When Anderson arrived at the bar for the new-employee welcoming event, he knew already that it had been a mistake. He searched the room a little warily. There in the far corner, where tables were available for reservation, were the members of the small start-up he worked for, gesturing wildly at each other. Before Anderson could think better of it, Griff, the marketing coordinator and second-most-recent hire, spotted him and raised both hands in victory greeting. In doing so, he accidentally sloshed excess beer on the seat that had been kept vacated, Anderson supposed, for Anderson.
Anderson walked to the seat and claimed it. There was a general howl of greeting, and he was instantly regaled with some story that he had missed, while he had been in the office working—where had he been, by the way? Why hadn’t he come down earlier, like a true red-blooded American? Anderson, you work too hard! Anderson, in fact, had been more or less twiddling his thumbs up in the sleek offices that they shared with a few other start-ups, full of quiet glass doors and elegant secretaries, some of them male, but no books other than the ones that the start-up that Anderson worked for kept piled on their secretary (female)’s desk, color-coded in the general arc of a rainbow and spread out edge to spine. The company was called FicShare. The idea behind it was that people could use the content on their Kindles or iPads that their friends or family weren’t using—they could stream it, like Slingbox did for TV. At the moment you were limited to a maximum of five ShareBuddies, but the plan was for up to ten. The online interface was much slicker than the regular e-reading experience, and the ultimate goal was a community of readers, sharing and recommending texts. Marginalia would be transmitted, and book chats were easy to initiate. Anderson was the editorial side of the start-up. Sometimes, Anderson worried that if it really succeeded like everyone else in the company thought it would, it would destroy the reading economy. It’s just like a library, they reassured Anderson, and that and stock options made him feel slightly better.
It wasn’t as if he was flooded with better offers. FicShare was the highest-paying employer he’d ever had, combined with the fewest responsibilities. His job was to curate the selections, in addition to writing short blog posts about the books that users were using, and generally manning the content that kept FicShare’s website fresh and new. This was all quite simple and he usually knocked off most of it by around 11:45 in the morning (the programmers never got in until ten, so neither did he). He took a long lunch and walk around noon, often to the water, where he leaned against the railing’s edges and pondered throwing himself in—to swim, not Virginia Woolf. He’d stare, happily/melancholically, out toward New Jersey. By two he was back in the office, playing solitaire or skimming an old paperback or tapping out a blog post on Ian Fleming, while the headphoned programmers pounded wordlessly away.
Anderson turned his attention to Griff, the new marketing coordinator, who was trying to engage with him. Griff had graduated from some fancy school, Duke or Dartmouth, only three or four years ago. Anderson had known from the moment that he met him that he was different from the programmers, who most often opened up only when they were drunk or taking a break from work—Griff talked your ear off 24/7. Though Griff’s resume (Anderson had snooped: he had a thing for resumes) claimed that he was proficient in JavaScript and C++, Anderson tended to doubt it, no matter what it was worth—or guessed he was proficient only insofar as could be accomplished by a class or two as an elective at whichever bucolic campus he’d been spawned on. He had worked for an event-planning company before this, high-end, proselytizing for an app someone else had created.
Time, Griff said profoundly in Anderson’s general direction.
I’m sorry, asked Anderson.
Griff’s watery smile wavered a little. ’Bout time, he said. That you made it down here, he continued, when Anderson hadn’t added anything to their rather one-way conversation.
Busy day at the office, Anderson said. I hear that my brother, said Griff. Griff usually wore polo shirts tucked into extremely neat, probably expensive jeans, and today he had added a blazer.
I’m gonna grab a drink, Anderson said. Then he said, his voice a little lower, Any tabs open? Sometimes the founders, Nikil and James, would come early to slip a card onto the bar, and then leave. The bar owners were trustworthy enough that they could pick it up, more or less unabused, when they came back in the morning. Anderson had met the pair of them at a bookstore reading where he was filling in as a moderator. It was the most work he’d done in weeks, other than transcribing conversations for a reality TV show. The reading was for a paltry book, a regular MFA collection of short stories, that he’d read the first three-quarters of the night before. We’re looking for someone of your caliber, Nikil and James told Anderson, while the author’s friends and family crowded up around the writer afterward, gushing and not buying books. Anderson didn’t think at the time that maybe they meant someone of medium-level caliber. Anderson’s then-current bio, chalked in next to the writer’s, hardly visible over the erasure of the true moderator’s more eye-catching credentials (New York Times, FSG), said simply, “Freelance editor.” They gave him their shared business card, which felt slim and small in his pocket. When he interviewed, he was surprised by their wide-ranging knowledge of American and international literature, and their seeming commitment to education and the literary sphere. They were in discussions with PEN International, they said. Truthfully Anderson wouldn’t have said no to any offer at that point. He had been on the verge of writing to his old dissertation adviser to see what she thought about getting the band back together once again.
