by David Shafer
Leo’s preschool, Brand-New Day, was on the far side of all of this new development, but he had never tried to bike through it. The way around wasn’t much longer, it had a wide bike lane, and it took him past a favorite coffee shop.
But a late arrival to work today would put him in even hotter water than he was in already with his fake-smiling supervisor, Sharon. Just yesterday, she had tried to impress upon him that it would be a Brand-New Day for him employment-wise if he didn’t start attending to the areas that she had earlier mentioned were areas he might want to look into improving around.
“I think that, instead of lateness, you could be aiming for on-time-ness” was one of her points.
And Leo, who more and more these days was overcoming his natural restraint, had said, “Or punctuality. I could aim for that instead of on-time-ness.”
A route through the pretend neighborhood could save him the five minutes he needed. The danger was dead-ending against a freeway sound wall and having to circle back. He briefly considered the stakes, then cycled deeper down the quiet streets of terra condominia.
Yeah. Too quiet, thought Leo. In a year or two, the facades of these buildings would no longer enjoy that blush of blank beauty. Soon each window would instead emit its own signal—here, probably the flaccid ficus trees and stereos of the urban professional, exercise machines and transfixed house cats—semaphoring to passersby some information about the lives stacked up behind the glass. But maybe one day, thought Leo, these buildings would be re-tasked—laundry might be hanging from those balconies, Caracas-style, or more buildings could be warrened atop these, like in Hong Kong. For that matter, the sunken civic Zen patch back there could become a Byzantine souk, tent-poled haphazardly and covered in rugs looted from the surrounding design stores. Maybe we’ll all be living a lot closer together in the future, in a sort of pleasant, Burning Man–ish kind of way, Leo thought. Or maybe in a totally unpleasant, refugee-camp sort of way, with viruses we haven’t seen the speck of yet, viruses that make your face fall straight off, and our drinking water brought in by tanker trucks. If it were like tha—
There was no one even near Leo when he flew from his bike. His mind cast about for a culprit, for someone to blame other than himself. The bike just ceased its forward motion and he did not. How surprising, how nifty physics was. And as he trebucheted toward a four-inch curb, aware at once that his meeting with it would be physically calamitous, he remembered that he was wearing no helmet, and his surprise turned to fear. A month ago, at a party to which his friend Louis had brought him, Leo had heard (well, overheard) the host claiming that he wasn’t afraid of death. That particular claim seemed to Leo to be demonstrably false. So, costumed as Jesus (for this was a Halloween party), Leo had decided to explore the man’s reasoning. Not afraid of death, huh? My, that must make you a real psychopath. But he had seen almost immediately that he should not have told the man that he was like a Holocaust denier. “I said like a Holocaust denier. Like,” he protested lamely when Louis escorted him out of the party and told him to enjoy the bracing walk home, dressed as Jesus.
No, thought Leo, as he landed his right hand, fingertips first, on the cold nubbly of the curb, I am definitely more than a body, but I believe I am less than a soul.
Then, with a fluid agility that hadn’t been his in years, Leo tucked his head and vertical body behind the leading edge of his rounded arm. Some latent muscle memory from five months of jujitsu at the McBurney YMCA on West Sixty-Third Street when he was ten? Leo seemed to recall that this YMCA had in fact served the adventurous class of men described in the song. Now, he felt a point beneath his stomach become the axis of his spinning mass, and he knew to use that dragony breath to take the hit when, after about 120 degrees, his trunk met the sidewalk, hard. Next was his hip and ass, which rolled over not just the concrete but also a busted padlock on the scene by chance. Then came his knees and feet, with a thwack. That was followed by his trailing left arm, which lay down gently, and his gloved palm, which landed and sprang back, the way a conguero lands a hand on the taut hide of his drum.
Leo stood up. He was fine. Just fine. Right as rain.
Leo stood up again, this time more carefully. Okay, maybe fine was an overstatement. But ambulatory and intact. A bit exhilarated, actually.
