The Company Man

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  Samantha’s mouth opened in shock as Hayes led her inside. The warehouse was enormous, nearly fifty feet high. Small rows of windows filled the upper portion of the room with the gray light of afternoon. Hundreds of stacks of books sat on the bare cement floor before them, anywhere from three to five feet tall, with oil lamps standing between them here and there. Chairs and beds and cabinets and tables were scattered throughout, most of them dusty from lack of use. At the far back was what had once been the manager’s office, although it seemed to have been renovated as a small home of some kind. Two mealy-looking ferns sat before the front door.

  “What is this place?” asked Samantha.

  Hayes walked forward and began staggering through the stacks, grabbing cabinets and ripping them open and digging through them. Finally he found a small green bottle, and he sat on the floor and opened it and drank. He sighed deeply and leaned back against the cabinet and shut his eyes.

  Samantha walked forward and looked at the bottle. “Laudanum,” she read.

  “My medicine,” he said.

  “For what?”

  “Attacks.”

  “What kind of attacks?”

  Hayes did not answer. He got to his feet and walked toward the office in the back. He dragged a small iron brazier out of the piles of junk and filled it with coal and stuffed paper in the cracks and lit it. Then he sat before the small fire, huddled in his coat and rubbing his hands.

  Samantha found a chair and brought it up to sit beside him. “You live here?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “For the quiet. Lots of room, lots of peace and quiet. I asked Brightly and Brightly delivered.” He stoked the coals with what looked like a conductor’s baton.

  Samantha watched him for a long time, her face oddly frozen. “How do you know what you know about people, Mr. Hayes?” she eventually asked.

  “What?”

  “I’m curious. How do you know the things no one else knows?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “It’s just guesswork. That and I have my sources.”

  “Are you lying to me, Mr. Hayes?”

  “What? No.”

  She looked closer at him. “Are you sure?”

  “Why?”

  “Do you… do you not remember what you said?”

  “Said? When?”

  “Just now, as we left the Nail. Do you remember what you started saying on the street?”

  “I think I gave you directions,” he said slowly.

  “Before that.”

  “No. No, I don’t. Probably just crazed muttering.”

  “It wasn’t.”

  “Then what was it?”

  She was silent for a good while. Then she said, “It was a good-night rhyme my father used to sing to me when I was little. Then you started quoting Twain. My favorite Twain story. From Roughing It .”

  Hayes stoked the fire again and did not look at her.

  Samantha was breathing hard now. “Can you… can you read… minds, Mr. Hayes?” she asked softly.

  “No,” he said. Then, “Yes. Sometimes.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s hard to explain.”

  “Please try.”

  Hayes took a deep breath and shook his head. “They just… Well. They leak in.”

  “What do?”

  “Thoughts. Things.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He screwed up his mouth. “Sometimes… sometimes if I am alone with a person for a very long time I can begin to act like them. And talk like them. And then eventually I know small things about them. Little things. Opinions. Feelings. Worries. They seem to come from nowhere.” He blinked and scratched his face, streaking it with soot. “That’s all.”

  Samantha looked away. The silence marched on.

  “Don’t be afraid,” said Hayes.

  “I’m not afraid,” she said. Her voice quivered. “I’m angry.”

  “What?”

  “I’m angry you had… that you subjected me to… You know things!” she shouted, and she stood, fists shaking at her sides. “You know things about me and I don’t know how you know them and I don’t want you to know them!”

  He nodded. “Yeah. Yes. You’re mad.”

  “Of course I’m mad! I’ve never felt so violated in my life!”

  “I don’t know any big things about you! Nothing private. It’s just a taste, a smell. A feeling. Like… like smelling something you haven’t smelled in a long time and remembering things and all the things associated with it.”

  “Like spice from downstairs,” Samantha said.

  Hayes did not meet her eyes. He played with the little baton in his hands. She walked away through the stacks of books and found another chair and sat in it, hidden from his view. “Damn you,” she whispered. “What are you?”

  She heard him stoking the fire once more, maneuvering the brazier about. Then she heard him coughing. She leaned around to look and saw he had a hand placed at the side of his head again and he was bent over, knees touching his chest.

  “Are you all right?” she asked.

  Hayes took another sip of laudanum. He shook himself and said, “I’ll be fine.”

  “An attack?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “What are those attacks? Is it part of your-”

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “What do they do?”

  “They hurt.”

  She stood up and walked back to the chair beside him. Neither one looked at the other.

  “Who else knows?” she asked.

  “Brightly,” he said. “And Evans. And Garvey.”

  “Garvey?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “That’s why Brightly rushed us in and out so fast, isn’t it? He doesn’t want to be around you. Doesn’t want anything to… to leak in.”

  “Yes.”

  “And that’s why you live alone like this.”

  He nodded. “It’s quiet here.”

  “Is… is this what you meant when you said they were keeping things from us? From me?”

  He nodded again.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  He laughed miserably. “How could I? Listen, Sam, I’ve been on this earth for forty-something years and I’ve not yet found one good way to tell someone what I am that wouldn’t end up with them screaming their heads off or me knifed for my trouble. How would you have told someone, Sam? Tell them your head fills up with the garbage their minds leave in their wake?”

