To Bring My Shadow

by Matt Phillips

  “I—”

  “I needed an escape,” I said. “And you fucked that up.”

  I left the bar with the cockiest and toughest swagger I could muster and made it two blocks toward my hotel before I collapsed into a heap on the sidewalk and started crying. Nobody paid me any attention and I was able to work out my shit in relative peace before trying to figure out what my next move would be.

  The first step was to get back to my hotel room where I had a lock, a television, a hot shower, and a bed. I stripped to my underwear and got under the covers and passed out. When I woke up, Judge Judy was yelling at someone about being responsible for what her son did in their neighbor’s yard. I didn’t feel great, but I felt rested, something I hadn’t felt in a very long time.

  Between the nightmares and flashbacks of the violence I’d seen the last couple of years—and the brand-new fear of my in-laws coming to whack me—sleep had been rare and fitful at best. But in a new city, a city of millions of people that made it easy to hide, I slept like a drugged lab monkey. A long hot shower finished off the revitalization, and by the time I flopped onto the bed again, this time as Dr. Oz was leading a group of overweight housewives through a comically large digestive system set, I felt a flicker of optimism. A flicker bright enough to grab the tourism guide off the desk next to the bed and flip through it looking for something to do. Something in the city.

  The real New York City.

  I skipped down the steps, out of the hotel, and up the two blocks and over the one block to the Queensboro Plaza subway station. It felt weird calling it the subway because I had to climb two flights of stairs and cross the street to get to the platform, but once I was near the tracks, everything looked like it did in the movies. It was loud and weirdly cold and smelled like oil and garbage. The mix of people standing around waiting for the next train was staggering in its diversity. I made my way over to the big map of the subway lines and after a few disorienting moments, I figured out where I was going. When the 7 train pulled into the station, I jumped on with everyone else and waited for my adventure to begin.

  There was far more wobbling and screeching than I would have expected and soon we were plunged underground into darkness with the train speeding up and slowing down at random intervals. I listened, fascinated, as the automated voice over the loudspeaker announced stop after stop. Subtle is not my natural state of being but I tried very hard not to stare as I ran my eyes up and down the seats evaluating my fellow riders. There were more families than I expected and more normal-looking people. I had assumed everyone would be fabulous and vaguely famous, but there were enough frumpy and goofy-looking people that made me feel at home. They all looked so natural on the train though, and I tried to be natural but was too aware of myself. So I embraced my tourist self, hoping my luck wasn’t rotten enough to get mugged twice in one day. It wouldn’t have mattered anyway though, because when I finally emerged from the subway up through the Times Square/42nd Street station into the magical bubble of lights and sound and electricity that made up the crossroads of the world, any hope I had of looking natural blew away.

  And I could not have cared less. It was amazing. I slowly spun around with my head tilted as far back as it would go, trying to absorb as much of it as possible as quickly as possible. I could feel the renewal like my spirit had been waiting for this moment my entire life. I briefly felt validated in all my efforts, good, bad, or inexplicable, to get to that city and wondered if maybe there was a chance my life could turn out right. In fact, I felt so good that I expected a thunderstorm to pop up or someone to stick a gun in my ribs. But the worst that happened was I was jostled around by a pack of tourists just like me whose necks didn’t go as far back as mine did.

  And then I saw Elmo doing the electric slide with Iron Man and I felt even better. I finally stopped spinning and made my way to the bright red set of bleachers smack dab in the middle of the street to see what that was all about. I climbed to the top of the narrow bleachers and found myself with an even better view of the whole area. My body was vibrating as I tried to decide what to do next. There were all the restaurant chains and store chains we had at malls back home but that seemed like a waste of the energy of Times Square. I was hungry again and thought about getting something from one of the food carts, but I was paralyzed by excitement and couldn’t move so I stared for a while longer. When my senses were so overloaded that they blew me back to reality, I exited the bleachers to go and see what was around back.

  I was in New York City for my stage debut but the truth was I had never seen a play before—well, nothing beyond the odd community theater massacre of Rodgers and Hammerstein—and I figured it was about time. My budget was limited so I couldn’t afford any of the big ticket shows but while I was staring at the big electronic board listing all of the shows waiting for a sign, someone handed me a flyer for a play called Perfect Crime offering tickets for twenty-five dollars. I bought a ticket for the two p.m. matinee that started in fifteen minutes, watched the show, and halfway through figured out what I was going to do with Dutchy.

  The play was awful, but I loved the experience. The theater was a few blocks up from the TKTS booth across from another giant Applebee’s and next to a closed strip club called Bare Essence and an open sex toy store called Mixed Emotion. I was disappointed by the lack of imagination in the naming but excited to be in one of the last vestiges of Times Square’s grimy peep show era that had been immortalized in my mind from too many viewings of Taxi Driver and NYPD Blue. There was a group of us standing just outside of the theater waiting to be called back in after the intermission was over. Some were smoking, some were analyzing the clues from the play, and a few of us were fidgeting, wondering how best to walk away without looking rude. One of them was a girl I guessed to be about my age dressed casually, not like part of the theater crowd. We’d made eye contact a few times before the show started. The front row of the theater, where all the discount ticket holders were put, had the feeling of a freshman campus mixer because we were bonded together and different from the rest of the folks around us. When she caught my gaze again, she came over to me.