His bike lay twisted in the street behind him, its front tire still clamped in the groove of the new light-rail system tracks they were laying all over town. Only now did he notice the yellow-and-black warning signs that would have made him aware of the hazard his bike had to cross. The graphics depicted pretty much what had just happened: a bicycle with its front wheel caught in the maw of the track, the blockish pictogram rider hurtling over the handlebars. An honest piece of graphic art; a tiny, two-line picture poem, thought Leo, and he started to upbraid himself for his carelessness and lack of attention.
But wait. On one corner—the direction from which he’d come—the warning sign was there, but it was swathed in black plastic, taped up tight.
The thought came like a revelation: This was no accident. They obscured that sign because they want me eliminated.
Some part of him said, No, don’t be ridiculous. But then why was only one sign shrouded?
The dips and swoops, the rapid-cyclings, had been with him for a while now, but these revelatory thoughts were new. They arrived at the peaks of the swoops. That’s when things really started ringing, when it seemed that he was at the center of things, that the very planet was pulsing with connectivity, and he was one of Tesla’s bulbs.
Was it really so far-fetched? That there would be some agency tasked with keeping tabs on wayward members of the intellectual elite? No, it was actually quite reasonable, Leo thought. Big Data and all. So, yes, it was possible that he was being singled out, being watched, being followed. It was probably connected to his blog, on which he’d lately been considering what exactly a shadow government would look like, how it might work. Maybe he’d been getting too close.
On the dips, he saw that such notions were perhaps paranoid delusions and that he might need psychiatric help. But he was unwilling to submit his mental processes to the purported care of professionals who might have all sorts of limitations and biases and, yes, agendas. And the swoops outnumbered the dips, so why complain? Shimmering on the bright edge of every day was the possibility that he was going to discover a grand unifying theory. That was not a condition to be treated; that was something to hold on to.
He started again toward work, wheeling his injured bicycle beside him. There was no way he could avoid being late. But he hardly cared now. He had been granted grace and had avoided death. Life was not a dense thicket of pain and scrabbling; it was a wild and godly fable in which he figured prominently. This news spread through his body like a flush. He was reconnected with the great river of life that flowed all around us all the time. The sky domed huge and gray-blue, and the trees, shaken by a gust, rattled a tattoo to him.
Brand-New Day was in a building that had once been a genuine warehouse. You could still make out SCHMIDT’S SPOOL AND SPINDLE in huge, ghosty letters across its facade. Five years ago the warehouse had been converted into the offices of a briefly white-hot Internet business that turned out to be a bellwether of the dot-com bust. Brand-New Day had inherited the late-bubble furnishings and appointments of the previous tenants, and so it resembled a start-up run by toddlers. Chop the legs off a couple of poured-concrete conference tables and you get some deluxe arts-and-crafts zones for little Mirós. Why not give every child a cubicle instead of a cubby? (Because children crapped in their cubicles was why not, it turned out.) The skateboard ramp in the foyer was filled with sofa cushions and called the romper zone. Employees sailed across the polished concrete floors on Aeron chairs while their charges crawled over and drooled on and beat with sticks black-leather benches and cubes and sectionals.
The Aeron chairs were nice. Leo was the author of a game called Rolling Death, staged in the outdoor play zone, in which a staffer, “restra
ined” in an Aeron chair by the kids, would zoom maniacally around the OPZ yelling, ideally, “I am Death. I touch you, you die,” while the kids screeched and careened, addled with joy and running with snot, and dodged the caroming desk chair. Leo wasn’t the only one who played it now either. Another staffer named Lisa did a great Rolling Death, as did a tiny Dominican lady named Cecilie, who laughed more wildly than the children as she zoomed—they raced from her as if from a plague. The game was a desperate favorite of just about all the children at Brand-New Day, though when he played with the twos-and-threes, Leo zoomed more slowly. Just the whisper of maybe playing it could get fourteen five-year-olds to collect from the floor a morning’s worth of paper scraps and gluey cotton balls.
The management was in a bind re Leo and his methods. He was sometimes a liability, especially when prospective parents were touring the facility. Why were the threes-and-fours listening to the Clash? Why were the fours-and-fives engaged in what appeared to be a mock trial of a stuffed gorilla on a Big Wheel? Sharon claimed to have no problem with Rolling Death per se (she was quite fond of per se; also at this point in time), but she wanted the name changed.