  Samantha sighed and shook her head. “You still should have told me.”

  “But I couldn’t. How could anyone? I’d much rather just… let it lie.”

  There was a knock at the door, the sound shooting up into the rafters and then drifting gently down. The door opened and Garvey stepped in. He looked at the two of them and called, “Am I interrupting something?”

  Hayes and Samantha shared a look. Then Samantha sighed and turned away and sat down far from Hayes.

  “No,” said Hayes. “Come on in, Garv.”

  “So what’s the news?” Garvey asked as he strode forward, weaving among the stacks. It took him a good twenty seconds to walk over to them. He found a chair and sat beside Samantha.

  “McNaughton’s panicked over the bad press,” said Hayes. “Guess who’s got the job of finding out if there’s any connections.”

  “Ouch.”

  “Yes. It’s going to be especially hard because I think they want us to find nothing at all.”

  “Do they know you sent me those files yesterday?” asked Garvey.

  Hayes thought about it. Then shook his head.

  “You sure?”

  “I’m pretty sure. They have a hard time keeping track of the things I make disappear. So I don’t think it’s connected. Anything on your end?”

  “I have a few things, sure,” he said, easing back into his chair. “Gibson came and gathered them up. Shuffled the deck, you could say. I ca
nvassed the area but no one saw anything. Spooky place, down there. We’re putting something in the paper about it, asking people to please let us know if they hear anything. I don’t expect much more than bullshit.” He glanced at Samantha. “Apologies.”

  “For what?” asked Samantha absently.

  “For swearing. Sorry. Don’t deal with ladies too often, these days.”

  “Oh,” she said, and nodded.

  Garvey looked at both of them queerly and said, “What’s with you two? Did I just walk into something?”

  Hayes turned to glance at Samantha, sighed, and said, “Sam’s just figured out where I get my little hunches from.”

  Garvey’s eyebrows rose. He uncrossed his legs. “Oh,” he said. “Huh. Is that so?”

  She nodded.

  “That’s… Well. That’s pretty fast.”

  “What?” said Hayes.

  “I said it was fast.” He grinned crookedly at her. “It took me a few months for him to tell me how he did it, and only then because he was slobbering drunk. You’re pretty quick, Miss Fairbanks.”

  She stared at Garvey. “That’s what you have to say? That I’m pretty fast?”

  “Well, yeah.”

  “Aren’t you horrified? Aren’t you offended?”

  “No. Don’t have much to be offended over.”

  “But he can just… he can just listen!” she hissed in a stage-whisper as though Hayes were far away. “Like he’s got his ear to the walls of your mind, listening to everything you say to yourself!”

  Garvey shrugged. “I guess. But it’s not like he can stop it.”

  “He can’t?” she asked, looking at Hayes. “Is that true?”

  Hayes looked up at her from the folds of his coat. He searched her face for a moment as though he had forgotten what they were talking about or maybe just who she was. Perhaps it was the dimness of the warehouse or the light from the small fire before him, but suddenly he looked older than any other person Samantha had ever met before. She had seen such things only once before in her life, when she had been an army nurse and had treated wounded men returning from battle. They had been boys, always boys, no more than twenty, and when they’d walked back through the carnage and the savagery and sat waiting to be treated anyone could look at them and see that they were creatures interrupted. Boys who would never become men now, never become people. They were something wounded and crippled. Something broken that could not be fixed.

  “No,” he said. “I can’t.”

  “Oh. You… you really can’t stop it?”

  He shook his head.

  She sighed. “I see. I think I see, at least.”

  “Are you all right?” he asked. “All right with this? And with me?”

  “I don’t know. I suppose I could be.”

  “That’s good enough,” he said. “Good enough for me.”

  They discussed the usual. How it worked. When he had figured out he could do it. His boundaries, both physical and moral. Samantha found herself both relieved and frustrated to find out how limited it really was. She asked about Evans, and Brightly, and especially the board, whom Hayes said he had been practically forbidden to ever come close to. She asked about the worst people he had ever read, whom he could barely recall, and the best, whom he recalled even less.

  Garvey told her of the first time he had met Hayes, stinking drunk and sleeping off a two-day bender in the tank. They had come to haul someone out of lockup and as they dragged him through Hayes had reached through the bars and grabbed Garvey’s arm and slurred, “That right there is a guilty bastard if I ever saw one. Ask him about the tack hammer and he’ll weep like no tomorrow.” And he had been right. The suspect’s next-door neighbor had murdered his dog with a tack hammer, and the suspect had done only what he thought was right in return. Hayes claimed he had no memory of this event, and had been extraordinarily confused when a Detective Garvey came calling the next day.

  “Anyways, what the hell was that you had?” Garvey asked. “A fainting spell?”

  “An attack,” Hayes said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t know. Sometimes I’m out walking and it’s like a thunderbolt hits me. Like someone just opens up my head and pours things inside. Never good things.”

  “Is that all?”