Tab, Griff asked innocently. What is this bar tab you speak of? Perhaps you mean the credit plastic in your wallet at the moment, kind sir? This was Griff’s idea of humor. Anderson had made the mistake of telling him once that though he was most familiar with contemporary literature, his favorite book of all time was the Morte d’Arthur. Just let me know before I buy us both a drink, Anderson said. Now we’re talking, Griff said, grinning. Then he leaned close to Anderson. Nikil stopped by but he was pretty flustered, he said. He continued: Apparently she didn’t take the job.
This was mildly interesting to Anderson. It was, in point of fact, the reason for this happy hour—held in honor of the number-one newest hire, fresher even than Griff. Every time FicShare hired a new employee, they held a bit of a gathering at the Kaminuk or a similar SoHo bar, before the employee started work. After he or she signed a contract of course, but before their first day. The idea was, according to James and Nikil, that the post-first-day drink felt somewhat apologetic, or carrot-at-the-end-of-the-stick: work hard, drink a little. Hold the welcome celebration before, and the employee was already a part of the family. It wasn’t a bad philosophy, as with most things that Nikil and James thought of. Anderson’s own ceremony had been pleasant, a bit like an initiation, like something out of Jules Verne, or one of Somerset Maugham’s spy stories. That was the way tech people felt about the things they did, sometimes. Griff hadn’t been there yet, which might have been part of it.
She fled the coop, huh, Anderson said thoughtfully. Wasn’t interested, yeah?
Griff got into the rhythm. Too good for us, I suppose, he said.
What was she supposed to be doing again, asked Anderson.
Griff drained his beer. Oh she was a star man, he said. Triple threat. I can’t say more than that. It’s too heartbreaking. He gestured at his empty glass.
Anderson took it to the bar and set it down softly. The bartender, who looked strangely content and upbeat for this hour of night and this location in the Manhattan universe, whisked it away. What’s the poison friend, he said, a little knowingly, it seemed to Anderson. Anderson looked at the sea of ten-dollar beers whose names were written in grainy colorful chalk on the board above him. He still couldn’t quite shake the price shock that came from being a freelance copyeditor full time. You got any happy hour specials still, he asked.
The bartender looked dramatically at his watch, though Anderson well knew it couldn’t be earlier than eight or eight thirty. For you, he said. Why not. Two of whatever it is then, Anderson said. Actually, he said, make one of them a Bud Light. That’s actually more expensive, the bartender said. That’s fine, Anderson said. It seemed to be the way the world was going.
Don’t I know you from somewhere, the bartender said to Anderson as he passed off the drinks. I don’t think so, Anderson said. Hmmm, the bartender said. He swiped Anderson’s almost brand-new credit card. Well, he said. Open please, said Anderson. He took the drinks back to the table.
It could have been a worse group of people, Anderson considered. He’d heard of worse things happening to professionals his age, that was for sure. It was a small company still, a true start-up. Nikil and James had the buoyancy of youth and positive thinking about them, backed up by what seemed to be a true intelligence—they were double-edged, perhaps was a good way to think about it, the type of people who at any stage in human history would have been at the top of their pyre or pyramid, however the age went. They might have been shamans, soldiers, explorers, nuclear physicists. Because it was 2014, they were start-up CEOs. And they’d gathered a good group around them, most of whom were clustered around the table. There was their second-in-command, the austere Zoe, who’d streamlined the initial code base enough to cut battery usage by 30 percent. She seemed to have no background but a very bright future, and the short haircut she often sported in addition to her clipped, complete lack of interest in him was an unbearable but low-grade attraction to someone like Anderson. Arrayed to Zoe’s right were Tim, Mike, and Anita, three hardworking programmers who hadn’t gone to fancy schools like Griff or Nikil and James—they’d learned their programming on the side, or had always been good at it, or went to Hacker School after leaving dead-end jobs in reception (that one was the lovely Anita). In a previous age they might have been construction or quality-control engineers, rolling up their sleeves to really get their hands in the business. Anderson had a soft spot for them, for Tim’s and Mike’s matching thick Boston accents, which jibed well with Anita’s New York one—not many people who Anderson interacted with had a New York accent anymore. She lived in Staten Island, and drove to work every day—James and Nikil paid for her parking garage. They had recently promoted her to project manager, and the other two programmers had taken it remarkably well, it seemed to Anderson. They’d bought her a cake in the shape of a blank triptych science board—“Project!” they shouted gleefully when she took the tinfoil off. They seemed happy together. They all made upward of 150K a year, though, which couldn’t hurt.
