Temporary

by Hilary Leichter

  They come home late and I’m waiting by the door. “Carl? Laurette? Carl? Laurette?”

  “Stage three, sweetheart,” Laurette says, stroking my cheek. “We’ve found you someone to kill.”

  The person to be killed is tied up neatly in a vault at a bank where Laurette is still on good terms with the bank manager. That is where Carl and Laurette went on their walk, to tie up the victim and lock the victim inside the safe. He or she is waiting there for me to do what I said I would do, to perform my job, and that is the plan.

  “Can I have more details?” I ask.

  “No,” says Carl, who hasn’t looked me in the eye since we were mirrors. “Not this time.”

  We walk to the bank single file, and Laurette gives me the bag of weapons to carry. She slips Carl’s murder journal in the bag, so he can record my efforts concurrent with the execution.

  “It’s like a trial run, sweetheart,” Laurette says, “except it’s not a run, it’s a kill. And it’s not a trial, it’s a life.”

  My face goes dark.

  “No pressure!” she says.

  We walk past the harbor and the public beach and into the center of the city. We’re fully exposed, yet no one really sees us. It’s amazing. I feel slick and invisible. The sky’s bright with stars, with flashing blue lights from planes, bleeping blue across the sky like Farren’s aquamarine nails. Then through the doors of the bank, which Laurette can open without even breaking a sweat. Then through the metal detector, turned off, the scheme detector, patent pending, disconnected from the wall outlet. Through the empty bank lobby and back to the vault, to the safe, to the lock Laurette cracks as easily as knuckles.

  And there, tied to a chair, surrounded by stacks of gold doubloons, I see the alleged Pearl. The Pearl I supposedly, allegedly, already killed.

  “I thought you could finish what you started,” says Carl, his voice as cold as the sea.

  “But what?” I ask. “How?”

  “Guess who also likes artisan paninis?” Carl says, pointing at this sweet prisoner Pearl. “Guess who I saw yesterday, when I went to get an extra panini, just for you?” he asks, pointing at Pearl once again, Pearl, who is always a prisoner.

  “Guess whose body is still attached to her head?” Carl asks.

  My face feels like it’s on fire, and I don’t know what to do with my hands. I don’t know what to do at all. I don’t know where to look. I look to Laurette for comfort, but her face is turned away, covered in a floral mask.

  “I can’t believe I thought we were the same,” Carl says, cornering me. “I can’t believe I heard something in you that echoed something in me.”

  For the first time in a long time, I notice the sheer breadth of his body, the sheer weight and height of him.

  “And the worst part,” he says, “is that you didn’t do your job.”

  He puts a knife in my hand and a knife to my back, then pushes me toward a horrified Pearl, her mouth taped shut, her eyes apologizing and begging with every blink.

  “I can’t,” I say, my whole body shaking. “I can’t.”

  I can’t, I say once more, but I don’t say it out loud. The words stop somewhere inside me.

  “I know,” Carl says, his voice suddenly tender, and he leans forward and slits Pearl’s throat.

  I cover my eyes.

  Allegedly, that’s what happened.

  That’s what the court transcripts will say happened.

  What I can tell you is that Carl didn’t cut Pearl’s throat. It was Laurette.

  It was Laurette who slit Pearl’s throat with one quick slice, who grabbed my arm and pushed me to the other side of the safe door and locked Carl and the dying Pearl inside, with his weapons, with his journal, slipped safely into his bag by Laurette, his journal detailing every single murder, every single last one.

  The safe, like a snack pantry, like a catacomb, like a tomb, clutched and sealed.

  “I’m sorry,” said Laurette, turning the lock.

  “But why?” asked Carl, banging on the door.

  Laurette’s eyes filled up behind her mask. “I miss my sister!” she shouted.

  And the gears clicked closed with a thud.

  And we’re standing on a hill stacked with betrayals, and the betrayals are stacked so high they topple and spill over, and I can hear Carl banging a distant bang until it’s just a far-off tremble in my eardrum.