  “New York Fucking City,” she said, waving her hand in the air.

  “Aren’t you New Yorkers all supposed to be jaded and cynical?”

  “I’m from Michigan. Just moved here last week to be a writer.”

  “Huh,” I said.

  A year ago I would have been jealous of her. I would have rambled endlessly about my own Michigan background and my own writing dreams and my own writing projects. But right then I just hoped to god she wouldn’t ask me where I was from and what I was doing in the city. Lucky for me she seemed content to continue talking about herself.

  “I work at a different theater, over in Brooklyn, doing accounting work believe it or not. I know that may seem like a silly job for a writer, but I’m good with numbers and who wants to be another cog at some shitty online magazine or get coffee for some bullshit publisher in Brooklyn, right?”

  “Yeah. Sure. I get it,” I said.

  I waited until the office manager called us back in and broke off from the crowd right before entering, but as I turned, I saw the girl I’d been talking to following me.

  “Hey, I’m Bianca,” she said, holding her hand out as she sped up her pace to catch up with me. “You’re not one of the regulars here are you?”

  “Regulars?”

  I stopped walking, but she continued toward me tripping on the sidewalk and falling into me so hard she knocked us both into the wall. As she pushed off of me, her mouth was close enough to my face that I could smell wintergreen gum on her breath. Her hands pushed off of my waist and crotch in a way that I was almost certain was supposed to be seductive, but before I could respond, she had been absorbed by a passing crowd and I headed back toward Times Square, confused and exhilarated.

  There was so much more I wanted to look at and to experience, but the first half of the play and my conversation wit
h Dutchy had shaken loose my devious side, and I wanted to get to work. Just as I reached the subway station to head back to Queens, it started pouring rain and I noticed my phone and my wallet were gone. I rushed back to the theater to see if they’d fallen out of my pocket during the show, but that seemed silly. My wallet had been in my back pocket despite my mother’s paranoid warning before I left, and I would never, ever, live that down. In her long and rambling pre-trip lecture she had recommended I keep my wallet in my front pocket so no one could pickpocket me and that I keep my wad of emergency cash in my shoe because muggers never ask anyone to take off their shoes to check for money.

  It was still raining when I got off the train. I remembered seeing a cybercafé nearby and was able to find the place just before the rain soaked me completely through. I gave the cashier a five-dollar bill from my sock emergency fund in exchange for three hours of internet access and thought I might have overpaid until I realized how slow the computers were and that it could take the entire three hours for me to log into my email.

  I could have logged into my Apple account to get the full picture of where my phone was, but that site was slow to load on my good computer, so I went with the simplest option and logged into Gmail. I had three emails waiting for me from my phone. The last location logged had been a block from where I was at the theater at almost the same time I’d been there. Either I was in a weird romantic comedy and this was part of our meet-cute, or whoever stole my phone was following me. I immediately thought of the woman who bumped into me outside of the theater.

  I sat back and folded my arms behind my head in a very dramatic thinking gesture wondering how to play this. A new move presented itself though when an email came in from my phone. The location logged was the café where I was sitting.

  Click here to learn more about Trigger Switch by Bryon Quertermous.

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  1

  They parked the car two blocks down, just past where streetlights spilled weak umbrellas of light over the street, making the broken glass glitter like fallen stars. All three shuffled out, bumping the doors closed with their hips. The summer air was damp enough to touch, thick with the smell of tiny backyard grills and festering garbage. They hurried down the sidewalk, the night thrumming with cars and shouting. The fat man stopped short when a rat scurried out from beneath a car, then kicked a bottle at it, the glass skittering across the pavement.

  The man running point snapped his fingers, then set his index finger on his lips before dragging it across his throat.

  “It’s the middle of the city in the middle of a heat wave,” the fat one said. “Ain’t no one sleeping.”

  The point man stopped short, the fat one’s gut squished against his sharp elbow. The fat man slapped away the elbow, then straightened his back, his stomach rounding out.

  “If people aren’t asleep, it’s more important that we shut the fuck up and not make any more noise,” the lead said. “Everyone stays quiet, we complete the mission, and everyone’s happy. Got me?”

  “Be careful, son,” the short man said to the fat one. “He’ll take your nuts, you don’t watch your mouth.”

  The fat man started to respond, then caught his tongue, and nodded forward. “Are we going or what?” he said to the lead.

  The point turned without a word and continued. Two hundred yards out, Community Health Medical Clinic—housed in a converted row home—sat quietly between a boarded-up Chinese restaurant and a darkened pawnshop, its metal gate drawn down tight. The moon silvered the windows, making it hard to see inside. The lack of visibility could have complicated the mission, if they hadn’t already obtained the staff schedule, security plans, and three weeks’ worth of camera footage of the lone watchman. Places like this, they made hacking as easy as breathing.

