SIX

Fake City

[Outside Time]

Not only had there been no complaint from our highlevel corporate customer, I was specifically requested to bring the next afternoon’s lunches directly to the office again myself. I didn’t understand this. But when my manager Roskind cornered me – literally backed me into a wedge between a workbench and a shelf of pans as soon as I walked through the door – she made the matter as clear as clear could be.

“You,” she said, pointing at me. “You take these upstairs now. Right now.” Her eyes were wide with fear, as if she were the one in the corner.

“I…”

“You…?” Was that doubt? Like lightning shot through the surface of her face, as soon as it had come, it was gone, like I’d never seen it. Her expression turned stony again, and manic. She was panting. She stood there, fierce and paranoid: the rudimentary hair, disheveled; the red-split veins at the corners of her eyes, wide, wobbling; and the stance: she took a wide stance, while she herself was not wide. I noticed these things, looking at her, following her ragged breathing, wondering at the likelihood of violence.

“Why me?” It wasn’t that I didn’t want to, but…

“They asked for you. Okay? They said to send ‘that same guy from yesterday’. The same. That was you. You went yesterday. You go now. You.” She pointed at me.

“Again. This time. Okay.”

Her lower jaw jutted out. “You’ll take these.” She indicated the several bags on the workbench, already prepared and waiting. So I carefully wound my fingers through the entwined handle-loops and was weighed down again, like before, with exactly as much as I could manage, not less, and no more. “Go now,” she said. “Go.” She made shooing waves with her fingers. “You go now. You.”

•

Because the tower had grown again during the night, the BOX Group no longer occupied the 129th floor as it had the day before, but was now on the 136th. As I rode, I wondered dimly what may have taken over the intervening numbers. The building would of course manage somehow to fill itself with tenants, much the same way as it grew, spontaneously. I was curious what this client of ours wanted so specifically with me – but more than this, I wanted to see how much closer this new height would bring me to the orb.

The 136th floor might almost be as high up as Mosquito.

As the elevator surged upward and I stood confined, dangling so many sacks from my fingers, I tried to remember what I’d got up to the night before. It was hazy. There was time, some span of it, or there’d been time, or something like it, after a manner, a duration of some sort. But the details were lacking because nothing had happened. Of course, I’d not slept. I’d watched Mosquito hang all ruddy-silver and weightless in the clouds. I’d felt it shimmer, quick and cold. I’d seen cockroaches scuttle over the wood-slat floors. They’d climbed the leg of the coffee table and onto its surface. They’d poked into the scattered objects left there – strange objects, scattered magic: the hat, the badge, the g-g-gun – and they creeped and crawled about, in and out of these things. I thought I’d maybe watched my own hand for a long time, washed as it was in the silver orb-light that shone through the window, and wondered that it could really be my hand, unfamiliar as it seemed. But that may have been another night, or every other night, or it may not’ve even happened at all. I worried about my job. Lousy as it was, I still worried, despite the lack of trouble I’d expected, despite the lack of incident to result in trouble. I still worried I would lose it over nothing.

No. Now. The client wanted to see me again. For what? Why? For some reason, he, they, the BOX people, wanted me, I…

The elevator doors chimed and slung themselves apart. Brass, shiny. I’d seen myself in them, bent and split. I’d seen myself. Again: the reception of the BOX Group, vaguely Japanese. Black floors. Planter boxes in the corners with stalks of living weeds, leaves, segments. The desk was a long slab, a block of black granite. Three women behind it, two on the phone, the third available. She: young, prim, professional, something. I approached, these bags and bags hung limp from the strap-constricted flap-hands of each arm, more bags than I had bothered to count, more than I knew. I held them forward, up: see?

“Hi, I’m –”

“Yes, just set those up in the conference room, please.”

“Set? Up?” Upsetting. My words wouldn’t work.

“Right.” Her eyes flicked at mine. “Just in there. Please.”

“You’re sure?”

She darkened with annoyance. When the phone rang next, she looked away from me to answer it, giving at the same time an impatient finger-point toward the empty conference room. I shrugged and hauled the bags that way. She had at least been clear, quite specific. There. I went. Long, along.

•

The room was a restful bit of quiet, apart from the front, wide and silent, waiting. I settled the bags on the table, careful not to let them spill – gently, gently – and was again taken immediately by the view. Now I knew what to look for and there I found it: up, there, still just a little higher, though not so much higher as it was before: look up. That I could remember, and quite clearly, if a fog obscured the rest. Angle, tri-angle. Dot. Degrees of declension. Dot. These things. Only an approximation, some might say. Quite exact, I think. My head, aswim with figures and form. She knew. What. She? Coming closer, seeming nearer to the node, yes. She, she. The Orb of Ambiguous Approach. We are approaching the IT, she… moss, mossy; compared to it, my thoughts were slow. Gently set and do not falter. Further IT to Touch. I reached my fingers forward. I felt my mouth fall open. I stared at the sky.

“Excuse me.” That was a voice I knew, now, details re-emerged entangled. Two feet on the floor were mine. Two others, his.

I turned, I started, a little.

