Temporary

by Hilary Leichter

  “Don’t forget to update your resume.”

  “I won’t,” I say, wiping my eyes. “I’m a stickler.”

  “And your time sheets?”

  “I’m a stickler for time sheets too.”

  “Yes, that’s why you’re in such high demand.”

  “I’m in high demand?” I ask, sniffling a little. Something in my eye, I mouth to the man with the long hair.

  “Sure you are!”

  “How nice,” I say.

  “That’s right. It’s nice to be wanted. It’s nice to be needed. It’s nice to punch a card with the world every morning, to let the world know you’re still alive and punching and kicking. You’re surely bound for the steadiness!”

  “Farren, I hate to be a bother, but could you look into collecting payment for me from the Wildlife Preservation Initiative?”

  “Of course, sugar. You bring the sugar. I’ll handle the direct deposit. So enterprising, you.”

  “Also, how are you today?” I ask.

  “How am I? I don’t understand.”

  “What have you been up to?”

  “Life. I’ve been up to life. It’s none of your business,” Farren says, her voice suddenly clipped. Then, “Oh, you know, nondisclosures is what I meant, and so forth.”

  “Of course,” I say. “But what color are your nails today?”

  “Blue,” she says.

  Blue.

  “Aquamarine,”

  she says. “Oh, and Farren?”

  “What is it, superstar?”

  “It’s just … I miss you,” I say.

  “What’s that?”

  “Nothing, nothing. Just thank you so much. Thank you so much. Thank you so, so much,” I say. “So, so much.”

  “Just doing my job,” she says. “You know that, right?”

  “Right. Me too.”

  Farren instructs me on where to go next. The man with the long twisty hair, it turns out, is my new employer. He takes temporary jobs when work gets slow, which explains his gig as the parrot, Maurice.

  “Times like these,” he says.

  I understand.

  He has a few more quarters for me, so I call the boyfriends. Specifically, I call my culinary boyfriend.

  “Food systems analyst,” my culinary boyfriend says, correcting me.

  “That’s news to me,” I say.

  “I guess so. You’ve been gone!”

  It turns out they’re at my apartment again, the boyfriends, sitting around my old coffee table, a red oval slab with hairpin legs that I found on the side of the street and hauled upstairs all by myself.

  “Really?” I ask. “What are you doing?”

  They’ve started a book club. My culinary boyfriend brings the snacks. Food systems analyst! he yells in the background. The phone fills with clouds of laughter.

  “Today,” he says, “I made a duck liver hors d’oeuvre, a foamed grapefruit amuse-bouche, and a cheesy puff shareable plate.”

  When my culinary boyfriend used to cook for me, it was a shareable plate of takeout, and when I say plate, I really mean carton.

  “Also,” he says, “you got another letter about the stolen boots. Your former employer implores you to return her boots, promptly and without a struggle.”

  “Thanks for mentioning it,” I say.

  “She’ll garnish your shoes for the rest of your life unless you return her boots in passable condition.”

  “Got it.”

  “She will break into your apartment while you are sleeping and take half of each pair of shoes under the glorious shroud of night, and when you wake up, you will have only single, solitary shoes to mark your singular, lonely life,” he says. “I’m just quoting!”

  My earnest boyfriend grabs the phone.

  “I put all the spiders on the window ledge!” he says. “Even the tiny ones!”

  “That’s great, love.”

  “Book club is the best,” he says, audibly beaming, without a hint of sarcasm. I think I hear him tumble forward into a pile of boyfriends, maybe on the couch, and they laugh and scream like fiends. Are they tickling one another?

  My turn, I hear. No, mine, I hear. Give me the phone! Me next! Oh, you!

  “We’re reading a novel,” says my favorite boyfriend, rising from the chaos, “about a group of friends just like ours. They have fights and disagreements, but they love each other until the end of time, which for all they know might be just around the corner. Some of the friends move away, but the people who move away are instantly forgotten. The story’s lyrical and told in the style of a really great song, like that one we heard at that concert all those years ago. I won’t spoil the ending. But everyone dies! You would love it. Maybe you’ll read it, hon?”

