Security: A Novel

by Gina Wohlsdorf

  “Anybody know if they’re interviewing somebody right now?” said the man across from me, the one who’d smiled.

  Another of us responded; another joined in. I said nothing. I knew that the current head of security for Destin Management Group was watching us. I knew, because it was what I would have done: observe who can and cannot be still and attentive and unmoving and quiet until such a time as action is called for.

  We weren’t waiting for the interview. This was the interview.

  I truly didn’t want the job. It meant a bump in pay, but not one worth the fantastic amount of work it would be to set up the gratuitous safety measures legendarily demanded by Destin at all his many new properties—paranoid son of a murdered diplomat, spoiled child with a god complex—but I wanted the offer of the job. That was all I wanted.

  She appeared at the receptionist’s desk, and my breath stopped. Suddenly, she was there. I would never describe the feeling, both because it would sound like it always sounds when someone describes the sensation of love at first sight, and because I had no one to describe the feeling to: it was a hollowing out all through me, and yet a filling up. It was the end of a wait I’d never known I was enduring. It was senseless. It made perfect sense.

  The walls were black, and so was Tessa’s hair, and so were her clothes, her boots. I would learn she had ten of the same black skirt and blazer, twenty white blouses, four pairs of the same black-heeled boots. Her black hair glowed darker than the walls. Royal blue in it, thanks to the room’s shadows. Like fine, clean water in a mountain’s valley. Like a lake it would be fatal to try to reach.

  She smiled at the receptionist, setting a file on the desk. She whispered, “He’s the one,” and she winked at the receptionist and disappeared again. I would learn there was a hallway Tessa had designed in the administration wing of Destin Management Group headquarters, to make such subtle entrances and exits possible. I would learn she’d wanted to major in architecture, but Destin’s offer of a guaranteed job after graduation swayed her, because she had a horror of ever returning to the destitute dependency of her early childhood. I would learn it was my file she’d set in front of the receptionist, as I was called moments later and led to a back room, where I sat opposite an aged but fit man who gestured to a monitor beside us, to a specific monitor on which my fellow interviewees were being dismissed. And he said to me, with no facial expression to speak of, “Tell me what mistakes these men made, and what mistake you made.”

  I stated baldly that I had stared at Tessa in blatant distraction after he’d selected me as his successor. I acknowledged my own mistake, one I would repeat. And repeat.

  I listed the other applicants’ bathroom breaks, conversations, smiles, the book—how these errors demonstrated a need to be occupied and moving and active with something other than the task exactly at hand.

  He nodded. Then he said, “Do you want the job?”

  “Bri?” Tessa whispers.

  “Yeah?”

  “You love riding.”

  He kisses the underside of her neck, where the skin is so pale one can—up close—trace the veins under Tessa’s skin. “It’s not that I love it,” he says. “It’s in me. I’ve been doing it so long, it’s part of me. It’s how I got somewhere.” He kisses her lips. Tessa’s been tasting them as he speaks. “If you absolutely need me to quit riding, I’ll quit.”

  If Tessa had absolutely needed anything, I’d have given it. I wouldn’t have paused to ask myself what I was sacrificing, what was being lost. But Tessa didn’t need anything from me. Not a damn thing. She was helping launch Destin Management Group to a height that dwarfed Donofrio Properties, spat on it from the troposphere of success, and she was doing it the fair way, by being simply better, by working harder. Destin Management Group built an office complex for an animation company in Palo Alto, and while construction raged like a competitive sport, walls and plumbing and electric and the highest-tech technology in meeting rooms resembling a sketch from The Jetsons, Tessa was called away from a problem with the unisex bathrooms to the coffee bar, where the animation company’s CEO was livid over the design of the cups and saucers. So Tessa took four hours to call the coffee bar manager, get the number of the distributor through whom he’d ordered the dishes, call that number, and climb the levels of speakers’ importance until she was joking good-naturedly with the CEO of that company. She talked him into marshaling his designers together and creating for the office complex an exclusive set of cups and saucers. When the animation company’s office complex was toured by a journalist, he ordered a coffee at the coffee bar, and used a paragraph of precious space regaling his readers with the fascinating, tilted, off-kilter design of the dishes from which he sipped his soy chai latte. Tessa’s job was to make an infinity of infinitesimal decisions like that, and to make the right decision, every day, all day. And the head of security watched her do this, from banks of monitors in close little rooms. He would take coffee breaks and bring her coffee, to which she said thank you, but then she would sip, set down the cup, and forget about it. He would see the cup from a monitor. It was torture. But it was also bliss, because she didn’t have a boyfriend, no husband, not even a father, and so it stood to reason that she was profoundly alone, as the man who watched her was alone, and that made it stand to reason that Tessa—given enough time and attention, enough focused prodding—would come to love the man who watched her. She had come from nothing, as he had. She’d come from a larger nothing than he had, and the sense of this, followed by the confirmation of it when he read her personnel file, was arguably what made him love her with such abrupt completeness. She lived in a humble apartment, but he owned a house in Malibu. She had made good her escape, but dared not enjoy it yet. He could teach her. He could save her.

