It was Saturday—the one day in Brody’s tireless week roaming bars and clubs that was reserved for painting. He took his easel out of the corner and set it up in front of the wall of windows.
The painting he had been working on, using a mix of acrylic and oils, was to be a snapshot of the city seen beyond his windows: red curtains flaring in the wind in the foreground and the metropolis in daylight beyond, something of a rarity for him. When he finished it he planned to hang it in the apartment, his sole piece of décor. All his previous paintings were layered under this one, but he had a good feeling about this latest attempt. He wanted to look at it with his lenses in and see a reminder not only of his artistry but that the Twin Cities also existed during the day.
He sat there in a pair of beat-up jeans and a T-shirt and painted for close to two hours before his hands shook from hunger. He took a step toward the kitchen and glanced back at the canvas, comparing it to the real thing behind it. It was looking good. He saw that he had spilled a couple of drops of black and red paint on the floor, but he had the lease on the place for another two years—plenty of time to scrub it out later.
Lunch consisted of a salad with tuna-flavored soy balls and hydroponic cocktail onions, evidence he was scraping the bottom of the barrel as far as the contents of his pantry were concerned. He stood within a few feet of the canvas as he ate, examining his work. At that precise moment, when the light was just right, his painting and its subject were identical. A few more minutes and the light would change, and there it’d be: a painting of an estimation of what his city looked like in the daylight.
09:59:59 flashed that terrible cautionary red only a machine can produce. That was all the new set of batteries could provide, it seemed. He sighed and went to the bathroom to remove the lenses to try to eke out the last bit of charge he could claim from the batteries, switched on his sonar, and slapped it to his forehead.
Exiting the bathroom, he looked at his painting on the easel. Just a flat square, textured with colorless paint. It might as well be a sticky, wet slab of canvas with nothing but black paint. He clicked off the sonar and opted to navigate his apartment in total darkness, smelling paint and faux tuna, listening for his cell to ring about something, anything to occupy his time. A case would be good, a woman on the other end begging him to do something about her awful husband. He wished no ill will toward anyone, but he relied on people doing what they did if he was to ever finish the painting.
Alone in his apartment for weeks at a time, Brody often considered getting an honest nine-to-five job to finance as many batteries as he wanted, but he felt better operating as a freelance problem solver of sorts. It felt appropriate for a war veteran who had a remarkably short fuse. But the longer he remained in the apartment with the silence and the memories of the crying women with bruised faces he met at the community center, he felt a tightening on him, as if he were in the grip of a giant snake, slowly being squeezed.
After he’d gone out and given whomever what was deserved, he could sit in the silence and the looming isolation calmly for two days. No more. Then he’d have to leave—go to the community center, work off a few hours his probation officer scheduled, and inevitably come across yet another woman who required his help. And then he’d be off again, another snake around his neck choking everything else out of his life until nothing but tunnel vision remained. But this time it came quicker; he had just dealt with Jonah the night before and already he was distracted, tight.
Brody rifled through the shoe box of old lens charger batteries in the cabinet beneath his bathroom sink. One pronged cylinder after the next felt solid to the shake. If they sloshed around, their liquefied alkaline was still good. If they felt solid when shaken—no good, used up, dry. He found one that sounded chunky inside, only parts of the fluid congealed. He snapped it into the panel on the underside of the case and looked at the top for the light to flash on. Oh, right. Blind. Strange how easy it was to forget.
Sonar on, he went back out and cleaned up his easel. He put the painting in the corner by the window where it could dry in the afternoon sun. He had a cigarette and chose to put the lenses in even without knowing whether they had gotten a decent charge. The moment his index finger retreated from the surface of his eye, the indicator sprang up: 10:59:59. Eleven hours. Still less than half a day.
He sighed. “Better than nothing.”
Brody pushed through the front doors of the community center to find the place nearly empty, save for a lone older gentleman in the corner playing both sides of the foosball table. Brody approached the reinforced glass and tapped on it with a knuckle.
Samantha, the spritely older clerk who was always there on weekends to sign him in for his community service, looked up from the ordi he was studying in her palm. She smiled, slid aside the partition, wafting out Chanel No. 5, powdery and acidic. “Well, good morning, good looking. To what do we owe this pleasure?”
“Just thought I’d swing by and get a few hours done.”
“Let me see what I got for you.” Samantha carefully set the unit on which she’d been doing the crossword aside to get the printed list of tasks.
