Those That Wake

by Jesse Karp

  A ding from just behind gave him a start, and he saw the indicator light over an elevator glow stark yellow. He hurried back around the other side of the big central columns, hidden from view. He heard the elevator doors open and one pair of feet step off and head toward the lounge. It was one person, he was sure of it, though he couldn't see. Once he stopped walking, there was silence.

  Mal waited, hearing his breath and afraid that anyone would be able to hear it, an illusion perpetrated by the all-encompassing silence.

  There was a whoosh, then, from the front, and the booming footfalls of a person coming in a hurry. The person went from the front door, past the other side of the elevator bank and over to the lounge. Mal heard the arrival shout a greeting, which was unreturned.

  The acoustics and lack of competing noises made hearing the two quite easy.

  "Take this to the library on Forty-Second. There will be a woman at a table on the third floor, looking at a book about fairy tales. Give it to her." It was an odd voice, not like a normal speaking voice at all; large, but somehow hollow. Mal recognized the voice, almost. Not like the voice of someone he knew, but a tone or a timbre that he had heard before, maybe many times. "This is your money," it went on. "I won't need you again until Friday."

  "You got it." This voice was nervous and a little breathless. It sounded younger, but old enough to know better than to do this. Whoever it belonged to hurried out.

  As the arrival's footfalls boomed away, Mal moved across and peered around the front of the elevator bank column to catch sight of the departing figure. He was worried—more than that, even, he was pained—by the idea that if it was his brother, he might not even recognize him from the back.

  He knew instantly that it wasn't Tommy. It was a young man in jeans and a sweatshirt, which was what Tommy still favored himself, for all Mal knew. But this guy was taller and much thinner than Tommy, almost scrawny. He had a wrapped package in his hand and he pushed through the doors and took off.

  No sooner had the doors whooshed closed than the footsteps in the lounge padded back to the elevators. There was another ding and elevator doors opened and closed, and Mal was alone again.

  He went out to the lounge and made a quick circuit of it. There was nothing more to see, nothing to indicate where the two had stopped to speak, or even that they had been there at all.

  He went back to the elevators and stood before them, deciding just how far into all of this he was going to plunge. It seemed like a big step, going up, maybe running into someone, but he'd committed to this last night when he heard Tommy's voice on the machine. He had even come here intending to confront this man or one of his associates, though that had been before this turned out to be something very far from what Mal was expecting.

  He stabbed the button, and a door dinged open instantly. He poked his head in and found a dull metal interior that reflected only a vague, misshapen silhouette of him. He got in. There were two rows of buttons, the last one numbered eighty. There was one button beyond that, though, a single circle of plastic crowning the two rows, but it was blank. A penthouse, perhaps, or a maintenance floor. He pushed a button at random: thirty-two.

  The speed of the elevator put pressure in his ears. In seconds, the door dinged open.

  He had expected a floor like the lobby, embryonic and empty. Maybe some cubicles, maybe some offices around the sides, awaiting inhabitants that might, in the end, never show up. More remotely, he thought he might end up playing the fool again and walking out into some crowded business, a law firm or a publishing company, the self-important eyes of suited men and women turning to look at the bruised kid who obviously didn't belong.

  It was a big empty room, its walls lined with doors. There were dozens of them, with less than two feet of wall between each. They were gray metal, unmarked, with dull silver handles.

  He stepped partially out, making sure the elevator didn't close on him, and looked around like a man looking at a world turned on its head, the familiarity of its parts making it all the stranger.

  There were something like thirty of them, and while his vision of the building from the outside was not photographically perfect, the size of the room seemed to rule out the possibility of the doors actually leading to anything but wall.

  With a look of distaste, he abandoned the elevator and walked up to one of the doors, again at random. There was not a single thing about it but its place in the line to differentiate it from the doors on either side of it or, for that matter, the doors on either side of those.