  “You love riding,” she says again. She winces. “How many motorcycles do you have?”

  Brian winces, too, and says, “Eight.”

  They laugh. They hold each other in the middle of the bed. A shape under the comforter. Tessa’s leg, rising around his waist, and the shape of Brian’s arm, stroking that tear-jerking home country of high on her thigh, to her buttock, to her hip and the lowest part of her back.

  “Keep one,” Tessa says. Her laugh muffles as Brian kisses her hard on the mouth.

  He says, “Two. I never ride one of them. It’s Mitch’s.”

  “Two.” Tessa kisses him. She does it like she’s serious about progressing beyond a kiss. Though that is a guess. That is not based on experience. Experience would suggest that sex was utilitarian for Tessa. Boring, really, most of the time.

  “You love working.” Brian pins Tessa under him to say it, pins her hands by her head. “Keep your job, but scale it back.” He says it roughly. He’s holding her wrists rather roughly. “Take a vacation. Take a big vacation, soon, so we can go somewhere and try and kill each other with sex.”

  Tessa says, “’Kay,” and rolls him over, under her, but he rolls them again, to the edge of the bed, where they teeter, giggling. He sounds like a girl; he practically is. He has the ass of a twelve-year-old girl, and he was the one Tessa thought of when she contemplated the dead morning hours, happening upon a cold cup of coffee she’d abandoned in another building project in another part of coastal California. Brian was why she looked sad when she brought the cup to her lips, needing the jolt to stay awake, needing to stay awake to make more decisions, put out more fires, do more work, more, more work. It was Brian she didn’t want to go to sleep and dream about, so she’d take the cup to the nearest microwave and nuke it, drink it, make sour faces at it. She didn’t have a boyfriend, husband, not even a goddamn father, but she had a soul mate, somewhere, missing her, needing her. Those two elements—missing and needing—multiplied together and then taken to the power of the years they’d been apart, resulted in a string of digits that stacked to dwarf the love of a man who thought Tessa would come to need him because she no doubt wanted to forget her humble beginnings, when the truth was that Tessa wanted to r
emember them. She wants to revel in them; she wants to return to her beginning, and be brand-new. She sounds brand-new, like a child. Happy. Brian’s tickling her.

  The Thinker leaves the east window. The monitor for the twentieth floor shows him sitting at the slop of his playing cards, gathering them together again, sighing and dealing his fifty-first game of solitaire. There is a salty, wet drop on the security counter, under the inert skull resting there, sideways. There is no way for the skull to lick the teardrop without alerting the Thinker to the body’s continued functioning (though the body has urinated and moved its bowels in the chair with wheels, by now, but bladder and bowels let go in death, and so the smell blends with the three other bodies that are actually dead).

  There is a running time clock on each security monitor. It is one fifty a.m.

  It is not impossible to recuperate from severe spinal injuries. It’s also not impossible that the Killers want to leave a survivor, to testify to the Killers’ cunning and ruthlessness. Probably only one survivor. Probably leave only one, knowingly.