Anderson put the Bud Light in front of Griff’s hand, and explained that they had been all out of anything else. He had expected to get a cheap thrill out of the prank, but Griff just slumped down a little, almost imperceptibly. Perhaps he hadn’t drunk much Budweiser in college. Here Griff, Anderson said, just kidding. The Light’s for me—better digestion. Griff lapped up the cold IPA.
Anita, flanked by the other programmers, was leading the table in conversation. The way I see it, she said, better member of no team than halfway part of this one.
Hear, hear, Mike and Tim muttered gruffly.
The new programmer, Griff told Anderson unnecessarily. Anderson raised his eyebrows in acknowledgment.
Where’s a better place to work, is all I’m saying, Anita said. There was an upturn to the end of her sentence, but it was a statement as opposed to a question. Zoe expressed her agreement, in the reserved, quiet way she had. Anderson wouldn’t have been able to say how she did it. The tilt of her chin?
Truth, she added.
You know, Griff chimed in, bigger’s not always better. Less cuts of the same pies.
Fewer, said Mike and Tim, almost simultaneously.
Huh, asked Griff.
Fewer cuts, explained Mike kindly. Right Anderson?
Anderson pulled down a gulp of his beer. He’s got you there Griffin, he said.
All I’m saying is, Anita continued, I don’t understand why Nikil and James were so torn up about this chick. Anita had strong, shapely forearms, which nestled confidently on the table while she made her point. Zoe bristled a little.
Know what I mean? Anita said, directing herself toward Zoe. It looked like Zoe, as usual, knew more than she was letting on.
She was an exceptionally good candidate, Zoe said evenly, by way of explanation. Anderson waited, but like a minimalist short story, it seemed like that was all she was going to give them.
She came highly recommended, Zoe added, when it seemed like it hadn’t been enough. The table waited.
Nikil and James had been pursuing her for a long time, Zoe finished, in a concluding kind of way. She shrugged and raised her glass, some kind of brackish wine. To the future, she said. And to FicShare.
To FicShare, the rest of the company chimed. Anderson felt himself going along with it, the way he went along with the river waves he watched, every lunchtime, leaning over the railing without jumping in.
EVEN THE STRANGE bartender could no longer pretend that it was happy hour. At a certain point in the evening Zoe had been a mensch about it and thrown down her own credit card—was it a company card? Did the company have those? Nobody quite knew—and bought the last few rounds for the cohorts. Anita, Mike, and Tim were the heaviest drinkers, quietly getting to the bottoms of their glasses as if they were adventure novellas. Zoe carefully drank the same brackish wine without any discernible exterior difference. Griff got sloppy, like the college kid he had been. Anderson was embarrassed to realize that he himself was getting a little sloppy, but there was nothing to be done about it at that point. He’d get home, heat up some old pasta, try to read a little more of Crime and Punishment, which had been bookending his bed stand for the past several months, before he’d inevitably give up and watch television. Sometimes he had dreams, on particularly warm nights, of a FicShare fairy creeping into his studio apartment and wrenching the unread Dostoevsky from his care. Others need it better, the FicShare fairy would say in a singsong way.
The chair did not squeak as Anderson pushed it away from the table, letting himself up. The bottoms must be covered with something, or else the floor was more forgiving than he’d thought it was, when last he’d stood up on it. A good lifehack for the bar, getting rid of all that excess noise, Anderson considered. Lifehack was a new word he’d picked up from Mike and Tim, which he struggled to use correctly. Room, Griff pronounced grandly as Anderson got up. This time he and Anderson were on the same page. Bathroom. He nodded. They pushed themselves away from the table silently and ventured to the men’s.
Anderson and Griff stood at adjacent urinals. In the middle of his piss Anderson felt himself drawn to check his cell phone, but he resisted the urge (it was a recipe for further sloppiness), and instead happened to glance toward Griff. When he did he noticed the pained expression on his colleague’s face.
What’s the matter, Anderson said, almost horrified. He couldn’t believe that he was about to have a urinal conversation with the guy. Griff continued shaking his head and staring into the blank monitor screen of the urinal.
