Reception was an existential statement, and they’d spent a lot of money on it, mainly in an attempt to make it look like they hadn’t, which is presumably the kind of thing that impresses the hell out of other advertising folk. Each chair cost far more than the woman behind the desk earned in a month, but she didn’t seem put out by this. She was all in black and willowy and big-eyed—yet also possessed of a fierce intelligence, you could just tell—and came across like a girl who inhabited the best of all possible worlds and was anxious to spread the joy around.
I asked for Todd and in return was asked if I was expected.
“Oh no,” I said, shrugging in what I hoped was a charming way. I didn’t have much practice. “Just here on the off chance.”
She beamed, as if this were simply the best possible way of stopping by, and got on the phone. She nodded vigorously at the end of her conversation, so I assumed that either I was good to go or she had mildly lost her mind.
Five minutes later someone eerily identical appeared from behind a frosted-glass door at the end of the room. She beckoned, and I got up and followed her into the offices beyond. This woman evidently inhabited only the third-or fourth-best of all worlds and was not disposed to mirth or unnecessary chatter, though I did learn that her name was Bianca. We took an elevator up two floors and then marched along a corridor with glass walls, past funky little rooms in which pairs of short-haired people were working so hard and creatively it made me want to set off a fire alarm, preferably by starting an actual fire.
At the end she opened a door and ushered me through.
“Todd Crane,” she announced.
Ah, I thought, only at that moment realizing I was about to talk to a third of the people who made up the company name.
I found myself in an austere space with big windows on two sides, giving a wide view of Elliott Bay and the piers. The remaining walls were covered with framed certificates and awards and huge and celebratory product shots, including a few campaigns I knew Amy had been involved with. In the middle of the room, there was a desk big enough to play basketball on. A trim man in his early fifties was coming out from behind it. Chinos, well-pressed lilac shirt. Hair once black now streaked with flecks of gray, bone structure so blandly handsome he could have been cast in a television spot for just about anything good and wholesome and reasonably expensive.
“Hey,” he said, extending his hand. “I’m Todd Crane.”
I’ll just bet you are, I thought, as I shook it. And I don’t like you.
He was smooth, though. I guess half his job was making strangers feel at home. There was a framed photograph on one corner of his desk, a studio portrait showing Crane with his arm around a glossy woman, flanked by three daughters of widely spaced ages. Curiously, it was angled not toward his chair but out into the room, as if it were another credential, like the certificates on the walls. There was a retro radio on the floor in the corner of the room, too, 1970s era, presumably another character statement.
“So, Jack,” he said, leaning back. “Great to finally put a face to the name after all this time. I’m amazed it never happened before.”
“Didn’t get out of L.A. often,” I said. “Until we moved.”
“So what brings you to the city today? You’re in books now, right?”
“I have a meeting. Plus, Amy managed to leave her cell phone in a cab yesterday. So I thought I’d kill two birds with one stone, get the phone to her right away. She must be in withdrawal by now.”
Todd laughed. Ha, ha, ha. The beats were separate, as if the sequence had been composed, practiced, and perfected in private many, many years before.
Then he paused, as if waiting for me to say something else. I thought that was weird. I had been expecting him to be the one to start volunteering information.
“So,” I said eventually. “What’s the best way for me to do that?”
“Well, I don’t know,” Crane said. He looked confused.
“I assumed someone here would have her diary.”
“Well, not really,” he said, folding his arms and pursing his lips. “Amy’s our roving troubleshooter now. As you know, of course. Finger in a lot of pies. A global view. Strategic. But fundamentally she still reports to the L.A. office. They’d be the people who’d—”
He stopped, as if he’d just put things together in his head. Looked at me carefully.
“Uh, Amy’s not in Seattle this week, Jack,” he said. “At least not with us.”
I was as fast as I could be, but my mouth must still have been hanging open for a second. Maybe two.
“I know that,” I said, smiling broadly. “She’s visiting friends. I just wondered whether she was expected to touch base at any point. As she’s here anyway.”