“How about Huggy Monster?” she suggested to Leo once at the seven-thirty goals meeting.
“Not as much at stake in that case, I think,” he said.
The truth was that the outdoor play zone was actually a covered parking lot that backed up to an enormous freeway pier and was surrounded by chain-link and surfaced in orange matting. A few play structures couldn’t dent its overall vibe of incarceration. When only the twos-and-threes milled outside in heavy diapers, or when a sparse crew of toddlers fought for possession of two blanched pedal cars, the outdoor play zone was truly grim and resembled a transfer point for tiny high-value detainees. Only a game that got the kids whooping, like Rolling Death, could transform the OPZ into the squealing theater that made parents certain they had done right to choose Brand-New Day, despite its cost, which was more than pretty much all of them had ever thought they would spend on child care.
And the parents, once they had interacted with Leo a few times, liked and trusted him. The mothers especially. They saw that their Lukes and Lolas ran to him first thing every morning. They watched him sit in tiny chairs and murmur to children who were protesting their parents’ departure. None of this wide-eyed condescension; no Is that your bear? shit. Rather, an intense and sincere interest. He rinsed their soiled clothes and hung them to dry over the sink; he slipped their best artwork into manila envelopes so that it would not get crumpled. And the parents liked the way he filled out the daily journal sheets that went into each child’s mailbox at the end of the day.
TODAY WE PLAYED WITH ____________. Blocks. Who woulda thunk? Leo might write. Or, for TODAY WE ATE ____________, he’d riff on the day’s offerings. Sometimes he’d produce a critique: Fish sticks flaccid, but juice boxes especially cold. Sometimes he’d mash up imaginary combinations, aiming for gross, as a child would. Orange Roughy and Band-Aids. Mousse de Purell. Baby Carrots in Rubber Cement. Or he’d pair a wine with the meal: Riz Brun. Petits Pois. Château Latour 1959.
But then, beneath those idiotic prompts, in the lower half of the page, he’d add a few sentences about the weather or a reference to current events, something to peg that piece of paper to the adult world. Or maybe something about the mood in the room that day. Carla’s vomiting in the sink transfixed the fours-and-fives and put them off snack. Or, The squall that came at midday soothed everyone here. Rain on windows trumps contested sock monkey.
Then he’d copy that master thirty times, standing over the copier as proud and eager as Hearst before his presses. Afterward, he’d add child-specific notes to a few of the editions, and then he’d distribute them among the mailboxes at the front. He liked to see the mothers and fathers jam these pieces of paper in their pockets and bags. He hoped that their lives would be improved some small amount by his words, by what they read about their children, for whom they toiled. Often he saw these notes crumpled and thrown away unread; there was a recycling bin next to the front door. Some parents had probably never once read a daily journal sheet.
That was okay. Leo was aware that taking pride in such a thing was ridiculous—that to do so exposed him to ridicule. But since everyone pretended to believe that you should take pride in whatever you do, most people were caught by something in Leo.
That happy fool at day care is referring to Afghanistan today, a man might say to his wife from the kitchen. And she to him, sweeping Cheerios from the sofa: It’s preschool, you idiot. What’d he say?
When coworkers chided Leo about his devotion to the daily journal sheets, he tried to take it in stride. But really. Why did grown-ups find it necessary to tease fellow citizens who actually gave a shit?
“Enter the aphorist,” Eric would say whenever Leo came into the break room. Eric was the only other penis-laden BND employee and he seemed to not quite understand what an aphorist was, or maybe he hadn’t actually read the daily journal sheets, because Leo’s reportage was anything but aphoristic. Whenever he was reminded that it was largely fools and galoots who ran the world, Leo resorted to subvocal mantric recitations of the true-yet-banal moral directives that he had picked up from the few AA meetings he had ducked his head into after the blacked-out drive home: Reserve Judgment. My Side of the Street. Principles Before Personalities.
