by Zach Powers
Lake stopped at her cubicle and flipped on the monitor, shifting the quality of light in the room. The same unfamiliar program as before, the one with green text on a black field, was running through a series of numbers too fast to follow. A five-figure number in the bottom corner of the screen crept up in the decimal column before flipping over a whole number. Even though they scrolled up the screen too fast to read, I started to recognize the figures. They were the same ones I entered into spreadsheets every day.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Skimming. Embezzlement. Defalcation. There are so many good names for it.”
I looked at the screen again. The five figures in the corner suddenly seemed more significant.
“That’s almost eighty thousand dollars,” I said.
“Not bad for a few weeks’ work.”
“Why are you showing this to me?”
“Because I like you and know you can keep a secret.”
Even if her face said something then, I wouldn’t have been able to read it in the dark.
I asked, “You’re not really in data entry, are you?”
“Nothing personal, Gar, but is that even a career?”
She squinted at my forehead. Her face flinched with an unrecognizable reaction, then she leaned in quick and kissed me on the cheek.
She said, “I take a job like this one, get in the system, skim a few cents off large transactions, shuffle the money around, and eventually deposit it in an account of my own. The best part is I also get a paycheck while I’m doing it.”
“Are you done here?”
“After tonight, yes. I’ll shut down the program and tomorrow tell the bosses I need to go care for my sick mother. Thanks for the opportunity and all that.”
“If you get caught, though . . .”
“What court would ever convict someone without guilt written all over her face?”
I took a step back, into the aisle, toward my own cubicle. It’s one thing to learn how to lie, it’s another to have something worth lying about.
“Where will you go?” I asked
“Where do you want to go?”
It was a question I’d never really considered. My own possibilities had always seemed limited by my faults, as if my forehead was the wall between where I was and where I wanted to be. I grabbed the top of the cubicle and waggled it back and forth, like I was prying the tab off a soda can.
“Anywhere that’s not made up of little boxes,” I said.
She stood up and joined me in the aisle. Reaching out, hand held like some saint in a painting, she touched my face, chin to cheek to the orbit around my eye. Then she covered my whole forehead with her palm. I wondered if that’s what it felt like for her, the message concealed.
“You know how I blank my face?” she said. “Because I only feel guilty about one thing: leaving my mother. The horrible bitch that she was, I still feel like I did something wrong. But I also feel that I did the completely right thing. So I feel guilty and not guilty at the same time, and they cancel each other out. One erases the other.
“But I never stopped running away. I never had somewhere I was going, but now, when you look at me like you want something, like there’s something I have worth wanting, like I don’t need to change myself to be wantable, then I feel there’s direction to my life. At least there might be.”
She lowered her hand. We leaned into each other, pressed our foreheads, tilted faces, parted lips.
The elevator dinged and the doors chirped open. Lake pulled me to the floor in her cubicle and reached up to shut off the monitor. We scuttled back under the desk, squeezing as tight into the corner as we could.
A woman giggled on the elevator. The giggling moved around the corner and into the aisle. A man’s voice begged for quiet, but it had no effect. The couple passed us and went into one of the doors on the side of the room.
Lake whispered, “I didn’t know the executive offices came furnished with drunk bimbos.”
I shushed her. She elbowed me in the ribs.
“Let me shut off the program,” she said. “I was hoping for another hundred bucks or so, but one can’t be greedy.”
She crouch-stood in front of her desk and flipped back on the monitor. It flashed bright enough to notify the whole world that we were there, but nothing came from the office but the continued laughter of the woman. Lake tapped a couple keys and then clicked once with her mouse. The screen gave off less light. She cut the power and darkened it completely.
Right then, a scream came from the office, high and throaty. We’d been spotted.
“Run,” I whispered.
Lake and I were up and around the corner when the second scream came, this one somehow muffled, full of real fear, not surprise. It was a kind of scream I’d never heard before. I stopped in front of the elevator and turned back.