  He put his hand on the knob and turned it. There was no keyhole in it, and it was not locked. It opened up and showed him a white hallway, a gurney pushed against a wall, carts of medical supplies stationed in two different places. There was a patient on a gurney and an orderly near her, his back to Mal and the door. A medicinal smell, like the smell of a hospital, pushed out of the place.

  Mal quickly threw the door closed and stood staring at it. He went to the next door to the left and pulled it open. It was dank and poorly lit, obviously a basement of some kind, yet somehow here on the thirty-second floor. He could hear the hum of the boiler and feel the heat within. Far down from the door, beyond rows of boxes and other doors, seemed to be a metal stairway. Mal yanked his hand away from the doorknob, letting the door swing closed, failing to note that it remained slightly ajar as his eyes shot wildly around the room. There were thirty doors in here. Did all of them lead to a place as large as these last two?

  He rushed back to the elevator, and to his profound relief the door opened as soon as he pushed the button. He got in and pushed another button, nineteen.

  The door opened on an identical floor: thirty more doors so identical to the ones above that Mal wouldn't even have been sure he'd left the last floor had he not felt the motion of the elevator.

  He looked back at the buttons. His eyes fell on the top one, again, blank and isolated from the rest. His finger twitched, the idea crossing his mind to press that one, go to the top. But his hand didn't move. It couldn't. The muscles suddenly locked, and his heart was beating too fast. He was afraid, choked with fear, in fact; paralyzed by it. The button put fear in him. No, not the button, exactly; the idea of using the button, of where it would take him. He remembered this kind of unreasoning, screaming fear from long ago. Growing up killed it; reason made it empty and silly. But he had known it as a child. Everyone had.

  He didn't toy with the notion of fighting it. He hit the button marked L, and when the doors opened, he ran the hell out of the place, his heart not slowing, his breath not coming evenly until he was back out on the crowded street. Some passersby noted him without more than cursory interest and went on their way.

  He stood, blinking away the last of the strange fear that had taken him, then straightened up and looked across the street to find Annie.

  But Annie wasn't there.

  He ran across, looked up and down the block, into the windows of a jewelry store and a restaurant and an upscale clothing store. Annie was not here anymore.

  He whipped the picture of her and Tommy from his pocket, worried suddenly that she would have disappeared even from that. She was still there, pretty as could be, Tommy's arm around her. He looked up at the people going by. Their faces were blank, often lit by the cell screens they gazed into. He could show them her picture, ask if anyone had seen her, but even though their bodies moved along this street, they were absent from it, enclosed in their electronic shells. They walked alongside one another, but each was completely alone; they were no more likely to see those around them than they were to spontaneously drop their cells and offer their assistance. This had become a city of phantoms.

  Even if Mal shook one from his fugue, asked him if he had seen Annie, no one would have. Mal was sure of it. He looked back across the street at his reflection in the doors of the horrible building. He saw himself, standing there, alone amidst the phantoms. Before the fear could take him again, he ran off, up the block and away.

  M
OM

  IN THE DARKEST HOURS of morning, Laura found the old flash drives under her mother's quilts and loaded the home movies onto her cell. Images, years, flickered by on her cell as the process sped itself through: a first day of school, a trip to Disneyland, a birthday party in the park. She snatched the emergency credit card from the kitchen drawer, along with her parents' hotel information and the roll of ten emergency twenty-dollar bills her parents always left her when they went away for a weekend. She used her cell to book herself a seat on the next train leaving Stony Brook for the city, left a full bowl of dog food in the kitchen, and marched into her room to change clothes, because a skirt was not something you wore on a mission. Jeans were something you wore on a mission, because you could run and jump and shout at people in them. She got into jeans, a sweater, sneakers; put the money, the credit card, and the pictures from the album into her wallet; stuffed the wallet in her back pocket and her cell in her front pocket; and pulled her father's old Mets cap on her head.

