Legion

by Robert Swartwood

  For an instant she considered telling him about her meeting earlier today. How Tom had insinuated that the only reason she had gotten the job was because of her father. Yes, it was true, her father was a powerful media mogul—at least in terms of print media—and yes, it was true, he had been a big factor in her getting the job at the Post. But she had proven herself since then, hadn’t she? Yes, goddamn it, she had, and Tom and Eric knew it, too.

  Then again, her attitude during the meeting hadn’t been quite professional. Ashley knew it. Tom and Eric certainly knew it. If anything, she had embarrassed herself, and that was the last thing she wanted to tell her father.

  “I had lunch with a friend of mine today.”

  “Yes?” Her father motioned her over to the couches and chairs to have a seat. “Which friend is this?”

  Ashley was about to mention Melissa’s name but thought twice. She knew her father followed the news closely. If he knew his daughter had lunch with ADA Baxter, he might ask about the Carrozza case, and it would feel like she was back at work.

  “Just a friend. I don’t think you’d recognize the name.”

  “Well, what’s new with this friend of yours?”

  “Her father just died.”

  Her mother, a glass of ice water in one hand, a wine glass filled with white wine in the other hand, entered the room. “Oh dear, that’s awful.”

  Ashley took the water from her mother, placed it on the silver coaster on the coffee table. “We didn’t talk much about what happened. She basically said she had gone to the funeral over the weekend. But when I got back to work, curiosity took over and I looked online. Turns out he ... killed himself.”

  Her mother offered a quiet gasp. Her father shook his head sadly.

  Ashley took a sip of the ice water. She hadn’t really wanted anything, but her mother was one to always offer and expect someone to take something. Still, she found her throat had gone dry and was grateful for something to drink.

  “So yeah, it’s pretty awful. I can’t imagine why anyone would want to do something like that. Obviously he was having issues. But still ... it made me realize I need to see you guys more.”

  Her parents smiled at each other.

  “We’re happy to see you whenever we can,” her mother said.

  There was a brief silence, and Ashley began wondering why she had even made the trek uptown. Yes, she loved and missed her parents, but she could have called or Skyped with them when she got home. Had her meeting with Tom and Eric jarred her so much? Or had it really been her lunch with Melissa, or, rather, the truth about how Melissa’s father had died?

  “So, dear,” her mother said, a mischievous grin signaling her next question, “are there any male suitors you’d like to tell us about? Because you know Marybeth’s son just recently became single.”

  Ashley groaned inwardly. “Didn’t he just graduate college?”

  “Medical school,” her father said. “Rheumatology.”

  “I appreciate the thought,” Ashley said, “but I’m not really dating right now.”

  “Dear,” her mother said, “you’re almost thirty years old.”

  “Seven more months.”

  “As I said, you’re almost thirty years old. You’re bright, attractive, you have a great job—you have a lot to offer.”

  Ashley forced herself to keep smiling. She set her glass back down on the coaster, leaned back in her seat, and said, “So, what’s new with you guys?”

  nine

  Gunfire and mortar shells exploding are the first things I hear when I step into the apartment.

  Duncan is on the couch, his hands glued to a controller, his full attention on the 75-inch plasma and the ongoing war raging from all those thousands and thousands of pixels. Despite the TV’s volume turned up high, he’s wearing a headset, which means he’s playing Call of Duty or some other multiplayer war game.

  I drift into the kitchen, pull a bottle of water from the fridge, twist it open and down it in only a few swallows. I don’t realize until I set the bottle aside that I’m shaking. When did that happen? Obviously this day has been one fuck up after another, so it’s not surprising my nerves would be shot.

  “You okay, man?”

  I blink and turn to find Duncan strolling into the kitchen, the headset hanging around his neck. He goes straight for the fridge, pulls out a beer, flicks the cap in the sink. Just another thing for me to clean up later, along with the dishes and wiping down the counters and the laundry and the vacuuming and everything else I do around here.

  “Bad day at work.”