  Jules and Justin are sleeping.

  Tessa is tickling Brian now. He’s ticklish in his armpits.

  It is easy to be motionless when one is paralyzed, and in three hours, when the security team arrives for shift change, the Killers will have left. And my team is trained to check vital signs before moving a body, no matter how apparent it is that the body is dead, and they will find that my body is not dead, and they’ll get my body on an ambulance, to a hospital, through physical therapy, into a wheelchair, onto crutches, off crutches. Tessa will visit. She’ll be traumatized. She’ll be inconsolable, because Brian will have died for her, heroically, taking a knife to the heart as she ran and, against all odds, escaped. I’ll console her, despite my condition. I’ll be the only one who can understand.

  Seconds are not sloppy, necessarily. Some things are better left over; everyone knows that. Lasagna, for example.

  Tessa and Brian are talking. They are saying the fastest way is to go to city hall on Monday. He is saying, haltingly, Kids—I don’t, and she is saying, Me either, and he is boneless with relief. He is telling her the two of them, knowing what they know, seeing what they’ve seen—she is finishing for him: What if something happened to us? He is holding her so tight, so tight, and in years and years of professionally spying, hearing conversations meant for two sets of ears, an exchange such as this, a sight such as this, is embarrassing to observe. It does not belong to anybody but them. No part of it can be borrowed for one’s own use. It can’t be projected upon. It could only be observed in the hours of total, utter unfairness, hours of beauty; it isn’t fair, not at all. I never had the remotest chance at all.

  It is two a.m.

  In Room 717, the clock radio suddenly blasts the bridge of “Born to Run” by Bruce Springsteen. Clarence Clemons was a wizard with a saxophone, truly. I’ll miss the sound. It is premature to think what one will miss, when one is not dead yet. There has been remarkable medical progress in the realm of severe spinal trauma.

  The Killer sits up on the bed and stretches. He arches his back. He’s probably yawning under the mask. He moves a dial on the clock radio, and it quiets. He turns on the bedside lamp and taps his phone alight, then types a text message.

  The Thinker’s phone buzzes. He stands and walks toward the bank of monitors on the north wall. He stops directly behind the seemingly dead body in the chair with wheels. If the Thinker nudges the chair, it could easily roll. If the Thinker moves—but he doesn’t; he watches. His mask makes it impossible to decide whom he’s watching.

  Justin and Jules are sleeping.

  Tessa and Brian are holding each other, so tight; it is not anyone’s moment—even with the Thinker watching—but theirs. They are kissing again, but without the hurry of before. With an altogether different heat. Hate is natural, and self-hate is natural, but the two combined are an unnatural sensation: to despise Brian or to despise the desire for the Killer to kill Brian? One or the other, not both.

  The Thinker types a text message, and the Killer’s phone lights but does not buzz. The Killer reads it, goes to the bathroom—the stiffness in his shin a bit worse—and urinates, checks his wounds, fills a short glass with water and drinks it by folding the chin of his mask. He takes his knife from where he left it on the nightstand.

  The Thinker, turning from the monitors, bumps the chair. The angle of vision changes, panic red and fiery, but say nothing, do nothing; you are dead. The angle changed about the width of a hair. You are not dead. There is no method to estimate the pressure or direction of body weight now loaded against the chair on wheels. There was no method for estimating this before. There’s no moving any muscle of the body. There’s no God; don’t pray.

  Please. Please, God.