  Mookie raised his shaggy head in sleepy concern for the commotion. She approached, and he rested his chin back down and watched her with expectant eyes.

  "Don't..."she began and then lost her thought, or maybe didn't have the strength to say it. So she got down and rested her head on his for a minute. She left him sleeping in the dark.

  The train ride took an hour and a half, the landscape, lit by tired dawn light, becoming increasingly grayer, more crowded with decaying edifices and pallid people. She sat next to a creaking old man breathing out hot, wet air, who told her she was lucky.

  "How's that?" she nearly demanded of him.

  "We're coming in from underground," he said, leaning closer. "If you come in from above, you can see the dome. You know what's really under the dome?"

  Everyone knew what was under the dome. That didn't stop him. Apparently, he knew something no one else did.

  "9/11 shook this city bad, but Big Black's what tore it down. There's no life left in it, no real life. So the corporations hide the damage. You know it was the corporations who caused it in the first place, right? So where the explosion went off, blew apart a chunk of the city, they put that big gray bubble over it, four blocks long. Looks like a giant insect with that wire framework inside, squatting over the ruins like they're eggs or something. The corporations are trying to hide what they did and what's left under there, but you see that giant bug every day, walking by it or when you come in on the bridges or fly over in a plane. They tried to hide it, but they made it worse."

  The man was becoming increasingly agitated, his rheumy eyes lighting up with paranoia. Laura held her face still.

  "And you know what's under the tent? Poison. Just like after 9/11, all the metal and concrete and chemicals disintegrated into the air, and they're keeping it trapped in there. Everyone knows. They walk by it every day of their lives and they know that if that tent ever rips, or if anyone ever gets through the MCT and cuts it open—"

  "Jesus Christ, would you please leave me alone!"

  He started at the revulsion that had burst onto her face. He blinked twice, and the sick light went out of his eyes, and he remained silent—but for the heavy breath coming from his open mouth—for the rest of the trip.

  Gray MCT officers wandered through Moynihan Station, moving slowly, further congesting the already hopelessly crowded train station, further infuriating already frustrated travelers. The officers' heads swept back and forth, occasionally stopping and focusing the bulky goggles they wore attached to heavy battery packs at their belts. It simply wasn't feasible to check every bag coming into the city, so this was what they did instead. Laura had once put on a pair of them during a civics demonstration at school. The boys wasted no time in training them on the girls, pretending at obscene revelations; but through the lenses, the world became gray and ghostly, superdense plastic showing a smear of dull blue, metal in dark blue and incendiary chemicals becoming burning lumps of bright red. The mechanism of the packs also became unbearably hot rather quickly, however. Her civics lesson at school was followed that night by an economy lesson from her father on tax money and inefficient, wasted resources.

  Laura stormed from Moynihan Station at Thirty-Fourth Street and Eighth Avenue to the Grand Mariner Hotel at Fifty-First and Ninth, refusing to notice the city around her: the cracked sidewalks, the once-grand façades dwindling and dirty, the sky a gray block bearing down, disintegrating in a cold drizzle. The city for its part refused to acknowledge her. She may as well have been a lamppost or a mailbox to the people scurrying around her, conversing on their cells, plugged into a song they used to shut the world out, as far away from where they actually were as possible.

  Who did pay her attention were the MCT officers, now a significant percentage of the city's already enlarged law force. They scanned her as she passed, sensing somehow that she was out of place, that there was something wrong.

  Something wrong.

  Two years ago, at fifteen years old, Laura's friend Rachel got a summer job in a pizza place. Friend Cheryl doubled up on her baby-sitting schedule. Laura volunteered in the children's ward at the medical center. Cheryl ended up raking in the most cash, though Laura's parents had supplemented an already generous allowance when she'd decided to carry out this heavily encouraged plan. Rachel came home every night with a fresh pizza pie, Cheryl with various bumps and bruises, frayed hair, and bleary eyes. Laura came home with unforgettable stories every night, some harrowing, few uplifting.