  Standing at the corner, awash in jaundiced light, they pulled down their balaclavas and the group split.

  Raymond Cody slapped his feet on the desk and opened his latest issue of Popular Mechanics beneath the lamp. His daughter had got him a subscription as a Father’s Day gift, and he’d gone to the library to read whatever back issues they had on hand. Really, it was a gift for Raymond’s grandson, who was spending the summer weekdays with Raymond while his mother worked. He’d gotten into computers and gadgets over the last year at school and talked about them endlessly. Giga-this, pixel-ready that, slam-zoom-something or other. It was all Greek to Raymond; his TV still had knobs. So the magazine was like a monthly Rosetta Stone to understand hyper-connected teenagers and a good way to spend night shifts at a tiny clinic on the Westside.

  Raymond took the top off his coffee and blew at the steam. He loved spending days with the boy, especially because it took some pressure off his mother, but the long days and work-filled nights were beginning to wear on him. Normally, he’d spend most of the weekend in the basement, planing boards for a dresser or working table legs on his lathe. These days, he felt like he could lie down as soon as his daughter left the block and not get up until she came back the next week. The boy’s one saving grace was that the teenager liked to sleep till noon, so Raymond could catch a little rest when his shift ended. True, the boy would be up all hours, but he was a good kid and Raymond trusted him to make the right decisions. Until summer’s end, Raymond was spending his nights with his new best friend, Juan Valdez.

  Inside the clinic, the short man crept down the hallway. The tile floor needed a wash, speckled with dirt and other things he wasn’t willing to wager a guess on, but a clean floor would have made for a squeaky floor, and so he was grateful for that. He passed four exam rooms, some sterile white with only a framed motivational poster as decoration, others painted with gaudy but fading rainbows and clowns.

  He paused at the edge of the hallway, listening for the guard, then risked a glance. The Center hummed quietly with the sound of the whirring computer fans in the server room off to the side. He’d been surprised to see the layout of the place, at its open floor plan and abundance of half-walls—save for the closed-off examination rooms—but he figured it was a cost-saving measure, and done with the help of the very people it would serve. Beyond the guard, the short man saw the sharp shadow of the point man and the bulbous one behind him.

  The point raised his hand. They raised theirs in response. He dropped it and they moved.

  Raymond was halfway through an article about using torpedo technology for self-driving cars when he heard a squeak. He set his magazine against his chest to listen a minute, but heard nothing else. Probably a mouse, he thought, though having vermin in a supposedly sterile environment wouldn’t sit well with the Center’s director. Not his problem now, though. He went back to his article.

  But two paragraphs down, he heard another noise, something like a swishing. He set his magazine on the table and grabbed his Maglite to investigate. He headed toward the hallway with the examination rooms.

  The Maglite’s beam pierced the darkness of the first exam room. Nothing unusual in the corners, or behind the door. Nothing except for that creepy clown painted on the wall. He understood it was supposed to be cheery, put kids at ease and whatnot, but every time he saw that clown he expected it to take off its face and expose teeth like a giant anglerfish. Raymond moved on to the second room, then paused outside the third, listening. The clinic lay quiet, and he began to wonder if he was just hearing things, the way his old partner used to when they were on stakeouts. That old boy either had supersonic hearing or had kissed the bottle one too many times.

  To be safe, Raymond cleared the rest of the rooms. Each was silent and still as a tomb. He closed the door to the fourth and headed back to his post in the main room.

  “This isn’t going to work,” the fat man said to the point. “This place isn’t big enough.”

  “We have
to try.” The point heard a door close down the hallway.

  “Trying’s going to get someone shot.”

  He whirled around to face the fat one. “No one’s getting shot. Just relax and stay quiet and everything will be fine.”

  They crept across the main office toward the servers. He’s right, the point thought as the second door closed. This place looked bigger in the security footage than in real life. The idea was to get in and out without anyone noticing—draw the guard away, hit the servers, and be gone before he came back—but there wasn’t enough space to distract him, get him away from the main area. And besides, once a single screen lit up, the guard would be able to see it over the half-walls from his post. He’d had reservations about the plan, but they didn’t have any other options; if they wanted to get in the castle, this was the door they had to use. This job was bigger than them. It was for the Harper twins; it was for the people.

  As they approached the server area, a third door closed. They stopped short. One exam room left.

  “Told you,” the fat man said.

  The lead could hear the smirk in the prick’s voice as the final door slipped closed.

  The footsteps tracked into the main office and the chair creaked as the guard sat with a sigh. His feet landed on the table.

  “Okay,” the point said. “We’ll have to improvise.” But as he went to turn back, the fat man was already moving forward. The point grabbed at the fat one but he was too far away. Calling to him would make too much noise. Choking him—while cathartic—might alert the guard. Plus, he weighed a ton. Instead, he strafed along the half-walls, approaching the guard, ready to spring up behind him, cinch his elbow around his throat, and put him out.