  I remember my favorite boyfriend snickering at my book clubs and knitting circles, and I wonder why his is any different. Why is yours different? I don’t ask.

  The food systems analyst says all of them will be friends for life, these boyfriends. I’ve built something lasting for them, something they can count on.

  “You don’t even know what you’ve given us,” he says, his voice trembling. “You could not even possibly know.”

  BLOOD WORK

  The long-haired man is named Carl, and he’s something of an entrepreneur. His small murder business sits in a tidy shack not far from the water. Convenient for dumping bodies.

  “Location, location, location,” he says.

  “You sound like my real estate boyfriend!” I laugh.

  Every morning I wash Carl’s weapons, adhering to the cleaning manual he developed. I’m filling in for his buddy who’s currently serving some time. Carl doesn’t always pay in money, but he feeds me and gives me a place to sleep, a small cot next to his desk in the shack, where I hide my possessions under the mattress: my rubies, my eye patch, my brooch in the shape of a nautilus shell.

  “I can offer you gobs of experience,” he says.

  “What about exposure?”

  “I can offer you the opposite of that.”

  He promises me stock in his company. “When we go public, you’ll be a very rich lady!”

  Murder isn’t a brand that usually goes public, I think, at least not by choice. But I don’t dare turn up my nose at a share of his shares.

  “You’ve got a knack,” he says, making a sound like knack with a crack of his fingers. It warms my damn heart. Carl warms my heart in general. It feels grand to see him in his element.

  “I’m sorry we weren’t friendlier on the ship,” I say.

  “Nothing to be sorry for,” he says, “is my motto.” He hands me a beer on the roof of his shack, where we sit and smoke and watch the sun set over the sea.

  I take initiative from the get-go and amortize the cost of Carl’s assassination equipment.

  “This one is cheaper,” I say, shopping for spears. “Sharpener included, free with purchase!”

  He’s grateful when I help him approach his daily schedule with more efficiency, and sometimes he lets me assist in planning the logistics of the murders.

  “If you take this street,” I point out, “you’ll shave six minutes off the getaway.”

  “Well, I never!”

  “Just a slight detour. No more nick of time.”

  “I’ll have a second to stop for a sandwich even,” he says. “Thanks, kid.”

  He comes home holding an artisan panini, and I see the gratitude all over his face.

  Carl schedules the kills for Tuesdays through Thursdays so he can take long weekends. He comes home on a Wednesday and I know where he’s been: knocking off a gentleman in the center of the city.

  “Gentle’s debatable,” he says. “Man: also debatable. More like a monster, really.”

  These are the only kinds of details he ever offers, the kind stripped from the innards of context I’ve already been given. An elderly woman in a sixth-floor walk-up: as high and mighty as her apartment! A child on horseback: less kid and more cavalry!

  He walks inside a
nd first thing removes his shoes, pants, and shirt, and everything underneath, and balls up the clothing in a nylon bag he hangs on a hook near the door. He walks straight to the tub and runs the water until a stratus of steam seeps from the bathroom and into the living space. We don’t discuss the murders, or, as Carl calls them, the business trips. While he enjoys his bath, I take the nylon bag and douse it in bleach. I wash the whites and colors in cold, crisp water. I take a dryer sheet and set it on my forehead like a veil, then lean forward and slip the sheet down my nose and into the machine with the fresh, clean clothes. If there’s a stain I can’t scrub, we snip the fabric in the trouble spot: a shirt with holes is better than a shirt with evidence. I prepare a bowl-sized cup of chamomile, and I set it on his desk with a plate of cookies near his journal, where he records the minutes and seconds from the end of every life he takes.

  “Those moments are sacred,” he says, toweling off his hair. “Don’t think I don’t know how to declare a time of death.”

  “I didn’t think. I don’t know.”

  “That’s why I write it down, see,” he says, jabbing the book with his finger. “It would be imprudent to forget. I’m trying to be better about keeping company records, kiddo.”

  “Can I help?”

  “I’m sure you can. But it’s my job, not yours. And anyway, plausible deniability.”

