by Rhys Thomas
It was okay, though. He’d taken the small square pad of paper from the miniature shipping pallet on his desk and jotted down some figures. The sales revenue from his accounts per year was just north of one million pounds and the profit margin was 30 percent. That was a lot of profit, even after VAT and corporation tax and whatnot, and Sam’s wage was minuscule in comparison. Also, he’d calculated that over the years he’d been there he’d given the company eight whole months of unpaid overtime. The air shipping costs might sound like a lot, but they were nothing, really.
The next day even more querying emails appeared from other clients. “This could be described as an avalanche,” he said aloud, under his breath, in the middle of a twenty-five-minute toilet/composure-regaining break, during which he leaned against the wall inside the cubicle and tried to stop sweating. When he got back to his desk, he pinged off those original emails, stating he assumed they were okay with incurring the costs because they hadn’t replied. Emails that seemed very puny all of a sudden. He’d sent a few WhatsApps to Sarah from the cubicle, but she hadn’t replied, even though they’d arrived at her phone and she’d read them.
In the afternoon the big Japanese car manufacturer wrote back.
You’ve got mail had become a banshee call now and filled him with horror.
The email said that, without the signed authorization sheet, they would not pay for the air shipments. Sam reread the message, but it couldn’t really be clearer. He was fucked. What if all the other clients refused to pay? Which was definitely what would happen. The slow dread that had been bubbling away started to rise through him. He thought of Zac dealing his little drugs in the middle of the night and how much easier that life seemed, and how unfair it was that Zac got to sit in his nice, cozy flat watching TV all day while honest people like Sam had to endure this.
For the rest of the afternoon he went through the old courier bills to tot up all the air shipments, and at this point the dread morphed into panic and then finally something else. Sam tried to conjure the word in his mind and finally decided on terror. He was feeling a cataclysmic sense of terror as he stared at the calculator screen.
£60,057
Probably best to say nothing. Just say nothing and sit here and pretend absolutely nothing is terribly, terribly wrong. He considered some options. Selling his house was one. He could pay back a lot of the money that way. The other option was simply never to return to work. If he opted for this, could they have recourse through the courts? Was the scale of his mistake so big they could prosecute him? Much in the same way that CEOs sometimes go to jail?
He considered another twenty-five-minute toilet break, which would take him nearly up to home time, but they might get suspicious. Instead, he lifted his clipboard off the nail stuck into the side of his desk and pretended he needed to do something in the warehouse.
* * *
When he got home, Sarah was already waiting outside in the car.
“You know, you should really give me a key,” she said. “I’m not going to steal anything, I promise.”
Sam laughed.
“I’ll get one cut for you,” he said, though he had no intention of doing so because, of course, she might find all his Phantasm kit. Since they’d been together, the flashes of dread had been growing steadily. Whenever she was over, he’d started feeling on edge. She had no problem wandering around the house, and when she headed toward the room where he kept his secret chest he became gripped with panic. He knew he needed to do something but didn’t know what. With the mask on he felt invincible, and he’d achieved more in the last few months as the Phantasm than in his whole life as Sam Holloway.
As they went down the hallway to the kitchen, she said, casually, “Ugh, Zac keeps messaging me. He wants to meet up.”
This wiped out all other thoughts.
“Oh, okay. Are you going to?”
“I don’t know. What do you think?”
He switched on the lights and caught sight of their reflection in the window, of the two of them, together, like they were normal people in a normal relationship.
“It’s up to you,” he said.
Sarah threw her bag on the floor.
“I don’t know. I feel sorry for him.”
“You moved away to get away from him,” he said, picking up her bag and putting it neatly on one of the kitchen chairs. “If you ask me, it’s kinda unfair what he’s done, moving here.” Kinda unfair meaning completely fucking mental.
“Yeah, I know, but... I don’t know. He needed to get away from his hangers-on. Maybe I should meet up with him and tell him how I feel.”
She sat at the kitchen table and picked up Sam’s tablet and started flicking through it, the blue light casting weird patterns on her face. He wished he could tell her Zac was dealing drugs again. He tried to gauge her anger on a scale of one to ten if she knew he’d dressed up as the superhero and stalked her ex-boyfriend for a week. It would probably be pretty high.
“You can do whatever you want,” he said. “Don’t worry about me, I trust you. But make sure you do what you want, not what he wants.”
She looked up from the tablet.
* * *
After a simple dinner of baked potatoes with tuna mayo, red onion and chopped peppers and a salad, they went into the living room and started watching a film on Netflix with Sarah snuggled up to him. As she flicked through pages on her phone, the stress of the day fell away. Her being like this toward him was still weird but less so every day. His arm was a little distended and he was getting pins and needles in it, but it was fine. He stared at her face for a while—she was lost in the internet—and when she looked at him he grinned very widely.
“Look at us two having a lovely time,” he said.
“Shut up,” she laughed, and went back to her phone.