“What the hell are you doing?” Lake asked.
“No one’s following us.”
The screaming had been replaced by a barely audible murmur and a sound like slapping. I walked toward the office, then sprinted. Lake said something behind me, stop, I think, but I wasn’t listening. When I reached the door, all I heard were hissed breaths. I pawed at the wall until I found the switch and turned on the light.
Tom straddled Mary on the boss’ desk, his hands around her neck, thumbs digging in at the base of her throat. Mary was almost still, her fingers losing their grip on Tom’s arms, sliding away. His face jerked toward me, eyes wide and feral, mouth set in a snarl. The text on his forehead, usually so benign, said, I WILL KILL YOU. His face twitched, and I saw his hands loosen just so much. Mary coughed.
I crossed the room in two strides, launching myself into Tom, toppling him off of Mary and off the desk, taking the marble paperweight and the fancy pen set with us. We crashed against the ground, tangled, Tom clawing at my face and neck but not able to find purchase. I scrambled a little bit away. Blood dripped from above Tom’s eyebrow. My hand grazed the paperweight. I snatched it and advanced on Tom. He was groggy, moving slow. He tried to grapple, but his hands grabbed air. I brought the paperweight down on his head. He swayed. I slammed the paperweight into his temple. He fell to his side. His limbs moved like he was swimming.
Lake was in the room behind me, helping Mary into a sitting position, saying meaningless but comforting phrases to her, stroking her hair, brushing the bangs out of her teary eyes. Mary’s forehead said, I TRUSTED HIM. Lake continued to coo nothings, pulling Mary’s head down into a motherly embrace. Her own head showed something then, text forming there, but I couldn’t read it from where I was, her skin too dark and the message too faint.
“What does it say?” I asked.
“Behind you,” she said.
Tom struggled to his feet, wobbling, eyes searching the corners of the room, reaching out his arms as if to stop the spinning in his head. I grabbed him by his shirt and shoved him up against the window. He barely resisted me. Underneath the blood flowing down his face, a new message formed. MURDERER.
Perfectly banal Tom. The man so loved because he was, when you got right down to it, not very interesting. Because he always did the right thing and he told good stories about run-ins with bears. His head only ever confessed some small indulgence. But all of that was fake. There was no bear. Tom himself was the only animal in the story. I had always hated Tom. But now I hated him for how he’d made me hate him, when he was even guiltier than the rest of us.
I held Tom with one hand while I unlatched the window and swung it open. I teetered him back over the sill. Lake watched me. “Stop,” she said. But I didn’t.
Tom’s senses returned enough to struggle, but he could only slap against my chest. His weak kicks failed to connect.
“Apologize,” I said, dipping his head lower. The ground was dark and far enough below to be invisible.
He muttered a slurred, “I’m sorry.”
“No,” I said, and jabbed my finger into his forehead. “Apologize here.”
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nbsp; He looked at me like he didn’t understand. I dipped him lower.
“I know you can lie. You can make it say whatever you want. So lie to me. Tell me it was a misunderstanding. Make me believe it like you always have. Apologize.”
He blinked three times, deliberately. His message faded from MURDERER to a simple I’M SORRY.
I leaned him out the window farther, and before he even seemed to realize what was happening, before I knew it myself, I let go. He fell head first. The last thing I knew of Tom was a crack against the ground.
Mary pulled her face out of Lake’s shoulder and cast tear-streaked stares around the room. Bruises were already forming on her throat. I wondered if she’d use the bandanna to hide them.
“Where’s Tom?” she asked.
“He jumped out the window,” I said.
“Is he OK?”
“Let’s just say the bear finally got him.”
Before the police arrived, while Lake comforted Mary in the conference room, I went to our desks and pulled up spreadsheets on the computers. I entered half-figures in the last column, like we’d come in to work late when we heard the scuffle. The chairs I left rolled back and spun.