  The next thing I know, Laurette makes a call.

  The next thing I know, I’m standing on the street. Sirens in the distance.

  The next thing I know, I’m receiving a hug. I’m hearing the word run. Run like it’s your job.

  The next thing I know, Laurette is gone, and police cars are pulling around the block.

  The next thing I know, I’m sitting in the murder shack. My things are in a bag, my eye patch, my rubies, my brooch in the shape of a nautilus shell, the same shape found in the spiral of a hurricane.

  The next thing I know, I know I just watched someone die, and that someone was a person named Pearl, and so a little piece of my friend Pearl has died too.

  The next thing I know, I don’t know a single thing, not anymore.

  I walk down a deserted road, wide awake. I find a pay phone and I make a call.

  “Well, superstar,” Farren says, “you’ve really done it this time.”

  “I hate disappointing you, Farren,” I say. “I hate disappointing you the most.”

  “It’s just, you were doing so great. Such a shame! Explain it to me one more time?”

  “Carl’s in jail.”

  “Right! Right. And you left your position without being discharged?”

  “That’s right.”

  “As in, no one discharged you?”

  “That’s right.”

  “So, here’s the thing: I am disappointed. Really disappointed.”

  “Can you please give me a new placement?”

  “I can’t give you anything!” Farren laughs, then sighs. “Honey,” and I can hear her nails tapping at her desk, the phone cord twisting around her index finger, “I shouldn’t have even taken this call.” The last part is whispered and low. I hope maybe the softness in her voice is a window to my future, a decibel I can climb through and use to make things right.

  “How can I fix this?” I ask. “I can fix this!”

  “This botched assignment truly botches things up. You feel me?”

  “I feel you.”

  “Oh, I don’t think you do.”

  “Just tell me what to do and I’ll do it, Farren. I’ll do anything. You know me, I’m a stickler.”

  “Then stick yourself back in time and make this disaster not happen. You’ve surely derailed yourself on the road to the steadiness.”

  “I have?”

  “Girl, please. Abandoning a placement? Criminal activity without the prescribed levels of discretion? I don’t know, maybe fifteen demerits? Maybe more?”

  “Oh no. No, no, no.”

  “Now look, don’t cry, don’t cry, please,” Farren says. “You know the procedure for fugitive temps. Right, honey?”

  “I do.”

  “Good. Consult your leather planner and follow the rules. I’ve got to be going.” Farren covers the phone and shouts to someone in the distance, “Pizza sounds perfect!”

  “Wait. Wait just a minute,” I say.

  “I’m afraid I can’t talk to you due to this truly botched assignment! We can’t put the agency in danger, you know?”

  “I know.”

  “It’s of the utmost importance that I protect the agency, understand?”

  “I understand.”

  “So don’t call me anytime soon. Don’t send me any time cards, don’t send me any birthday cards. Just go away. Go away. Go away. OK now?”

  Farren covers the phone again and shouts, “Always pepperoni, obviously!”

  And whispers to me, “I’ll try to be in touch.”

  That decibel, and my hope returns. “How will you find me?” I ask in the
same whisper.

  “How does anyone find anyone in this infinite world?” she responds. And then, “Fine, so just do half with veggies!”

  Before hanging up, there’s a short pause, a fissure. It could be nothing, but I choose to hear it as hesitation. I fill it with the rest of Farren’s day: Her pizza, her veggies, her meat, her sustenance, her nails buried in cheese and flaked in flour. Her colleagues laughing and kidding around. Huddling, as they say. “Let’s have a morning huddle,” they say, and they gather with arms wrapped around shoulders and hoist Farren in the air in her ergonomic chair. She crosses her legs. “You guys!” she says. “Here’s a raise!” they say. “Get it? Because we’re raising you in the air?” “I get it!” says Farren.