Emerged, bald, from the room-edge in shadow, the gray wash of light shone on his pate, flashed twice in a lensing of glasses. The same shiny jacket. The tie.

“Your receptionist,” I said, “told me I should set these up in here.” Picturing her finger, piercing space. Small muscle twitch of impatience. I could see her through glass, talking on the telephone.

“Ah. Ah-hah. I see.” He adjusted the tie, stepped some further forward, fully revealed. “Well, if that’s the case…”

Spiderwebbed. These were eggs. I began to take the small squares full of lunch from their sacks, each container stamped by ink: BOX, BOX, etc., BOX.

“I’m sorry, is this not…?”

“No, please, continue. It’s of no importance.” A wave of a hand. Small hand, small figure. Bones, delicate, now that I’d noticed. Had I thought him a spider? Only a moment. Now he seemed more like a bird. Or birds. Amusement lingered. His face, amused. Watching me. I thought he thought I must be funny, but I was not, so far as I knew, that funny. All the same, I fumbled out the food, aware of his eyes on my person. Here was a thing done every day by someone, now by me. “I’ve not found,” he said, “reason yet for complaint over the quality of your service. You’ve done well enough. You bring the food, it’s true. You set the food out… And we are happy.”

“Thank you,” I said. Relief.

“But of the food itself? The stuff? Well. What can one say? Were anyone to actually eat it, perhaps…”

“I’ve wondered that more than once,” I said over my shoulder, bent into my work, “myself. Since it seems that no one does. Eat it, that is. Now that we’re dead.”

Hands in his pockets. Small hands. He rocked forward and back on the balls of his feet.

“I take it, in that case, that you no longer eat either?”

“I don’t. Not a bite. No need to. Don’t sleep either,” I said, “at least so far as I know. My memory is not so clear past yesterday, perhaps the day before.” A scratch of the head in puzzlement.

“Yes, memory. It is an agitation.” He nodded. “Pity…”

“Pity? What?”

“It’s one of those things,” he said, “of life I once thought fondly. Eating is.”

I’d finished setting the boxes out over the long, oval table, one per seat, with accompanying napkins and plasticware each, brought from the bottom of one sack. Studied, modified, deliberate. Done. I stood back, studied again. It was okay.

“No more of that, I suppose. Yet there will be a lunch meeting?” I asked.

“Oh, naturally.” Folding the arms across his chest. “Much in our industry, driven by necessity – the product as much as the process – much as it was formerly by preference. A thing you need or a thing you choose over another. What a market decides, for instance. A streamlining at some point in the process occurs, or has occurred. What is unnecessary, you see, becomes no longer… possible. Yet what is necessary… You’d think there would be more of it, only there’s less. Only what is possible is, in a word, necessary, and that much is absolute. What must be must be. Which is, I suppose, a kind of preference. The preference of what our condition allows. In death, as unlike life, it is what has, so far, driven our success. If success is what you call it. But then, come about, another day, and there’s lunch again. And meetings over lunch.”

“Which is…”

“Neither possible nor necessary. Yet it is, and there you have it.”

“I see.” Although, in actuality, I did not.

“I watched you looking out the window,” he said, pushing his glasses askew with a finger and scratching at his eye.

“It is really quite a view,” I said.

“It changes every day. Every day, a new city, seen from a different place.”

“It isn’t real…”

“Of course it isn’t real. No one ever said it was. Quite the opposite. Although without memory, it could be always exactly the same and we’d be no wiser. We’d think ourselves each day a fresh, new, brave bug, come into the world to face the thing that’s not ourselves. The stuff of heroes, every one of us. But it’s not the city you’ve been watching, is it?”

“Come again?”

“You’ve been looking up, not down.”

“You see it too?” I asked.

“What do you think?” The light glimmered off his circle-lensed glasses.

“No one else seems to notice it. If they do, they never say anything.”

“You imagine it belongs to yourself alone?”

“Not like that,” I protested. “It’s just… I do feel it’s so familiar.”

“It knows what you know, and it knows you.”

“So you say, and I might imagine as much. But really I know nothing about it. Less than that, even, except that it’s always there and I can’t forget it. It’s the one thing. I wonder…”

He removed his glasses from his head and held them tilt-wise, and with these off now, I could see that his eyes were not almond-oval as my own but narrowed some, slanted a bit, at least a little Asiatic. Or was he squinting? No, he was not squinting. I took another quick glance at the view outside.

“Yes?”

“I wonder,” I continued, “that it has authority here? In this place?”

“Interesting.”

“I mean, it seems to be watching.”

“Is that what it does?”

“Don’t you think? I mean, what else?”

“It’s not mine to say,” he said.

“But you know, don’t you? You know what it’s doing.”

“What makes you think that?”

“You do.”

He took a step back, still smiling. Another step and the shadows had begun to enshroud him once more. He lingered there, liminal, the gleam on his glasses, which now he’d replaced, remained, as did the halfsmile. Cheshire-face, Cheshire smile. Remain. I was still amusing, somewhat; enough. I would be asked back again tomorrow, I knew that much.