a plumber. Actually an apprentice. But he’s really a sculptor …”

  Either she wasn’t listening or she was busy thinking of something else, but Mrs. Freeman suddenly fell silent. Tiphany fully expected her to change the subject—hoped, in fact, that she would.

  “Nothing wrong with being a plumber,” Mrs. Freeman said. “It’s far more noble than doing nothing, which is my husband’s sole profession. He’s quite good at it, though. Don’t ever get married,” Mrs. Freeman said, sipping again, “At least make sure you know what you’re getting into. Your generation has broken many of my generation’s bad habits. You test each other first. You have trial runs. You sleep around. I don’t mean you in particular, of course. For us—some of us, anyway—marriage was something that just happened, like menstruation. You learned to accept it. I don’t even remember how we met, my husband and I. My second husband, anyway. My first I prefer not to think about. With my second it was never love. We knew each other through others, mutual friends. It’s hard to remember how it began. I guess these things seem less exciting when you’re older, these opening volleys of a relationship. When I think about it now, I think of it as being at a party—one of those god-awful parties where you get stuck talking to someone for hours on end. Not necessarily someone you hate. Maybe it’s just that you don’t know him very well, but because you’ve met him before—probably at some other god-awful party—it’s easy to fall into conversation. There are things you both know that you can talk about. It may not be the most stimulating conversation in the world, but it’s better than sitting by yourself in the corner. And of course he’s a little attractive. All right, more than a little. So there’s that. But then what happens is you get stuck. No one comes over to say hello. And the conversation isn’t so painful that you want to go out of your way to come up with an excuse to escape. You don’t want to offend him. It’s just that you don’t particularly want to spen
d the entire evening with him. But that’s exactly what happens. At a certain point you look around and discover that you and this man are the only people left. You can hear voices coming from the patio. People are laughing. You know there’s something interesting going on out there. Maybe the host is showing off his new outdoor theater. Or his professional-grade grill that runs on briquettes of ancient sequoia trees. Whatever it is. The point being that you like this man, more or less, but really you’d rather be outside with everyone else. At the same time, though, the two of you being alone together has already begun to feel natural and inevitable. Next thing you know, you’re married, and you realize you’ll never again have a chance to go out to the patio to see what all the hubbub was about.”

  Mrs. Freeman raised her glass to her mouth, and then she seemed to smirk—or was it a smile? Tiphany couldn’t tell. She’d long ago lost track of what Mrs. Freeman was saying, and she’d been sitting in terror for several minutes, dreading the moment when she’d have to respond. Uncertain what to do, she raised her salad fork to the light of the candle between them on the table and rubbed her thumb over some imaginary watermark.

  When she looked again at Mrs. Freeman, Tiphany saw it was a smile on the old woman’s face, and she understood the moment had come, the final reckoning. But she also realized the moment brought with it one final chance. If she could just figure out the right thing to say, Mrs. Freeman might perhaps forgive her. Maybe they could, after all, put everything else behind them.

  But nothing came. Not the right thing. Not even the wrong thing. Tiphany kept rubbing the fork, as if a magic genie might pop out to save her. She couldn’t imagine Mrs. Freeman having floundered like this when she was her age—when she was any age, for that matter. The old woman must have thought her a complete imbecile.

  And so it was with great relief that Tiphany looked up just then and saw the waiter approaching. She took that opportunity to glance once more at her menu, and she settled at last on the coq au vin. She didn’t know what the coq was, but she was certain she needed as much vin as she could get.

  Mrs. Freeman ordered the same thing, but the words rolled off her tongue as if she’d been saying them all her life. When the waiter left, Mrs. Freeman also seemed to have forgotten what they’d been talking about. In retrospect, Tiphany didn’t remember much else about the meal, perhaps because she’d worked so hard to repress the many ways in which she’d embarrassed herself. Unnecessarily, entirely out of kindness, Mrs. Freeman had given her a second chance. Tiphany had blown that one too.

  Embarrassment was Tiphany’s principal recollection of that entire trip. Embarrassment and disappointment. Disappointment because she discovered she liked Mrs. Freeman even more than she’d expected. She liked Mrs. Freeman so much, in fact, that in the years following the convention, as she grew more settled into her position, she ceased to debate with herself about whether it was right for her to be working for a company that profited from pollution and war and destruction. As Mrs. Freeman said, they were the conscience.

  Mercifully, the old woman had let her keep her job. She’d even reimbursed her the ten dollars she’d tipped the bellhop, without Tiphany having to ask. And yet it was clear to Tiphany that the old woman’s feelings for her had changed. The more she tried to make up for her mistakes, the more Mrs. Freeman seemed to resent her.

  The morning the investigators showed up at Tiphany’s apartment, the trip to New Orleans was two years in the past, but for the last hour she’d been able to think of little else. She wasn’t surprised to see the men in their dull gray suits, though she wasn’t quite ready for them either. It was eight-thirty, and she hadn’t bothered to dress for work. Sasha had already left for his studio. Tiphany was still trying to understand the story she’d seen on the news. Last night, extremists—terrorists of some sort—had broken into HSI. They’d taken the guards hostage and barricaded themselves on the third floor. Her floor. When Tiphany had left for the day, Mrs. Freeman had still been working there. Tiphany had left her all alone.