She was supposed to be beautiful man, he said. The new hire. Talk about one who got away. For a moment only the sound of their quiet piss streams interrupted Anderson’s silence. This always happens to me, Griff said, and for an awful moment Anderson thought that Griff might be about to cry. They washed their hands together at the sink, the water cascading around and getting the fronts of their shirts wet. The bathroom was dark and smelled strongly of ginger beer. Griff didn’t meet Anderson’s eyes.
When they exited the bathroom, Zoe was the only one waiting for them, sitting at the table and tapping on her phone. The guys went home, she said. I don’t think they’re gonna let Anita drive. She smiled in her thin way. Anderson wondered if he’d ever have a chance dating her. He wasn’t sure how much they had in common—her favorite author on Facebook and the FicShare landing page was Ayn Rand, favorite book was The Right Stuff (one for two, at least)—but he admired her quiet competence, the elegant way she sat at her computer desk. Anderson spent a lot of time looking through the interior glass walls of the office. Anderson tried to project all his possibility into a smile. Griff broke the moment with a burp.
I should take off, Zoe said, and went to the bar to close out her tab. She did so quickly, while Griff and Anderson watched—it was almost as if the bartender had had her card ready, a pen prepared for her to sign. After she did so she looked back, and gave them a small wave. Her small tote bag bounced softly against her back as she left.
Well, Anderson said, another night in suck city. Griff laughed uproariously. That’s really funny man, Griff said. Where you come up with these things? Anderson accepted the praise. Here’s to tomorrow, Anderson said. Tell me about it hombre, Griff said. They were walking to the door when Anderson remembered that he’d left his tab open, his shiny new credit card in the bartender’s clutches. He’d finally responded to one of those countless spam ads after he’d gotten the job—he felt like a member of capitalism once again. I’ve gotta close out, he told Griff, and he backslapped him. See you tomorrow. Griff nodded a little and kept walking. Anderson felt strangely buoyed—it was, he realized, that he’d both remembered about his credit card and also had succeeded in not taking the train the few stops to Brooklyn with Griff. Although surely Griff would have taken an Uber. Hell, he might have too.
Anderson made the universal symbol for check-please at the bar, and the bartender came to him immediately. The check was right there for him, and an uncapped pen, all ready to go, but before Anderson could reach for it the bartender bent toward him and whispered in his ear. You’re going to get an email tonight, the bartender said, portentously. She will contact you.
Anderson backed away, his fingers still curled around the pen. Now he really felt like a Maugham story; maybe Ashenden. What are you talking about, he said, a little thickly. The bartender backed away, and smiled as if he hadn’t heard him. He made the check-please sign back at Anderson, and walked away to the other side of the bar.
Anderson waited for a moment and watched the bartender. He signed the bill, and made sure to pocket the new credit card. He looked toward the bartender one last time to see if he might divine any special provenance or helpful assistance but the bartender refused to meet his eyes. There had been no customer at the other end of the bar—the bartender was leafing through the pages of a book. Anderson wanted to ask him what he was reading—it was a habit that Anderson found hard to drop. He’d always considered that he could judge a person by their paperback choices. This had changed in recent years with e-readers. There was only so much consumer difference between iPad and Kindle. But just as Anderson was opening his mouth the bartender shook his head warningly. Anderson, a little disconcerted, took his leave from the SoHo bar.
AS IT WAS wont to be on summer evenings when the night air is cool and welcoming and the subway itself is fetid and warm like the day that has already died aboveground, the Broadway-Lafayette station was dark and crowded, and Anderson waited twenty-five minutes for the next train. He had forgotten his book at the office, and though he tried to read a couple more pages of the always-waiting Crime and Punishment on his iPhone, through software Anita had introduced him to, which allowed you to read the same book on all your devices, he soon gave up. He wasn’t sure if it was the translation, the device, or just him. Also, he couldn’t get the bartender and his strange warning out of his head. When the F finally came, it was empty; not as in loosely populated but almost entirely empty, only its ghost lights on, like the garbage trains of 3:00 a.m. The crowd at Broadway-Lafayette surged on anyway, and Anderson followed. The train paused a little in the station but the air-conditioning worked and eventually it closed its doors and continued on.
Back at his apartment, Anderson heated up the days-old pasta he’d been not much looking forward to. He wasn’t much of a cook, and in his freelance days he’d been forced to enjoy his own cooking more than he would have liked to. The pasta was left over from a restaurant that Anderson had been to one night the week before, after work. He’d left the office, gone to the restaurant, thought about nothing, sat with no one, and before he knew it it was ten o’clock and he brought the rest of the meal home to his quiet apartment, where he had immediately fallen asleep.
