Authors: Christopher Hebert
Fitch raised his empty glass. “That’s even worse.”
April went back to the kitchen table and returned with the vodka bottle.
“Don’t,” Holmes said. “He’s had enough.”
April poured.
Fitch said, “What are you, my mother?”
“How can you drink that?” Holmes said. “It smells like it was distilled in a rain barrel.”
Fitch sprang up from the sofa and pirouetted around the steamer trunk. He grabbed April by the hand, and she let out a shriek.
“ ‘Save your sobs for thunderstorms,’ ” Fitch sang out in his raspy voice, “ ‘and your tears for when it rains.’ ”
“It’s been raining all day, you idiot,” Holmes said.
“It’s stopped now.” April had wriggled free of Fitch, escaping to the wall of windows at the back of the apartment. “Why does it only rain when
I’m
outside?”
With a glance in her direction, Holmes saw it had grown dark. But inside the apartment, under the fluorescent lights, nothing had changed. He wondered sometimes if it ever would. It was possible, wasn’t it, to love one’s friends and be driven crazy by them, too? People couldn’t spend this much time together without occasionally dreaming of murder.
McGee had taken the empty spot on the love seat next to Myles, ignoring the wet cushion. The two of them looked like an old couple on a park bench, lost in thought and memory as the world went by. For all their differences lately, it was one thing they still had in common, the ability to be absent even in the midst of a crowd.
On the wall above McGee and Myles’s heads hung a painting, one of the ugliest things Holmes had ever seen. The canvas looked like a lunch tray on which the remains of a thousand meals had permanently congealed. Over the top someone had smeared a layer of something thick and shiny, the texture of fossilized gravy. Everything about the piece was revolting, and yet it demanded to be touched. The painting called out to Holmes every time he was here, and the only way to resist was to avert his eyes, to turn away, even if that meant having to look at the crooked outhouse he’d built. But for once Holmes couldn’t seem to take his eyes off the canvas.
“Where did this come from?” he said.
“She used to have a studio here,” McGee said, “the woman who painted it. She left it behind.”
“I can see why,” Fitch mumbled into his cup.
“It’s supposed to be this building,” Holmes said. “I just realized that. After all this time.”
Fitch said. “I thought it was meatloaf.”
“It looks like trash,” April said, not judgmentally.
“Those are wrappers,” McGee said. “Bits of newspaper and parts of containers and packages and advertisements. It’s made of stuff she found on the street outside. Then she put paint on top.”
The whole time she was talking, Myles was shaking his head.
“What?” McGee said, glancing at him sideways.
“It’s just, I mean”—Myles looked at her helplessly—“of all the things to use to describe the place you live,” he said. “Trash.”
“You think she should lie?” McGee said. “Sugarcoat it?”
“It’s like giving up,” Myles said. “Accepting the worst.”
“I think it’s more of a reminder,” McGee said. “To keep you going.”
Fitch broke out in a fit of laughter.
April looked up. “What’s so funny?”
“Nothing,” Fitch said. “Nothing at all. It’s all so deadly fucking serious.”
Fitch fell down onto the sofa with all his weight, and Holmes, as if on the other end of a teeter-totter, immediately sprang to his feet. He didn’t know why at first, other than that he’d been sitting there too long, and suddenly the space seemed so small, the high ceiling pressing down on his head. And also, he realized now, he needed to take a piss, but he didn’t want to go in that outhouse. He’d rather go outside in the alley. He’d rather go out the window. He’d rather go anywhere but there.
“That reminds me,” McGee said, and her voice was supposed to sound offhand, casual, as if she’d just managed to retrieve something before it slipped away from her memory. She stretched out her legs and reached deep into the back pocket of her jeans, pulling out a piece of paper, a crumpled printout, which she unfolded on the steamer trunk. Holmes leaned forward to look. The words were upside down, but even so they were immediately clear:
HELP WANTED
. The address, he couldn’t help noticing, was the HSI Building. What, exactly, had reminded her of this?
“Custodians?” Holmes said.
McGee’s enormous eyes were wide, and a smile was forming in the corners of her mouth. And Holmes knew, without having to ask, that this, whatever this was, had nothing at all to do with what they’d been talking about a moment before.
“No,” Holmes said.
McGee frowned. “You don’t even know what it is.”