  “Is she okay?” Tiphany said, looking from one man to the next. “They didn’t hurt her, did they?”

  One of the investigators opened his briefcase and took out some photos. They were mug shots of five or six people, all close to Tiphany’s age.

  “Have you seen any of them before?” one of the men said.

  “Have you noticed anything out of the ordinary?” said the other.

  Was it possible, Tiphany wondered, that she’d somehow failed Mrs. Freeman again?

  Summer

  Seventeen

  Sylvia remembered the first time, waking in the night, thinking something’s missing.

  Looking at the empty half of the mattress beside her, the discolored pillow, thinking, There was something here that’s gone.

  And then, in the morning, she found him asleep beside her, breathing through his mouth, like the boy she once knew.

  But still there was that feeling: Something is missing.

  All day long at work, on her feet, trying to understand what it might be.

  Eighteen

  He mistook the sound at first for birds. He was blocks away when he heard the chirps, several of them at once, floating in from different directions.

  But on second thought, the sound was too dull, the edges of the notes too static. There was no music in it. And it was the middle of the night.

  As he drew closer, he saw the forklifts, crawling through the streets, pushing and pulling pallets stacked high with produce, beeping as they went.

  It was Saturday, market day. Dobbs had lost track. The sun was nowhere near risen yet, but the overhead doors of the hangar-like buildings were open. Inside he could see vans and panel trucks and pickups. Harsh fluorescent light leaked out from every opening. Everyone was busy, brigades of exhausted-looking people ducking in and out of the backs of trucks.

  One of the enormous sheds was in the process of being transformed into a greenhouse, waist-high terraces of pink and white and yellow and red, all in rows, stretched out like the stripes of some exotic flag.

  In the other buildings, in the open-air stalls, there was so much produce, it hardly seemed like food. Potatoes were tossed together like rocks; the unwashed carrots and turnips looked like grotesque deep-sea creatures, with their tentacle roots.

  No one seemed to notice Dobbs. His exhaustion was indistinguishable from theirs. From the sidewalk he picked up a small, empty crate. As he went, he filled it. Something here, something there. He didn’t know what half of it was. His hands did his thinking for him. No one thought to stop him.

  This time the note was stopped up in an empty water bottle, cast onto the porch, as if it had made the voyage here by sea.

  Dobbs fished the slip of paper through the neck. Delay, it said. Four weeks.

  He tossed the note into the corner with the others.

  It was late June. By now Dobbs was supposed to have been done and gone.

  But there’d been problems. First it was ten days. Then two weeks, then three. What did they even mean when they said “delay”? It wasn’t as if they were running a factory. There were no raw materials to run out of, no supply lines to get tangled, no labor disputes, no bureaucratic holdups at customs. The entire business had only one piece: take people from here and move them to there. What did that leave? It didn’t take months to change a flat tire.

  He’d already spent almost all the money they’d given him in advance, the setup funds. There’d be no more until the shipment arrived.

  In the meantime, he’d done everything he could with the warehouse. Sweeping alone had taken weeks. A strange, dense dust had filled the place: crumbling block, flaking paint, shards of rust and glass. His broom had moved across the floor like a shovel through mud. It was as if the floor were made of this—sediment and nothing more.

  And he’d spent more weeks clearing away the junk and rubble: cable spools as tall as he was, piles of rusty disks and rebar. Everything was deceptively heavy. Even scraps of wood see
med to have doubled their weight from the damp.

  In addition to the mattresses, he’d gathered food, every dented can he could find within twenty square miles. And he had half a dozen syrup barrels, swiped from a bottling plant. He’d filled them with water at the sewerage department.

  And now he had four more weeks to wait.

  He dreamed he was in an ice cream shop. It was a clean white space. Lots of small tables, matching chairs. Every seat was full. The customers were men, each one dressed in the same tan linen suit. There must have been at least twenty of them, identical but for their ties. The ties came in reds and blues and burgundies. None of the men were eating. They sat perfectly still, brown paper napkins draped across their laps, as if waiting to be served.

  Dobbs was minding his own business, bent over the ice cream case, trying to choose what he wanted. But he didn’t recognize a single flavor. The names were typed onto plastic cards, but they made no sense. DON’T BE AFRAID, one of them said. Inside the tub was an orangey soup. Deep within the next tub Dobbs saw a forest, a copse of trees bending in the breeze. LOOK BEHIND YOU, the label read.

  It was the girl from the bookstore, from the demonstration. McGee. She was directly behind him. She was even smaller than he’d remembered. There were butterflies now beneath the glass, flitting among the ice cream tubs.

  When Dobbs looked again, the men in the tan linen suits had gotten to their feet. They stood shoulder to shoulder now, brown paper napkins tucked awkwardly into their collars. Side by side with their backs to the counter, Dobbs and McGee were surrounded.

  “Don’t be afraid,” McGee said, patting his arm.

  Beside the cash register was a Lucite box. Inside the box, on the very top shelf, a row of cardboard cups were arranged by size, from small to large. On the shelf below sat a pair of cones, one sugar, one waffle. As McGee reached inside, Dobbs saw the cones weren’t real. They were plastic, for display only. McGee placed the sugar cone in her palm, pointy side up, and then she turned to the nearest man, driving the cone into his open mouth, impaling him with a single jab.