Pasta devoured, Anderson checked the locks on his door and changed into a sleeping T-shirt and clean boxers. He settled himself into the armchair beside his bed, and rather than cracking the desperate old copy of Dostoevsky that had been darkening his bedside, he reached for a copy of The New Yorker that he’d picked up on a whim one subway ride. It was neither new nor old. This was the perfect age for a New Yorker, he considered. He had always felt an aspirational tug to read The New Yorker, to sit somewhere and read the magazine from beginning to end. Including the dance reviews that he might not have paid any attention to otherwise. He could envision himself doing this someday, some weekend when he was married to a Zoe-like figure and he was the editorial director of a fresh new imprint, maybe e-only at that stage in the game. He would page through the magazine, knowing all the writers, many personally. Anderson opened the magazine, and made it all the way through the Talk of the Town, skipping the economics column (naturally), and starting the short story. But it was a light first-person piece that had the problem that many first-person pieces had in recent years, in Anderson’s opinion, that they mattered only to the first-person in the story and their creators themselves. They didn’t have the elegance, the everyman quality, of third-person narration. In the middle of the story Anderson lost interest for good, and closed the magazine.
Usually Anderson tried to go to sleep without checking email. He’d come to understand that it messes with your natural sleep patterns, that it opens some pathways that healthy sleep depends on having closed. But tonight Anderson pulled his laptop off the shelf where he kept it next to his bed, and signed into his Gmail account. There were the usual promotions from Amazon and BookBub, and news alerts from a local news website he’d signed up for long, long ago. Nothing of interest. Perturbed, Anderson pulled up a new tab to get into his office email system, which was something he very much tried to avoid on a regular basis. He gave them enough hours of the day. He typed in his ironic password—DownAndOutInNYC—and the colorful green design of the FicShare page appeared before him. There was an all-staff email from Griff about some new e-reading app he’d seen on the train that night. Nikil had responded, “Interesting.” Zoe had sent out the daily schedule for the upcoming day. But nothing particularly intriguing. Anderson even checked his spam folder.
There’s no other way to put it: Anderson felt a little down. As usual, there was nothing special in his life. This was nothing new. He found his surprises in literature, not real life. Even his reading choices confirmed it—he looked, dilettante-like, for amusement, rather than deep vertical mastery of any particular author or period. It was why he’d drifted out of graduate school to New York City in the first place. Anderson looked at the clock on the upper right-hand corner of the screen—it was 1:00 a.m. Easy to get down on yourself at a time like that.
Anderson closed down the laptop, slid it back on its shelf, took a lingering look at the forlorn-looking Dostoevsky, and shut off the lights.
HE WAS AWOKEN with a rap on his window. He had been in the middle of a dream in which he and Anita were staring at a computer monitor, forearms bumping, and Zoe had her hands on their shoulders, staring disapprovingly. This was all par for the course for Anderson. Anita reached for the computer screen and tapped it with her fingernails. Again and again. Finally Zoe reached forward and did the same, but harder this time, so that in his dreamworld the screen Anderson was looking at shivered and broke. He woke up. There was someone tapping on his fire escape.
He got out of bed. With the lights off, he had a pretty good view of the outside, once he pulled the curtains apart. Leaning against the fire-escape railing, hand poised to knock once again, there was a woman. She was dressed in slacks and a button-down shirt, which seemed to Anderson improbable for a cat burglar or nighttime strangler. Her posture prefigured not danger or anxiety but almost normality, even out there on the fire escape. The woman nodded at him, gesturing the window up. He unlocked it and lifted.
Higher, the woman said, in a friendly but impatient way. He pushed it as high as it would go, and the woman ducked her head underneath. He gave her a hand as she hopped down next to his bed.
Shut that, the woman said, and keep the lights off. Wait, she said, as Anderson opened his mouth to begin with one of various pressing questions. The woman took a cell phone out of her pocket—it looked like an iPhone but a bit heavier-duty. She brought it to life with a few touches of her meaty fingers and a beam extended from it. She swung it 360 degrees around the room. Then she consulted with its glowing screen and, satisfied, returned the phone to her pocket. Okay, she said. Then she froze again. No. Her eyes had lighted on a plastic cup that Anderson had carelessly left on his bedside table, gifted from some takeout place down the street. The woman peered at it, sizing up the angle from it to the window, and in one motion reached it, snatched it from its perch, and crumpled it to a loud nothing of grainy plastic in her hands.