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  Tessa and Brian communicate with tongues’ calculated laziness. Tessa must be overly warm—which never happens—as she pushes the covers down. Brian kicks the covers lower, and there, now, is all of them. It is embarrassing. A naked body is embarrassing. So is a dead one. Two naked bodies pressed together are doubly embarrassing. It’s a matter for philosophers, but then again, it’s simple. It reflects unfairness—deadness does; nudity does. It’s not fair that we are at once so vulnerable and yet so aware. That walking (the Killer walks, limping, out of Room 717 and toward the cleaning closet/ secret elevator) this life with almost the same pure physicality as the orangutan (though with less hair to guard against cold and thinner skin that tolerates less injury) but a mentality that places that body in a continuum of thought, feeling, endeavor. It is unfair. She is so soft. She’s an ideal contrast to a hard, muscular body, but that isn’t what she wants. She wants Brian; it’s plain from how she kneads his arms from shoulders, to elbows, to slightly higher than wrists and then reaches under his arms to knead his buttocks, lower back. Buttocks again. And Brian has a softness that is more conspicuous, somehow, than hers. A flexibility. A comfort in his muscles’ tautness that lets the tautness keep a disproportionate mobility. He does not, as would be understandable, mount Tessa now, and make all his anatomy a show of hardness to contrast with her softness. Rather, he counters what Tessa is doing to him—the kneading—with caresses to the border of her scapula and the long line of her intact spinal column.

  The Killer boards the secret elevator.

  Jules and Justin are sleeping. They are still asleep when the bookshelf downstairs slides aside and the secret elevator opens into the living room of Room 1801, the regular penthouse. There are many reasons it will be distasteful to watch Jules and Justin get butchered. The main reason is there’s no chance whatsoever the two of them will live. They simply won’t. They are defenseless, sleeping, as the Killer climbs the stairs toward them, disappears from that camera, and appears on the one upstairs. They are on their designated sides of the bed—he on the left, she on the right, if one is facing the bed—and they have lived lives in which their knowledge of their own vulnerability is startlingly limited. Justin’s parents run a successful travel agency. Jules’s parents are artists—painter and photographer; they collaborate occasionally—whose livelihood does not depend on their art, but on inheritance from industrious ancestors. Jules and Justin had bad skin and broken hearts in adolescence, but then the pimples cleared and they found each other in grad school. Justin’s parents bought him a motorcycle for a high school graduation gift. They made him buy the helmet so he would feel a sense of responsibility. He rode the bike for a few months, then lost interest. Justin has long eyelashes and a touchy disposition that he thinks makes him sensitive to others’ feelings, but it does not. It makes him sensitive to his own feelings. He married Jules because she’s hot. He introduces her to people as “my hot wife, Jules.” Jules, it could be asserted, listens to Tessa’s problems with such a ready ear because Jules herself has had so few genuine problems that hearing Tessa talk is like listening to a pioneer woman tell about doing laundry with a ribbed board and a rock. Or an Amazonian hunter who eats
his kill’s heart as a gesture of respect. Or an elderly couple wealthy enough to live on a cruise ship complaining that the bingo room is open only until midnight. It could be said, if one periodically entertained unkind thoughts about Jules, that Jules befriended Tessa in the first place because she found Tessa’s difficult past exotic. These unkind thoughts might be substantiated by Jules’s end-of-the-day recitations to Justin about everything Tessa told her. Everything. As Jules has begun to develop problems of her own, her recitations to Justin have begun to include problems for Tessa that actually belong to Jules: Tessa’s got a secret shoe stash that’s bankrupting her; Tessa takes her top off at the beach purely to reassure herself her tits still draw stares; Tessa’s seeing a shrink and it’s not helping at all. It comforts Jules to give Tessa her problems. Jules comforts herself by pretending Tessa wouldn’t mind: Tessa never tells Jules to keep secrets. But some things are implied. Some things are just decency. Decency is made exponentially more difficult when one has never really been tested. Jules and Justin love to tell people how Tessa delivered them from certain ruin when their catering business was failing, but Jules’s and Justin’s parents would have bailed them out one way or another. Jules’s and Justin’s parents gave Jules and Justin a house for a wedding gift. They’ve never existed without a safety net. They are nice people. It’s not that they’re not fundamentally decent people; it’s that one cannot know, because they’ve never known hardship. It is easy to be nice when being nice is easy, but niceness is the first thing to go when an unexamined life becomes even slightly difficult. People begin failing tests they never realized they’re taking. People get pills; people get mistresses. They get angry at grand injustices they created for themselves, and they created those injustices in an effort to ignore the fundamental, foundational injustice that being alive means living in the shadow of death. It strikes them—these blessed children—as horribly unfair. The Killer walks closer and closer to the bed.