  The office expands to the size of my desperation, and Farren is instantly a speck in an open-plan universe. And the universe populates itself with Farren’s hopes, her dreams, her aspirations. Where does she go at five o’clock? She goes wherever she goddamn wants! The subway platform stretches before her like a runway and carries her to her door, her home, her apartment filled with children, no, with cats, no, with drawers and drawers and drawers of nail polish. Organized by color, just the way she saw it in a magazine. I can picture it. She sits at her self-care station near a window with billowing curtains, and she lights a candle, fir tree scented, smooths a dollop of moisturizer into her palms, paints each nail with a bottom layer of lacquer to protect her cuticle, then a thin coat of granite-colored polish, then a second coat, and then a third layer on her thumbs, achieving a presentable thumbs-up for her positive work in the world. Then a top coat to seal everything in place, and her hands stretched before her like a magician, palms down, rotating her wrists to chase the breeze of the oscillating fan. There’s a certain power in this voluntary immobility, Farren thinks, smiling. I don’t have to move if I don’t want to! My hands are as soft as my sheets! I take care of myself, she thinks. She turns her hands over and over, bends her paws, practices the calisthenics required for the distribution of gainful employment. She collects dexterity like a precious alloy. She enchants the room to give her everything she has ever wanted, and the room delivers her favorite television program, fetches her a drink. And then the journal bookmarked with an inky purple pen, where Farren writes the story of her life, not wondering whether her life is a story at all, just taking it for granted as a plot that makes sense. “Today I woke up,” she writes, and she proceeds with the clarity of an honest-to-god real person whose days unfold according to logic and precision. “I am a real person!” she writes, and so it must be true. “Today I abandoned a friend,” she doesn’t write, not remembering our call, just marking it as one of many disappointments, a series of disappointments, ill-advised investments of Farren’s confidence and time. A folder of women with my shortcomings, my experiences, my failures. “Today I ate pizza,” Farren writes, “and I felt satisfied.”

  When her nails are tough and dry, she sits on the floor in sweatpants, assesses her life choices, enumerates her achievements, flirts with a pile of resumes, finds someone to replace me.

  I wish I had a criminal boyfriend to call, but I do not. I settle on a bench pushed up against the pay phone. I settle on my pacifist boyfriend, with whom I’ve never had a quarrel. He answers his phone and sounds out of breath but happy.

  “Oh my gosh,” he says. “Speak of the devil!”

  “I’m the devil now?”

  “Don’t get confrontational, babe. It’s just a turn of phrase!”

  “OK then.” You can turn a phrase only so many times before it turns into something else.

  “Guess what?” he says. “You’ll never guess. Never, never, never. Oh boy.”

  “What is it? Are you all right?” I can’t take another shock to my heart, my head, to anything, really.

  “I’m fine! Everyone’s fine.”

  “Everyone?”

  “That’s right. We’re all here at the Hangout for a very special occasion.”

  “What’s the Hangout?” I ask, but I already know.

  “Oh, we started calling your apartment the Hangout. We were tired of saying ‘your apartment.’ It gave us zero ownership over this place, which we treat so very, very nicely. So we turned the phrase around, and now we call it the Hangout! Which has a pleasant ring to it! And also it describes what we do here! Which is mostly hanging out. But sometimes one of us will buy a new plant for a corner, or paint an accent wall, or hang some erotic photography, or put a broken coffee table on the sidewalk with a sign that says FREE, or replace that broken mug that says Favorite Mug, or break another mug for good measure so there are always an even number of mugs, or move the television to a different corner, or roll up a rug that doesn’t really match, or catch a mouse under the rug, or keep the mouse as a pet, or hang a life coaching poster above the couch, or move the couch into the kitchen, or send our magazine subscriptions to this address, or send our groceries to this address, or have a stoop sale at this address, or throw away any objects that aren’t currently in use at this address.”

  “The objects aren’t currently in use,” I say, “because their owner is away.”

  I remember my pacifist boyfriend tidying my apartment in the past. I showed him how I liked the pillows on the couch to look, because I’m not particular about many things, but I’m particular about pillows.

  “Show me!” he said, all tactical consensus.