  “No shit?” He takes a swallow of the beer, squints at me over the bottle. “You don’t look too good.”

  “It’s a long story.”

  “I got time.”

  “I lost a package.”

  “No shit?”

  “And someone jacked the wheels on my bike.”

  “No shit?”

  “And I fell off the platform and nearly got hit by a train.”

  He sets the bottle aside, places both hands on the counter, and leans forward slightly. “Are you fucking with me?”

  I shake my head.

  “Man, that’s fucked up.”

  “Yeah, well, the craziest part? They bring my bike back to the office and it still has its wheels.”

  Duncan’s hair is long and curly. He shakes it like a dog, then tilts his ear at me. “Say what?”

  “I swear those wheels were gone earlier. People had to have seen it. I know one woman did, the one who was behind me when we were evacuating the building.”

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa.” Duncan holds up a hand. “Evacuating what building?”

  “It doesn’t matter. But there was a fire, so everyone was outside, everyone saw my bike without its wheels.” I pause, thinking about it. “You know, if we could track down that woman, she could confirm I’m not going crazy.”

  “But the wheels were back on the bike?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How is that possible?”

  “I’m not sure. But someone is obviously trying to fuck with me.”

  “Who’d you piss off this time?”

  “I can’t keep track anymore.”

  Laughing, Duncan grabs his beer and starts toward the living room. He pauses in the doorway. “Hey, you want to come out with me tonight? There’s a concert in Tribeca that’s supposed to be pretty cool.”

  It’s nice of him to ask—he never invites me to anything anymore—but I shake my head. “Thanks, but I’ll pass.”

  “Your loss, man. Can you check to see if my black shirt is clean? I’m going to want to wear that one.”

  Duncan has about a dozen black shirts. I don’t even think he knows which one he means, but I tell him no problem and he gives me a thumbs-up and heads back to his virtual war. He’ll probably play for another hour or two before finally taking a shower. Then he’ll leave and won’t come back until sometime in the middle of the night. He’ll probably hook up with some hair-dyed chick, either get a blow job in the bathroom or find somewhere dark and private to fuck her, or maybe, if the girl’s stupid enough, she’ll take him back to her place. Not that Duncan is any kind of threat, but a girl’s definitely not thinking if she takes some stranger back to her place for a fast lay. Anyway, he’ll return to the apartment by three, maybe four in the morning, crash on his bed, and sleep until noon when he’ll get up, grab himself a bowl of Froot Loops, watch some TV, then play video games for roughly five hours.

  That’s Duncan’s regular schedule. That’s all he ever does. Which leaves it to me to do the rest: the dishes, the laundry, the grocery shopping, the cleaning, everything. But really, I can’t complain. It’s all just part of the deal, though when I first moved in with Duncan five years ago, it hadn’t been this way.

  We met while I was over in Europe doing my backpacking thing. We were staying at the same hostel and really hit it off. He was funny, easygoing with the ladies, and a blast to be around. He learned I was into extreme sports
and said he wanted to do something fun, so we ended up skydiving—both of us our first time, me not scared at all, while Duncan was scared out of his mind. Still, he loved it or at least said he did. He mentioned he was from New York, and we exchanged email addresses in case I was ever in the city and then went our separate ways. It was a year later when I was back in the States, broke, that I ended up in New York and sent him an email and we met for a beer. I told him how I was having a hard time making ends meet and he offered to let me stay at his place. I told him I didn’t want to put him out, he said it was no problem, and so I moved in with my one bag of clothes. I offered to help pay rent but he waved it off.

  As it turned out, Duncan had struck it big before the dot-com bubble burst. He actually used to run his own company at twenty-three. But he saw the way things were going and cashed in his chips before it was too late, and after making the right investments, he claims he’ll never have to work another day in his life. What he doesn’t like to do, however, is take care of his place. So that became my job, little by little, cleaning a few dishes here, picking up a few things off the floor, scrubbing the toilets and bathtubs, until it finally dawned on me he had hired me as his live-in butler. The only thing I don’t do is make his meals, but that’s because he’s fine with a bowl of cereal in the morning, then he grabs dinner after he leaves at night.