Todd shook his head slowly. “Not that I know of. But maybe, you know? Have you tried her hotel? We always book people in the Malo. Or is she staying with her…friends?”
“I left a message for her there already. Just wanted to get this phone back to her as quick as I can.”
“Understand that.” Todd nodded, all smiles again. “Lost without them these days, right? Wish I could help you more, Jack. She stops by, I’ll tell her you’re on the hunt. You want to give me your number?”
“I left it already,” I said.
“That’s right, sorry. Hell of a morning. Clients. Can’t live with them, not recommended business practice to shoot them in the head. Or so they say.”
He clapped me on the shoulder and walked me out back along the corridor, filling the journey with praise of Amy and a sustained meditation on how her new position was going to shake things up for the company, and in a good way. It was not difficult to imagine him greeting his wife and kids in a similar manner every morning, a goals-and-achievements spiel capped with assurances of his best attention at all times, CC’d to his personal assistant.
He left me at the door, and I walked across reception alone. I turned my head just before stepping back out into the world. It seemed to me that there might be someone standing behind the frosted-glass door watching me leave, but I couldn’t be sure.
I walked down the alley slowly. I hadn’t brought Amy’s organizer, but I remembered the contents. Three days full of meetings. Sure, I hadn’t read the details, and they could theoretically have been in L.A., San Francisco, or Portland—the last only a three-hour drive away—but I didn’t believe for a moment that I’d confused the city. Plus, I had her phone in my pocket, found here in this city last night. Amy had come here and until the night before last had been in contact as usual. Now she was nowhere to be found. The hotel was a blank. The people at her job didn’t know where she was—or said they didn’t.
And neither did I.
Post Alley deposited me in a stubby dead end, over which the beginnings of an elevated street set off toward the bay before banking sharply left to join the Alaskan Viaduct above. The concrete supports had been covered in graffiti, over what looked like many years. REV9 and LATER and BACK AGAIN, it said, among other things. While my eyes were wandering over this, I felt a sudden itch in my shoulder blades.
I turned, slowly, as if that were simply what I was doing next. A few people were walking back and forth at the end of the road, going about their business in the shadow of the elevated highway, getting in or out of cars, moving stuff here and there. Beyond that there was a wide road and a couple of piers, and then the flicker of light hitting water out on Elliott Bay.
No one was looking in my direction. Everyone was in motion, walking or driving. Traffic rumbled over the elevated highway above, sending deep vibrations through the buildings and sidewalks around me, until the whole city almost seemed to be singing one long, low note.
I found a bar downtown. I scored a table by the window and ordered a pot of coffee—employing the last of my charm to get the waitress to let me use an outlet behind the bar to plug in a power adapter I’d bought on the way for Amy’s phone. While I waited for the coffee, I watched people at the other tables. Bars used to be a place where you came to get away from the outside world. That was the point. Now everyone seemed to be sucking free Wi-fi or talking on cell phones.
Nobody did anything interesting enough to distract me from the interlocking dialogues in my head. The fact that Amy wasn’t in town on Kerry, Crane & Hardy business could be explained. I knew that. I was calm. It was still possible there was nothing strange going on here except inside my own head, and it reminded me of a time a year or so before, when Amy went through a period of talking in her sleep. At first it was just a mumbling, and you couldn’t really make out anything. After a while it got stronger, words and sections of sentences. It would wake me up, night after night. It began to screw with both our sleep patterns. She tried adjusting her diet and caffeine intake and spending even longer in the gym on the way to work, but nothing helped. Then it just stopped, though it was a couple of weeks before I started sleeping soundly again. In the meantime I had plenty of time to lie in the dark and wonder what made the brain do such a thing, how it must be organized so that when all the conscious functions had apparently checked out, some part was still verbalizing about something. How was it doing that, and why? Who was it talking to?