Jesus, yelped Anderson. Microphone, the woman explained. Or, it could be anyway. All they’d need is a laser pointer and a clear view from across the way. The woman scowled out the window from whence she’d come, as if these laser demons had been right behind her. I have to say I’m a little confused, said Anderson. Don’t you have P2P, the woman said indignantly. The blank look on Anderson’s face would have told her what she needed to know. It’s a security system, sighed the woman. Anonymous peer-to-peer secure communication. I thought everybody knew about that these days. Anderson, however, didn’t.
Can we turn a light on, Anderson asked. The woman responded by retrieving her cell phone from her pocket and tapping a few times. The ceiling light, and also Anderson’s reading lamp, flickered on. Anderson eased himself back onto his bed. This is all quite a lot to take, Anderson said.
He closed his eyes for a moment. When he opened them, the woman was still there, indeed, was peering down at him concernedly. It gave him a good chance to take the measure of her. She wasn’t exactly beautiful, which is another way of saying that she matched Anderson. She had thick limbs like he did, a wide, angular face that in some lights could seem strange or intriguing. She seemed to have the beginnings of a paunch around the waist, just like Anderson had begun developing recently. He would say it had been the switch from earning his money hand-to-mouth to FicShare’s custom of leaving Nutri-Grain bars all around the office desks. But really it was his lack of self-control.
I’m the new hire, the woman said, with an air of explaining the obvious. Or, former, she added. Svetlana, she said, waving her hand in an awkward but pleasant hello. Great bookshelf, she said, I love Malory too. Anderson, Anderson said stiffly, a little behind.
Let’s get going, she said, gesturing toward the doorway. It’s fine, it’s not bugged after all. Anderson stayed where he was, although she didn’t look back to see if he was following. She didn’t seem to be the type of person who successfully waited for answers or orders. Only at the doorway did she turn around.
What, she said, do I have to make the whole speech now? Aren’t you even a little bit curious? Look, I promise to have you back in bed in an hour, if that’s what you want to do. Her eyes twinkled a little.
Anderson considered. If he was in danger he probably would have felt it already. There would be plenty of time later for regrets. It wasn’t like he had to be at work early in the morning. Svetlana, sensing what the small movements that Anderson was committing were pointing toward, opened the door soundlessly. Anderson gathered his keys and wallet—Svetlana wagged a finger when she saw him reaching for his cell phone, which he dropped—and, on a whim, traded the phone for the copy of Dostoevsky lying to the side. Anderson carried the book against his wrist, and the weight of it, the half-fresh paperback pages, felt comforting as he ventured into the unknown.
OUTSIDE, ON THE corner of the block of Anderson’s apartment, a white car was waiting. This furthered Anderson’s sense that he wasn’t in danger, immediate anyway, and besides, Svetlana was the one driving. She pulled a slim ring of keys out of her pocket as they approached. Anderson opened the back door. I’m not a taxi driver, she said, indignantly. Or a cop. She grinned.
The car bounced along the recently unpaved streets of Brooklyn—Anderson’s neighborhood (not Anderson exactly, but his immediate peers) had been pressuring the city government to re-level their relatively bucolic street, as if there weren’t enough problems elsewhere. Someone with a sense of humor in City Hall must have given the okay to get started, but not permission to finish. The hot exposed street was sticky and vaguely sewage-smelling in the summer days. But soon they reached the Manhattan Bridge, by the good offices of wide Flatbush Avenue. As they crossed the great river, Svetlana began to fill Anderson in.
FicShare is a dangerous entity, Svetlana started. It’s not alone in its danger, but that doesn’t make it innocent either. She had a stirring, sugary voice. Maybe it began in an innocent, positive way, she said—maybe the idea really did come from a library. That was partially why I went through the interview process, Svetlana said, gunning the gas to get through a red light off the bridge, to hear Nikil and James in their own words. She looked over at Anderson. It’s seductive, as I’m sure you know. I can see them thinking about it while sitting on some leafy steps outside an actual library, wherever they went to college. Anderson knew it was Stanford (he’d seen their resumes too), but he didn’t mention this to his confident driver.