I walked down the long, dark aisle to the men’s room. The light switched on automatically, casting fluorescence across the institutional gray tile. I’d already washed my hands once, after I cleaned the paperweight, but I did it again, all the way up to the elbow. I stared at myself in the mirror. My forehead should have said KILLED TOM. I should have been branded with that fault-guilt forever. But all it said was SKIPPED DINNER. The empty knot in my stomach confirmed that this wasn’t an outright lie, but I’d need a stronger alibi for the police. I searched my feelings, and found one thing I did regret about the whole situation, that I hadn’t killed Tom earlier, before he’d even had the chance to touch Mary. Not exactly something I’d like to confess, but with the right presentation . . .
The old message faded from my forehead and in its place emerged COULDN’T STOP HIM IN TIME. Let the police assume I wanted to stop him from jumping, not stop him from living. The difference between a hero and a villain is in the context of a verb.
I exited the restroom and found Lake waiting right there.
“Mary wanted to clean up a little bit,” she said. “Had mascara streaked all the way down to her chin.”
“Is she alright?”
“Still confused, but she’s starting to put the pieces together. While we were talking, her face shifted to ACTUALLY LOVED HIM. How about you?”
“Me?”
“You did just push Tom out a window, and the police will be here any second. What will you tell them?”
“I’ll tell them the same thing I told Mary. He jumped. Must have been scared of getting caught. Anyway, do you really think the police will investigate it when the guy has a suicide note written on his own face?”
Lake reached over and adjusted the rolled cuff of my sleeve. She looked close at my face, first the eyes, and then up to my message.
“How’d you get so good at lying?”
“Had a good teacher.”
A message flickered on her forehead, but never fully formed. The door to the women’s restroom swung inward, sweeping sudden brightness into the room, and Mary stepped out. Her face was dark under the eyes and pink on the cheeks, but showed no other sign of the night’s trauma.
Through the open office door, through the open window, the first flash of police lights shot their red and blue onto the ceiling. We took Mary to the conference room and waited.
We were with the police for over two hours, even after the ambulance took Mary to the hospital. She asked for Lake to come with her, but the police said we had to stay a little longer. Lake promised to visit as soon as we were done.
Several different detectives came in and repeated the same questions. It felt cursory, like they were avoiding going back to their desks more than they were investigating. As soon as they’d read Tom’s apology and the message on my own face, they seemed to only go through the motions, spending more effort trying to comfort me than to get information.
“You did the right thing,” said one cop. And another, “She’d be dead right now if you two hadn’t been here.” Another, “He was a bad man, and he got what was coming to him.” Another, “You’re a hero.” After an hour of that I was ready to confess just to make it all stop.
Lake assumed a sad, shaken posture, and answered questions in a quiet voice. She wouldn’t look at me, and she shrugged off any praise like a blanket on a warm night. Her forehead filled with a faint message, but I never got a good look at it. When the cops said we could go, Lake stood and left without a word. I tried to catch her at the elevator, but she was already gone.
I circled around the scene of Tom’s death. The body had been hauled away, leaving just its white-taped outline. A dark blotch marred the gray concrete, spreading away from the shape of the head. I ducked under the police tape, which repeated the phrase CRIME SCENE over and over even though the cops themselves had said the fall wasn’t a crime. Had Tom landed on his face or on his back? It was impossible to tell.
Lake, myself, the late Tom. Three liars in one office. Was it coincidence? Fate? Or were there many more like us, several in any crowd? The numbers didn’t matter. From now on, I would doubt everything I read. The curse of the liar is to suspect lies from everyone else.
I let my forehead say, I’M SORRY, the same confession I’d forced on Tom, but I didn’t mean it. Not at all.