But why did it not occur to any of his colleagues that not enough was being written about these kids? That children—even these economic-pinnacle children—were cashless and unlettered, after all, and if some decent record was to be kept of their day, someone would have to do it for them? Leo didn’t consider his account even adequate, really. So much was going on around him that escaped his notice. They were a flock he watched over; corralled, actually. He was a subcontracted shepherd, and his authority over them came from his greater strength, from the fact that he could quickly extract and, if need be, carry and, if need still be, restrain a child swinging a Wheat Thin like a shiv. The kids were hardly ever offered a choice—a real one, anyway—and Leo pretty much had to leave them alone to see them express preferences and drives. In these moments, or when he knelt among them silently observing a quarrel or a peacemaking gesture, he was aware of their society. But mostly, he was as clueless as a towheaded television reporter in Tahrir Square, and he did not hold himself up as a toddler sage or anything.
Leo made certain not to slack off in the other areas of the job. His coworkers could count on him to do his fair share or more of the daily labor required to run the floor at BND. The job consisted largely of light to medium housework and physical interventions in minor civil disputes. Leo was good at it, and he was well liked by pretty much everyone at BND.
Until Sharon came around. She started in on him at once about the lateness. Can’t you see that no one else around here cares? he wanted to say to her. I’m fifteen minutes late and you’re thirty pounds overweight. Can’t we just call it even? He did not say this. He loved his job and feared that Sharon was looking for cause to fire him. But really: No one else cared that he was late. Leo was almost always the last to leave. And there were about nine doors to check and lock and three notebooks to sign out of before the last to leave could leave. Once a week it was Leo who would stay late to receive the cleaners, a spectral team of Tyvek-suited Mexicans. A day-care facility was light duty for these guys, probably. Leo imagined that they usually cleaned up after suicides and fires.
Two or three times a month, Leo could count on staying late with a hyperactive boy named Malcolm whose mother would tear up at half past seven in a heaving BMW, desperate with apology and excuse. Such a parent was, per BND policy and contract, supposed to be charged a dollar per minute for any child care provided after 6:00 p.m. That was just stupid and punitive, though, so Leo would back-time Malcolm’s mom’s arrival to, say, 6:15. The last time that she had been late, she put cash in Leo’s hand under a dark and soggy sky outside. He’d accepted it accidentally, because she’d slippe
d it to him so discreetly, as if he were a maître d’. There followed an awkward operation in which Leo tried to give the money back, and he’d succeeded only when he’d finally pressed it against her. Which in turn complicated things, because there was a little spark, and they were both suddenly and briefly aware of the fun they could have fucking.
There was definitely something off about his equilibrium, Leo thought as he wheeled his lame bicycle up to the door of Brand-New Day. The right side of his body was beginning to feel like meat wrapped too tight in cellophane, and his hands were clumsy working the key of his bicycle lock, as if he had two fingers instead of five.
That fall really gave me paws, he thought to himself, and he chuckled, which hurt his ribs.
He gave up on the lock, thumbed a code into the keypad around the side of the building, and rolled his bike into the play area. Employee bicycles were not supposed to be stored in the play area, another Sharon-promulgated rule.
Louise, a self-assured five-year-old on a Razor scooter, was the first to see him. “What’s wrong with you?” she asked.
“I fell off my bike, Louise,” he said.
“Did you have a helmet on your head?”
“No. I forgot it,” Leo said.
“You shouldn’t forget it, Leo,” said Louise sternly, and she Razored off.
Then Bennett and Milo, inseparable four-year-olds, stamped up to Leo, huffing, in spotless Nikes.
“What’s wrong with you?” asked Bennett.
“Nothing, Bennett,” Leo said. “How are you doing today?”
“Okay,” said Milo. “You fell off your bike?”
These kids were rhizomic, thought Leo. “Yeah, but I’m okay.”
“Can we play Rolling Death?” asked Bennett.
“Maybe in a little while,” said Leo.
“When?” asked Milo.
“Gimme a minute, guys,” said Leo as he slid down a wall to sit on the ground. His neck felt like a stem. He tried to keep his head between his shoulders and directly above his body. He was weirdly aware of his skin as the sack holding his person. It was unpleasant.