I don’t think I need to play out the numbers for you, Svetlana said. Sure, maybe this gives a relatively underprivileged kid the opportunity to read a few more books—that’s assuming they’ve gotten their hands on an e-reader in the first place, and haven’t heard of a public library system, which does this for free anyway. And maybe it spreads awareness of an author, and someone, somewhere, actually buys the book, physical or digital, that supports their bottom line. But you know the real drill. The only people who will actually use FicShare are people like us, people like Griff. It sounds sexy and hip and like a new way forward, in lots of ways. But people will start feeling good about thinking about all the reading they can do and they won’t actually do any of it. And all there’ll be will be VC funding and some nice offices, Svetlana said. Another reason to be glued to our device. Anderson was pleased, among all this, that Griff’s proclivities traveled before him. And so it’ll be one more trap, snaring us in the digital space, Svetlana said.
They coasted through the streets of Chinatown. The people I work for, Svetlana said, don’t want this to continue. It doesn’t matter who they are, or how many of us it takes. There is a silent majority of us. A person wakes up in the morning and discovers—well, nothing particularly earth-shattering, just that they can’t continue with it any longer. Not with life, although that’s a part of it, but everything—the constant connection. Pinterest, Facebook. The fact that the first thing this person reaches for every morning is their cell phone because it has become their alarm clock, and then, because they’ve reached for it, they start checking things, before their bleary eyes have even adjusted to another morning—email, work email, various sites, Snapchats. In this way this person or persons feels that they are missing the advent of sunlight, the nape of their lover’s neck; the puffy-cheeked entry into daily existence. They sometimes forget to go to the bathroom first thing, as they had usually done, sometime in the distant past. They can hardly remember their old daily routines. Anderson did, in fact, know what the woman was talking about. He agreed, in a sort of begrudging way.
I’m bringing you to meet some people, Svetlana said. They’ll have some requests to make of you. They’re fellow souls, you’ll see. You’ll feel right at home with them—she nodded at the paperback Anderson was carrying, like a talisman or spirit pole. We’ve taught ourselves to survive in this world, Svetlana said, but we want to change it. We want to pause it, is a way of thinking about it, she said. Suddenly there were the lights of Broadway, the empty but half-lit stores of the street’s southern section, mannequins gesticulating in the moonlight, and before Anderson had much more time to process anything they had arrived, back at Bar Kaminuk where he’d started his then-uneventful night.
Svetlana parked in a bus stop and they left the car. Don’t worry, she said, there won’t be any cops coming by. She moved confidently and methodically, Anderson noted, like a former athlete, or someone who had cottoned to manual labor late in life but well. The lights were off in the bar except for one, all the way in the back, and Svetlana and Anderson eased their way through the quiet door. Inside, the bartender was sitting more or less where Anderson had left him, still reading something or other, and next to the bartender stood Zoe.
Hello Anderson, the bartender said with a smirk. Zoe! said Anderson. Are you involved in this, he said, and she gave a small nod without changing her expression. Svetlana reached over the bar to shake the bartender’s hand, and nodded at Zoe. Svetlana took her heavy-duty cell phone out of her pocket and waved it around once more—it beeped when she got to the bartender, and the bartender pulled his own phone out of his pocket and apologized. He got up and Anderson watched him go to the refrigerator behind the bar, where he tossed his phone in and closed it. Svetlana took a seat on the stool next to Zoe, and Anderson remained standing, as if at an interview.
Zoe has been very helpful to us, Svetlana said, in monitoring FicShare. But soon she will be moving on. It’s all it takes, one woman or one man, some serious conviction—Anderson could tell that Svetlana was just starting to get warmed up. She seemed to have a nervous tic of continually rolling her sleeves up, even as they kept falling down. Anderson had noticed her doing it about four times already. And now the burden has come to you, she continued. It’s time to shake off your lethargy. Time for you to step out of your quotidian existence. You are old world but you are also new. You are a guardian but an innovator too. Time to decide to make something of yourself, for this and all ages. Very soon—
But at that very moment the door of the bar slammed open. There was no high-end creaklessness now—it slammed and banged. Inside ran four hooded figures, dressed all in black—were they armed? Anderson couldn’t say. The lights had suddenly shut off again, and the room was plunged into darkness and delirium. Anderson felt a hand on the back of his neck, urging him down, coolly, softly, almost pleasantly, though urgently. As he crouched, heart banging away somewhere around his throat, he turned and saw that it was Zoe, and she had her usual grim expression on her face. He realized that, whatever else, he trusted her. He didn’t know why, but he realized now that he always had. The little grimace she made, unconsciously, while she was typing, in the office; the way she bit her bottom lip while she read something, almost whispering it out loud. They crouched together, and Anderson closed his eyes. He clutched the Dostoevsky to his chest.