Lake didn’t come to work for two days. The office was somber. Everyone had loved Tom, loved his stories about run-ins with bears, felt comfortable around him, familiar, simpler. Jim handled the duty of cleaning out Tom’s desk. No family, it turned out. No one at the funeral but a few people from the office, and not as many of them as you’d expect. That’s what Jim had said. He walked down the aisle between the desks with a cardboard box full of the dead man’s possessions. On Jim’s forehead it said, KEEPING THE NEWTON’S CRADLE FOR MYSELF.
The next day, Lake returned and retrieved the cardboard box from under her desk, the same box she’d unpacked just a few weeks before. She loaded up her things, plus the monitor, which I’m pretty sure belonged to the company. She set her key card on the center of the empty desk. As she walked into the aisle, box hugged to her chest, she leaned in and whispered, “Supply closet.”
When I entered, she was busy stuffing office supplies into every empty space in the box. Printer cartridges, pens, Post-its, a dozen rulers as if somebody needed more than one.
“Hi,” she said, still snatching items from the shelves.
“You’re leaving,” I said.
“I told you it was time.”
“Should I come with you?”
“It’s up to you.”
“Were you going to ask me?”
She set a roll of masking tape on top of the already overflowing box like a beige crown. She straightened herself and looked at me finally.
“I can’t trust you anymore.”
“You’re the one who showed me how to do this.”
“I was wrong.”
“You don’t get to decide what’s right for me.”
“It was wrong for me. For us. I didn’t realize it until too late because there’s never been anyone else. This thing we do, before we show a false message, before we lie to anyone else, we have to lie to ourselves. We delude ourselves and then delude ourselves even further in believing that’s OK. And maybe it’s fine when we’re on our own, but what do two liars have to fall back on? What truth? Look at you, even now.”
I’d felt my forehead change. I’d willed it to change. Not completely on purpose, but it was no accident.
“What does it say?” I asked.
“EVERYTHING WILL BE ALRIGHT.”
I had to laugh at that. And Lake laughed too. There was a moment then when we could have kissed, when we could have repeated our supply closet romp. Everything might have turned out different, but we didn’t. Everyt
hing was different already.
“Let me help you carry that to your car,” I said. I lifted the box without waiting for her to agree. It was several times heavier than I expected.
She kissed me by her Corvette, deep and long, but it was a goodbye, not a see-you-later. Simple and sweet, not a hint of bitterness, no guilt to sully the flavor. The taste of regret.
Lake handed me a bulging envelope, sealed with tape, and told me not to open it until I left work. I said OK even though I knew I wouldn’t wait. Later I’d realize that was the only time I actually lied to her, at least out loud.
Back at my desk, I slit open the envelope. Inside was a stack of bills, all hundreds, probably ten-thousand dollars total. Stuck to the first bill, there was a Post-it with a single word written on it: SORRY. More than written, the text was drawn, care given to the lines and the serif at the foot of each R. I wondered if this was her font, if this was what her face said underneath the skin, what it would show if she ever let it.
I relaxed, let my feelings out from the place I’d learned to bottle them. I felt the familiar burn of words forming on my forehead. The same feeling as in my chest. I leaned close to the computer monitor, still switched off, and looked at myself in the dark glass. My forehead was blank, just an expanse of pale, naked skin. I tried to will a message to form, but there was nothing left to say.
MY 9/11 STORY
1
After 9/11, the artist took to drawing pictures of the Twin Towers in the moment just before the first plane hit. Instead of the plane, however, she substituted different objects. The only rule for what she drew was that it had to contain a person. This felt somehow important to her.
She started with other vehicles, cars and trucks, moving on to buses and trains, cruise ships that weren’t much smaller than the Towers themselves. Looking closely at one of the cars, a Volvo, revealed a family inside, singing road songs, blissfully unaware of the sudden stop that awaited them. On a bus, strangers hunched next to each other. One man held up a newspaper like a partition, never turning the page and doubtfully reading. On the deck of a cruise ship, people lay out in bathing suits even though the time of day, the early morning, was wrong for sunning.