Brody noticed the ordi was shiny, new. Not like his phone, with the cracked screen and thumb-polished keypad. He found himself compelled to ask. “Got yourself a new ordi?”
“Excuse me?” Samantha said, shooting daggers over her thick half-glasses. Corrective surgery was getting cheaper by the year, but she still wore reading glasses.
“Ordi. Ordinateur,” Brody explained but her confusion remained. “Uh, minicomputer? Newfangled abacus?”
Samantha followed his gaze to the handheld ordi on the counter. “Oh, this thing? Pete got me that for my birthday.” She flipped to the next page on the clipboard. Brody could see that a majority of the easy jobs—dusting, putting up weatherproofing on the windows—had already been done by the other community servicers, none of whom he had ever actually seen around the place. “All I can do on the damn thing is make calls and do crosswords. But at my age what more do you really need? What did you call it?”
“An ordinateur. Can I see that for a minute?” he asked, pointing at the clipboard.
She handed him the list. “That French?”
“I think so.”
“Why are you using French? Is that cool now or something?”
“Not that I know of. I guess whoever makes the gizmos gets to decide what to call them.” He tapped an item on the list. “Does that still need to be done, the basketball court?”
“Mopped and waxed.” She furrowed her brow, clearly still stuck on talk about ordinateurs. “The French make the gizmos?”
“Canadians, actually. And the basketball court would be my pleasure.” Brody smiled and handed the list back to her. He removed his keys, cell, and wallet and set them on the counter. That was the rule: one had to leave all personal belongings at the desk during community service. It was pretty hard to cheat court-mandated hours while parked on a barstool around the corner without a jigsaw to settle the tab.
She picked up the ordi and settled an answer into three down on the crossword—diligent—and asked, “So that’s the word they use for ‘telephone’ nowadays, huh?”
“And all other electronic devices.”
“All others? Whatever happened to the other shit?”
Brody smirked. “Pardon?”
“You know, the laptops and desktops, tablets and web-books, the towers and hard drives and thumb drives and the this and the that. The stuff that everyone just had to have or else you might as well be using two cans and a string or making smoke signals to call your neighbor. That shit.”
“They’re all one big happy melded together family now: ordinateurs.”
“That’s confusing. I’ll tell you what I think. I don’t like it.”
Brody laughed. “I’ll be sure to let someone know because I am clearly in charge of deciding technological colloquialisms.”
“There you go again, talking nonsense.” Samantha collected his things from the counter and put them aside, save for his jigsaw card. That she inserted into the ubiquitous nautilus card reader, a big black conch shell commonplace in the community center and in just about every establishment—government, restaurant, or otherwise.
She waved him over to the body scanner to the right of the office window. “I know you’re not carrying anything, but the last time I let you go on through, I really got chewed out.”
“It’s fine.” Brody stepped through the plastic doorway, and no alarms went off. He stepped back through and again nothing went off. He put out his arms as if to say: Good?
“Okay, go on ahead,” Samantha said.
As Brody approached the elevator, he said over his shoulder, “You shouldn’t be so hard on yourself. Did you see my phone? It’s ancient.”
From the kiosk, Samantha shouted, “The phone I had before this gizmo had a rotary dial, honey. Try that on for size if you want to compare old junk.”
He laughed, smacked the call button. “Is the floor buffer still in the utility closet up there?”
“You know it is. It’ll be right where you left it. Thanks, sugar. Ain’t no one but you ever want to do more than a half-ass job round here.”
“Oh, it’s my pleasure.”
The door skidded aside.
“And the court system’s,” Samantha jibed just before the elevator door closed.
Brody was unable to squeak out a decent comeback. Alone in the elevator going up, he cursed but it was with a smile.
The gymnasium was empty. It reminded Brody of his apartment in its chasmal, yawning emptiness and how each footstep reverberated off the walls. The wood floor creaked and popped with each step upon it. Above, the entire ceiling was a paneled skylight, the glass tinted to keep a majority of the sunlight out, causing everything beneath it to take on a jaundiced look.
After an hour, he had the entire floor mopped. He wheeled out the floor buffer and went to work, patiently steering it around the gym floor in grinding circles.
As the buffer droned, the constant hiss of the scrubber gliding across the wood’s lacquered surface forced Brody’s thoughts elsewhere. He held the finger throttle down on the buffer and slowly steered it to the right, then the left, and then back again. The sound drilled in, mining the memory best associated with a similar sound.
And just like that, time receded and towed Brody along with it, ten years rewinding.