  We find a rhythm in this routine. Summer is the busy season, and Carl is all booked up. “Something about the heat,” he says, “makes the blood boil.” He comes home on a Tuesday, removes his shoes, pants, and shirt, balls them up in the nylon bag, and runs the water for his bath. I do the wash and fold the socks and prepare the chamomile and the cookies, and Carl stays up most of the night recording the intricacies of the murder of a young bank robber named Laurette, who kept receipts from every robbery like she was preparing to do her taxes. Instead of the taxes, she’s the one who got done. Carl is writing when the sun is rising, and then it’s coffee and a bagel and a schmear and off to prepare for the next day’s slaughter.

  I know about Laurette because Carl keeps his journal on his desk. While he’s gone, what else can I do but take a peek? I peek on a regular basis. I know about a lot of people now, not just Laurette. Research, I tell myself. How can I be of assistance without a clear context for the work? How can I be of clear conscience without knowing what clouds the conscience to begin with?

  Only once does Carl come home and break his habits. He walks into the shack with his shoes still laced, tracks blood and mud all over the floor. He slumps in a chair, still wearing his business garb. I’m not sure what to do, so I just listen as he explains the feeling of knife hitting bone, the sound of the crack of a neck, and how it reminds him of the sound of holiday crackers bursting at a fancy dinner table.

  “Your table?” I ask.

  “No,” he says. “I’m not sure whose. I’m not sure where that memory’s from. I’m not even sure it’s mine.”

  “I understand,” I say. I unbutton his shirt and help him out of his shoes, and I clean the shack until it shines.

  On Sundays, I have free time to explore the place Carl calls home, and I find that I love it quite a bit. I love the weather and the people who sit near the dock. I love my job. Files and documents come and go by way of the shredder, but murder is a task that lasts. It’s nice to have my head in something nearly steady. I’m not sure if the real steadiness will come, but a girl can dream.

  I frequently stop at the cart that sells shaved ice drizzled with lemon and cherry, and I eat the ice with a wooden spoon, staining my tongue red and yellow, sitting on the boardwalk watching the sea, looking for human barnacles, starfish, jellyfish populating the shore. I like to find the shells with tiny holes punched at the tops, perfect for holding the length of a chain. I slip a glowing mother-of-pearl specimen on my necklace, to keep the Chairman company, and the name of the shell contains the names of two of my favorite people. My necklace feels like a little family, for want of a picture in a locket.

  In the evening, Carl takes me to the carnival, where we ride the carousel at least ten times. Porcelain horses. More like cavalry, I think.

  “Don’t you feel dizzy?” he shouts.

  “I feel excellent!”

  We play the midway games, and he’s proficient in the challenge where you shoot a dart at a rising balloon.

  “Gotcha,” he says, and he gets it several times. Every now and then, someone stops and stares—not only to admire his marksmanship. They watch him with expressions I’ve never seen before, and I say, Carl, let’s go, let’s please go, let’s leave now, let’s please go now, before they have a chance to turn their expressions into something worse, to reach in their pockets, to pull back their coats, to slip a hand into a boot or reveal a holster strapped to a belt. These are, of course, I think, Carl’s victims come to haunt him, come to claim revenge, left to pick up the pieces of his various business trips. Or maybe they aren’t, or maybe they are, or maybe they just ate some bad funnel cake. I’ll never know; I never do find out. Life is a stranger in a crowd whose intentions are unclear and, come to think of it, so is death.

  Carl wins a cornucopia of stuffed animals for me, a litter of toxic-green inanimate bunnies. He carries my prizes so I can hold my drink and walk unencumbered, swinging my arms and spinning my skirt, and when I get tired, he carries me as well, sets me on the cot to sleep, lifts my legs under the covers. I wake up in what feels like a soft rabbit warren, surrounded by the plush, sweet gifts from the night before.

  Other nights, my sleep isn’t as sound, and the necklace takes hold. The Chairman and I travel the length of the shore and back again, my feet bloodied by sharp shells. We climb the lifeguard chair, the scaffolding under the boardwalk, the water tower, the carnival Ferris wheel. We talk about life, about business, about decisions related to both. Carl finds me climbing his shack in the hours before dawn, talking to myself, and I explain the effects of my necklace.

  “Does he have good advice?” he asks, bandaging my feet.

  “Good, but maybe misplaced?”