Sam watched the TV and they fell into a silence, and over those minutes he tried to fight off the feelings coming back in, of worry about work, about her finding out about the Phantasm and then, more strongly, about Zac.
Before bed, Sarah decided to take a shower and left Sam alone downstairs. He listened to her moving around, making sure she wasn’t anywhere near the secret chest. When he heard the shower come on, he picked up her phone and it came to life. He noticed she had downloaded the app and was logged into her Facebook.
He looked at the ceiling and listened to the sound of water hissing.
Quickly, he went into her photos and scrolled down. He knew this was awful, but he had to see. Then he had a better idea, and found Zac’s page, and scrolled through his photos. Why was she looking at Facebook so much now when she never used to use it? The most recent photos were dated eight months previously, meaning he was no longer using Facebook, or not posting at least. It didn’t take long to find pictures of her and Zac, happy together. He had longer hair then and looked much better than he had when Sam met him in her flat. There were lots of pictures of them sitting on sofas in dingy-looking living rooms, with lots of people. And they were happy. They were having a good time. Sam scrolled farther down, a year and a half backward, scanning each scene, of pubs and barbecues and so many friends. They didn’t look very savory, but there was no denying how much fun they were having.
He went to scroll down again and horror smashed him. He stopped. Oh God. No.
He’d liked one of the photos.
His finger had meant to scroll but had jabbed the screen too hard, right where the “like” button was, and now it was pressed. His mind was working horrifyingly fast. Zac was going to get a notification saying Sarah had liked a photo from eighteen months ago. The photo was of them standing together with his arm around her in a fairground, both with thick winter coats and Sarah holding a stick of shocking pink candyfloss. In Zac’s mind, Sarah would have been scrolling through very old photos and liked an old favorite, a special memory. This was bad. Instinctively Sam unliked the photo immediate
ly. Oh no. When the original notification popped up on Zac’s phone, what would he think? It was obvious: Sarah was sending a hidden message—she remembered the good times. Then Sam realized that when Zac clicked on the notification Sarah’s like would no longer be on there because he’d just unliked it. He threw his face upward and closed his eyes. Then he liked the photo a second time. A second notification would arrive at Zac’s phone, but maybe he would think it was a glitch because it was the same photo liked twice. This was so complicated. He felt sick. Sam quickly got everything on the phone back to the point he’d started at, so that Sarah wouldn’t think anything was up. It was in the lap of the gods now.
Upstairs, the shower stopped hissing.
27
IT WAS WHEN the phrase “sixty thousand pounds” slammed him that the nausea would return. In work the next day he awaited the emails from his clients. Nobody would phone, of course. Nobody did that anymore. Having decided to mute the American woman, he sat there stewing, unable to concentrate, until the bold black letters of new emails arrived.
He clicked the first one and held his breath. Refusing to pay. And the next one. All morning they came in—all refused to pay. Sixty thousand pounds. At the same time the fear of Sarah finding out about what he’d done on Facebook got churned into the mix, which in turn set off further anxiety with the wider problem of her discovering he was the Phantasm.
It took nearly three hours and lots of trips to the toilet and the warehouse to finally get up the courage to go over to Rebecca’s desk and ask if he could have a private word in the meeting room.
“Everything okay?” she said, as they took seats facing each other across the beech-effect surface.
“Yeah, great,” said Sam. “Actually, not really.”
He spat out the information, unable to make eye contact, choosing instead to fixate on the notepad in front of Rebecca. The clock on the wall ticked, in the warehouse you could hear the forklift telescoping. When he did eventually look up, Rebecca was smiling, smiling so he could see her teeth, top and bottom rows touching. Her eyes were open in a kind of manic wideness.
“So you’ve got the authorization forms,” she stated.
“No.”
Rebecca did a series of rapid blinks. “And how much did you say the shipments came to?”
Sam scrunched up his shoulders like he was wincing. “Sixty thousand pounds?”
“Okay.”
“I sent them the emails, though,” he said. “They knew what was going to happen.”
“But their argument is going to be they didn’t sign off on the shipments.” Fast blinking again.
“But they didn’t stop them either. It was better to air ship than go on line stop,” Sam offered.
“Yes, but... Sam, you’ve got to get things signed. That’s why we have the forms.” The tension in her chest appeared in her voice.
“It’s okay. I mean, my accounts alone make three hundred thousand pounds profit a year.”
“What?”
“I’ve got a 30 percent profit margin.”
“That’s just the cost of the part and the shipping cost from Japan.”
“And the cost of shipping out. That’s included too.”
Rebecca’s eyes fluttered again.
“You can’t seriously think it’s as simple as that. Do you know how big our wage bill is? Our rent? Our rates? Insurance? Office costs? All the different tax bills and PAYE contributions? We’re barely breaking even across the whole UK branch, Sam. We’re hanging on by the skin of our teeth because the Czech branch has taken all the business.”
Sam felt cold.
“I’ll have to speak to Mr. Okamatsu about this.”