When he opened his eyes again, the lights had come back on. The sounds had stopped, and Svetlana and the bartender were leaned up against the bar, plastic zip cuffs around their wrists, dark material blindfolding their eyes. Zoe, Svetlana called. Anderson? Do they have you too? Zoe looked at Anderson and slowly shook her head. Anderson didn’t say anything. Two of the hooded figures took charge of the captives, and began to perp-walk them out the employee exit of the bar. As she went by, Anderson could smell a whiff of something off Svetlana’s body—sweat? Fear? But she went toward her fate stoically, her sleeves hanging loosely around her cuffed wrists.
When the captives and the first two figures were gone, and the door shut softly behind them, the remaining figures removed their hoods, and Zoe stood Anderson up. Well done J, the first figure said. Anderson watched him carefully, as the shadow of the hood fell away from his face. It was Nikil.
Good work, Zoe, Nikil said quietly. She never suspected. Zoe nodded almost imperceptibly. We’ve been very successful here tonight, said Nikil.
As if on cue, the three leading members of FicShare looked to Anderson. Zoe’s bracing arm left Anderson’s back. Once again he had the feeling of being at an interview, or else a firing squad.
This is bad business Anderson, James said. We wouldn’t want an employee who’s dissatisfied at the company. You know what I mean. He looked to Nikil, who agreed.
Of course, continued James, we haven’t been entirely honest with you either. With many of our employees. We have certain connections with a larger start-up, one which doesn’t have a public name yet, but which very soon will be changing the way we think about lots of the regular aspects of our lives. James looked quite earnest, the way promotional material does.
One vast connection, he continued. One large multiplier. One—
All right J, Nikil said sharply. This is all quite beta.
James came down to earth. We’d like for you to be a part of it. We value you at FicShare, we really do. The books, the stories—you keep us grounded. Will you stick with us a while longer? He, Nikil, and Zoe stared out at Anderson. Zoe held her hands motionless behind her back.
Anderson considered. Should he answer truthfully? What he wanted was a steady job, a decent apartment. Room for his books, nicely constructed bookshelves, and most of all, time to read from them. He realized, deep down, that he didn’t mind office work, much as he complained about it. It was a routine for him, like life. It kept him connected to some larger role, the possibility for some great advancement. And, he figured, everyone else was doing it. Once, when he was just out of college, there’d been an opportunity for him to go to an island off the Finnish coast and work in a bookstore for eight months, room and board included, but he’d decided against it. His life was like that. He shrugged off the unusual, and the strange. These thoughts flashed through his mind, like end-of-life, like a montage, like the flip-book public art installment that the B train passed on the Brooklyn side of the river when going over the Manhattan Bridge. It was a painting, lit from behind, covered with strips of black metal, so that when the train sped past it, it jumped and buzzed almost like a movie. He knew it well—he could see it before him. Anderson closed his eyes. He felt like Griff, nearly weeping in the clean SoHo bar bathroom.
I’ll see you all in the morning, Anderson said, pointedly. I don’t suppose I’ll recall much of what you might call a very dreamlike night. Nikil nodded swiftly, James pressed Anderson’s hand into a quick handshake. It’s for the best, Nikil said. Undoubtedly, answered Anderson.
He was almost to the door when Zoe called out to him. Wait, she said. You forgot this. He turned around. It was the Dostoevsky. He took it from her grasp. Her face was impassive, grave. Without saying anything, he left the bar. Outside, he hailed a cab—the subway would have been a nightmare at this hour, whatever hour it was. He didn’t know, because he didn’t wear a watch anymore. He didn’t have his cell phone, so he couldn’t tell the time—nor could he call an Uber. But the taxis were out in full force on the vacant streets of lower Manhattan, even at that hour, shuttling from the hotspots of northern Brooklyn and the centers of commerce, industry, and culture on Wall Street, Midtown, Murray Hill. The taxi that picked Anderson up stank inside of old cigarettes and bad bread, and old, mildewed leather jackets. By the streetlights of the city that never sleeps around them Anderson opened his copy of Crime and Punishment, and began reading. St. Petersburg. Islands and canals. A policeman and a public park. Fallen women. He forgot to tell the driver to avoid the unpaved street just before his building. They bounced to the end. He paid the driver, walked the quick stairs to his apportioned room, closed the window that he’d left a little open, and settled into the armchair next to his bed to continue reading. By the time morning came, stark and resolute, Anderson had finished the book.