Holmes leaned back against the sofa, arms folded across his chest. “I don’t need to.”
“What is it?” April said.
McGee handed her the page. “It’s perfect.”
Holmes realized then that the occasion for the party had been hiding in her pocket all along.
There was a long silence as the inevitable question, the question Holmes had decided he himself wouldn’t ask, went unspoken among the others. And Holmes found himself hoping the silence might go on forever, or at least as long as it took for them all to gather their coats and belongings and head for the door.
But then April, sweet April, handed the page back. “Perfect for what?”
McGee lifted the ad weightlessly between her fingertips. “This is how we’ll bring them down.”
“Oh, God,” Holmes said.
Over in the love seat Fitch broke out in more drunken laughter.
“Just listen.”
And McGee explained her plan. She was going to get a job there. She was going undercover.
“As a cleaning lady?” Holmes said, no longer able to remain quiet.
“Let her finish,” April said.
Once inside, McGee would get into their files. “I’ll grab everything I can find,” she said.
“About what?” Fitch shouted from his reclining position. “What do you think they’re hiding?”
“Everything,” McGee said, “going all the way back to the beginning. Every toxic spill they’ve hushed, every environmental report they’ve squelched, every pension they’ve cheated, every corner they’ve cut, every compromise, every casualty they’ve written off.”
For months and years, she’d buried them in information about the company’s crimes: exposés uncovered by shoestring nonprofits; hunches chased by alt weekly reporters; arcane pie charts issued by obscure agencies; blog posts by unaffiliated Ph.D.s.
“But why
them
?” Fitch’s drunkenness seemed to have miraculously vanished. “There’s a million other companies doing this stuff. If not worse. Why are you so obsessed with
them
?”
“Because they’re here,” Myles said. “And they’re all that’s left. The others are gone.”
McGee rewarded him with a partial smile. “And everyone’s afraid they’ll leave, too. So they don’t say anything, don’t hold them accountable. Why do you think the city keeps giving them tax breaks? They move another plant down south to get away from unions, and the city gives them more handouts. The company threatens bankruptcy so they can slash wages, and then they give their executives a two-hundred-percent raise. No one says a word. The city council wouldn’t give them a jaywalking ticket, they’re so afraid they’ll pack up HQ.”
“City councils don’t give out tickets,” Holmes said.
“It’s a parasite,” McGee said, ignoring him, “destroying this place.”
“You actually think this is stuff they’ve just got lying around?” Holmes said. “All these revealing documents?”
“Filed under D,” Fitch said with a deep, throaty air of mystery, “for diabolical plans.”
“That,” McGee said, turning to Holmes, “is where you come in.”
“No,” Holmes said, “no, it isn’t.”
It was all a simple matter of locks, she said. And locks had simple answers: picks. “You,” she said, coming up to Holmes’s side, “just have to teach me how.”
“Have you forgotten where I woke up this morning? Me and
Myles?” Holmes looked over to find Myles had returned to his staring game.
“Since when are you afraid of getting in a little trouble?”
“There’s trouble for a purpose,” Holmes said, “and there’s trouble that’s just stupid. His interview—” Holmes pointed to Fitch, who promptly rose from the sofa, eager to sneak away. “What did it accomplish?”
“If it’d worked,” McGee said, “we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”
“What makes you think they have this stuff at all? These reports? These memos? Why on earth would they keep them?” And why, Holmes wondered, looking around the room, had everyone else fallen so silent? Fitch diving back into his cup. Myles off in a daydream. April at the sink, bent over her sweatshirt. Why was no one taking his side?
“Because they’re arrogant,” McGee said. “Because they think they’ll never get caught. Especially your new friend.” McGee nodded toward Fitch, and he swallowed deeply. “If Ruth Freeman really doesn’t fear the truth, like she says, then she’s got no need for a shredder.”
“What if you get caught?” April said.
“I’ll make sure I don’t.”
“What’s there to say?” Myles finally lowered his eyes from the painting. “It’s not like we can talk you out of it.”
And of course, Myles was right. McGee wasn’t asking their permission. She was informing them of what she’d already decided.
“This isn’t us,” Holmes said. “This isn’t what we do.”
“Like you said,”—McGee turned back to Holmes—“what we do isn’t working.”
April had drifted over from the sink. “I should get going.” The ball of pink cotton cupped in her hands looked like a dead rabbit.