  I showed him how I liked the two small yellow pillows to rest on a diagonal against the large, soft, feathery pillow, buttons facing out. I centered them against the tufted cushion and draped a crocheted throw across the back of the sofa. When my pacifist boyfriend tried to replicate this staging, he invariably lined the pillows up like soldiers, which I found ironic for a pacifist. There they stood, straight against the tufted cushion, single file, tags popping from their corners like little white flags. And though his forgery in no way resembled my preferred pillow arrangement, the distance between our interpretations somehow made my chest swell, for his effort, for the aching separation between his intended outcome and the actual result, fueled only by the goodness in his heart.

  “Also,” he says, “we got a lizard!”

  I can feel the pacifism retreating over some distant hill behind my eyes. “You had some news,” I remind him. “Exciting news.”

  “Right! Right! Well …”

  In the background I hear noisemakers, singing, clapping.

  He says, “We turned your closet into an office!”

  My handy boyfriend grabs the phone. “As a way of saying thanks!” he says, his voice a trill of muscular assembly.

  “We stayed up all night working!” my caffeinated boyfriend chirps.

  “Now you have a desk where you can leave your mug forever,” my tallest guy says. “Although not the mug that says Favorite Mug. No one knows where that mug went. Don’t ask about that mug.”

  I hear their arms around each other, their cheeks pressed to cheeks, phone sandwiched in the middle. I hear their pride, and something else too. I wonder who will use the desk while I’m away, or if the use of the desk even matters. Will the pet lizard lounge across the desk during my sabbatical from home? No, it’s not the desk at all, it’s the project that counts. I hear the inside jokes from their night of renovation, and I don’t understand a single one. This is like a surprise party where they forget to invite the surprised party. They reminisce about shopping for donuts, picking out streamers. The piñata, the balloons. The party expands and replaces the person.

  “Does the office have your blessing?” asks my favorite boyfriend.

  “Of course it does. How nice. How actually very, very nice. I’m speechless. You guys.”

  “Now you have a chair and a lamp and a stack of papers!” says my favorite boyfriend. “Now you have a place to keep pens!”

  My closet stretches back an extra square foot into the wall, a hidden crevice, a false exit. If you look deep enough inside a person, you’ll see a surplus square foot, an elbowed bracket that exten
ds past the boundaries of the body, and this is where you find the soul. My soul, now full of office supplies.

  “What else?” I ask my favorite boyfriend.

  “Just yesterday,” he says, “your former employer came back and stole some of your shoes, because she insists you’re still wearing her boots. She is convinced that her boots are on your ungrateful feet, your horrible deceitful indelicate feet. Just quoting. She started to cry, so we offered her a cup of tea from your Favorite Mug. We offered her an ottoman, and she kicked her moccasins off and stretched her toes against the fabric. She touched every book on your shelf. She told us some great stories about the new girl who organizes her shoes, a young intern with laudable personal hygiene. She complimented your tea selection. She smashed your Favorite Mug against the floor. She was very not OK. We let her steal a handful of your clogs. It totally made more room for your office!”

  “What else?”

  “We threw away our old fuzzy sweaters. They don’t fit. We hate them. Now we wear denim jackets. We threw away an old bag stuffed with other bags, with little plastic bags balled inside the medium-sized paper bags. We threw away a skirt with a slit that ripped all the way to the top. We threw away a box in the back of your closet that was filled with nothing but human dust.”

  I throw the phone against its cradle and throw my hands in the air. I throw myself into a jog that lasts for days. I throw one leg in front of the other and throw my arms back and forth. I throw away the idea of sleep, but the necklace burns around my neck, and the Chairman throws himself into running beside me. We throw ourselves across the public beach, into the center of the city, through the forest, over the stream, and up to a discreet-looking building, no bells or whistles, no chimes or awnings, no signs or signals or warm welcomes. I climb the stairs and enter the agency for fugitive temps.

  The First Temporary was assigned to complete a variety of projects.