  So the money I make from being a courier and the part-time stuff I do at the bookstore? Yeah, that certainly wouldn’t give me the option of living in this part of the city, in this apartment, but I can’t complain.

  Speaking of the bookstore, I have to call and see if it’ll be cool for me to come in tomorrow. The way Ed made it sound, he wants me to take the next couple of days off, unwind, do whatever I need to do to get my head straight. I swore to them that the tires weren’t there on the bike when I came out of the building, but it’s pretty hard to claim one thing when the truth is standing right there in front of you on two wheels. So I’m not fired per se, just on leave. It sucks, because I like the company, but if push comes to shove, I can always get hired by another company ... though if word gets around what happened—like how I lost a package which cost my company a big client—then maybe my chances of getting hired elsewhere aren’t as easy as I think they’ll be.

  From the living room, the gunfire and explosions start up again. I head for Duncan’s room, check his closet to see how many black shirts are on the hangers, then check the dirty clothes splayed out around the floor. I grab two black shirts and take them down the hall to the washer. I throw in the shirts and some other stuff—jeans, socks, my hoodie—add some Tide, crank the dial, and press start.

  Then I head for my room, where I close the door, undress out of my work clothes, put on sweats and a T-shirt, grab my iPod and earbuds and a book I’m borrowing from the store—Clockers by Richard Price—and lay back on my bed.

  Duncan has his routine, and so do I.

  Hey, I never said my life was exciting.

  ten

  By the time Ashley made it to her apartment, it was nearly nine o’clock.

  She’d stayed at her parents’ much longer than she had intended, but it was good to see them, to talk, to learn about everything going on in their lives—the charity banquets, the Broadway shows, the different boards her father still sat on—that it was a mild distraction from her own life. But then, the night wearing on, she headed back home, remembering everything that had happened at work, all the things that had been said and unsaid. Sitting on the hard plastic seat of the N train, the tin can vibrating and shaking like it was going to snap apart at any moment, she gave a surreptitious glance around at the few people nearby, then lifted the sleeve of her coat to check her arm. There was still a slight indentation from where she had bitten herself when she screamed.

  She made a quick stop at Whole Foods—milk, yogurt, bread—and then continued on toward her apartment building. Through the lobby, up the elevator to the fourth floor, and then she was standing in front of her door, taking a deep breath, before pushing it open.

  Rex met her immediately just like he did most evenings, the cat probably bored out of his mind all day, that any change to his routine was welcome. He rubbed himself against her legs, purring softly, and then followed her into the kitchenette where she put away the groceries. By that point she had abandoned her heels, stretching her toes as she opened and closed the fridge.

  She opened the cabinet above the sink on impulse, eyed the bottles of wine, hesitated, closed the cabinet.

  Good, that was a start.

  Rex hopped up onto the counter, meowing to get her attention.

  “Hungry?”

  The cat meowed again.

  She opened a can of Fancy Feast, spooned the gunk out into a bowl, thinking about those cat foot commercials where cats are served their food on nice china with a side of parsley. Did people actually do that? Ashley figured some must. She loved her cat very much—she had gotten Rex when he was just a kitten four years ago—but there was only so much she was willing to do, and she wasn’t about to let Rex eat off better dishware than her.

  She left Rex to his unfancy meal and padded into the bedroom. She undressed, laying the clothes she wore out on the unmade bed, opened up one drawer after another, not sure what to put on. Sweats, maybe? That made her think about the gym, and how she hadn’t gone in over a week, which then made her think about the one cute guy she always saw there, the one who spent twenty minutes on the elliptical before doing weights and who, as far as Ashley could tell, wasn’t married and wasn’t gay, which then, oddly, made her think about the undercover cop escorting Melissa this afternoon, which then brought her all the way back to her conversation with Jeff, which then, inevitably, reminded her about her meeting with Eric and Tom.

  Rex looked up at her, his dry tongue licking his lips, when she came back into the kitchen.