  “There’s a few things I do after. Vomit. Cough. But yes. That’s all.”

  “Christ,” said Garvey. “How long has it been going on for?”

  “About half a year.”

  “Are you sure you’re all right?”

  “Yes,” said Hayes irritably. “I’m fine. Let’s talk about something important, eh? Like the bodies we saw today?”

  Garvey reluctantly consented, starting with the Third Ring Pub. “They didn’t want me there, hoo boy,” he said, scratching his head. “I’ve had murderous looks before, but never so many at once. So I called for support and got a half-dozen patrolmen to accompany me in to speak civilly with the owner and the patrons. They didn’t want to talk at all, but they gave us something. Turns out Naylor and the rest of them were regular patrons there. They were there nearly every day, and they were there that morning before the Bridgedale trolley mishap. If ‘mishap’ is the right word. They left all together, probably heading to work or maybe to one of their homes, which explains why they were all on that trolley at once.”

  But as to who could have done something about it or why, neither Garvey nor Hayes could possibly guess. With no witnesses and no leads and the primary suspect being an entire company that, according to Hayes, seemed to know barely more than the police, they all figured it was going to be an ugly mess indeed.

  “Something else odd,” Garvey said. “You know the door? The trolley door?”

  “I suppose,” said Hayes.

  “It was broken in. There were marks on the front. Impact marks. From what, we’re not sure. Looks like a battering ram, maybe.”

  “Someone hung on the side of a moving trolley and rammed the door in?”

  “Maybe.” He sighed. “You know what, we could send shit back and forth on this for hours.” He slapped his notebook shut. “You just can’t think about this normally. You just can’t.”

  “You think this might be related to the man in the canal?” asked Hayes.

  Garvey turned the question over in his head, handling how it fit. “I don’t want to say anything too fast,” he said. “But I’m tempted to.”

  “Is the union situation really this bad?” asked Samantha. “For something like this to happen?”

  Hayes shrugged. “That’s the big question, isn’t it? To be honest, I can’t say. I rarely deal with the working-class levels of Evesden. You want to answer?” he said to Garvey.

  “There’s not enough work,” said Garvey. “And what work there is isn’t paying enough. Not by a mile. But that’s the way it is. The dockworkers want one pay, the smelters and foundry workers want another, the airship assembly teams want highest of all. Everyone says they want a little more, just enough to survive, they say, but they don’t. Not really. They just want. I know them all, I’ve listened to them all, I’ve hauled in people from each of their damn clans. And who’s going to tell McNaughton how to run their company? And how will they set their standards? One pay for all workers or certain levels only for a few? And how will they figure that out? I don’t know. I can’t think of a solution. I just clean up.”

  “So what’s going on?” she asked. “Out there.”

  “Out there? They’re starving. As is expected, I guess. Things got too big. There’s too many of us,” he said, and lit a cigarette. The bright orange flare seemed strange in that colorless place. “You can say all you want about greed and evils and economics, but that’s what it comes down to. They all came here looking for work and a lot of the trades they came here with got put out of business, and now there’s too many people. So they’ll turn to vice and violence and make a living as best they can. I guess you can’t blame them. But I have to. It’s what they pay me for.
”

  ***

  Hayes dozed off as night came on, the bottle of laudanum half-empty between his feet. Garvey and Samantha rose and left him there among his books and his dusty chairs with the coal fire smoldering before him.

  “He’ll kill himself drinking that poison,” said Samantha.

  “Maybe,” said Garvey.

  “No. It’s really poison. It’s opium.”

  “I know. He does, too. It’s been, well… manageable for a while now. Here, let me take you home.”

  He led her to his car and they climbed in. He hit the lights and asked her where she lived. When she told him he whistled. “Newton is pretty fancy,” he said.

  “It does all right,” she said, smiling.

  After a while of riding they turned down Grange Avenue and the lights and white stone buildings of Newton swam into view. The thin, smooth tunnel of the train ran between the building tops like calligraphy, and here and there it dipped to the platforms, its car windows strobing in its descent. Up above the streets an arched glass walkway stretched from one building to another, and though it was empty the starlight refracted through it to make a ghostly prism suspended in the sky. Down on the corner a theater let out its patrons, all of them standing in the flickering lights of the marquee bulbs, arranging their coats and discussing the show. Cabs descended on them in a flurry, sensing the hefty fares of drunk rich folk who’d forgotten precisely how far they’d come. On nearby restaurant rooftops men and women in furs laughed and their merriness rebounded off the walls to rain upon the street. Champagne laughs, lily-petal laughs, pretty and sweet and perfect.

  Samantha remembered what Hayes had said about the twentieth century and remembered the fairy world she lived in compared to the rest of the city. A tiny bubble of promise that would come true for only a select few.

  Beside her Garvey explained that Newton was like a birthday cake, with many layers, all interconnected. Even below the street, where an entire marketplace filled the corners and cracks of the trolley tunnels and you could eat exotic food from all over the world, provided you didn’t mind a roof made of piping. And down there more mechanisms and devices kept the city running, more than you could ever imagine. Though, considering what had happened today, who would want to imagine it?