“Of course, yeah, absolutely.”
And his relationship with Mr. Okamatsu had been going so well.
“You should have done it properly. This is so unlike you.”
He went back to his desk, about halfway down the main office. Mr. Okamatsu sat in the desk at the far end, his back to the meeting room wall, surveying his kingdom. Because Sam worked with his back to Okamatsu he could only listen as Rebecca approached him.
“Could I have a word with you, please?” he heard her say, quietly.
“Yes,” he said.
“In the meeting room?”
There was the sense of everybody listening now.
“Here,” said Mr. Okamatsu, shortly.
Sam felt Rebecca’s hesitation. A tiny leaf dropped off his bonsai tree. Rebecca lowered her voice to an inaudible level as she told Okamatsu about the air shipments.
“Huh?” he said.
She whispered something else. And then silence. The image of a giant black hole in some distant part of the universe arrived in Sam’s head, a galaxy of swirling debris slowly consuming everything in its influence. He could feel Mr. Okamatsu’s eyes burning laser holes in his back from behind those light-sensitive glasses and he felt paralyzed. Up until now the situation had been too big to fully comprehend, but now he realized he was in huge trouble.
Mr. Okamatsu appeared at Sam’s desk in absolute silence.
“Follow me,” he said.
He closed the meeting room door behind him and Sam felt like the whole world had just been closed off. Mr. Okamatsu sat down and offered Sam to do the same. He was drinking black coffee from his Pebble Beach golfing mug.
“Why didn’t you get the forms signed?” he said, outright.
Sam’s gaze fell to the desk.
“Because they wouldn’t respond to my emails, and if I left it any later production lines would have stopped.”
He thought again about how what he’d done might be a criminal act in some way.
“But why didn’t you get the forms signed?”
Sam was unsure how to proceed. Hadn’t he just answered that question?
“You tell me,” Mr. Okamatsu insisted. Suddenly, he was no longer the pantomime villain of Sam’s mind but a genuinely dangerous force. He was sweating just beneath the hairline.
“I don’t know,” said Sam.
“You bring me the invoices. Shipping invoices.”
Sam hated it and considered going to his car and driving off, but then he was back in the meeting room handing over the documents. Okamatsu sifted through them, a slight tremor in his right hand. Sam’s fear was turning to sorrow. How was Okamatsu going to explain this to the head office? His mouth went dry. Mr. Okamatsu tutted, clicking his tongue against the roof of his mouth. He placed the papers gently on the table.
“You must tell me why you didn’t get the forms signed.”
“Mr. Okamatsu, I... They wouldn’t sign them. It was because of the ship. In the Suez Canal. It’s—”
Sam jumped with shock. Mr. Okamatsu had punched the table with so much force it shook Sam’s chair. The room emptied of air.
“Why did you not tell me?” he said, calmly.
“Because...” But he couldn’t say anything.
“Go away,” said Okamatsu, turning his face away.
He then raised his hand to dismiss Sam with a flick of his wrist. Sam couldn’t move. Mr. Okamatsu waved his hand again, more urgently this time, his signet ring glimmering in the fluorescent light. It was hard to tell if Sam had ever felt this humiliated before. A part of him hated Mr. Okamatsu for being so rude, but the other half was accepting of the behavior being dished out. Whatever happened to Sam, it was going to be far worse for his boss. At last he stood.
“You must not speak of this to anyone,” said Mr. Okamatsu. He removed the ring from his finger and placed it on top of the papers, then leaned forward with his head in his hands.
Sam stared at the signet ring. It was emblazoned with an insignia of a lizard.
The clock on the wall said it was 3:33.
* * *
At home he stared at the costume laid out on the bed. All he had t
o do was make a little bonfire and throw everything on top of it. Forget about the Phantasm, and focus completely on Sarah. But why did that idea feel so terrible, make him feel such a strong surge of emptiness?
He thought of all the times he’d been patrolling in the last few months—all the things he’d done, the good things, coupled with the awesome feeling of invincibility the mask brought. The costume made him whole. Whatever had been missing, he’d found the answer in that other person. He knew about functioning addicts and wondered if this was similar to how they feel, the dirtiness of the secret measured out against the serenity of the high.
He lifted the utility belt and held it up to the light. If he didn’t go out tonight, he knew—through some other sense, he knew—that all the pressures piling in would crush him...
THE PHANTASM #012
Rivers of Asphalt
It feels good. It feels right. He nods to himself. Yes.
Revelers on a Thursday night, a small cluster of office workers staying late at the flat-roofed hostelry of the industrial estate gather in the car park. They shout and laugh, and this is acceptable to the entity that espies them from the shadowy grass bank on the far side of the road. Lying on his front, propped up on his elbows, he watches and waits unseen.
It feels better, being in the costume. It is a clarifying lens and brings with it a sense of freedom. At last he feels at home. The grand mystery of belonging is solved. In the suit he belongs. These streets are his.