  One of the stories was of a young boy, seven according to his chart, who was in psychiatric care. He swore from his down-turned mouth with two new teeth growing into it, beneath his tight, tense blue eyes, beneath his bright blond hair, that his parents were not his parents. There were no signs of abuse, physical or mental, and Laura had seen the parents many times, coming in for consultations, respectably dressed, showing convincing signs of secondary trauma, as she'd heard the doctors say. She watched from afar for the most part, her heart aching for the boy, but also scared of him in a most instinctive and primordial way. He was the embodiment of a nightmare dredged up from her own younger life, the product of a too-early showing of Invasion of the Body Snatchers by an overeager father who had caught hell for it from a sleepless mother for the rest of the week.

  One evening, as Laura was departing, the boy was sitting on the old couch outside the therapist's room by himself. His eyes wandered around, looking at the hospital hall as if it were an alien place, confusing and cold, even though it must by now seem as recognizable as the home he no longer lived in.

  Laura stopped mid-stride, hypnotized by him at first, struck still by his wandering, helpless eyes. Those eyes found her, and she smiled back at him and walked over and sat down.

  "Hi," she said, putting on a bright smile for all she was worth. "I'm Laura."

  "Hi," he said in a voice as timid as anyone would have imagined. "I don't have a name anymore."

  "What? What do you mean?"

  "My real parents have it. They took it. They took everything about me with them."

  The Grand Mariner Hotel was a tall brown building, its awning and windows once blue and sparkling silver, but now dulled with a patina of soot. A tired doorman in an incongruously grandiose overcoat let her into the lobby with a forced smile. Inside was also silver and blue, somewhat better preserved, with high ceilings and walls adorned with antique paintings of ships at sea. Laura walked around the tinkling, central fountain growing from the well-trodden tile, past the restaurant, and up to the desk.

  "Good morning," the man at the counter greeted her with a big blond smile. "Can I help you today?"

  "Yes," she said, managing a smile. "My parents checked us in this morning, and I'm supposed to meet them. Unfortunately, they're not answering their cells and they didn't tell me the room number."

  "I see." He met the problem head on with his can-do smile. "If you tell me the name, I'll ring the room and let them know you're down here."

  "They're actually out at some m
useums. I'm supposed to meet them there with some things that are up in the room."

  "All right. What was the name?"

  "Westlake. Ron and Claire Westlake."

  His fingers brushed across the touchpads on his screen for a moment.

  "May I see some ID?" His smile didn't waver.

  "Of course." She fetched her cell, and when she looked back up he had the phone in his hand and had dialed the room. Little blond punk. If her parents answered and were told that a daughter they didn't think they had was down in the lobby, that would get her thrown out of the hotel.

  "Looks like you're right." The blond man put the receiver down after a moment and accepted her driver's license. "This is in order, ma'am. I can give you the room number, but I can't give you the key."

  "If you can't give me the key, then I'm not going to be able to get the things they need."

  "I'm sorry, ma'am." His smile made the subtle shift from genuine to fake. "It's policy. I can only give the key to the guests registered in the room."

  She gave him the look designed to make him squirm. It worked on mall sales personnel, waiters, and some teachers. It didn't work on DMV clerks or school administration—or hotel clerks, apparently.

  "I really am sorry, young lady," he said, the smile straining at the corners.

  "What's the room number?" She was done with him.

  "Fifteen twelve, ma'am."

  Fuck you, you rat-fucking bastard, she thought and strode away. She found a seat at the restaurant breakfast counter and struggled back and forth with the idea of ordering liquor. She drank wine at dinner occasionally, had been known to get served a beer when in the company of the very mature-looking Cheryl, and had once thrown up a stomach full of bourbon on an ill-advised date with a college boy a few months ago. She didn't want to throw up now, but she wouldn't have minded the numb-headed feeling the bourbon had given her.