That’s what it felt as if my brain was doing right now. The part under my conscious control was sticking fingers in dikes and providing rational explanations. It was doing good work, suggesting that Amy might indeed be here on the quiet in the hope of bringing clients to KC&H as a lock, stock, and barrel triumph that couldn’t be group-owned. She lived and breathed office politics. Could even be that was what she’d been trying to explain the evening when I didn’t listen properly.
But meanwhile other bits of my head were running scattershot in all directions. Deep inside each of us is a part that mistrusts order and craves the relief of seeing the world shatter into the chaos it believes lies underneath all along. Or perhaps that’s just me.
When Amy’s phone had enough charge, I retrieved it from behind the bar. Sitting with it in my hands felt strange. This was the only device through which I could talk to my wife: but it was currently with me and thus made her feel even farther away. We have evolved now, gained a sixth sense through the invention of e-mail and cell phones—an awareness of the utterances and circumstances of people who are not present. When this sense is taken away, you feel panicked, struck blind. I had a sudden idea and called the phone back at the house, but it rang and rang before switching to the machine. I left a message saying where I was and why, just in case Amy got home ahead of me. It should have felt like a good, sensible thing to do. Instead it was as if another road had just been washed away in the rain.
Amy’s phone was a different brand from mine, and the keys were a lot smaller. As a result my first brush with the interface put me in the music player section by mistake. There were eight MP3 tracks listed, which surprised me. Like any other occupant of the twenty-first century who wasn’t Amish, Amy owned an iPod, a dedicated digital music player. She wasn’t going to be using her phone for music, but while I could imagine that a device might come with a couple of songs preloaded, eight seemed like a lot. Seven of the tracks were simply numbered Track 1 to Track 7, the other a long string of digits. I tried Track 1. Tinny music came out of the earpiece, old jazz, one of those crackly 1920s guys. Very much not Amy’s kind of thing—she’d gone on record more than once as hating jazz, or basically anything that predated Blondie. I tried another track, then one more, with similar results. It was like holding the world’s smallest speakeasy.
I took another scroll through the contacts section, this time looking not for Kerry, Crane & Hardy but for anything else that stuck out. I didn’t see anything to make me linger. I didn’t recognize all the names, but I was never going to. Your partner’s workplace is like another country. You’ll always be a stranger there.
So I headed to the SMS section. Amy had picked up the joy of SMS messaging from the younger dudes in the agency, and she and I now exchanged texts regularly—when I knew she’d be in a meeting or when she wanted to convey information that didn’t need my attention right away. Usually just to say hi. Sure enough, there were four from me there, going back a few months. A couple from her sister, Natalie, who lived down in Santa Monica, in the house where she and Amy had been born and had grown up.
And eleven from somebody else.
The messages from Natalie and me had our names attached. These others didn’t, just a phone number. It was the same number each time.
I selected the earliest. It was blank. An SMS communication had been sent and received, but there was no text in it at all. The next was the same, and the next. Why would you keep sending texts without anything in them? Because you were incompetent maybe, but by the third or fourth you’d think anyone could have gotten the hang of it. I kept scrolling. I’d grown so used to the single line of nothing in each message that when the sixth contained something else, it took me by surprise. It didn’t make much sense either.
yes
No period, even. The next few messages were blank again. Then I got to the final one.
A rose by ny othr name wll sml as sweet…:-D
I put the phone on the table and poured another cup of coffee. Eleven messages was a lot, even if most of them had nothing to say. Besides, Amy wasn’t the type to let her phone be clogged with other people’s Luddite errors. She was not sentimental. I’d already noted she’d only kept the texts from me that contained information of long-term use. A few thinking-of-you ones I’d sent a couple of days before, and which she’d replied to, had already been erased. The couple from Natalie looked like they’d been saved because they were especially annoying and could be used later as evidence against her.
So why keep someone else’s blanks? And under what circumstances would you receive this many messages from someone and yet not have that person’s name in your list of contacts? The others came up as “Home”—my phone—and “Natalie.” These just listed the number. If you’re that regularly in contact, why not go to the minuscule trouble of entering the person’s name into your phone book? Unless it’s something you don’t want found?