  “I used to watch you talking to yourself on the pirate ship,” Carl says, and I remember all the times I watched him from afar myself. I’m so glad we have something in common. I take the common ground and turn it into a site on which to plant the rest of our days. “Remember when we kept tabs on each other?” we’ll say. “Remember when we took those tabs and settled them up?” I think of his socks, folding them in little packages. I think of how many times I’ve seen him walk naked from the door to the tub. I think of the elegant, sturdy block letters filling the pages of his journal. I could ask him to become one of my boyfriends, even though I haven’t added a new boyfriend in ages, let alone a long-distance one. Then I think of my other boyfriends nestled at home, the distance something I hadn’t considered before. These days, all my boyfriends are long-distance. But then again, so is the length of an arm stretched between two people watching each other from afar.

  “Do you want to be one of my boyfriends?” I ask.

  “That’s not in my skill set, kid,” Carl says, and he gives me a long, soft kiss good-night.

  The full story of Laurette the bank robber is complicated indeed. Carl wrote ten pages in his murder journal about how he was and always will be filled with regret and sorrow for what happened, even though his motto is “Nothing to be sorry for,” and how if he could take it back he would, because the girl who robbed the bank that day, the girl who stole the money at the hour Carl had set the murder on his schedule, she wasn’t Laurette, she was a substitute bank robber with a penchant for bright face masks and bright gloves, and she wore a floral mask that complemented her blue eyes, and Carl knew right away when her eyes hung open after she had left her body that no, this wasn’t Laurette at all, for in her file it clearly stated that Laurette had silver eyes, not blue, and he ripped off the mask and there, from her limp, slack face, he got the full proof he was dreading. He had gone and murdered the wrong person.

  On the day
in question, Laurette herself was home with the flu and a fever of 102 and a stack of magazines and reruns from her favorite television programs and a well-received documentary about the true lives of Bonnie and Clyde, which she’d been saving for a special occasion. She felt lucky to have coverage on her sick day, and that word, coverage, was a word she liked—the shirt that covered her shoulders, the blanket that covered her body, the sleep hat that covered her head, the roof that covered her hat, the sky that covered her roof, the universe that always covered her ass, so lucky was she. Lucky Laurette. Her fever was so high she started to hallucinate that the robbery hadn’t gone as planned, that something was wrong at the bank, and that her younger sister, who had filled in for her that day, was standing before her near the couch, wearing her favorite floral mask, begging her to come and help.

  “The heist is a bust,” her younger sister said, or so Laurette thought.

  “A bust is just a heist performed by your body,” Laurette said, and when she heard her own voice out loud she knew she was delirious, and she fell asleep there on the couch with a magazine in her lap opened to an article about how no one really wears the correct bra size, not really, not ever.

  Word reached Laurette late that night, the news on the television, someone tried to rob a bank, someone was dead, the robber was dead, body missing, and Carl stood outside her house watching her through the window, and she was at once bewildered and devastated. She started laughing hysterically, like a woman who stands under a piano falling from the sky, and the piano misses her by inches, and then the realization of a life spared fills her with maniacal giggles. Then she started crying, like a woman who realizes that even though the piano didn’t fall on her head, it fell on someone else’s head instead, and not just any someone, but her younger sister, a brilliant bank robber in her own right with so much potential, so much potential, potential like a piano prodigy, and she suddenly hated the word potential, because it’s either wasted or lived up to and guess who was no longer up to living in this particular scenario.

  The universe had covered Laurette’s ass yet again. The universe! The universe doesn’t subtract, it just replaces. Matter isn’t created or destroyed, it’s just replaced, it just changes, it’s just misplaced. And if nothing is ever really lost, how can we ever mourn? That’s what Laurette wanted to know. Laurette laughed and cried and laughed and cried and thought about that word, coverage, and how it reminded her of the word shroud, and how it also described the grief that now covered her entire life, and she turned off the television and went to open the window for some fresh air, and there was Carl, standing in the twilight, watching her. A lesser woman might have screamed, but Laurette hadn’t been startled in upward of twenty years, and all she said was, “Why not join me inside?” For she knew he was certainly death, come at last to collect.