“It’s early.” McGee’s smile reappeared. As if she were trying to remind them this was just a party, an innocent party.
Was it early? To Holmes, the hour suddenly felt ancient, as if they’d been frozen in these positions not just for the evening but for eternity, like a dark parlor scene painted by an old master in a world before industrial ruins—before trash could be glued to a canvas and passed off as art. It was time for some new kind of scene. A landscape, a seascape. A nude. It didn’t matter. He’d gladly settle for even less than that, for a vase of cut flowers, a still life with fruit.
She called herself Zolska Zhronakhovska. For her hair, she found a dye to turn the brown hay-colored blond. She had April cut her bangs straight across and iron out the waves. From the front, it looked as though she were wearing half an iceberg lettuce on her head.
She practiced speaking so it sounded as if her mouth were full of ice cubes. Only ever the simplest of words.
Yes. No. Okey-dokey
.
According to the placard, the woman in the basement was the “Head of Facilities Maintenance,” a fancy title for someone whose office was a cage. The woman’s name was Dorothy, and Dorothy shared the cage with mops and buckets and jugs of pastel cleaning fluid. Dorothy was slim as a cigarette. Her red plaid shirt fit her like a cape.
Beneath the low-hanging fluorescent strips, Dorothy asked McGee questions about her experience and about her immigration status, and McGee smiled and scratched her head and blinked. At the thrift store,
April had dug up a pair of toothpaste-white orthopedic shoes. McGee’s pleated, acid-washed jeans closed at the ankle with zippers and bows.
“Okey-dokey,” she said, knowing perfectly well the legal formalities were a bluff.
Dorothy pointed to a square in the calendar. McGee would start the next night.
Never had she ridden in anything capable of moving so fast without seeming to move at all. When the elevator doors opened at the third floor, McGee thought at first that she’d forgotten to press the button and was still in the basement.
But the view had changed. Dorothy’s cage was gone. There was a tiny black woman squatting with a rag before a set of double glass doors. Beyond the doors was a suite of inner offices.
McGee was right where she’d intended to be.
But already there’d been complications. This was a forty-story office tower, and not until after Dorothy had hired her had it occurred to McGee to wonder what the odds would be that she’d be assigned the precise floor she wanted. One in forty, April had pointed out in her innocently helpful way. And sure enough, McGee had shown up tonight for her first night of work, and Dorothy had handed her a scrap of paper bearing the number twenty-four. From there she was supposed to work her way up, not down. McGee had no contingency plan, and the sight of the number twenty-four had shut off something in her brain. If she’d been capable of thinking anything, she might have thought to turn around and walk home—give up right then and there. But she’d managed to suppress her instinct to flee, and then she’d managed to suppress the unwanted information too, crumpling the number in her pocket and getting on the elevator and pressing the button for three instead.
Now here she was, her brain still numb, with a woman glaring at
her, annoyed by the interruption. The woman’s ID badge said her name was Calice.
“What is it?” Calice said, already turning back to her work.
Trembling slightly, McGee picked a bottle at random from her cart. “Okey-dokey.”
“What are you doing?” Calice said as McGee approached the glass.
McGee smiled, and she was raising the spray bottle to the glass when Calice grabbed her arm. She was small but strong.
“No, no, no,” Calice said. “What are you doing?”
It was difficult to guess the woman’s age. There were no wrinkles anywhere on her face, but her hair was threaded with gray.
“This is my floor.” Calice’s teeth were big and square and clenched. She took McGee by the arm and led her over to the elevator. Calice pointed at the forty numbered lights above the elevator doors. The third bulb was lit. Calice motioned toward that one, then pointed at herself.
“You see?” she said.
Every last bit of moisture in McGee’s mouth had evaporated, but she swallowed deeply anyway. “Okey-dokey,” she said, turning around again and squirting a faint yellow mist onto the glass.
Calice’s mouth fell open. “All right,” she said, shouting with the first syllable, already calming with the second. She stopped her tongue between her big square teeth. “I don’t know what your problem is,” she said. She came right up to McGee’s chin, so close she could smell the citrus in the woman’s shampoo. “I don’t know what country you’re from that you don’t understand
no
. Babies understand
no
. Dogs understand
no
. Are you dumber than a dog?”