  “Don’t mind me,” she told him, opening the cabinet above the sink and selecting one of the bottles at random. It turned out to be a red wine, Pinot noir, which was just as well, and she poured herself a small glass.

  Rex watched her from his place on the floor.

  “Don’t judge me.”

  He licked his lips and went back to his gruel.

  Ashley drained the glass—only a swallow or two, not much at all—then hesitated, regarding the bottle, telling herself that one glass was more than enough, that she was done, to cap the bottle and put it back with its friends and go into the living room to watch TV.

  She almost did it, too—she was right on the cusp—when she thought one more glass wouldn’t hurt and poured herself another, this time a lot more than before, and walked past Rex into the living room. She turned on the TV, the first thing coming on E!, a rerun of the Kardashian show. She grabbed her iPad off the coffee table, checked some of her personal email, went to take another sip of the wine when she realized that her second glass was empty.

  She stared at the ghost of her lipstick on the rim, telling herself that she was done now, two was more than enough, just set the glass aside and keep watching TV. It was a good idea—a great idea—and she managed to go five, maybe ten minutes, before she found herself back in the kitchen.

  Rex once again regarded her disapprovingly.

  “What? You cough up hairballs.”

  He seemingly shook his head and retreated into the bedroom.

  She filled her third glass a bit higher than the first two, or maybe a bit less, it was difficult to say. She promised herself this was it, just this third glass and no more, and she congratulated herself with first one sip, then a second. Then, before she knew it, she had dug the prescription bottle out of her purse, her emergency Vicodin, and swallowed two tablets. Back on the couch then, E! still on the TV, she began thinking about Melissa.

  If you considered the amount of contact numbers and email addresses in her phone, Ashley was a very popular woman. But if you went person by person, Ashley would be hard-pressed to name any of them as good, close friends. They were
acquaintances more than anything else, almost all of them friends on a professional level. Sure, there would be quite a few numbers from guys she’d met at one time or another, either at a function or at the club, and who knows, maybe she had called them and maybe they had hooked up, or maybe she hadn’t even given them a second thought, but all of those were numbers that meant very little, just like the rest. The only number that mattered, she realized, was Melissa’s, her old college roommate, her best friend.

  It had never made much sense how she and Melissa ended up friends. Their backgrounds were so different. Ashley, having been raised in an elite family, where she always got what she wanted. Melissa, who had been somewhat well off, but not nearly to the point that Ashley was. Not, Ashley would interject to anyone who asked, that she was spoiled. Yes, her parents had paid for her apartment, and yes, her parents had paid for her schooling, and yes, her dad had basically gotten Ashley her job at the Post, but she was good at what she did, she was smart, so she deserved it. Didn’t she?

  But Melissa, well, Melissa had gone against all odds and ended up where she was. It was true, Ashley helped her out a few times in college when she needed it. Ashley still wasn’t sure why, but she had been drawn instantly to Melissa their first year of college, as if they were destined to be friends. From there they became best friends, then roommates, and now, all this time later, they were still good friends. She had to admit, sometimes she was jealous of Melissa, for earning her spot in life, for finding a great husband and raising two great kids. It was something Ashley wanted one day, though every day that passed, she kept thinking it would never happen.

  Rex jumped up onto the couch, stretched himself out over her lap, and yawned.

  “Just you and me for now, huh?”

  The cat purred as she stroked the scruff of his neck.

  Ashley thought about another glass of wine. She thought about slipping out of her sweats, slipping into something low-cut, something black, something that would go great with heels. She thought about flashing lights and loud music and the rush she got on the dance floor, moving her body, nodding her head to the beat, the crush of people around her, the men and women, though mostly it was the men she thought about, even on a week night, the men who would buy her drinks, give her their numbers, maybe promise her a good time. She even considered it, lifting the cat off her lap and heading to the bedroom to change, but instead she found herself yawning once, then twice, then leaning her head back against a pillow and closing her eyes, telling herself she would just rest for a minute, maybe two, and see how she was feeling then.